I grimaced as the passenger behind me did another cough. It wasn’t one of those dry, just-passing-by coughs—a wet, sloppy with phlegm, a soaked keeaulough from the depths of hell of his lungs—that I imagined the splashes of microdroplets misting over every bit of my exposed skin and happily dancing its way into my nostrils and mouth and eventually, my immune system.
I despise plane sickness. The feral kek-kek sneezes of the toddlers, the bloody sseuph sniffling of old ladies (thankfully) wearing masks, the mushy blerererr of mucus slathering onto paper napkins, the kooah-h-h-h-h of the toilet flush of the food-poisoned diarrhea; I’d truly wear a hazmat suit if I could get my hands on one, and if it wasn’t so frowned upon to expect cleanliness on public transport. Hours after hours of trying to fall asleep but unable to, earphones frequently forgotten—I find myself forced to listen to this surround-sound bacterial symphony of plagues, only the rumbling of the plane vibration to tie down my sanity to. Why listen to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker when you can listen to the harmonic duet of the hacks of a throat choking on an almond three aisles down dancing with the screeches of the unplugged Netflix horror movie? Why watch a love-comedy movie on the screens when you can experience your own romance, kissing the viral envelope of COVID molecules frolicking in the air? Ahead, the flight attendance handed out tiny squares of alcohol wipes—a new policy since the pandemic, I supposed—and the clattering clinks of the beverage cart of metal on metal and the zik of the packets ripping, opening another dimension of chemical stench, devolved the germy orchestra into a false hallucination that only smells of cleanliness.
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Prompt from Daily Themes Week 3: Sound
Write a theme about something you judge negatively and try to evoke corresponding feelings in the reader by way of sound. Will it be through spiky/kiki words; through an overabundance of certain sounds, no matter what they are; by connecting certain ideas by way of alliteration or rhyme? Any strategy that involves sound is an option.