by Angela Townsend
Everyone is excited about the norovirus. Some people think it starts with negative thinking, or else it wouldn’t be called the “neuro virus.” Some people attribute their immunity to apple cider vinegar, misanthropy, or the Holy Ghost. Some people assume you have the stomach for an unabridged reading of their personal norovirus odyssey. Some people are planning to keep hugging colleagues and licking doorknobs, because nobody’s gonna make them live in fear.
The norovirus is more interesting than thunder snow, buy-one-get-one sales, and the bums who run the country. The norovirus is a personality test, a psychiatric assessment, and a thermometer for your cosmology.
When the norovirus is at large, everyone has hypotheses. Someone said it was born in a bowl, because patient zero was not ashamed to take the last Dorito for themselves. Someone said it is here to settle a debate, because archangels want to know whether humans need handshakes. Someone said we can lure it back to its natural habitat of cruise ships if we use enough Magic Erasers.
Not everyone has had the norovirus. You can spot survivors across the aisle. Their freckles fluoresce at the name of the foe. They can pinpoint where they fell. They were infected at the trampoline park when a human the size of a wombat landed directly on their mouth. They were infected because they bought loose fenugreek at the farm market. They were infected at the honky-tonk when a man wearing jean shorts in January expelled visible spittle while performing “Jolene.” They were infected because they gave in to temptation at the club store, sampling shakshuka on a stick. They were infected because they forgot to pray for their enemies or take their riboflavin.
It appears the cure for the norovirus is time, fluids, and telling people how many times you ran to the toilet and at what velocity. No cure exists for being excited about the norovirus. There is promising research in the therapeutic uses of shoe shopping, Donkey Kong, and the direct application of warm cats to one’s midsection. I have found comfort through dignified entreaties to the Great Mercy. Were it not for the norovirus, I would have never crafted such hymnody as “me small, please no pukey.” The big ears are open. The norovirus is not the highest use of our excitement, but everyone is talking to each other. Maybe that is worth the price of the cruise.
Angela Townsend is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, seven-time Best of the Net nominee, and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Epiphany, Five Points, Indiana Review, The Normal School, Pleiades, SmokeLong Quarterly, Terrain, Under the Sun, and World Literature Today, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and works for a cat sanctuary. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for over 30 years and laughs with her poet mother every morning.