Sick


The old woman lay groaning, her deathly purring only broken by slow faint breaths often punctuated by short rasping gasps. How had this happened? Even the doctors were shocked. She was so healthy for her age, a regular bingo player and partaker of grilled lamb chops with salad. Her only vice, it seemed, a weekly port and lemon.
Now what a specimen of human decay lay before them, bloated, unrecognisable, a monstrosity. The medical world has seen tumours before, some large enough to be wheeled away on hospital trolleys all to themselves after removal from the patient. But nothing ever like this before, “Will she die?” whispered a nurse.

“Perhaps,” said a doctor shaking his head in bewilderment. “It’s such a mystery”

The nervous nurse nodded in agreement, barely able to look at the old woman yet drawn, car crash like to her side.

“I suppose we’ll never know?”

“What?” queried the doctor.

“Why she swallowed the fly in the first place?”