Nothing. I shut the fridge. Damnation.

I'd woken up ravenously hungry, for some reason; it took three bagels and copious quantities of schmear just to stave it off enough for me to get through the morning. Now it was lunchtime, and I was only just realizing that the fridge was completely devoid of animal protein. I'd meant to make a grocery run on Sunday, after working on the Bug, but then that whole business with the neighbors'd driven me indoors, and...well, I hadn't left the house all week.

It wasn't like I was afraid - I knew there was no way they were still infectious - but something within me just wasn't ready for that...wasn't prepared to see them as they now were, and remember them as they had been. I didn't really know why; it wasn't like I was attached to them, we hardly interacted beyond basic neighborly greetings and chit-chat about the weather...but for some reason, I just couldn't do it, and so I'd remained holed up inside...

...and now I had nothing to eat. Okay, that wasn't actually true; I had ramen, I had more bagels, I could make a PBJ...but I wanted meat, damn it, and currently I didn't have so much as an egg to add to the ramen. Hell, I was hungry enough that I was starting to get light-headed...no, not quite. I felt off somehow, but not like I was starving. I couldn't quite put my finger on it...

With a shrug of resignation, I made a bowl of ramen and brought it back to my desk; but I couldn't make myself finish it. It was all wrong, like somehow it was exactly calculated to tantalize someone else's tastebuds and not mine. Granted, instant ramen isn't haute cuisine in any case, and this was the ultra-cheap kind that wasn't shy about piling on the MSG, but I'd been fine with it before; had I just gotten a bad packet?

It was funny, too, that it smelled so strongly, much more than usual. I dumped it down the sink and had another bagel instead; it didn't sate my craving for animal flesh, but it was filling, at least. I thought idly about trying them with lox; that'd always seemed weird to me, but maybe there was something to it...?

The rest of my break was spent in restless fidgeting, as I failed to focus on one activity after the next. It was strange, I reflected, as I picked around randomly on the guitar, that I was so funny in the head; aside from that and the cravings, I felt like the proverbial million bucks. A twitchy, distractable million bucks, but still. That was also a little weird; I rarely felt this good, even on good days. Normally I'd still be waking up about now, but my whole body felt like a coiled spring, thrumming with potential energy. What was I doing cooped up in here? Some unfamiliar part of me wanted to explode out the door, run down the street, and...and...

...and then I was distracted; what was that I'd just plucked out? Some quietly trilling figure that I knew from somewhere...that was it, it was the intro to an old Simon & Garfunkel number, but I couldn't remember the title. Was I thinking of it earlier, or had I just stumbled onto it out of nowhere? I wasn't sure...

Suddenly, the timer on my phone went off, and I almost jumped. Right, that was the end of my break; it took me a moment to de-scramble my thoughts enough to remember what came next. It was Thursday afternoon, which meant the weekly review meeting, and I hadn't showered and was still in my pajamas; I'd left the camera off during the morning stand-up, since Bryce'd called in voice-only from the road on the way into Rancho,° but he'd definitely say something now.

° (Every couple months he insisted on driving over the pass to visit our office, under the impression that this helped with team-building, and he was apparently going to keep doing so even though none of us were in the office. It contributed nothing at all to our actual work, but at least the stand-up tended to run shorter.)

Still restless and energetic, I put on coffee, went to the bathroom, shucked off my pajamas, and threw on one of my assorted "business casual" shirts and a pair of slacks. God, my hair was a total snarl; I sat down on the toilet and spent the next few minutes combing out tangles until it was reasonably straight again, but I kept getting distracted by the way my bangs dangled into my field of vision...

I was just finishing when I noticed the toilet-paper roll. Heh, I thought with a grin, that's dangly, too. I batted gently at it, unrolling it a bit. Heheh. Then a bit more. Heh. Wait, if I used both hands... Heheheh, heheh, heh! Pretty soon the whole thing was unravelling all over the-

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

-the meeting! God...! I sprang up, whipped out my phone, and glanced at the clock. Okay, thankfully, I still had a few minutes. I took a quick glance in the mirror, licked the back of my hand, ran it through my hair - there, that looked about right - and went to the kitchen to grab coffee before we started. It smelled stronger than usual, too; was this a fresh can? I couldn't remember. It was nice, anyway; I got lost in the aroma for a bit, but my stomach was grumbling again, and I still had no...

...no, wait, I did have meat, it just wasn't in the fridge! I flung the pantry door open; yes, I still had a couple cans of tuna. I fished out the can opener, popped the lid...

Even processed and preserved, the pungent smell of fish hit me like a ton of bricks. My stomach rumbled again, and it was all I could do to keep my wits about me long enough to drain it and get back to my desk, tuna and coffee in hand. I dropped into the meeting, hit the mute button, and began shoveling bits of canned fish into my mouth with abandon. Yes - this was what I was after...!

I wasn't normally a seafood freak - tuna casserole was just childhood comfort food that was also dead simple to make - but this hit the spot to such a degree that I found myself thinking about other kinds of fish I'd had over the years, and to my surprise I started drooling a bit, even as I ate. Something wasn't quite right, though; none of the smells I remembered were as potent as what was in front of me right now. It was like they'd been recorded with a metaphorical finger over the lens; I'd have to revisit them...

I finished the whole can before my attention drifted back to what was going on around me. "-getting to a critical point," Bryce was saying, as I licked my fingers. "We've got servers that are coming up on eight months overdue for a refresh, and we've got to figure out how to get those scheduled. Now, they're supposed to have test kits for the virus available by the end of the quarter, and if we can arrange to have one of our techs and a client representative meet on-site after testing negative..."

I growled audibly; thankfully, I was still muted. Were we still on about this? Our official policy was that servers should be replaced when the warranty expired, but I knew both of the machines he was talking about, and neither really needed it. CBDA's Exchange server was a bit long in the tooth, but still running fine, and Tate-Lyman's file server was only a few years old. The RAIDs were healthy, and we had some older spares we could swap in, in a pinch. But, well, that was "best practices" for-

Hey, is that a bird? Distracted by a brief flash of color in the corner of my eye, I glanced outside. Yes, there it was; a scrub jay was nosing around in the bushes outside, in the little patch of "green space" between my bedroom window and the pavement. I watched it, mesmerized, for a long moment; I knew we had a bunch of different species in the area, but I'd never paid close attention before. We must be coming into the spring rainy season, too; I wondered when I'd see a-

"-inson? Mr. Robinson? ...Kit? You with us?"

I jumped. "Mya! Uh, I, uh-" I blinked and shook my head; something there'd seemed out of place, but I couldn't think of what. "Uh, sorry," I said, unmuting myself, "got a little distrrracted..." Well now I felt like a dolt; why was I so addled today, if I felt so good otherwise...? I hadn't even touched my coffee, I realized; maybe I was just going through caffeine withdrawal. I took a long sip, let it settle, then frowned; it was missing something.

"Uh, just a sec," I said, getting up to hit the kitchen while my coworkers looked on in confusion. I returned with the carton of half-and-half and added a generous splash to my mug, watching intently as it bloomed up towards the surface. Was that enough? Maybe just a little more...a liiittle more...

"Uh, Kit?" Giles snickered. "D'you normally take coffee with your cream...?"

I snapped back to reality with a start, and nearly sloshed the half-and-half right out of the carton; I glanced down to find that I'd filled the cup almost to the brim. The coffee was almost white, and I couldn't even pick it up without spilling; I hunched over it and carefully sipped it down. Whole cream, I realized, that's what I need; I'd have to get some when I made a grocery run this afternoon.

There was a brief, awkward silence before Bryce resumed his gripe, satisfied that we were all paying attention.° I felt a bit embarrassed; what was with me today...? But the cream tasted so good, even diluted, and I was still savoring the fish; maybe I could go for the other can after I finished my coffee...

° (We weren't.)

Then my IM client pinged.

Michael: You okay, man?

Michael: You seem kinda out of it.

I considered that for a moment. Was I okay? I felt...strangely nice. Nicely strange? The words tumbled around in my brain for a bit as I tried to break them into components I could re-order so as to properly reflect the state of my mind. I felt abnormally good, and it made me want to run outside and do other things I normally wouldn't. Sensations I was normally neutral on were suddenly intoxicating, and stuff I'd been fine with tasted bad. Things I'd never paid attention to before were completely absorbing, but I couldn't focus on the basic daily grind. It was all so strange...

...so strange that, honestly, it was a little unsettling. I did feel good, but a little nagging voice in the back of my mind reminded me that this was all very Not Normal; but it was getting quieter, muffled by a growing pleasant haze that seemed to be filling my whole brain...