The Unraveling Thread

Hello Hello, today’s six-sentence story is based on the word of the week, THREAD.  I took this one a little metaphorically, with the idea of it being the thread of someone’s argument.  It got weirdly preachy, and it is sort of a outsider POV of someone delivering an epic anti-vax rant.  This is delivered from the POV of a pro-vax narrator, and if that isn’t your jam, I would ask that you please stop reading rather than flaming my comment section.

One of my core beliefs is warning instead of censors, which is why in many of my pieces you will see references to tags for things that might upset people, or trigger them.  While I love feedback, I do always request that you consider what you are about to read and follow the basic rule of “Don’t like it, don’t read it,” or the social media equivalent, “curate your own experience.”   For those of you still interested, take a look at this weeks six, on the thread of the argument.

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On the surface the story made sense, but even as he spewed his vitriol if you started to follow the thread back to it’s origin, to the flimsy web of conspiracy propped up by a single study paid to say what they wanted to, you would realize that all It would take is one good fact tugging on it to have the whole thing unravel.

He spoke of the consent of children, that he was afraid of needles, but no one cared, and he ignored how much his mother did care, how much it hurt her to watch him scream in terror, but remembering the screams of her own mother when she was told that the polio had moved to her sister’s lungs, and it wouldn’t be long now.

He stood saying that he had mumps, measles, chicken pox, all of it, he was just fine, they had pox parties back in his day, but he doesn’t remember that Timothy Green from special Ed was in his 1^st grade class, top of it, before the party, and just because those were the best options they had at the time, didn’t make them great ones.  He doesn’t remember his mother worrying about how badly he had the mumps, more so than she worried about his sister, that the fact he “got around” so much in his younger days without consequence, might have less to do with luck, and more to do with why his ex-wife got pregnant a month into her new relationship, after years of trying with him before the divorce.

He brandishes the scar for smallpox, saying that his body was permanently disfigured, when he was only a child, along with his 5 siblings, even though he had never known anyone with smallpox, as if that mark wasn’t the reason he didn’t know anyone with smallpox, and that without it, they would likely have numbered 4 instead of 6.

Then he wound up his rant with the rise in autism, the last great proof, citing data 20 years old, before the vaccination rate and autism rates diverged, before it was common knowledge that there was just one study, and he delivered it all with the conviction of a man who had never had a child, never watched one die slowly from something spread that didn’t have to be, a man who had never once followed the thread of his own story back to its faulty sources.