Day 5 of my 2023 drabble-a-day challenge! Here is today’s drabble:

It Must Be Something In The Biscuits

Three hours into mathematics coaching, Belinda began to scream. Everyone glared.

Only two months to go until the exams and we still had so much to cover. Noone had time for Belinda's histrionics.

Which didn't stop.

Ms Margolon yelled, and Belinda fell from her chair, thrashing her head against the floor. My head ached just watching her.

Millie, next to me, looked scared. Her breathing got louder and louder, and I could almost feel her shaking. She began to scream.

My head pounded, screams sawing my nerves. When Lydia screamed behind me, I couldn't stand it any more.

I screamed.

This morning, I was catching up on an old episode of My Favorite Murder, in which they were talking about Mass Psychogenic Illness (formerly known as Mass Hysteria) and the Dancing Plagues of medieval Europe.

So on my commute today, I was reading about MPI, and the thing that struck me was that (at least in so far as I could Google on a phone, with poor signal) there are no accounts of how it feels to be caught up in an episode. Possibly because most people involved are unimpressed with the “psychogenic” diagnosis and prefer to believe they are the victims of covered-up poisonings, toxic environments, viruses etc.

Today's drabble is an exploration of how it might feel to be there at the start of an outbreak.

Oh, and hey - marketing segue - did you know I had a story about the dancing plague in an anthology last year? The anthology proposes a wide variety of fantasy and sci-fi explanations for the Dancing Plague. So if you'd like to know what it is like to be caught up in university politics, rather than MPI, you could read my story Interdisciplinary!