I went online one day and stumbled upon a news item about the Cat Virus currently exploding across the globe. Many humans have been infected, regardless of country, nationality, ethnicity. Cat Virus has spread far and wide, and the number of people getting sick is increasing.

I read up on the symptoms of many sufferers, who all reported low spirits, lack of energy, growing anxiety, emptiness, and despair. This sounded like some unheard-of illness, trafficked and disseminated by cats. Once infected, people became completely dependent on their felines, losing interest in humanity. Some were so severely afflicted that, after not receiving proper care in time, they passed away. Reading about their deaths, I pressed my hands to my bosom in terror. Just like that, I felt unable to breathe.

I cried out for Husband and, when he came, rubbed his chest and asked him, “Are you having any trouble breathing?” He shook his head. Maybe it was psychosomatic, but after reading that article, I began to feel myself coming down with the symptoms of Cat Virus.

A few days later, my friend Drizzle rang me up. She mentioned Cat Virus, asking if I’d heard about this new thing that was popping up all over the news. I said yes, I knew, and we began discussing it. Drizzle said she’d been experiencing more and more signs of the virus. Timorously, I confessed I was too.

After hanging up, I felt my heart fill with panic. Hurrying over to Husband, I told him I might have been infected. “Stop being a hypochondriac,” he said, “and definitely don’t go online to look up more diseases. In the end it won’t be the germs that kill you; you’ll die of fright scaring yourself with your self-diagnoses.” I promised him I’d stop, but I couldn’t help worrying about it, so when he wasn’t looking, I went online and started scouring for more information. I needed to look up whether there was any treatment for Cat Virus.

I found a peculiar website whose interface was covered in terrifying headlines: “Warning Signs for Late-Stage Cat Virus,” “Cat Virus Epidemic,” and more. Cold sweat ran down my back. I kept scrolling, until I saw an ad for treating Cat Virus.

Curious, I clicked on it. The page displayed the account of a Cat Virus sufferer who’d been on his deathbed before discovering a miracle cure, which he now wished to share with the public for free. All you had to do, according to the website, was press your nose up against a cat’s body and inhale deeply. Below this post were dozens of comments, every single one of them praising the effectiveness of this method. The only side effect was uncontrollable sneezing, and if you happened to have an allergy to fur, you might also find your face getting itchy and swollen.

Following a link on the page, I was redirected to a test consisting of thirty questions. Answering them confirmed I was at high risk of Cat Virus because my antibodies were weak. This was followed by a series of helpful tips for people in my demographic: If you don’t have a cat, keep your distance. Don’t allow them to come into your sight. Don’t venture anywhere that cats prowl, and you’ll remain uninfected. If you do have a cat, your only choice is to fight poison with poison and keep having cats for the rest of your life. Cats are both disease and cure, and abandoning cats will now cause you great physical and psychological harm. Not only that, you’ll cause widespread damage within your community, because this illness doesn’t just spread from cat to human but also between humans. Most of the people around you will end up as asymptomatic carriers or chronic sufferers.

This was both good and bad news. The bad news was that I was almost certainly infected with Cat Virus; the good news was that I could still be saved. As long as I continued living with Cat, the virus shouldn’t affect me at all. Or at least, it would be slow acting, and I wouldn’t end up dead. This suited me because I never intend to part with Cat.