The disease was known as Physcophino, and its effects were devastating. It would make a person only be able to see shades of gray, and it would also cause them to go insane. It was a relatively new disease, but it was an epidemic. There were no known cures at the time that a man named Timothy Goodwell contracted it, and the time John Street was already 3 weeks into the infection. Ever since the first case of the epidemic, there were fake cults that would get into contact with these people who could only see gray, and tell them that they had the cure for them. Of course, this was not true, and it was a scam in the end for the victim’s money. The cult’s “doctor” would inject some water into them and give them a sugar pill, and tell them that in three weeks they would be cured. Both Timothy and John were completely unaware of this, but it was already too late for both of them.

Timothy was a middle-aged man who was well off. He worked as a lawyer before he got physcophino. He was a very smart man, and did well in college. On the other hand, John Street was a high school dropout who ended up living in a rundown apartment building. He probably got the disease from being around garbage all the time. John had already got the disease a weeksbefore Timothy did. By the time Timothy contracted the disease, John’s mind was almost completely gone. John was in a state of complete disaster. He didn’t know what to do about his condition at all, except wait to see if maybe it wore off.

John was at the middle of his second week. Most things to him were a gray as it was and gray was the only thing his mind could concieve. To him, mostly the whole world around him looked all the same in its dull, bland form. He rarely ever travelled out of the house because he knew he would always see the same thing. Sometimes he more or less wished for death, and so he became increasingly insane and antisocial.
Every day, the gray he saw got darker and darker, and he wished it would turn black so he could just declare himself blind. It did not happen like that though. The shadows got darker. The sun’s rays got darker. Everything got darker, but nothing turned black. It was torture and he sometimes just couldn’t bare it, and he would crawl into the closet in his small apartment. He would sometimes take walks down the street. He would put his hood over his head and would walk with his arms folded. He would bump into people sometimes by accident, and when he looked up, he would see the same empty gray faces he would always see.

Things became darker, as did his outlook on life. His field of vision and his depth perception shrunk backwards. Things far away from his looked fuzzy and when he found himself reaching for something on a shelf, he sometimes had to guess how far away it was from him. He decided that the third week was going to be his last. He decided to think this over after a walk in the park.

While John was figuring out his problems, Timothy’s had just begun. To him, the first two days after the “procedure” by the cult were ablaze with color. He saw everything, the trees, sun, and people, all in vivid detail. There were rich shades of blue, green, and multiple hues of orange and red. He would take long walks in the park just to take it all in.

As days went by for John, he began noticing a slight change in the world around him. Things not only became blurrier, they were also drained of color a little bit. It was not really noticeable to him at first, but slowly to him it appeared.

The grayness started to stick out during the middle of the second week. He didn’t really know why it was happening to him, and he was scared. Sometimes he would just stay inside his house under the cover of his bed all day. When he would stay under the covers, he would close his eyes and squeeze them shut hard, and then open them to see if anything changed. It usually did not.

Timothy decided to take a walk in the park. He thought that a walk could ease his nerves and maybe, just maybe, bring the color back to his eyes. He started his walk through the park. It was calming, and even though it was gray, it was still pretty serene. He looked around, when sometimes caught his eye. It was a flicker, but it was a flicker of color. He turned to see a person walking the opposite way. Little did he know that it was a fellow victim of the disease they both had, physcophino. It was too much color for Timothy’s half-deteriorated mind to handle. He snapped, and ran all the way home, pushing people aside, not really knowing why he was doing that.

Three weeks passed since Timothy’s incident, and he had gotten a lot worse. There were only two shades of gray he could see now, and he was completely mad. He figured out that there was no cure for his disease, as the treatment would have worked by now. He couldn’t deal with anything anymore. He couldn’t stand walking among the mannequin-like humans and the gray trees and the gray world he now lived in. There was nothing he could do that would change it, nothing at all. He just wanted it to all be over, and he thought about it as he crawled into his cupboard, his world turning black, because as it turns out, it wasn’t just the virus or the grayness making him mad, it was himself and his own self-ignorance.