Bed of Roses

My eyes were glued shut.

It's a familiar feeling.  You know if from nightmares, long, tangled dreams in which you stumble from one room to another, unable to see the horrors pursuing you.  You know it from slasher films, in which the heroine awakens in an abandoned hotel, manacled and blind.  You know it from first grade, when you came down with pinkeye.

Oh yes, my friends.  I suppose it's one of the perks of working with preschoolers.  Cuteness and hugs and good, old-fashioned conjunctivitis. 

But it sure isn't fun.  My eyes itch, for starters.   The whites are a bright, candy-striper pink, as if my twin windows to the soul suddenly decided to go around delivering shelter magazines to the hospitalized.  I sport, in addition to vampire eyes, dry, pasty skin; bedhead; the hangdog look of the uncomfortable; ratty clothes; and a voice like a chain-smoking Barry Manilow.

I am monstrous.

I'm afraid to go outside, for fear of being burned at the stake or excommunicated or stripped of my charge card or however it is the masses show fear these days.   I have it on the highest authority (WEB MD) that I am not supposed to return to work or preschool (they haven't cottoned to the fact that my work IS preschool) until I stop looking like a slavering zombie (WEB MD) because pinkeye is contagious.

As in Hot Zone, Andromeda Strain, 28 Days Later, Contagion, CONTAGIOUS.

If I come up with enough movie titles, do you think I can overlook the fact that I have to hang around the house for the next few days looking like something the cat was afraid to drag in because it looked so sad and awful?

Outbreak.