text: At first, I ignored the dripping sound. Figured it was just raining but the drip, drip, drip, just wouldn’t stop. No matter where I go, it’s there. I’ve searched the whole house by now for the source, but no matter where I stand it seems to be coming from just over my head. Called a plumber. They should be here between ten and two. I’m really hoping for ten. This sound is driving me crazy. I try to distract myself with music, but no matter how far I turn the stereo up, the dripping is still there, insistent and just loud enough to form a backbeat. Drip, drip, drip. The plumber shows up. His eyes are red, like he hasn’t been sleeping. I explain the problem and he goes to look. “I’ve been hearing dripping sounds for several days now,” the plumber says from under the sink. The leak clearly isn’t there, but I don’t say anything about it. He’s the plumber; it says so on his nametag along with his name, which I’m certain he told me, but I have forgotten. The plumber keeps talking. “I’m starting to think is some form of tinnitus because the dripping just follows me around.” “This drip does that,” I admit. “I can’t seem to narrow down where it is.” “Well, it isn’t here,” the plumber says, coming out from under the sink. His eyes look even redder now. “I got a few more places to check.” I follow him around the house. He’s weaving a bit drunkenly, and I start to wonder if that is why his eyes are so red. Just my luck to get a plumber who can’t find the drip because he’s been hitting a bottle of scotch! “Been getting a lot of these calls,” the plumber slurs. “You’re lucky we could get you in... seems like everyone has a leak they can’t find these days.” “Just find it,” I say. The tapping, dripping, dropping, clacking sound makes it hard to be patient or kind. Perhaps that is why the first thing I think when the plumber drops to the floor is, “I’m supposed to be thankful for this alcoholic showing up?” My second reaction is better as it clicks with me that something is seriously wrong with the plumber. I sink the floor beside him and reach out. I call his name, which I only know because it is on the nameplate on his chest. I’ve forgotten his name even as I say it. He doesn’t respond. A little pool of blood is spreading on the floor from his nose. The next bit happens in a whirl. I call 911 and paramedics show up. One of them has bloodshot eyes, and I find myself staring at that rather than at the corpse on my floor--because by then I know the plumber is dead. He hasn’t so much as blinked since he fell to the floor. They take the body away and leave me with a little pool of blood slowly congealing on the tiles in my kitchen. When I head to get some towels to clean up, I pass the bathroom mirror. My eyes look a little bloodshot too. It is probably the dripping... makes it hard to sleep at night. Though maybe it’s time to pick up a bottle of scotch. I’m not usually a heavy drinker, but something to help me relax sounds good. The next day I’m sitting in my living room with the tv blaring, in a doomed attempt to drown out the drip, drip, drip. A report comes on the news that catches my attention, mainly because I recognize the plumber’s face. The familiar plumber’s snapshot is alongside a few others on a split screen. The details of the report are hard to concentrate on. Drip, drip, drip, seems to wind in among the calmly states facts from the news reporter. But even with that, I manage to get the basics. The people on the screen, including my plumber, are all dead. That part makes sense, the rest doesn’t seem to compute properly, even with my limited knowledge of biology and how the body works, the findings in these deaths don’t seem right. When they brought my plumber to the hospital and examined him, there was no brain in his head. His entire skull was filled with blood. He was the first--lucky me to have the first die in my kitchen and leave a pool of blood. The others are the victims that have come in since his death. All dead now, according to the newscaster, with her perfect lipstick and wide blue eyes. The CDC has been called in, and the newscaster gives a list of warning signs of this new disease. I barely hear most of it, because it sounds more like a practical joke than a real thing. The only sign I really pick up on is the dripping sound. The dripping in my own head wouldn’t let me tune that factoid out. Apparently, all of the victims heard a dripping sound which the doctors and scientists are positing was the sound of blood dripping into their empty skulls, filling the place where their brain was supposed to be. I turn off the tv and head upstairs to bed despite it still being the middle of the day. People can’t live without brains. Even I know that. Despite being unreasonably exhausted, trying to sleep is hard with the dripping sound. I can’t escape the repetitive noise. I shut my blinds trying to blood out the sunshine outside and climb back under my coverlet. And I find myself mulling over the tv report. It can’t be real. How would they even know that the people had empty skulls prior to the dripping? Were people coming in to report this to them before dying? And who would ever have thought to look for such a thing? Outside my window the sound of a siren screeches by, fading into a keening sound in the distance. By the time I finally drift off to sleep, I’ve convinced myself I imagined the entire report. I dream that I’m trying to find a leak in an old basement that smells of mold and copper. I find blood dripping down the walls instead and realize I’m standing in a puddle of it. By the time I get back to the basement stairs it is up to my knees. Morning comes and the dripping sound seems louder, more like a plop of water into a full bathtub than droplets hitting the porcelain. Like my brain is filling up. Except that thought comes directly from the news report that I must have dreamed of. I go downstairs and turn on the tv again as I make breakfast. There is a dried pool of blood on my kitchen floor. I should clean that up. I’m gearing up to do that as I eat some dry toast for breakfast, but the news comes on and distracts me. Pictures of the local hospital and a new set of faces fill the screen. I see a number, but I can’t recall the death total a moment later. It must be hard to remember things without a brain, I tell myself. I don’t listen to the newscaster’s report this time. Instead, I pick up my smartphone and do my own research. The report I heard was real, or at least, the report really happened. Lots of people are calling the disease out as made up, or falsified. But I notice that everyone from where I live is scared. There are more reports of death, wives telling what happened to their husbands, children saying what happened to their parents... and every story starts with a drip that no one else could hear. I do some research on the doctors who are putting out the insane claims. They were all respectable before this. And their reports now chill me in a way I didn’t expect because all of them are saying exactly what I thought. This shouldn’t be possible. People can’t live without brains, but they are. That makes me study the reports carefully, searching for the underlying facts, even if those facts contradict logic. The body count is up in the hundreds now. Didn’t take long, the disease seems like it takes about four to five days in total. Now I’m sure of what the sound in my head is. It’s a drip, slow and steady, of blood into my empty skull, filling the space left vacant. Drip, drip, drip. No matter how much I study the reports, there’s no explanation for this phenomenon, nor why the person dies when the empty space is full. But they do and by inference, that means I will too, unless I can figure a way around the looming fate. I clean up the dried blood from my kitchen floor, overflow from the plumber’s brain. He should have drained it beforehand and bought himself some time. How full is my skull? I’m three days into this awful dripping. I go out to my car and consider driving away but the dripping would just follow me. When I go back inside, I’m thankful I didn’t try to leave. The tv tells me that the borders to the city have been closed. We are in full quarantine from the rest of the world. Another fact sneaks out to frighten me: over a thousand are dead. And that’s just the ones who have been reported and tallied. There are only two things the city is doing now, dripping and dropping dead. That strikes me as funny, and I laugh. I can see my reflection in the kitchen window as night falls. My eyes are a horrid shade of red. I wouldn’t mind some scotch, but I’m pretty sure that even if there are places open out there, they wouldn’t serve me. No one seems to know if this is contagious, but no one is taking a chance. We don’t know what causes this plague, but the quarantine has people thinking that if it can be contained, that means that we are spreading it somehow. No scotch in the house. I lock all my doors and bar the windows as the night deepens. There are bodies in the street. I can’t find a death toll online anymore. No one is doing anything akin to scientific recording. I find several places where people outside the city are discussing what’s happening. I try to leave comments, but my fingers don’t seem to want to type anything sane. I can locate a few like me typing similar comments. All we talk about is the dripping. Drip, drip, drip. But it has started to sound like a ticking sound to me. After all, that drip is my life ticking down to zero. In the middle of the night, I hear a gunshot fired. Then another. Someone runs by outside my house, and I’m pleased that they don’t fall down and die. There are enough corpses outside my house. If... no, *when*, I survive this, I don’t want those bodies to be my responsibility. No one out there is going to help me. Not those talking about this disease from their safe unaffected cities, and certainly not the dwindling people of the city around me. I stare at my kitchen floor and think about the plumber. Ending up just like him is hardly appealing. So I won’t. His problem, I decided, was that he didn’t have the information I do. He didn’t know what was happening to him, so he couldn’t address it. He didn’t know that he didn’t have a brain and his skull was slowly filling up. My leg up is that I do know those things. I wonder how we lost our brains and if we can get them back. But those are facts that I don’t have. The people who come after me may have them, but I have to make do with what I know. And what I know is that when my skull fills up with blood, I’ll die. A smile spreads across my face. I feel it stretching unused muscles. All I have to do in order not to die is to not let my skull fill up. I head into my garage and dig around in the tools there. I find my drill and bring it inside. Safety first. I wash and sanitize the drill bit. Then I leave my sink faucet on. I figure I can wash and rinse things as I go if it becomes necessary. Good thing I know my sink doesn’t leak. I giggle a little. I’m getting silly. It is all the dripping, I tell myself. It is hard to focus with the dripping. And maybe, just maybe, it is hard to think clearly with no brain. The best place to go in, I decide, is dead center of my skull. I don’t need to worry about hitting my brain, after all. I plug the drill in, put the bit back where it belongs, and picture the blood coming out of the plumber’s nose. Obviously, that doesn’t work as a drain before death, but I am smart enough to create my own drain. My head would never fill up. Nope. I’ll just let that pesky dripping blood drain out the front. The back might have been a better choice, not to mess up my face, but I can’t properly reach back there. Forehead it is. I turn the drill on and press it to my forehead. You’d think it would hurt a great deal to drill a hole into your head. But the truth is it doesn’t hurt all that much at all. After the first surprise jolt, it is more like a toothache--nasty but localized and the knowledge it would be over soon keeps me going. The drill bit pops through on the other side of my skull, I feel it because the resistance is gone and the drill just slides forward. I pull it out and tipped my head over the sink letting the blood drain out and get washed away by the flow of water. I wonder who else had thought of this as I clean up bone fragments and blood from myself and my kitchen. Then I wander into my living room. I don’t turn on the tv. Can’t hear it over the dripping anyhow. People are screaming outside. I feel sorry for them. I figured it out, I’m safe, but they are still out there in the worst of it. I go to the window to look out, peeling back the curtain. The world is fresh and new, vital. It looks redder than it did before. It’s actually a little hard to see. Oh. I should have thought of this. The blood is draining into my eyes. No dripping now, but there is a lot of red, more than a tiny drip should account for. I can’t see anything through the blood drip, drip, dripping over my eyes.