Adiós Grasa

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NEW PROMPT:
Write a story or poem about a new miracle medication available to the general public.
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         “It’s a miracle pill,” Jenny told her good friend, Ruth. “I’ve lost 20 pounds in just one month on it.”
         “That’s quite a lot to lose so fast, isn’t it?” Ruth nervously asked her friend. Jenny, who originally weighed close to 300 pounds, did look thinner. Ruth still was worried. “I’ve heard with most diet pills when you stop taking them you put the weight back on, sometimes even more.”
         “Oh, no. It’s guaranteed you don’t, and there are no side effects at all.” Seeing she wasn’t going to convince Jenny to be careful with the pills, Ruth backed off and changed the subject.
         Over the next year, she heard from other sources about this miracle diet pill, Adiós Grasa, Spanish for goodbye fat. AG, as it quickly became known, was sweeping the country and then the world. The formerly fat latched on to the product that promised easy and quick weight loss without having to diet or exercise. Month after month, the fat disappeared from everyone, usually as much as 10 to 20 pounds a month.
         One rainy morning in January, Ruth got a phone call from Jenny with an invitation to lunch at downtown’s popular eatery, The Hungry Hunter. Ten months had passed since the two friends had last seen each other. Ruth was looking forward to hearing all the latest gossip.
         When she saw her formally obese friend sitting in a booth at the back of the restaurant, Ruth was shocked at Jenny’s radically changed appearance. Gone was the constant smile Jenny’s friends were used to seeing. Instead, her blue eyes had dark shadows underneath them, and her once beautiful and shining blonde hair hung lank and lifeless around her shoulders.
         “Jenny, you look terrible. What happened?” Ruth asked this before realizing how rude it might sound.
         Jenny started crying deep sobs that shook her whole body. When she finally was able to speak, she whispered, “AG, Ruth, there is a side effect. They lied to us.” She shoved an empty pill bottle across the table. “I stopped taking it two months ago, and the weight still continues to come off. It’s slowing down, but not stopping.”
         Ruth thought back to how many people had embraced this miracle pill over the last year, and her face went white in fear. What if the effect of the pill never stops? Her racing thoughts squirreled in fear at what this would mean to anyone who was on this miracle pill.
         For the following few weeks after Ruth saw a frightened Jenny, television stations covered the rapid slimming of the population. News anchors happily praised the healthy benefits of losing weight. During March, various doctors and dieticians were guests on evening talk shows. They were still delighted with the marvelous effects of AG, but cautioned patients that being too thin was just as bad for their health as being overweight.
         By the end of summer, the previously overweight, most of whom now resembled walking bags of bones, began inundating hospital emergency rooms. The first to die, a woman down to 60 pounds from a slightly heavy 200, went into shock from massive organ failure. One after another, they started to die, men and women and a handful of children who had believed the drug company’s pie-in-the-sky promises regarding AG.
         Two days before Halloween, Ruth spent hours at Jenny’s hospital bedside, trying to comfort her friend. It was just past midnight, the witching hour, when Jenny took her last shallow breath. With tears of loss streaming down her face, Ruth whispered into the quiet of the room, “Oh, Jenny, why couldn’t you be happy with the way you looked before?”
         On the last day of the year, the final AG patient died in agony. All that remained throughout the world were those happy with their appearance, no matter what size they happened to be.
         On that evening’s network news show, the lead anchor sadly read from the teleprompter what everyone should have known from the beginning. “To quote that familiar acronym TANSTAAFL, 'There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.' Everything, even a miracle drug, has a price!”'

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Microsoft Word count = 688

"The Writer's Cramp"  daily contest entry for 01/11/08
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