Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Eighty

Don’t you think it might be time to just rest? All these scattered things cast about – we’ve got nothing left to hold onto. We’re all of us a little incomplete, not quite there, shining and corrupt darkness. And yearning for those pieces to fill all those absences.

All lost on All Souls Day. The dead tumble out of the sky, dropping like cannonballs with echoes of precision fire. I can hear the intimations of a new reality now that I’ve got my nose pressed tight to the sulphur-laced ground, as an endless line of boots march by.

The doorway is enigmatic, hanging precariously open. The building shakes with the weight of its hundreds of lives. The pre-dawn raid carried out, a ruffled corpse left – uncollected – on some failed piece of real estate, bleeding clean through. Reservations lost, the final trappings of conspiracy. The far side of the sky is all filled up.

The dregs of the morning’s coffee sit in the cup, cold to the touch. The ambiguity of the situation is now apparent. You smile, in that off-hand kind of way.

The night sounds softly, like the hush of breathing from a sleeping form, a song that drifts on and is lost on the breeze.