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 Four Hundred Twenty

I dreamed while still awake, or perhaps I drifted off for a few minutes, though I do not think so. Sleep has been precious these last days, hard to come by. In the dream I had returned to the central parts of the Quarter. There were the rolling hills, the vast blue sky and the endless horizon that I know so well. The prairie extended in every direction I looked. There were no roads, no homesteads, no markers. I walked for what seemed like hours but encountered nothing and no one. The birds and insects flitting about, and the wind that carried them, provided the only sounds I heard.

It seemed I was seeing the Quarter as it once was, or perhaps as it will be again someday. I walked until I came to a small valley where some chokecherry trees grew, their branches heavy with unripe berries. There was a spring there, hidden amongst the bushes and I cupped a few handfuls of water to my lips. It was cool, a revelation. I sat in the shade of the trees for a time.

When I emerged from the valley the light in the sky had changed. It was a faded kind of blue as if something had been drained from it. There was something on the horizon, massive and dark. Metallic. It was hard to tell whether it was moving on the ground or in the air it so filled up that part of the sky. All I could be certain of was that it was approaching, growing larger and larger.

I blinked and it was gone and though I stared at the horizon trying to find some trace of its presence I found myself alone again. The birds had gone quiet, only the grasshoppers whirred on oblivious. The wind shifted direction and began to blow.