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 One Hundred Twenty Four

The sun is bright, the sky clear, hardly a breath of wind stirring, as I drive to the testing station. The traffic is steady, almost a typical midday in the city. I listen to the radio, where for once they are not talking about the dread lord’s presence in the Lost Quarter.

My love was feeling off for a few days and was tested yesterday. Today she feels fine, her symptoms vanished. Likely it was nothing, just one of those weeks that would pass without notice or mention in the time before the grippe reborn returned. Or maybe it was just the generalized dread we all feel on some level, even without being entirely aware of it, manifesting itself.

The testing centre is in the parking lot of a health centre. Men in fluorescent yellow and orange overalls, that must be stiflingly hot on the pavement in the sun, wave vehicles into queues. I go as directed, turn off my car and wait. The minutes tick by and I slowly move closer to the station, which is a large white tent connected to the health centre’s entrance.

The heat radiates off the pavement and concrete of the parking lot, making me drowsy as I wait. As I get closer to the tent I can hear a little girl crying out as they try to take a swab. “No, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I want to go home.” Nurses move between the vehicles to the centre, wearing face shields, masks and gloves. The girl’s piteous cries continue until I am in the tent.

The test itself is over quickly. A q-tip shoved up my nostril and twisted. It feels as though it is scraping the top of my skull. There are tears in my eyes and my face is contorted into a grimace. The sensation at the top of my head, a probing ache, accompanies me home. In two days I will know.

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 One Hundred Twenty Three

The days are warm and sunny, the best of summer. Only a few cirrus clouds passing by above, long strands of disintegrating webs. People crowd the rivers with rafts, floating along, laughing and flirting. The paths, once crowded with those seeking an escape from lockdown are quieter now as lives return somewhat to normal. The roads are busy with traffic again, people with places to go and things to do.

We must stay inside though according to the quarantine protocols. My love has a sore throat and has been tested for the presence of the grippe reborn. Until we get the results we must seclude ourselves. I will be tested tomorrow. I doubt very much the dread lord is present, but we owe it to ourselves and everyone in the Quarter to cautious.

Oddly I feel little anguish as we await her results. There was much more torment before the test as we pondered whether the dread lord might be present. Now we will know, one way or another, and can proceed accordingly.

That is the hardest part of the quarantine protocols and the dread lord’s incursion. We are left in stasis, in a holding pattern, uncertain what tomorrow or the next day will bring. Life goes on in other ways: jobs are tenuous and we grow restless to do something, anything. But it is impossible to plan for any eventualities when we do not know whether this will be over next year, or linger on for several.

My feeling is that we will be able to begin erecting strong defences against the grippe reborn next year. There will be treatments that prove at least somewhat effective. But to build up these defences will take time – it is no easy task. As a result, the dread lord will still cast a shadow upon the Quarter for some time, and we will have to find a way to endure.

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 One Hundred Twenty

In my youth, growing up in the Lost Quarter, we battled another plague: the round leaf mallow. A weed as merciless as the grippe reborn.

Though common in other parts of the Quarter it was unknown where I was raised. How it arrived was unclear, though there were an untold number of vectors for the seeds. The clothes of visitors, the trucks of those picking up or delivering cattle, the animals themselves. Looked at that way its coming was as inevitable as the dread lord’s invasion of the Quarter. People are always coming and going everywhere, carrying who knows what with them.

The first year we noticed one or two in the pens and around the yard. An unfamiliar plant in amongst the usual weeds: kochia, dandelion, and thistle. How it had come to be there we had no idea. It grew low to the ground, spreading out with viney stalks topped by a ‘round’ leaf that looks like a poorly drawn heart. We thought nothing of it. There were always weeds and grass growing everywhere in the yard and around the corrals, and this was just one more.

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 One Hundred Nineteen

There are days when I feel on the edge of everything. Raging, sorrowful, full of despair. Exhausted by every fucking last thing. The skin on my head feels tight, stretched across my skull. My hands ache from being clenched too tight.

It has been one hundred and nineteen days since this began and some days it seems like one thousand. It may be one thousand before it is all over.

And it is wearing on me. The constant vigilance required to stand against the dread lord. At a certain point, and without even meaning to, one becomes indifferent to the need. A defence mechanism almost, a need to not think of this any longer.

We need a break, a chance to reset, and we are not afforded it. For every time we do, the grippe reborn slips in through the cracks, finding his way to our most vulnerable spots.

This has not been easy. Let no one pretend that it has been. It has been relentless, unceasing. Everything we do, even our leisure, is shadowed by the dread lord. And the question echoes and echoes in our minds: how long?

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 One Hundred Eighteen

Abandoned houses dot the plains of the Lost Quarter, remnants of lives left behind. Not all of Those Who Came, after Those Who Left were sent into exile, stayed. When the depression came and the lands blew, setting up clouds of dust so thick there was darkness at noon, some were sent to other parts of the dominions to start anew. Many others left of their own accord. Others gave up along the way, abandoning their lives for what they hoped would be better ones outside the Quarter.

They left behind the houses they built, and the yards they carved out of the sea of prairie grass. Driving along empty roads, surrounded by rolling hills and pasture, you will see them. A house alongside the road, surrounded by a wall of trees. From a distance it will seem like any other house, but once you get closer you can see the paint has faded and gone, the wood bare to the elements. The windows are broken and the roof is sagging. The ground around the trees, once kept with meticulous care, is overgrown with weeds and grass, and even new saplings finding their way into the world.

The Quarter is haunted with these places, left to fall into disrepair, for the wind and elements to wear away all traces. Seeing them has always filled me with a strange longing to know what became of those who once inhabited these places. All that is left are a few fragments of how they once lived, only those that they could leave behind. Soon enough the wind will have them.

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 One Hundred Seventeen

A restless night, filled with dreams. I wake up tired, wanting to sleep longer but unable to. That has been the way these last days. It feels as though I am on the edge of waking all through the night, my dreams so vivid  that I can never quite relax to let them go and submerge deeper into the pools of sleep.

I imagined I was back at the academy. It was bustling with people, everyone on their way to some grand occasion. I went along, though I knew nothing about the celebration, hoping there would be some free food. The crowds grew thicker as we went, crowding in all around, and I turned away in terror.

They always say that when you graduate from the academy it is time to enter the real world. It is a strange conceit, as though you have spent the last four years at some frivolous task in some cosseted place where the hard reality of the world cannot intrude. Certainly there is frivolity, to say nothing of debauchery, but it isn’t as thought that all ceases after graduation, and the world always intrudes no matter how ethereal your concerns.

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 One Hundred Sixteen

There is a darkness at the end of the road. She walks toward it, gravel crunching under her shoes, rocks skittering in her path. Above, half a moon is still visible in the sky, the morning sun bright in the east. There is blue everywhere, as far as the eye can see, vast and perfect. Except at the end of the road, where the horizon ceases. The world shrinks there, becoming smaller and bathed in shadows.

The road narrows, the gravel becoming dirt. It is uneven, slanting this way and that, shifting with the way water runs. There are no ditches now, the grass along the sides taller than her in places. In low spots where water gathers, trees lean over the road. A sparrow drinks from a puddle with tire tracks on its edges, flitting away at her approach.

A gentle descent begins carrying her to a slough, the road curving around its edge. There are round bales of straw in the water where geese have made nests. They pay no mind to her passage. With the recent rains the slough has risen past its boundaries and washed out the road completely, so she needs to leave it, finding a path through the marshy hummocks on the other side.

At the far side of the slough the road ends. The water glistens less there, the light of the sun dissipated. There is a tangle of trees at the edge, some in the water. Willows and poplars, chokecherries and caraganas. The darkness is within their shadows, a presence, ebbing and flowing like the waves on the slough.

She stops to watch it for a time as it shivers in the wind, contours barely visible through the branches and shifting by the moment. Setting her shoulders she begins her approach.

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 One Hundred Thirteen

The Lost Quarter has always been at the borders of maps, the blank spaces where the ink runs out and imagination begins to stir. No dragons lie here though, no explorers yearn to venture to its wilds. Only the wind strains to reach the far places of its hinterlands.

When explorers ventured into these territories they came to the Quarter, they looked around and carried on their way. Only the aridness of the place and the wind were of note. It was a waystation on their passage to greater things, grand discoveries.

Those Who Went Away passed through often of course, following the bison herds until they dwindled. They would be here still if they had not been so cruelly banished. Now they linger at the edges of the territory, and the minds of Those Who Came. They are at the borders of the maps, unwritten and unacknowledged.

Yet they remain and the maps we try to draw of the Quarter are incomplete without them. But to include them is to be forced to acknowledge that all the roads and settlements in these parts were built upon their suffering. That is History, some will say. Conquerors conquer, the subjugated are subjugated, and the victors write the songs we all sing. The dead are mute and so many of Those Who Left had their tongues cut out so their songs are forgotten.

Can anything be good if it is built on something wrong? The trunk is poisoned and so every branch and leaf that grows is tainted with that venom. The fruit that grows from those trees is more bitter than a chokecherry. We still add our sugar and boil the juice until we have something sweet that just hints at the bitterness that lies beneath.

We are forever losing our way in and out of the Quarter. The roads are never sure and the maps are never complete. There is no way for us to get back home, because we do not know what that home should be.

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 One Hundred Twelve

Summer in the Lost Quarter typically means rodeos. Cowboys and rough stock move from town to town  with crowds gathering to watch the performances. Bucking horses and bulls. Wrestling steers and roping calves. Racing horses around barrels. Some towns will have wild cow milking. Others will have wild horse races. Children strap hockey helmets on their heads and clamber on the backs of sheep who race across arenas in a frenzy to loose themselves from this encumbrance.

This year will be different with the dread lord’s return to these parts. All the rodeos have been cancelled, the crowds forbidden from gathering and the participants unable to travel to the events. It will be a sad thing for many of the towns have few events that bring people together in celebration. Many of the events have origins going back a century or more. Wars and floods and other calamities have not forced their cancellation, but the grippe reborn has.

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 One Hundred Eleven

Last evening as I sat reading before retiring to bed, we received a tornado warning and were told to seek immediate shelter. The window opposite the couch I was seated upon faces east, toward the heart of the Lost Quarter, and there I could see the terrible storm building. There were dark clouds with flashes of lightning roiling in their hearts. But above our home there was only bright skies, the clouds painted red and pink in the setting sun.

Storms rarely move west in these parts, usually pushed east by the winds coming down from the mountains, and this storm was no different. It went east and south, mostly sticking to the open prairies. It was strange to watch the turmoil of the clouds from such a distance. The air around us was calm, hardly a breeze stirring, while several kilometres away the swirling of the clouds suggested a gale was passing through. Though I could see lightning dancing across the darkening sky, no sound of thunder reached us. Even the movement of the clouds wasn’t really visible, I just intuited it from their shapes which went from sharp and defined to inchoate.

It has been a season of thunderstorms in these parts this past month, which is unusual. Normally we would only just be starting into the storms as the summer heat reaches its zenith. That heat has yet to truly arrive – the warmest it has been is the low to mid twenties – yet every few days seem to bring another tremendous storm. Vast thunderheads fill the sky, the wind shrieks, rain and hail fall in cascades, while thunder rumbles and lightning flashes. They pass quickly, leaving pools of water and glistening leaves in the sunshine in their wake.

The tornado never materialized from the clouds as the storm passed through the plains and out of existence.