Crazy times ahead

The emergency broadcast is the only thing on television, and it tells us not to leave the house. Today I told the girls we were taking a nice, long staycation. A stay-at-home staycation where nobody is allowed to leave the apartment. Well, Isabelle took exception to that, because they were supposed to have show and tell this week in class, and she had caught a luna moth that she was very proud of. Isabelle got to crying, which got Priscilla crying, too. Barbara made their favorite for dinner: pizza quesadillas. They seemed to cheer up a little, and by the time I tucked them in with a story after bath time, Isabelle had come around to the staycation idea. She is my treasure.

I got an email from my brother, who lives out in the country, and he says that at least four cities have been quarantined so far. Apparently, something nasty got through airport security and is now circulating widely. They're trying to pin it down but it's wily. He said it looks like our town's slated for quarantine, too. It was a foregone conclusion. The whole city is under house arrest already. Soon they'll start gassing the streets, he said. He is keeping us in his prayers, he said. He did not say everything would be fine. He did not say the mortality rate was low. He said what he could and left the rest unsaid, like a goodbye unspoken because of its finality.

Me and Barb went out on the porch with plastic chairs and had a few beers. Folks in the tenement across the street had the same idea, and we raised our bottles in cheer. Night was coming on and it was getting cooler, so you couldn't smell the stench so much anymore; or maybe we were just used to it already. 10 stories below, you could still see a few on the street. Most of them just stood there, stock still, but there were several sprawled out on the ground, and you would think them dead if not for the occasion that they writhed sporadically like a beetle on its back. Once or twice one wandered in to view, and it did not move like a human. It moved like something on stilts, something that didn't belong in the body it inhabited. It moved like a bug, one leg at a time. It makes the hair stand on end to watch them moving around on the dead street, like watching the shadows of long-legged spiders crawling on the wall.

Barb and I whispered gaily and laughed like kids. It was the sort of laugh brought on by submerged anxiety, a laugh of calamity soon to come. We stayed out there half the night, living for the moment, our moment, a moment that might not come again. There are crazy times ahead.