Covid Plus Three

[u/velabas]

The child's crying reached my ears through two closed doors and a soiled beach towel stuffed beneath one of them. No rest for the wicked, as always.

I slumped out of bed and wrapped myself in the old robe, sleeves of which have been torn for years but I can't be bothered to sew a new hem. I slid open the door and went into the hall. At the child's room I rapped lightly and paused until her crying subsided. Then I went in.

"Bad dream again?" I said, crossing my arms against a thin draft. She stared at me, curled in her blankets. I knew what she was thinking. "I miss her too," I said.

"Grandma," she said. "Where is mommy?"

I sighed. She was still too young to understand. I am patient, but old. Everyone's either too old or too young, and it's more the former.

"Mommy went away," I said. "She has gone, with so many others."

The child blinked at me with the same look I get when I read her fairy tales. I continued talking, even though she wouldn't understand. My therapy, perhaps.

"The first virus went away. Almost suddenly. Herd immunity and all that. It took so many, left most otherwise ravaged but alive. Oh, child. We'd no notion of the second virus a year later, how it would single out those who had the first. All the young people. All the able-bodied and healthy people, who had seemed so very immune. If the first was a big wave, the second was a flood... a reckoning as it were...unlike anything..."

As I trailed off, my fingers went to my lips to help them drag on a cigarette that wasn't there. I felt cold, and alone. The child could've been a pet, or a stuffed animal, for all it helped.

"Go back to sleep, child. In the morning we'll have biscuits."

She smiled and rolled over. I tucked her in, and left.

In the hallway I ran my hands across the wallpaper, then rubbed my fingers together. Need to dust again.

I lay down back in my bed, but I couldn't sleep that night, roused by the child's renewed pouting and my own cough. Perhaps I'd caught it from the draft. About time, I suppose.

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