all the marvels of twenty-first century science reduced to a bizarrely medieval bit of wishful thinking.
A woman is walking towards me, and it takes me a minute to realise that she has, beside her, like a puppy, a small child on a leash. I blink, and take it in: a woman is walking towards me, and she has a child on a leash.
In the days to come, as I try to recollect and record all of this, I cannot recall if the leash or the child’s dress or something else altogether was a bright yellow. What I do remember: the woman is clearly deathly ill and is coughing and I become angry and shoot her a hard glare because I am now policing everyone and everything around me, my fear of death and misery overtaking any and all analysis I might have about structures of power and the threat of global capitalism and neoliberalism because I am within feet of her, a mere, a few feet only, and she is coughing and very pale and sick and I could in turn become very sick and cough and cough and cough and die. And she is white and I think if you were not you would be rounded up right now and your child taken away.
The child is unaware and strains to reach beyond what the tethering will allow and the woman is coughing and holds tight to the leash. The child seems happy and not sick but the woman is coughing, coughing, coughing all the way down the street.
At home I wonder what drove her outside, perhaps a partner who is stuck elsewhere, perhaps in another country, perhaps she is sick but has no one to help with the child who may well be dying after all. I can be kinder and more thoughtful outside of the penumbra of death she brought with her.
But they tell us, at the start of all this, that children are somehow immune but may also be carriers. Children, it turns out, are demon spawn after all. And I wonder if we might ever see a call to expel and exterminate children from our world.
They are wrong, of course, and children, especially the poor and vulnerable will die and few will take notice. The woman coughs and coughs and coughs and I hold my breath and then expel it through my nose, all the marvels of twenty-first century science reduced to a bizarrely medieval bit of wishful thinking.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
For more on the Pandemic, see this category.
Image: Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya, c. 1819