"I thought maybe they’d just go deaf"

“It just consumes them.”

Ready to continue the fiction adventure into the original novel, “Senseless”?

These were yesterday’s words… or you can go back to the beginning here.

Thank you for being willing to go off on a new and unexpected journey and for gifting me this recovery time!

And hopefully you enjoy the special glimpse at a book I otherwise never would have shared?

I will return to my normal style of essayist writing and real time rambles and Every Weekday Promises but…

Maybe this is an experiment worth taking?

Please share. Consider supporting an independent writer. And let me know if you wish you could turn the page (fingers crossed, but I’m not editing this to perfection before sharing… I’m just willing myself to be vulnerable and share in all its imperfection).

See you tomorrow for more!

FOUR [sort of]

I’ll never forget the first time I saw it happen.

I thought maybe they’d just go deaf. Or just go blind. Or just stop knowing who and what they are. But I was so completely wrong.

“No one really knows how it works,” Theo said to me one morning in the break room.

I was trying to get the old Kurig to work even though I think coffee is sort of disgusting, but long days under the florescence of school lighting gives a perma-migraine like you wouldn’t believe. Nothing hurts your eyes and skull quite like educational lighting. (You can imagine what it does to kids.)

“Like, some people seem to lose all their sensation and functionality but keep moving, sort of,” Theo was saying, while prepping whatever sort of Tupperware-tucked greens they would pack back then. “And then some people it just wipes out. Like right away.”

“Wipes out how?” I remember saying, oblivious to how quickly this would go from snack-refrigerator gossip to the rest of our lives.

“I don’t know,” they said, likely ignoring the constant inexplicable traffic to the fax machine that happened in those days, “It just consumes them.”

I remember the news saying that something like 50% of those infected were dying instantly. Their sense of self stripped, gone. Ability to taste… see…. hear. Gone.

“It’s because they don’t give a shit about living like that,” Madlena said, weeks later, when we were marooned indefinitely inside building walls, “Without the will, there is no way.”

That seemed trite to me. A little too easy; simplified. Like half the world’s population would just shrivel up and die because they couldn’t taste their morning bagel. But… it was happening. No one knew why some reacted one way, and other’s another, but we knew those who survived could only survive through touch… and touch was how it took over.

“It’s some sort of mutation of our biology because we screwed with our biology so much,” Theo theorized frequently, “Or maybe it’s technology. Everyone blames everything on technology anyways.”

I don’t know what it is.

Madlena was trying to leave campus the day that it happened. We all were. It was supposed to be our last morning before the shelter locked into place and we left. The national curfew had dropped but no one was going outside any more. The pickup line cul-de-sac was thick with cars; parents frenzied, fast moving.

One of my student’s caregivers had bubble wrap all over their body like a puffy popping marshmallow. Some seemed scared to take their belongings in hand, and sort of shimmied them into a vehicle. One simply left us standing with a handful of gym bags and a suitcase; leaving everything behind.

A lot was left behind. The biggest were five students named Pearl, PJ, Timothy, Monica and Low Key (who was really named Steve but liked going by Low Key instead).

“Who the fuck doesn’t come get their child?” Theo said, face seething with disbelief… “How is that even possible?”

“Someone who doesn’t want to touch them,” I said in return, not knowing what else to say.

We couldn’t leave school with students still in our care and didn’t know whom they should go with or how to divide their guardianship or whatever, but we never had to figure it out, because that’s when the problem arrived.

That’s the first time I saw it happen.

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……pause mid-chapter…..

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Continued Tomorrow.

** Thumbnail Art Credit: Filippa Bjerling **