“The Suicide Supremacists are everything that’s wrong with this planet”

Hux had a way of signing that made me forget I ever disliked him.

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!

FIVE 1/2

Pretty soon, we had very little access to what was going on outside, and part of me was selfishly relieved.

The dwindling media had become so morbid over the last few weeks, I’d force myself to leave the room, wishing I was deaf and blind too.

“The Suicide Supremacists are everything that’s wrong with this planet,” Hux would narrate, a constant voice of morality when none could manage, “To kill yourself before you have the chance to become what you hate…”

“By poison,” Theo would add, always a glutton for details, “He said the room was like covered in foam when they found them.”

“…The real disease isn’t what this disease is doing to us, it’s how little we value life that doesn’t look like our own,” Hux finished.

“We have maybe two weeks left,” I remember saying to both, checking my last mental produce tally after counting it all twice again. “What are we going to do?”

We were speaking in Hux’s native language. He was an English teacher in the Deaf department before all this happened; something considered oxymoronic to idiots who think the Deaf can’t read or write. English was his second language, for sure, but his hands used it better than anyone I’d ever known.

“The real issue isn’t what we are going to do,” Hux said, casting his light brown eyes in my direction, “It’s what we are going to do when the formula feed is finished.”

The supply of nutritional supplementation for our PJ was already wearing thin. Her caretaker used to drop off new boxes before each term, but the medical supply company was no longer functioning of course, and the term was well under way when this whole thing started. There was no one to deliver; no one to help. There was no one but us… and a digestively challenged eleven-year-old who ate entirely through a tube in her upper abdomen.

 “Well, I mean the issue is also what we are going to do, Mother Theresa,” Theo rebounded, “If we starve, they starve.”

Counting and signing with our hands covered in multiple layers of materials was proving difficult. Theo had a sloppy way of signing that made it feel like they were always mildly drunk; a carry-over from their cool Cali accent that never cared enough to articulate.

Hux had a way of signing that made me forget I ever disliked him. His face was animated, so full of life I could never imagine it like Madlena’s had been in the end. He had these eyes that were hard not to stare at, even in captivity, where we basically had nothing to do but stare at each other all day.

I felt increasingly aware of my mannerisms around him. Do I chew weird? Did I blink too much? My motor functions needed a round of Model Of Human Occupations themselves. (That’s an OT joke and I’m hilarious.)

“At least the orgies are consensual,” I said out of nowhere, not sure why that’s what I decided to contribute. They both looked at me.

“I mean, remember Rob the Pod found some Reddit about people actually wanting to infect others? They wanted to get it, so then they could feel-up others without punishment or whatever, and…”

“That’s playing with fire and fuckery,” Theo said, not missing a beat, “Most people just die from the thing.”

There weren’t many of us left inside the walls, but we’d managed to stay this way for a while. There were five students, of course, who’d mostly adapted in one way or another. Two had retreated emotionally when they could no longer call their families, but most were hanging in. 

For staff there was Michael Paul, the former cafeteria worker who was missing his two front teeth but seemed to whistle everywhere he went. There was Sunaura, who I mostly still hated, and Hux, who I didn’t hate exactly as much. There was Janette the P.E. teacher who never really seemed to do her job even before she didn’t have one, and McCray, my former supervisor who still somehow felt like my supervisor, and Dr. Zayid who couldn’t go down with the ship but probably wanted t as fast as she could. She was the Superintendent that never wanted to be. She just wanted to teach for a living, and now was responsible for all of us instead.

I think she used to have twin daughters. She stopped mentioning them.

And then there was Theo, who had accepted their position at the same time as mine. We’d gone through undergrad together before meeting up later for post.

Theo was one of the best Physical Therapists I’d ever met, and loved to give me hell for my Occupational snobbery.

“Can one of us really survive on campus without the other?” they’d say, always humble enough to not mention their groundbreaking thesis work in non-binary movement practices, or the former push to change the sexualization of gym equipment.

“Yes,” I’d say without blinking, “Yes I can”.

Then Theo died seventy-eight days in… and I realized I couldn’t.

Continued Tomorrow.

** Thumbnail Art Credit: Unknown**