The Queen Who Was to Stay: the coronavirus lingers long past expectations.

…The Queen, some reported, had already come (and, according to others, had already gone). Some said her armies passed through various states and countries, but She Herself was never seen. Some said she had never even existed. Some saw her reflection in the mirror behind them even after 14 days. And some did die.

Some say they’re still waiting. “They prepared us for the apocalypse, and the post-apocalypse, those assholes in Hollywood and TV,” one said. “No one ever said anything about the pre-.”

“Assholes is right,” mumbled Elissa, throwing the book across the bedroom in a huff. It grazed the cat’s tail before clipping the wall with the edge of its spine.

“Hmm?” I ventured, having been jolted out of a deep sleep by the thunk. I had been in the middle of a pleasant dream about working on my laptop in a coffeeshop. The cat went back to sleep; I was up.

“The apocalypse. It’s supposed to be this flash-bang moment where the whole world gets turned upside down in the course of seconds, or at the most, one whole day, and so many people die instantly that the collective shock turns the sky permanently gray. And from then on out you have to walk amongst zombies to fight for the last bag of Cheetos in the grocery store and you only feel true joy when you stumble upon a single loose cigarette in a rainy gutter after ten years. It’s permanent! The aftermath, I mean. The during isn’t supposed to last this long. It’s not the part that’s supposed to feel permanent. Assholes!”

“Oh,” was all I could muster. I didn’t understand what she was really getting at. We were technically in the best version of post-apocalypse we could have ever expected, and I was already missing the cozy ambient noise of silent focus of the other dream coffeeshop patrons.

She wasn’t deterred by my lack of ready repartee.

“It’s been four years since the outbreak and now the virus has been mostly eradicated as of January, right? We’ve attained herd immunity. We’re moving on. No one even lets it come up on Twitter or Facebook anymore. It’s what all the doctors and scientists and even most politicians have confirmed. Right?” She sounded shaky now; I sat up, concerned.

“Hon, what’s wrong?”

“It’s still here.”

“Yeah, that’s what they said might happen. Remember? There’s no way to wipe it out entirely if 46 percent of the population refused to get the vaccine. There’s always the threat of it coming back in the future.”

“No, I mean we’re still in the during. We could have done more. We had all the weapons. We had the power to stop it from ever coming back again. It’s not dead. I’ll bet you anything it’ll come back in, like, four years, I just know it.”

“Okay, babe.” Now I was getting annoyed and she was verging on conspiracies. It was closing in on three in the morning and I had to go in to school to teach at eight, my first day back without a mask. “Things are getting better, you know? Don’t you feel it? The sun has actually been shining every day since the end of January. The sun doesn’t shine in the Hollywood post-apocalypse, and certainly not in the during. Remember a few weeks before that, when it was the darkest day we had seen in a long time?”

She shivered at the memory. “I really thought that was the end of us.”

“Me, too. But it wasn’t. We’ll keep fighting this virus, even if it’s lingering, threatening, dividing us, okay? I have faith that we’ll come out stronger if it rears its head again. And you know what? It probably will, and the same people will let it. Then we’ll just move to New Zealand.”

“I’m not joking, Dioneo.”

I feigned a snore and she got the hint. I heard her tossing and turning for a bit, then she started to relax, and soon she was snoring for real.

The thing was, I wasn’t joking either. The past four years had all but destroyed my sense of humor, of vitality, of hope, and the sadder thing was that the black hole was starting to feel normal when we got the news that it was “over”. We had stretched our atrophied muscles and headed en masse to the nearest dive bar to celebrate, but we were still crippled with doubt and fear, instinctively darting warning glances at friends who got too close, then laughing too loud about it. The scars were indelible, and the alcohol didn’t help. By nightfall that same day there were murmurs that the numbers had been fudged. We shut ourselves inside again for days, ignoring our phones, watching and re-watching Gaslight on Elissa’s Prime Video account until my laptop died. Even with hope fresh on the horizon and new power at the helm, even with the sun now shining every day, I knew she was right – this apocalypse was far from over, and the King would return, doing far more damage than the Queen ever did.

I went over to where the book lay crumpled against the wall and gave the cat a pat on the head. Then I picked up the book, crept downstairs, opened the back door and stuffed it in the recycling bin on top of too many beer cans. I stood barefoot in the snow in my t-shirt and boxers for what I thought was a minute, not realizing I was crying until I heard the garbage truck beeping from two streets over and snapped back into myself.

The sun was coming up. Again.

I went back inside and prepared for the new day.

This tale is a sequel to an earlier one, “The Queen Who Was to Come”

For other Coronavirus Tales, see here. 

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