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Breath In The Afternoon
Earnest Hemingway writes about his experience with SARS-COV2
The day was bright and clear and the sun stood proudly in the sky as if to remind those below that once it too had been a god, a god in the days before social media and smartphone apps and the unbroken noise of endless tweets turned everything into gods and all those gods forever clamoring for attention from their screen-staring devotees. Ernesto squinted up at the sun and acknowledged its ancient splendor. He felt his heart swell. Such a bright god was a good thing, a noble thing. But such gods were forgotten now by the many who stroked their devices and kept their heads bowed low. A man had to look up to see such a god but today there were no real true men. Today the day was bright and clear but the streets were empty, empty of real men whose hearts beat truly in their breasts and whose eyes turned upward to squint at the sun.
Ernesto was walking toward the local hospital. In his soul he felt the trouble of a man who had not truly struggled, the trouble of a man who had not faced the ultimate challenge of the virus. Like all of his friends, like his publisher, his agent, the women whose names he could not remember after a night of heavy drinking in his favorite bar, and the girl who came twice each week to clean and bring fleeting order to his apartment, he had contracted the…
