The Red Flu

The Red Flu came early this year.

People locked their doors straight away.

They remember the year before, and the year before that, and even though the Red Flu was never early, it was also never benign.

The butler in the Georgian Mansion on Elm Street was the first to cough.

The family ejected him immediately.

Survival leaves no room for kindness. 

For two months there were no dinner parties, or invitations for tea, or picnics in the park, though the weather was the nicest it had been in months.

In the first three weeks, six houses contracted the Red Flu.

In the fourth week, everyone in those six houses had died, and the flu had spread to the primary school.

As always, someone predicted that it’s the end of the town, itself. That the flu would take too many. No one would live through it.

Raccoons and cats and dogs took over the streets, bold and hungry and noticing that the grocery stores are full of the food that the citizens won’t venture out to get.

When the mayor’s daughter spat blood onto her pillow in the morning, the mayor cancelled his train to France.

The mayor’s daughter, and seventeen other children, died in the next three days.

There was time to pray, and to wash one’s linens, and to reflect that the dead did not have enough time in the world, and did not appreciate the months before the flu’s arrival.

Survivors swore to cherish the year between this flu season and the next.

The Red Flu passed six weeks after the mayor’s daughter died.

Five weeks after the mayor died.

The surviving townspeople counted their blessings.

We’ll be better prepared next time, they said, as they dug the graves.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Another Night

Mira tucked her feet under herself and leaned back against the couch. Valentine glanced at her and away. He seemed to find the dancers very interesting.

“Did you know what was happening to you, the first time?” Mira asked, pulling a gold cushion over her legs. She was just slightly chilly; the wind from the garden drew goosebumps on her arms and legs. It felt like summer – if this place had seasons – was fading fast.

“I didn’t,” Valentine said. The tone of his voice didn’t invite her to ask further questions. His face didn’t lend itself very much to emotion, but Mira saw his hands curl into fists on his legs.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “If you’re- if it’s all right.”

Valentine watched the dancers for several long seconds. Mira considered getting a glass of wine, but there was something distinctly disturbing about the viscosity of it. It was darker than any wine she’d ever seen, such a dark red it was nearly black, and viscous as sludge. She sipped the drink Valentine had poured for her. It left her feeling more hollow than before she’d drunk it, but it warmed her chest. She cradled it in her hand and waited for him to reply.

“Another night,” Valentine said finally. He pressed a knuckle between his straight dark brows and closed his eyes. Mira wondered if, sometimes, the noise and the sound got to him. She imagined what it was like, to live in this world of constant revelry, where the wine kept flowing and the dancing never stopped and the music was forever playing. Perhaps he did tire of it. She had the impulse to put a hand on his arm.

She didn’t. Mira let her gaze wander to the band, and the green-eyed musician. His eyes were closed right now, and she didn’t watch him too long in case he opened them and saw her staring. It wasn’t magnetism that drew her gaze to him, or the feeling that she knew him from somewhere else. It was the feeling that he was as much an outsider here as she was. That he wore this place on him like a skin that he could shuck off when he returned to the real world.

Assuming this isn’t real. The more time she spent here, the more Mira felt like the real world was less solid than she’d first thought. If real was what she could touch, taste, hear, then why was this world not as real as her own?

“Don’t let yourself be fooled by appearances,” Valentine said. She felt a draft of heat, as if someone had lit a fire nearby. “Reality is not as crude as this.”

Mira turned to the women in brocade, and the velvet drapes, and the crystal wine glasses with coloured flutes. “I don’t see anything very crude about it.”

“Then you are fortunate.”

Art by Natalia 

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Senseless

She held her hands to her face. Pieces of it were falling away, jagged edges like broken crockery. The cupped her hands over her eyes, trying to hold them in place, but as if the solid pieces of her eyes were water, they slipped through he fingers.

More pieces of her were falling away. Without eyes she couldn’t see them. She saw blackness as she felt her hands unravel. Her shoulders chipped. Her abdomen fragmented.

She was a reflection in a broken piece of glass. Everything shifting and out of proportion and in disarray. Her mouth fractured. She had no throat with which to speak.

The pieces of her that fell away were disconnected; seconds passed and she felt less and less. There was no sensation where her hands had once been. Sight, touch, taste, gone. Then her nose; there hadn’t been any blood to smell, but she hadn’t realized how fragrant even the air was until there was no scent at all. Perfect olfactory silence.

How human was she? With only ears with which to hear? And now birdsong, breath, win rustling leaves, was disappearing? She was thoughts, a consciousness in a cosmos that she could not see, hear, smell, taste, or touch.

What was a person, stripped of their ability to connect with the world? Outside herself - her mind, the essence still in tact, still thinking, marveling at the horror of being unraveled – Pieces of her body floated, nebulous, in the approximate curve of her spine, the arch of her collarbones, the swell of her cheeks.

How could she have worried about this body? It was gilding. The barest bones version of herself was unseeable. How little she was, without an envelope.

Consciousness blurred. Was this it? The final part? If she had a mouth, she would laugh.

In the end, before consciousness too fell apart, more physical than she’d thought, no less important than her envelope body, she thought: I do not have a soul. I am my soul. I had my body. 

Art by Alex Cherry

Text by Lucie MacAulay