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