“Your journey has been a challenging one, hasn’t it, Senator?”

“It’s certainly been interesting, I can’t deny that,” Pamela Cormack said.

“You may not be aware of this but my first break as a field reporter was covering the story when you first joined the crowded field for the open U.S. Senate seat and spoke to voters for the first time about the stakes of the election. I remember you coming on stage holding your two-year-old son on your hip and your six-year-old daughter by the hand and you told the crowd—”

“I said the race wasn’t about me or my opponents, and it wasn’t. As a 44-year-old single mother and a proud American, I knew the race was about our kids, our families and our future.”

“And while you were out on the campaign trail, it was revealed that your children were the by-product of in vitro fertilization and that you had just come out of a five year same sex relationship, news that, no offense, could have crippled your bid for the Senate seat, yet you seemed to take it all in stride.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about Danielle and Mason being referred to as by-products—”

“My apologies.”

“But my IVF treatments were never meant to be kept secret. I love both my children very much and they are the best thing that ever happened to me. As for my relationship status, I refuse to put up a front in order to project the illusion of adhering to societal norms. Love and truth are more important to me than keeping up appearances. Those who cannot accept that are free to follow candidates who better represent their lifestyle choices.”

“A bold stance.”

“And an honest one.”

“I’d like to address a quote you made during the primaries when you stated that Washington D.C. has lost its way on too many of the priorities that matter to our state. What did you mean by that?”

“Let me put it to you simply, if you have twenty problems and each one of them is a top priority then none of them are a top priority. I’ve made it my business to assign levels of priority and committed myself to solving problems instead of handing out excuses and I pride myself on working across party lines, without picking sides, in order to find common ground.”

“You do have a pretty impressive track record, Senator.”

“Thank you. When I see something is wrong, when I see people struggling, I think about what am I going to be able to do today to make a difference,” Cormack said. “That’s why I decided to run for President.”

“Did you really think the nation was ready for a LGTBQ president?”

“How can you be certain we haven’t had one already, and more importantly isn’t it about time we started looking past labels? I ran because our country is in desperate need of leaders, not politicians. Despite how people self-identify, I know we all want the same thing. We want to make a good life for ourselves and our families.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more, but now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to move on to a more serious matter—”

“The campaign center bombing. I always know this topic is coming but I’m never quite prepared when it arrives.”

“I realize how difficult this must be for you but can you walk me through the events of the day, to the best of your recollection?”

“I remember waking up early that morning to help set up the campaign office. I know we had volunteers tasked for that sort of thing but I’d never ask anyone to do something I wasn’t prepared to do myself. No job was too small. And even though the pandemic is in our past, I began the day sterilizing and cleansing all the workstations because it didn’t hurt to be careful. When the office opened, I helped our elderly constituents and those potential voters without computers or internet connection to register to vote online. Toward the middle of the day I helped process donations to my campaign and—”

“And?”

“If you’re asking about the explosion itself, I don’t remember it, what I was doing when it happened, where I was…nothing. I just remember waking up to a sickening smell that made me want to run away. Then I saw rubble where the campaign office used to be and in the debris were dead bodies…and it wasn’t men or women but children and small babies as well.”

“I can’t imagine—”

“No, you can’t, nor should you have to. I knew the risks when I decided to run for office and dwelling on events that could happen wasn’t of any use to me, or the people I was trying to help. However, after the…event…I found it difficult to sleep, control my emotions, and even focus on my duties.”

To be continued…

It’s a little odd that I haven’t realized until recently that when I look back over my childhood, there’s a line drawn between two sets of memories: the happy times when it was just me and my mother together and she loved me more than anything in the world, and the rest of the time when I had a sibling rivalry with alcohol, which she loved above all else.

It was untimely plucked from the garden that sat beside the frozen lake, Cocytus, in the Ninth Circle of Hell, and although the weeping bone rose was most assuredly dead, when steeped in hot water, it made a joyous tea that sang when sipped slowly by those sinners whose souls were free of treachery.

According to so-called afterlife specialists, there is a belief that when the metaphysical embodiment of Death first approaches its next assignment, the chosen feels it in their bones, but such was not the case for Millie Poole. She felt it in her chest as if her heart was a charcoal briquette pre-coated with lighter fluid anxiously awaiting the Grim Reaper’s fiery embrace.

“I kicked a cat that crossed my path, strangled a bum panhandling for chump change, pushed a hipster into traffic for whistling that Young Folks song, and shivved a businessman on the subway for reading his newspaper in my face, and it’s only 9am. What the hell’s the matter with me?” the sweat-soaked, twitchy man asked.

The barista sighed and with the wisdom of Solomon, asked, “How many have you had today?”

“How many what?”

“Cups of coffee.”

“This’ll be my fifth.”

“Dude, maybe cut down a little.”

“On coffee?”

“Yeah.”

“Heresy!”

The sign above the awning proclaimed the store to be a super discount shopping destination and there were discounts to be had but customers were required to do their homework to avoid selecting items which could be purchased cheaper elsewhere. As Doris Sherban exited the store, she immediately ran into the two people on the planet she hoped to avoid at the moment, Jennifer Morton and Jessica Cooper, whom she not-so-lovingly referred to as The Blue Jays behind their backs, for their penchant of layering their clothing in shades of blue and their incessant squawking.

“Oh my God, did you just come from the super discount?” Jennifer asked in mock surprise, inspecting the two canvas tote bags in Doris’ hands which were stuffed with—

“Surgical masks, latex gloves, hand sanitizer and disinfectant spray,” Jessica said as she rummaged through the totes. “What on earth do you need all this stuff for?”

Doris yanked the bag away. “You’re kidding, right? Aren’t either of you following what’s going on in the world? There’s a new virus—”

“Yeah, halfway across the world,” Jennifer said. “We’ve got nothing to worry about. We’re safe here.”

“And even if some dirty bastard brought it stateside, this is America! We’ve got the best doctors, the best healthcare, the best everything. We’d totally kick that bug’s ass!” Jessica added.

“Like we kicked cancer’s ass? Or Crimea-Congo fever? Or Avian influenza?”

“I literally forgot I was talking to Disaster Doris for a moment,” Jessica said.

“Remember the time she got us all worked up over Y2K—”

“And we hoarded all that canned food, bottled water and toilet paper for nothing? How could I forget?”

Remembering Mark Twain’s sage advice, Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience, Doris pushed her way past the Jays, leaving blue layered squawking laughter and mockery in her wake.

Although she had broken off contact with the Jays after the incident, ignoring their half-hearted apology texts and blocking them on social media, she was fairly certain they weren’t still laughing three months later when the World Health Organization upgraded the virus from a cluster of cases to a pandemic.

Following state recommendations, Doris hunkered down in her Astoria one-bedroom apartment and as she had recently broken up with her boyfriend, lived alone, and her family resided in Arizona, self-isolation wasn’t the inconvenience it was for most people. She dabbled with art and blogging and both her book shelf and Netflix queue were stocked with enough entertainment to keep her mind occupied for a good long while. And had everyone been as alert as she and observed lockdown regulations and if the government had been on the ball from the very beginning and done their jobs properly, perhaps the situation would have been sufficiently handled by now. She had no evidence to back up any of her claims but she felt confident that she was absolutely on point.

But people were unpredictable and stubborn and mistakes were made and things spiraled from bad to worse and her self-imposed exile lasted way longer than she, or anyone else for that matter, had anticipated and she was well aware of the health risks involved with coming into contact with people outside her household bubble but she didn’t have a bubble, being all on her own, and she was growing extremely tired of quarantine. Zoom calls with friends and family just wasn’t cutting it, so when she learned her church was holding an outdoor prayer meeting for those parishioners whose families had been affected by the virus, she convinced herself, against her better judgment to attend. It was outdoors for goodness sake and the church promised to practice social distancing so how big a risk could it actually have been?

And the church certainly did enforce the wearing of masks and keeping attendees at least six feet apart…in the beginning. It turned out that Doris wasn’t alone in her reasoning and more parishioners began showing up than she or the church anticipated. A lot more. So much so that she was packed in the vacant car lot that had been converted to a prayer space and couldn’t move in any direction. To counteract the overcrowding, a blessing was issued to protect everyone in attendance and keep them in good health and Doris had double-masked for safety’s sake and convinced herself that everything would be just fine.

It wasn’t until sometime later when Doris had learned from a friend of a friend that one of the parishioners she engaged in casual conversation at the prayer meeting tested positive for the virus that she considered how huge the mistake was in her attending the church function.

Doris wasn’t sure if her subconscious kicked into overdrive and whipped up psychosomatic symptoms but after receiving the bad news phone call, she began feeling under the weather. It started with a sluggishness she couldn’t shake, then her temperature spiked out of nowhere, but she was able to bring her temperature down by keeping hydrated, taking ibuprofen and tepid baths, and getting plenty of rest. Her new resting temperature ran a couple of degrees higher than normal but remained below one hundred, so she took it as a good sign. The scratchy throat that followed soon after, the one that would not go away, combined with the fatigue and her higher than normal temperature made her suspect her health was in jeopardy.

But was attending the church gathering the real culprit? Doris wasn’t sure because there were other places where she could have been exposed to contagious people. Her savings had been low prior to the pandemic and her job at the bakery making sandwich loaves was deemed essential so she had to keep working if she wanted to keep her apartment but even with a reduced staff, there were still too many people too close together especially when changing in the locker room before and after her shift. Also, she rode public transportation to and from work and people observing the official mask policy during rush hour congestion was a mixed bag of cooperation.

If her suspicions were accurate, she didn’t want to put her coworkers at risk so although the bakery didn’t offer paid sick leave for employees who might have become contaminated with the virus, Doris convinced Human Resources to allow her a few weeks unpaid leave, pending confirmation of the results. To make matters worse, none of the physicians or facilities associated with the health insurance offered by the bakery had virus tests available so she was forced to go out of network which meant she would have to pay for the test out of pocket.

If there was a light at the end of the tunnel, Doris couldn’t see it. She was stuck at home, waiting on her test results, and if the results came back positive, she might die or if she survived, might suffer lingering and debilitating effects that would affect her returning to work and she needed that job in order to pay rent and utilities and buy groceries.

Yes, anticipating the worst was being defeatist but she couldn’t help herself. She kept thinking back on how confident she felt when she made the decision to attend the prayer meeting, how sure she was that God wouldn’t inflict such a nasty disease on one of His chosen. Come to think of it, she wasn’t to blame at all. It was all God’s fault! He was supposed to be omnipotent, after all, so why didn’t he do His job and prevent Doris from going to the stupid event by sending her some sort of sign?

The instant the thought entered her mind, Doris knew it was a mistake, a moment of weakness and misdirected anger. She fell to her knees and prayed, apologizing for her sin and promised to become a better person, one who lived a life in service of others, she would even forgive the Blue Jays if only He let the results come back negative.

Dark thoughts plagued her so badly she was unwilling and unable to get out of bed because everything seemed so pointless. Eventually, Doris owned up to the responsibility of going to the church function, even though that might not have been the place she was exposed to the virus, if she was exposed at all. Her possible exposure could have been out of her control, but regardless of where she got it, she was prepared to pay the price, so she picked up her phone to look up her results online.

None of the women had met prior to their imprisonment yet they were sisters of a fashion, bound to one another by persecution rather than blood and in their bizarre union they discovered a wondrous ability. Each woman stumbled upon her unique key and together they harmonized and sang into creation their new lives free of objectification and the tyranny of evil men.

On the very first day of May which was unusually hot for the season, the air was filled with the loamy smell of rain-damp earth. Birdsong twittered throughout the forest surrounding the secluded monastery and on its doorstep sat a wicker basket with a wee bairn inside. Within the folds of the baby’s blanket was note that read:

“This child, untimely torn from his mother’s womb, bears the mark of the beast. I have fallen short in my duty for I lack the courage to purge the world of this evil. Hopefully you possess the faith and strength to do what I cannot.”

The moment his father shut the light off and closed the bedroom door, the shadows caused by Evan’s nightlight started parting like so many curtains, allowing the denizens of the Nightmare Realm to cross over. The tiny room began filling with feral cockroaches, skull-deprived rats, soul-sucking bedsheet-wraiths, carnivorous plastic dinosaurs and a set of windup teeth that wanted to eat his face off!

Somewhere within the lowest depths of her delirium, Soledad heard a voice, raspy but not totally unpleasant, whispering her name and she fumbled in the darkness for what seemed an eternity until she finally felt the touch of a pair of lips to her own. She was greeted with a kiss to obliterate all others, full of passion and desire, one she would cherish and remember to her dying day, which unfortunately was that very moment. Death had come at last, and although life had abandoned her forever, the kiss still lingered.