We were the first folks in the county to get a Ford, and I’ll tell you, we were off to California. For a people emerged from the bleakness of a coal-mine into the bleakness of a Midwestern winter, to roll up shirt-sleeves on Christmas is quite the heralding image. We found our home and a parish. The new jobs were simple, but easy enough. Yes, a job each, since we thought ourselves modern. I’d not been in the Great War. She’d not had to see me go. Things were quiet enough and our world was small. We didn’t own a radio. We only got a newspaper on Sundays. A whole city began to grow around us, as others came to roll their sleeves on Christmas too. But we paid that little mind.
That day had been dark, like clouds rolling through a diamond sky. But with the dark came a hiss. Almost a hum, and with it a living roil of swarming life. The black cloud of what would prove a pestilence lifted over our city, and then dropped from the air like a balloon had burst, and lay like dust on every surface. This fine, alien dust that choked your throat and ringed your nostrils. The streets sat quiet for days as people swept and mopped with rags across their nose and mouth. And then the bleeding began.
The yellowed sheets were threadbare and loosely knit. This gauzy lens through which we saw the cathedral ceilings was lifted above our heads as soon as we arrived. No waiting for death to pull the shroud across our faces. That time weeks ago. The glossy, red stains would wick through them rapidly, like a nation fleeing toward the coasts. They all but dripped at the corners as though taps had been installed and opened wide. If the shift nurses forgot to roll you every few hours, or if things advanced considerably, you’d be wrapped in a gestalt of your own lifeblood in just a few seconds. Weighted and suffocated in a glistening, crimson death shroud. In 1918, you could drown from the inside on your own fluids, if the fever didn’t cook your mind first. But now...well, not so much the opposite as a new the-same.
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