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DAY 22: TOTAL CONFIRMED DEATHS 64,743 WORLDWIDE


Her hair reeked of sweat and old bubble bath soap.

When was the last time she washed it? She truly didn’t know. Tonight would be a big night then, whatever day it was.

It was Saturday, which wasn’t even slightly exciting anymore. She wondered what the young people were doing to pass the time. She recalled all the energy she used to have and how “partying” used to soothe that agonizing urge to just get all that youthful angst out. She needed it, she craved it and her and her friends always had a good time. It was normal for old people (she now considered herself officially ancient and not all all cool) like herself to just relax and recharge from a week of working on the weekend, but what were those college kids and young twenty-somethings passing the time?

In Florida they still didn’t have a state-wide order to stay home. Spring break had come and gone, and there were thousands of spring-breakers who hit the beach, and the bottle. There were some stories going around that now large swathes of these invincible kids were now infected. One father is rumored not to have left his son back in the house after recklessly partying for a week in Florida. Smart, she thought. It was a perfect example of what not to go- travel to a highly populated destination, get infected, and then return to infect their own community. Smart. Some actually believed in their invincibility, and others were quoted to have said, “If I die, I die.” This was different. Had society reached a point where the world was so stark, so desolate, and so hopeless that young people didn’t even try to build a future? Where the moment was all that mattered so that those sweet memories would fill the eyes as they closed for the last time?

If it wasn’t the virus it was cancer. If it wasn’t cancer it was devastating debt. If it wasn’t debt it was the inability to get a job. If it wasn’t that, it was diseases and conditions that seeped into the pores from the toxic environment that was seeking revenge on polluting and deforesting humans.

No wonder her students didn’t give a shit about commas.

But even though she knew that the planet was pretty much doomed, she couldn’t just wallow. She had to work, to create, to at least attempt to cover her mouth. Chances weren’t that bad that she would survive this; she had survived other situations, and didn’t give up then.

She would even take the time to finally wash her hair.

Brushing it, was a definite maybe.

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