Skip to main content

DAY 35: TOTAL CONFIRMED DEATHS 160,721 WORLDWIDE


It had finally hit her: the rage cleaning. She stared at the looming cabinet that she knew was filled with expired, unused, and anonymous items.

This ends today, motherfucker!

Shelf by shelf she dumped, cleaned, and questioned what the hell some items were.

Fish sauce?

Vital wheat gluten?

She had gone through many phases of diets and cooking, and it showed. The vegan phase: years old egg replacer mix. The sushi phase: various jars of oils and sauces. The paleo phase: coconut item after coconut item, after coconut item. Cans that were leaking, jars with a layer of solidified mush on the bottom- how did she let it get this way? This was just pure savagery, living this way. So uncivilized!

It all went, and as she wiped down each empty shelf that glorious feeling of victory washed over her. Clean. Reborn. Sanitized. It was as if with each wipe of the shelf, her soul also got a mini-cleanse-a layer of film scrubbed away the weight and anxiety of living in such filth.

She was able to move all the items just sitting on her few counters into the cabinet, nice, organized, in order. Now she could clean the counters, and she gazed at how much room she now had. Amazing.

New.

Sparkling.

She shivered.

The rage was gone, and she knew she would sleep well that night.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

DAY 34: TOTAL CONFIRMED DEATHS 154,215 WORLDWIDE

The apocalypse had not slowed home improvements. In fact, this is what people must have been doing with their time, she realized, as she pulled into the home improvement store’s parking lot. It was packed. More than the big box stores, more than the super markets. There was a line of cars just to enter the parking lot, and each row was filled. Her overhead fan and light had broken over a week ago, and even though she loved the darkness and candlelight, she knew it needed to be replaced. The previous owners had spared the least amount of pennies on renovations, and this was one of the last items to go. They would make a run for it. She took her husband to ensure she had the right size, and this was his first trip to a store (besides the local convenience store) since the pandemic. They both were amazed at the amount of people that were shopping. Here they had been hiding, following orders, only leaving the house for necessities and bouts of fresh air- and these people were just meanderi...

DAY 39: TOTAL CONFIRMED DEATHS 183,454 WORLDWIDE

She tried some banana bread rage-baking. She didn’t really have rage per se, but her bananas were blackened and she didn’t want them to go to waste. The previous rage-cleaning made it easier to cook, as she could actually see her counter-tops. She found she could move slowly. There was no rush now, no deadlines. Just this lingering time. Usually, she was a sloppy cook, but now she took the time to organize her ingredients and instruments before actually getting started. Who was she? She laughed. There was something magically about the smell of baking bread filling the house. Just just sat in the aroma. She wasn’t even hungry. Did they make candles with this scent? She wondered. As she sat there in her aromatic privilege, she thought about all the families that lost their income, who were on their last pennies, wondering what the next day would bring. There was news that small businesses hadn’t received the relief funds from the government, while big companies banked millions. Workers w...

DAY 26: TOTAL CONFIRMED DEATHS 95,731 WORLDWIDE

During the Christmas season people would stake LED projector lights in their yard facing the front of their house. Green and red spots would dance across the face of the house making passersby merry and bright. Sometimes the specks would form images like reindeer with Santa in tow, or bouncing snowmen with their stick arms that would dance in the windows. She thought of these images as she stared into the map of the virus in her state. She looked at it every night, gazing into the blooming, bright red dots. The dots themselves like a rash, a skin outbreak infecting every square inch of epidermis. At first there were only a few dots. In Washington state, and New York. Then, slowly, over time major cities would get the feared dot. Then slowly, leaking out from the cities, like a small pinprick in a garden hose, the surrounding areas would get their dot, but smaller. And from there more surrounding small towns would get the mark. Until now, over 25 days since people started to hunker ...