In Stillness
My neighbors are setting off fireworks. The screams of woo-hoo fill in the cracks between explosions. Slim is in the next room, watching movies. He thinks it’s weird now to see people touching, and so close. Already that’s weird, and we have to learn how to love each other a little differently. We’re not always six feet apart, but we don’t kiss anymore.
I’m already sick with MS and on immunosuppressant drugs to hold back progression of the disease. I know it’s a losing battle, and it puts me in a high-risk category for getting the coronavirus. I wait to get sick. I wonder if I’ll survive.
My neighbors like to have backyard parties in the summer. Through the thick trees and brush that separate the lakefront properties, their firepit flames dance in oranges and yellows. Tonight they’re having a fire. It’s cold and doesn’t feel like spring, but it does feel a little bit like the end of the world.
It was only Tuesday when I fought with Slim, kissed Slim, made plans with Slim. On Wednesday none of that mattered and barely any of it was remembered. Things shut down rapidly. The libraries were the first to go.
I bang into the walls a little as I walk down the long hallway in my house. I hate the walker. My back muscles have gone weak from too much time in the wheelchair. I want to stop having MS so I can just be afraid of the virus like everyone else. I try to will myself better almost constantly with depression following each failed attempt.
Slim’s in the kitchen now, rolling a blunt at the table. The TV is still on. With the onset of COVID-19 came free movie channel trials. Slim wants to get in as many movies as he can before he has to go back to work on Monday. He works for a company that makes fire sprinkler systems. As of now, his company is saying it’s essential to stay open. There’s about a dozen guys in the shop. Everyone’s got their own machine, pretty much. No one wants to get close. One guy sprays bleach right on his hands throughout the day. No one wants to be there.
Slim kicks the chair out for me to join him. The neighbors are setting off the kind of fireworks that hiss on their way up before booming into the night sky. Slim’s daughter is staying with a friend. My son isn’t coming by. It feels premature to be empty nesters, but this is the safest thing right now given my condition. I fear loneliness to be a side effect of safety.
Everything’s different. I’m supposed to go into the hospital for another round of Ocrevus. It’s given through an infusion that takes most of the day and will continue to weaken whatever internal defenses I might have to fight a pandemic. I called my doctor last week to say I couldn’t do it. He said he was already working on some sort of backup plan. It’s okay to push it back a month or two. But without this drug, I risk needing doctors and hospitals that are busy, too busy, and filled with the thick air of sickness. This is not the time to need a doctor or hospital for anything short of an emergency. I don’t do well in emergencies and after a ten-year fight with MS I still haven’t gotten the hang of being sick. Sicker seems to follow sick.
The world is closing. The cry of last call ringing in my ears. I smoke pot at my kitchen table. An isolated celebration is lost in the big picture. I had a birthday during the pandemic. Another year crept in quietly. I think it’s happened before. A tick on the counter, but it was nothing really. Slim got a cake and wrote my name in messy letters of purple icing. There were no candles or singing. The arbitrary basics. And, though there are many things I want, I forgot to wish for anything and instead just turned forty-three.
Andrea Gregory holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her fiction has appeared in The Sun and Consequence Magazine, with a story forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly. She is a former journalist and world traveler, having spent time reporting from the Balkans after the wars. Her work from the Balkans has appeared in Transitions Online (TOL), Balkan Insight, The Christian Science Monitor, and other places. She holds a BS in journalism from Emerson College. Her journalism career ended when she came down with multiple sclerosis, but life has a way of calling writers back to their roots.