My eyes popped open and silence filled my ears. I lay perfectly still for quite a long time with the cool blanket pressing down on me before I decided it was time to get up. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I took in a deep breath that had an unfamiliar taste. I turned on the news and took another long breath in and pondered a moment. Freedom. That’s what that was in the air.

The news said it was PW 85, but it felt like a Tuesday from the before. In the shower, events of the past week ran on an endless loop. I stayed there until the water began to cool before hesitantly stepping out to get dressed. The absence of sound seemed even more pronounced as I made my way downstairs and had a quick breakfast. The sound of my chewing, crunch, crunch, crunch, slowly quieted as my resolve to enjoy my new freedom returned.

The P had officially ended and today was the first day with no restrictions. We called it the P, but plague, pestilence, or pandemic work just the same. Today I was going to stretch my legs and get out for one of the walks I used to take before everything. I said bye to mom and popped out the door.

The sky was a deep morning blue with only wisps of clouds and the slightest breeze to keep the air cool. Don’t get me wrong, there had been plenty of days just like this, but the quarantine was over and that alone made it special. As I walked out to the curb, Mr. A called out “hello” from across the street as he struggled with lawn equipment. He was preparing to tackle his grass that was nearly two feet high and the row of arborvitae hedges he had been so proud of that were now overgrown and drooping from the weight. I call him Mr. A because honestly, after over a year in seclusion, I can’t remember his full last name and, from his greeting, he probably can’t remember my name either. I wave back.

I took a moment to glance up and down the street that I had lived on my entire life and it was the same story in each yard. There were piles of trash bags full of recyclables and broken furniture that had been tossed on the overgrown lawns. Yardwork had always been such a battle in our house. Dad was too cheap to pay someone to do it and never seemed to get out of chair unless he felt like I needed motivation. It always started with a little yelling, but never ended well. Now I was going to be able to make the decisions about how yard was tended and later is definitely what I was thinking.

Later was something that loses meaning when days blur and the time gets warped in a never-ending spiral of repeating events. The P had lasted 85 weeks, and each time we thought it was over, it wasn’t. From week to week, life was a crazy, never-ending jumble of desperation and hope. If the government loosened the restrictions one week, thousands died. Then they told us to stay home but nobody was prepared for the food shortages, mental anguish, and violence that comes when lives are completely uncivilized.

The isolation turned people into caged animals fighting for their lives, desperate to escape the endless quarantines. Initially, they told us 3%-4% would die, but as weeks dragged into months, death became too familiar. Entire families were wiped out and their homes left to squatters, vandals, and drug addicts. On my block alone, one house was gutted by a fire back in PW 40. I remember the firetruck arriving and the crew just standing silent in the darkness as the thick smoke rose into the night. They were only there to contain the fire because the whole household had been dead several weeks.

I took my regular route that was a mile and a half through about ten blocks of the neighborhood. Like the untended houses, the trees lining the streets were overgrown and threw shadows at odd angles causing me to actually stop to get my bearing. In the early days of the P, when it was still safe, I did this walk regularly. But after the second wave in PW 33, nobody wanted to take a chance on a random encounter. So walking, or any outdoor exercise, just stopped. Everybody who could, drove, and never got out of their car until they reached their destination. The farther I got from home, the calmer I got and today, I was reclaiming the sidewalk.

It was amazing how just the familiar rhythm of my arms swinging and daylight took me back to the before times when all the houses, driveways, and even cracked pavement had been familiar. It was tremendous relief knowing that there wouldn’t be any more civil defense sirens to warn us to stay inside or government vehicles patrolling the streets looking for quarantine violators. Today, nothing was going to prevent me from living my life in the new world.

I’d seen Mr. Ferguson from a distance washing his car. The blood-red Ford matched the baseball cap perched on his head and he looked up as I was approaching. He was a gruff, burly man, a city bus driver, who I would normally avoid if I had the choice. I rode his route daily in college and it wasn’t always pleasant. More than a few times, I heard him shouting for people to move to the back. While it was frequently necessary to remind people, he seemed to take perverse glee in shouting at the non-white kids. Before the P, I remember once seeing him striding out onto his lawn with a shotgun to threaten a bunch of Latino kids skateboarding on the sidewalk fronting his house. Still, armed with freedom, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me avoid him so I stiffened my spine and continued walking.

Sweat poured down his face as he buffed the side panel to a shine that reflected the sun to a point that it nearly hurt my eyes. The motion of my arm rising to cover my eyes must have caught his attention.

“You’re Morgan, right?”, he said and I nodded. “I remember you on my bus when you were going to school, and didn’t you used to work…”

He trailed off, probably realizing that the business I had worked for closed after the fire in PW 46 when the gangs had nearly taken over the city and burned down at least 15 buildings.

I nodded again as he continued, “Those damn gangs. Just a bunch of brown punks with no values that think they got a right to do whatever they want because they’ve been oppressed and crap like that. Who the hell do they think they are when it was me working through quarantine? The same goes for those cozy, work-from-home types who never missed a paycheck holed-up in their comfy homes ordering take out and never having to go out into the god-awful mess on the streets.”

He seemed to have run out of steam so I took the opportunity to escape and said, “Well, now that the vaccine is available to everyone, you can get on with your life”. As I started to turn and leave, he bellowed, “What about those damn foreigners who created the virus in the first place? What about them’s still bringing it into my country? Who’s gonna pay for all the companies that got ruined and jobs lost? You know the only reason there’s a cure is because of real Americans. Unpatriotic foreigners screwed up everything for us real Americans”

There was nothing I was going to say that would calm the rage welling up inside Mr. Ferguson. Angry was something I was familiar with and it was consuming him like a raging fire burning him from inside. Yeah, I knew all about anger, but the liberation this day offered let me put that all behind. And I knew that there comes a certain point where the things that make you mad are the same things that keep you from moving forward so I walked away.

Putting anger aside isn’t the same as moving forward or making a change. The world keeps changing whether I notice, or even like, but change in me is something I decide. In this new world, everyone was suspicious of a government that failed to protect the poor and disadvantaged when they decided that commerce was more valuable than lives. I couldn’t go back after everything.

I thought about time again, and how it had lost meaning during the P. It swirled just out of reach and when you added unreliable information, mass confusion was what you got. The news would vacillate between cure and chaos, so nobody trusted anyone in authority to tell the truth. News wound its way through the internet and cable television like a snake down a clogged drain and pulled out the lies jumbled up with the truth. In the earliest days of the P, hoaxes, scams, and outright propaganda were the main reason for confusion and fear. “Vaccine works” repeatedly flashed on the cable news chyron only to find out later that testing was incomplete. Governments, including our own, flooded us with conspiracy videos which all eventually proved to be wrong. The ones who couldn’t cope with this complicated new reality turned to social media for comfort from other misguided people who shared the same fears.

I saw Shelley sitting on the shingled porch roof outside her 2^nd floor bedroom window with her knees drawn up, staring intently at the phone cradled in her hands. I didn’t know her well, but I knew her boyfriend Steve from school.

“Hey Shelley”, I said.

An alien could have landed on the lawn and she wouldn’t have noticed, so I called out to her again. Once more and I moved forward, then once again. Finally, she lifted her head lazily, removed an earbud and said, “Hey”.

“Where’s Steve? Why aren’t you out celebrating?” “Steve’s gone.” She said while tapping a few characters into her phone.

There had been so much death in the last 18 months that people had practically run out of polite ways of noting the hole left in their lives. Gone obviously meant died. What should I say now?                                                                         

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know him well… How are you doing?”

“Steve had more inner strength than anyone I’ve ever known”, she said in a flat voice. “But it’s been almost a year and I’m great. Making new friends all the time. See?”  she said holding the phone screen forward. I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic and there was no way I could read the screen from this distance. I nodded anyway recognizing the color and pattern of a familiar social media app. What I didn’t know then was that Steve had hung himself in week 40.

“I’ve got plans now that the quarantine is over. New people, new places, new things to do”, she said without a hint of doubt in her voice.

The truth was that social media had become so toxic and depressing during the P that almost nobody was using it now. Most people used it to dreamscroll through memories to avoid reality and Shelley was obviously under its spell. Out of the blue, she blurted, “I don’t trust the news. If it wasn’t for social media, I’d never have found out what happened to Steve.”

I couldn’t argue with her assessment of the media and everyone knew that the internet was the best source of lies ever invented, but I wasn’t going to get trapped in this conversation.

As she adjusted her sitting position, the blue sweater that had been in her lap fell from her perch to the ground in front of me. I picked it up and held it out to her.

I reached higher, standing on my tiptoes. She gave me a disparaging look and tried to grab it from my hand. Unable to stretch far enough, she said, “Just leave it on the porch”, and replaced the earbud before returning to stare at her phone.

Shelley was just as aimless now as she was in the before times, it was like she hadn’t seen the people working through the P keeping food stores open, the EMT and medical staffs saving lives, and even people like Mr. Ferguson who kept the busses and trains going. At least they were out in the world facing the possibility of catching the virus instead of hiding away from it. I’d lost my job, and even though I was safe from the P at home, there were some things worse than getting sick. Flashing on my homelife, maybe hiding wasn’t such a bad idea.

Mr. Yokuna was one of the essentials. He ran a warehouse that kept the stores supplied with food and had lived in the neighborhood with his wife for longer than I have been alive. In the before times, I would see him tending his garden of rose bushes wearing the same faded orange windbreaker. He was always friendly but always looked tired this morning.

Sure enough, as I walked past his house, he was pruning his roses in that same old jacket. I called out to him and he motioned me over.

“Why don’t you take some of these home to your mother?”, he said handing me three coral roses. “Mind the thorns.”

I didn’t want the flowers, but as he spoke, the way the corner of his eyes crinkled told me that something was bothering him. “Thanks, your wife must have enjoyed these roses.” His chin slowly lowered but his eyes remained on me. “This was her favorite color and it was so hard to keep them alive during the quarantine. And I worked such long hours because so many got sick and there was nobody else to make sure the deliveries were made. People were counting on me, everyone would have suffered if I didn’t…”.

The cascade of words spilled out then his voice trailed off and he mumbled something to himself. I was a bit shocked so I kept silent and he raised his voice, “If only I’d been stronger. If only this whole disaster hadn’t happened. If only I’d known.”

“Known what?”, I asked.

“My wife”, he said choking back a sob, “She never told me she was sick. She let me, told me, to go to work. They took her to the hospital while I was working and had her isolated so I never got to hold her hand. Never got to say good bye”.

He had a 100-mile-away look in his eyes now as his memories flooded in. All I could do was give him a light pat on the shoulder before I left.

Mr. Yokuna was haunted by things he could never change but there were others like Ms. Adao who never left the past. She lived in the largest house in the area and when we were kids, we swore it was haunted. There was a large willow tree in the front yard that seemed to swallow a house that badly needed paint, and every window either had a shade pulled down or was boarded up. I saw her standing on the porch in the shadow of the giant tree. I tried to sneak past. “You!”, I heard a voice say, “You need to get inside”.

She was dressed in black and it was difficult to actually make out her figure but her very pale face seemed to glow unnaturally. “Me?” I said pointing to myself.

“Don’t you know it’s not safe to be out on the street by yourself?”.

“Don’t you know the lockdown is over?”, I asked.

“You don’t believe any of that, do you?”, she said as she motioned me to enter the gate, “They keep saying it’s over and the next round comes and the medicines don’t work like they promise.”

I wasn’t sure what to tell her. I’d already had my second vaccination and there hadn’t been a new case in 3 weeks.

“Come closer”, she said.

I pushed aside the thoughts of ghouls sweeping out of the house and moved towards her. “You know those vaccines are just to trick you, right? The government is using it to put trackers in your body so they can spy on you. They did that to my husband and took him away in the middle of the night. My son too”.

As she spoke, she moved towards the front door intently watching me as she did.

Stifling a sigh, I said, “Everyone can get the vaccine now. I have. It’s safe.”

She was already through the entrance and had the screen door shut. She leaned slightly forward and almost hissed as she said, “That’s exactly what they want you to think. As soon as everybody has it, then they’ll come to take you all”.

Her voice grew fainter as she slowly backed into the darkness of the house. All I could hear was, “I’ll wait. I’ll wait for God to come and take me.”

There were definitely spirits in that house and they weren’t leaving anytime soon. Ms. Adao bound them there as surely as she bound herself to the house. In a way, all the people I saw today had their own ghosts chasing them. It was understandable but the horrible time was over and everyone gets a new lease on life, right? None of these people were excited about this day like I was. They didn’t seem to realize that nobody was going to care who you had been or what you had done because we were survivors.

Surviving the P was only part of the battle. Enduring the ongoing boredom, stress, arguing, and fear and coming out alive filled me with a new sense of strength. My father’s drunken outbursts and mother’s constant whining were things I’d put firmly behind me. Everything that kept me from being who I wanted to be had simply disappeared.  I took another deep breath of freedom and knew, for the first time, what my future would be. I’m definitely going to bury the folks in the back yard tomorrow.

The End