Chapter 6
Episode 6
6.1as gyvas kosmose koronoviryso nelysk prie manes juoda baidi ragans juodu plauku skyse dvi tampancios eaganox nedu rujsnviu pabsidu kuo tape esdami jrauja [maro]dulke...
I am alive in the cosmos, and the corona-virus is a whisper that follows me like a stray dog. It pads behind me on the cracked asphalt of the old market square, its breath a low, humid heat against the back of my neck. Don't come near me, I want to say, but the black frightens me—the black witch with her hair split into two, two thick ropes of darkness that stretch like the branches of a dead tree, pulling apart the threads of what we once were. I see the two of them: one is the virus, a glistening orb under a microscope in some forgotten lab, the other is the hunger inside me, the raw, animal want to touch another skin without flinching. But they are not separate. They are the same dust that settled on my grandmother's stove, a fine gray powder that smelled of burnt milk and old prayers. The same dust now drifts through the empty streets of the city, silent and golden under a sun that no longer feels real, like a stage light left on after the audience has gone home.
I remember the green light from the end of the last summer—the way it bled through the leaves of the linden tree in the courtyard, turning everything the color of a bruise just before it heals. Now it has returned, but it is sickly, pale, a jaundiced glow that clings to the walls of the abandoned kiosks. The robots are still here, their metal joints clicking in the silence. I saw one this morning, depilating the legs of the dead, its silver arm moving in slow, deliberate strokes across a woman's calf, the skin already waxy and cold. Or maybe it was just polishing the bones, because there are so many bones now, scattered like white pebbles along the riverbank. I close my eyes and see the witch's black hair—its split ends, frayed like old rope—and I know that I am not safe. The plague is not a virus. It is the shape of a thought that cannot be unthought, a splinter lodged in the soft tissue of the mind.
The dust of the maras settles over everything, a fine grit that coats my tongue and makes my teeth ache. I walk through the city, past the shuttered bakeries and the silent playgrounds, and I am alive in it, breathing the fine grit of what was once a world. The two of them—the virus and the hunger—are still there, their fingers intertwined, their hair tangled in the branches of the dead tree. I whisper to myself: as gyvas kosmose—alive in space—and the word falls apart like a prayer without a god, dissolving into the dust, into the green light, into the click of the robot's arm as it continues its work, patient and endless.
Keep reading "Episode 6"
Open the same story in AIBookCraft. Later chapters may require an active subscription.
Free on iOS & Android · No signup to read