Pathogen

Wednesday Morning

I ran out of toilet paper and used some of the moss Dave brought me. I feel like a hypocrite. Not only that, but it flushed. It actually went down the...well, I don't know toilet part names because I just call the super whenever mine isn't working, but it worked. I didn't even have to plunge.

So that's the good news. The bad news? There's now a city-wide curfew. No one is allowed out after six p.m. In the city that never sleeps. Now the only people I'll see out my window after six are police officers. What are they going to do for the people who don't have homes? I guess they'll force them into shelters.

My parents called again. They asked if I needed money. What good is money right now if it can't get me a helicopter out of here? Actually, I don't really want to go home. My parents live in Litchfield county, near Lime Rock where Paul Newman used to race. Every time I go home, my dad mentions this to me over a glass of milk and Newman-o's. They're tasty, but don't mess with my oreos. Classic for the win.

Or double stuf.

Anyway, going home means seeing my sister, the overachiever. Older than me by two years, the only time she ever did anything wrong was when she offered to let me use her old ID so I could get into bars. That lasted about a millisecond once Mom insisted I go to rehab.

The call with my parents was short, terse, and uncomfortable. Give me a fistful of moss over talking about money with them any day.

I turned on the news today. The number of cases in the city skyrocketed. And there's a new development, too. The virus, while not all that deadly in and of itself, is almost always followed by a secondary infection. Great. Now people will get sicker and the ones who don't will panic even more. What will happen to my moss source? Will Dave be afraid to venture out? I could go harvest moss from the park but...I'm not going to.

Okay, so this book I'm editing. I've asked the author countless times to stop making her symbolism so obvious. But in this latest draft, the archer-teacher still found a bunch of arrow heads from the indigenous peoples buried in the dirt outside the school. Why was she even digging there? It'd make at least a little sense if she was a geology teacher. But no. She teaches health (yet another convenience for when one of her students gets sick Oregon-Trail style). Anyway, she launches into this bout of exposition talking about how the arrowhead symbolizes a return to nature and sustainability, but then fails to weave it into the text.

Pet peeve: when authors tell me what symbols are like they've written the text to try to be about the symbol instead of letting symbols emerge from a novel.

Okay, I had to stop writing there for a few minutes because Dave came back. I thought maybe he was delivering more moss or checking to see if I'd used mine. He told me they were going out at noon to forage for food to put by, again in Central Park. I agreed to go, not because I don't have food—I still have enough Lean Cuisines to choke a horse—but because I want to see who the we he keeps mentioning are and what they plan to forage to put by in a park.

I guess beyond his teeth, he's pretty cute. He has a dimple—only one—which I sort of dig. He needs to groom his eyebrows better though. He doesn't have a unibrow, but one eyebrow is noticeably larger than the other.