This is the story that started it all, so to speak.
“The Plague” was the first story that I published professionally. My friend Derek (of speculatingcanada.ca) had posted the call for submissions for his friend’s publication Postscript to Darkness. The call sounded doable: a short story that was speculative in some way, and was under 3000 words. The pay was decent, too. Enough to motivate me–but not enough to make me think I had to be too professional or serious.
And so I wrote this little story I had in my head about a queer kid surviving the apocalypse and what that would feel like. In some ways, it’s a new beginning–and for a queer kid, that is sometimes the best thing we can get.
So I wrote the story. I enjoyed writing it.
And then it was accepted.
And then I got to do a reading of this story in downtown Ottawa with other authors, some who have gone onto serious good things. That night was really magical for me. It was the first time a life of writing–and writing really weird things–seemed completely viable.
Even fun!
What a nice new beginning.
The Plague
No one ever really remembers a plague. It’s not like a war, where the planning, battles, and deaths are all categorized at once. Each step is made with the conscious fact that this will be history one day. In the present everyday life of war and destruction, an archivist is happy. There is always something to do.
But a plague is pieced together like a puzzle, always after the fact. It cannot be foreseen and even while it is happening, many people move about their daily life unnoticed and not affected. It is always understood after the deaths. Not the first or the second—these are merely incidental and could have very well been accidents of fate. But by the two hundredth or two thousandth, then something is happening. Only when one death tips into many deaths does it become history. When it is worth remembering and learning from, it is given a name.
Back during the cholera epidemics, John Snow tried to solve the mystery of the sickness. There was no such thing as bacteria and germs were thought to be spread through the air. The plague doctors wore bird masks stuffed with herbs and home remedies in the beak, hoping to keep away the death and not breathe it in. People avoided certain areas where the dead were piling up, but they did not look at the water. Snow followed an inventible ghost map of sickness, and later realized it was emerging from one pipe where everyone drank. Even without seeing the bacteria with a microscope, he knew the existence of the monster that was taking people one by one. As soon as the mystery of cholera was solved, then it could move onto history. Plagues are always created backwards, after the ending is known.
***
When my mother got sick, I was twelve years old. She called to me from her bed one morning, her voice hoarse and grainy. It was the sound of two bones rubbing together in sand, trying to sound out the syllables of my name.
“Abigail. AB-A-GALE.”
I didn’t even fight her when she used my birth name. I just got up and gave her water to try and make the sound behind her voice stop. I gave her soup and other fluids, but nothing worked. I changed the sheets and tried not to touch anything. I washed my hands and I showered regularly. I wanted to stay home, but she told me to go to school. When I arrived and sat in my class, I counted the heads of each person who was there. Three students were away. It is just a flu, I told myself.
But I stopped going to school when three students became five and I could hear the same dried-out hollow voice in others. I went to the library before I left, wearing winter gloves though it was spring, and took out books on John Snow. I stopped showering, in case whatever was happening was in the water and it could get into my mouth or eyes. I boiled all the water in the house before anything touched our lips. I drank and did not get sick, but my mother, already sick, refused everything I gave her and spun in her bed at night.
It is only the water once, I thought to myself, and John Snow has already claimed that for his history lesson. I looked away from the pipes and the books collected dust on my shelves. I did not go to school for days, then months, then years. I learned more in my house than anywhere in the world.
To me, the plague started with my mother. But that is only because I know the doors and the roof and the walls of our house. I know our private history, the photos on the walls and where the dead cats are buried in the backyard. The plague always starts inward like this and spirals out. I only became aware of what I could see and feel with my own hands. But I did not know the history that was happening outside my window, not for a long time.
Really, the plague stated halfway around the country. Some sheep farmer was the first one to display symptoms. He had gotten too close to the dirt and to the bodies that were buried underneath, stepping on the ground in bare feet. Later, he would be rendered mute in bed, just like my mother, spinning like a millstone at night. The bodies underground were old corpses from one of the wars that Napoleon had started. I can’t remember what one exactly—Waterloo or the French Revolution—but the battle name is not really important. What I do remember is that Napoleon wasn’t really a short man. He was normal height, maybe a few inches less than average, but he was probably taller than I was when I was reading about him. He was only portrayed short to humiliate him by his enemies. Maybe that was why the bodies from underground wanted to lower us, to reach up and grab us by our toes and bare feet. They wanted to pull us down to their level.
Zombie is not quite the right word. Zombies come up to the surface and demand attention; they bite and infect you. These creatures were not solid and bold like zombies. They had broken themselves down into tiny pieces, the past history of a group of people, and they demanded to be remembered by pulling us all down with them. It got lonely underneath and we were doing a terrible job of keeping track of history, of keeping track of death.
When I checked my mother, she had no marks, no bite wounds. But the flesh on her feet glowed pink and I knew it was something in the garden. I scanned the ground, always wearing shoes and hopping on cement, to see where the disease had started. But there was no distinct portal, no distinct entryway. The sheep field was incidental; the farmer may have been the first infected, but there was nothing special about his land. The invasion of the illness was really something that had been brewing ever since Napoleon got the first short joke. There never is a distinct beginning to plagues, only our own interpretations.
I cut my hair first. I thought it may have had something to do with the illness, the same way arsenic and other poisons linger in follicles. But I scanned its roots and saw nothing, so I began to learn to start again. I wanted to be like John Snow so badly; I thought I had to be him in order to find the answers. After I read his books, I’d then stand in the mirror, my chest flattened across my skin from binding, and will myself to figure it out. I needed to know where it came from and its origins, how it could start so small and then explode out. I needed to understand that it could somehow get my mother, but not touch me. I needed to understand why we were so different, and yet we shared the same last name and facial features. Even when I stopped eating as much and my cheekbones stuck out and my hips disappeared, it did not seem to matter. Not enough, at least. I was still her daughter to her, and she was still calling me Abigail from her bed while I pretended to be John Snow. Even if she couldn’t see my face, my bound chest, or my new cropped hair, she knew my voice and who was in the house with her. Even at our most desperate, when she was dying and I still could not figure out the plague, I told her my name was only John Snow once. She never answered me and I don’t think she ever heard. I didn’t like the way the name sounded anyway; it was hollow and too blunt. It was only the water once, I thought. And there would only be one John Snow. I was not him. But I was still left wanting more than what I was given, what had been passed down from generations, and what I saw disappearing right in front of me.
I watched as my mother grew drier and drier. Her skin flaked off and into the wind. Her voice became distant and then it was nothing but bones rubbing together. The last time I went to see her, she was a pile of dirt on the bed. What was left was formed perfectly to her body, like a mummy, but in a thousand tiny pieces. The window was inexplicably open, and in one gust of wind she was gone.
This is how they all went. This was how they all left us and died. They touched the ground and the past infected them. They let the past hold onto their bones and take everything else away. And then by chance, they floated into the atmosphere, into the air. So long as you did not touch the ground and let the past get to you, you did not appear like ashes and dust.
I was alone in my house for weeks, piecing the mystery together. Others were also figuring it out. Men walked by my window regularly on stilts, their wooden limbs creaking as they learned to take new steps again. Other people realized it came through the dirt, and not the air. People began to talk to one another through a mutual exchange of their feet. To look at the sole, and not the soul, was oddly moving.
Everything else in the world was the same except for this elaborate stepping stone game, like pretending the floor was lava when you were younger. Only once touched, the lava would burn you from the inside out, boiling away your blood and organs, turning you into ash and dirt without the least bit of pain. There was only lethargy, until you were dried out worse than the mummies in the museum, and then the wind took you. Peaceful, almost. Most people want their ashes spread across the world, as if it was the key to immortality, to be many places at once.
One day, I moved to my still-open window and watched as pack of stilt walkers traipsed by. I went outside, being careful to stay on the pavement my house was surrounded by. The stilt walkers reached so close to the sky that I could barely see their faces.
Someone threw me a pair of stilts and they rattled to the ground. From up high, he yelled, “We could use someone like you.”
I did not know what to say in return. I showed him my feet.
“Good. Good.” He smiled. “Let’s go.”
I took his gift with shaking hands and tried to learn my new motions. From atop my wooden legs, I took in a sudden breath of the shallow air. Like looking down the water pipe, I began to understand what John Snow had felt. I was seeing the world and its history the way I had never witnessed before. This was a plague now, to me and all the others around. I could see the empty houses and the fallen bodies, the dust that spread up into the atmosphere and was almost thick enough to block the sun. I learned, as I walked with these new men, that they were calling the illness The Dust Disease. It now had a name and time would remember us, either as victims or survivors. It was a chance to start again.
“What is your name?” the man asked me.
I was still bald from my hair cutting and I looked very different than the soles of my feet. I was wearing what my father had left behind, not wanting to wear my own clothing or tarnish my mother’s memory by wearing hers. The pants and shirt were old, and now covered in dust, but it looked okay. The man regarded my new jacket, too big in the shoulders, before he looked at me and asked my name again.
“I’m Max.”
“Nice to meet you, Max,” he said with a smile. He introduced himself, and then we kept walking. It was hard to work my new legs at first. But he was patient, and waited for me as I caught up to him. I left my house behind me, the ash and dirt of others lingering in my path.
***
This is what I have learned so far, now that I am fifteen. We are still piecing together what has happened to us, but we now know that we are not alone. More days past by and we find others on slits, and others who blow right by us in the wind. This is not a war, something deliberately made with the intent of remembering, recreating, or with a distinct end. This has all just happened, almost by accident, and it will keep going until someone like John Snow has a need to track it down.
But I am not John Snow anymore. I am Max. As the man beside me calls me by my name again, more people on stilts join us. We walk into the night.
END
Eve Morton 