Fireside story

 

Multi Mask (breather)

She gazed into the fire, 

“At first I kept expecting to get sick, waiting for it. Pretty much everyone in my family got it to some degree or another. But I didn’t. I waited for it but after a while I thought that maybe I wouldn’t get it and then, maybe I couldn’t get it.” 

She rubbed her nose. “Most people were sick and of course Cen-Gov found a way of twisting it so it was our fault. People got sick because they were unfit, or ate the wrong things. When they found the correlation between body weight and poor respiratory function that was an opportunity to point the finger at fat people and at old people. When it became clear that the air was so polluted that everyone had to wear breathers outside, Cen-Gov said that people who got sick weren’t wearing masks, or wearing them wrong. It was always about blaming the people, the people’s fault, never them, their idiocy.”

    She sat straighter and placed her hands on her lower back, stretching out her spine, easing her bones. Her back was cold but the flames were making her face hot. It was strange and nice, feeling the chilled and heated halves of her body together, sitting in the cold dark before this golden fire, the spit and crackle of the wood (real wood!) and little orange sparks jumping as pieces of ash splintered off and dropped from the logs. Tiny blue flames sputtered in the heart of the fire, flaring and dying then bursting into life somewhere else. 

    Those flames were like the Cen-Gov instructions in the decade after the Last Year, constantly changing, leaping up with some new hope then dying away, twisting the truth of things, burning up the goodwill of the people until they, like the land, were all ashes and burnt out hope. 

    She sighed, “It was awkward and then awful, to be a healthy person then. Or seeming to be. I mean I couldn't have been healthy, I was breathing the same air as everyone else, I just didn’t get sick. I suppose I was just lucky.” she laughed hollowly at the thought of where that ‘luck’ had taken her; into a body that was not her own and exile in a dead land.