The prompt said to write a disaster.
I picked a very specific prompt out of the grab bag, because I had seen clean fingers fold one side of it. I tried to avoid taking another poet’s slip of paper, because he kept coughing on his hands.
This was late February.
—
I have written disasters for a long time. I have written disasters to deal with my own disasters, using character and plot and dialogue to process the ways real people have and haven’t let each other down when worlds, personal and large, have fallen apart. I don’t write to feel good, or to feel better. I write to understand and exert control. I can make my characters fail the way I have failed, or have been failed, I can show the reader, hey - do not act like this.
I teach 12th grade English in a Brooklyn high school. We study mythology and folklore to suss out codes of ancient behavior; we also reflect on our own. We evaluate xenia, or hospitality, in “The Odyssey” when Circe’s failed assassination ends in seduction, when she provides feasts for manpigs, when Telemachus feeds his father’s enemies. We watch with glee as the suitors, who have violated the guest’s end of the xenia deal, are slaughtered for their greed. What do we learn about how one should act in that society? What do we expect of each other today? Would you take in a stranger and feed them, clothe them? The Phaeacians baste wanderers in oil and ask them to tell a story.
—
I was a student in a high school English class when I saw fireballs rip through floors and floors of metal skyscrapers, watched people take flight off the roofs when there was no way down, watched a water bottle shower a person caked in white debris, whose brown skin shown through only after he poured it over his face. I stood on the West Side Highway and contemplated the empty sky. And later that day, I felt gently but firmly pushed out as my dusty father came to collect me from another student’s apartment. We were interlopers.
My classmate’s father was thumbing through takeout menus and giving us curious, nervous side-eye when we realized that we had to get home, and that we had no way of doing so. Xenia only went so far. This was New York, not Phaeacia. Between us and Staten Island was a hole in the city. The trains were not running. We could not get to the boats. Odysseus would have been bathed and fed. We were dirty and scared. How to go due south, when due south was Hell?
—
The way strangers treated us on September 11th, the way humans treated each other afterwards, is enough material for thousands of lifetimes of writing. I will never understand all the facets and ways of responding, the silent codes by which people reacted to each other, to the world. For me, flash fiction is the way I safely explore these ideas. Tiny moments, whether after a terrorist attack, a virus, a famine, a flood, tell us more about humanity than the entirety of a Hero’s Journey. Hero’s Journeys are about those few exciting protagonists, but slices of interaction are about all of us. I tell myself this is why I write flash fiction and poetry. I probably just don’t have the attention span for anything longer. Is this a modern-day tech-overuse problem? Or is my need to ping-pong between different realities a coping mechanism? Is that what’s actually happening? How much do we love TikTok because reality keeps hitting and hitting and hitting and hitting - and instead you can scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and?
—
This past February, I wasn’t concerned about the poet coughing on his hands and his prompt because of COVID-19. I should have been, but I am always worried about people coughing on their hands. At that moment, the virus still felt vague. My newborn at home had my hackles up about germs more than usual, for sure, but my hands always burn when they feel dirty. They have since September 11th. Another problem? Or another coping mechanism?
—
The December after the planes crashed, we finally got a puppy. Rufus was our informal therapy dog, our own version of the Golden Retrievers that were working with disaster recovery operations at the smoldering pit. I heard they were going home and having nightmares, but Rufus was pure joy. He absorbed our sadness and tried to drown it in kisses.
These kisses made me wash my hands. A lot. Maybe I was doing it before Rufus, but his joy and love and spit really catalyzed the issue.
It got to the point that I was cracking at the palm-side of my knuckles. No blood came, but you could fit a thick piece of thread in the space between skin. It took years for me to calm down about it. My father made a rule: I could only wash my hands after the bathroom, and before and after meals. After much negotiation, it was expanded to include after trips on the subway, bus, or ferry.
You could call this pandemic a setback.
—
Is this germaphobia my COVID-19 superpower? I can’t touch my face with subway hands.
—
I’ve written about a lot of disasters. I’ve written about rodent infestations, red giant suns, electromagnetic pulses. I’ve imagined tsunamis, floods, sinkholes and even viruses.
Like a diamond, they each look different whenever the light changes. Who would have imagined toilet-paper shortages and a world where we no longer did the majority of our defecating at work? It would be funny, if it weren’t awful.
The one thing I could have predicted, that of which I saw a specter nineteen years ago, is the fear we would have of each other.
—
By the time my father collected me from that small apartment on the afternoon of September 11th, he had traveled north through the smoke to meet me. He could have gone straight for the Staten Island Ferry, but we were on opposite sides of Ground Zero and he wanted to come find his daughter. He took his shirt off to block (not enough of) the dust, and went around East.
Apnea, kidney cancer, heartburn: he was left disabled and compromised by that day, and I blame myself. I should blame the people who crashed the planes, the inadequate followup by the healthcare system, the foreign policy that led to these tensions, the inept people in power that allowed it to happen and then used it as an excuse to tap our phones. But all I know is that my dad got sick because he came to find me. And now he’s at greater risk of dying from our 21st century plague.
“I am afraid of people now,” he tells me on a video call. The short attention span I mentioned earlier may also just be genetic, because we step on each others’ sentences and hop from topic to topic. My bemused husband just rolls his eyes, lets our loud talking wash over him. My father stares at his five month old grandson through a screen. He hasn’t seen him since he was 8 weeks. My father, who laughed when I, six months pregnant, came to visit with hand sanitizer in tow, now sanitizes his hands, keys, phone, steering wheel during any outing. Twice. I mailed him homemade masks and filters. We cross our fingers and hope this disease doesn’t claim him. We all acknowledge that it is a distinct possibility.
Two hours from his home, we live in a South Brooklyn neighborhood where masks are political. Dog-walks require dodging out into the street when we see others on the sidewalk, because 90% of the time they do not move over themselves. 50% of the time they are unmasked. Most of those times, they roll their eyes at us.
—
There’s a lot of talk about how people came together after September 11th. That wasn’t true for my brown friends. That wasn’t true for many wanderers, like us, trying to get home that day. It wasn’t true for the people we subsequently attacked, the countries we conflated with each other, those we viewed with suspicion simply for existing. But we mourned our dead, at least.
Now it is May, and the New York Times prints 1,000 names of our dead. This is only 1% of the tally so far. There is no unified grief, no banding together to protect each other. I see friends at their neighbors’ pools, people in other states crowding into bars and hot tubs. My neighbors on one side have large families over to visit their own large family. My neighbor on the other bemoans the school her teenager is missing, but frantically sanitizes. One block over, two have died.
We all do our own calculus of what is safe, what is not.
But we have not come together. We judge. We blame. We claim breathlessness when asked to wear masks and a need for normalcy. Or, we decry irresponsibility and reckless neglect towards others. We do not listen to understand. We have not come together. We are all on our own islands, and nothing about this feels like home.
—
If I had written this disaster in response to the prompt back in February, I don’t know that you would have believed me.
The fun I used to have writing disasters is sucked away now. The part where the premise is unbelievable so the morality can shine through no longer applies. I thought it so clever, years ago, when I wrote a piece of flash fiction set during a pandemic. The disease in my story killed all those who had completed adolescence. The children buried their dead with plastic shovels.
Half a mile away from me, a funeral home director was arrested for storing bodies in unrefrigerated trucks. “I ran out of space,” he said. “Bodies are coming out of our ears.”
—
I was promised that 9/11 would be the disaster of my lifetime. I felt like one of a minority whose lives had been upended. New York and I were Odysseus tossed around by Poseidon, while everyone else was a suitor enjoying his meal.
Now we are all on homemade rafts of our own circumstances. They all look different. Some are solitary, some weighed down by household members, pre-existing conditions, racism, or poverty. Some of us, inexplicably, make some more room for water, take hatchets to the bottoms of our own boats. “I want to feel the ocean,” these people tell themselves, “it’s summer.” Some have hatchets taken to their rafts by others, or were never given adequate supplies to construct their vessels in the first place.
I think we all just want to get home to Ithaka. I think if we rush, fewer will make it. The unmasked people are a hypothetical, unabashed Odysseus running naked towards Nausicaa on the shores of Phaeacia, forgetting his composure, ensuring himself death. The rest are taking Athena’s advice, approaching slowly, hoping this is the last stop before we can return to whatever normal life we think we remember.
All I’m saying is, there’s a lot to learn from fiction.
—
I’m too sad to write more disasters.
But we need disaster. We need conflict. Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t need destruction to learn? But how else would we get the message, other than through tragedy?
Hey- the authors of this universe are telling us, do not act like this.
But are we listening?
Dana Nelson
Dana Nelson is from New York City. She gets too nervous to submit things for publication, but you can find her work in old copies of Shrew, Arc of a Cry, and Circus Book. She also edited the latter two at some point(s). She teaches 12th grade English and a poetry class in Brooklyn. She is waiting out the plague with her kid and her dog and her husband and a lot of snacks and existential dread.