Shelter in Place #3: “Pueblo, Colorado”
BY PATRICE McGIVNEY ’23
I wake in the night and hear you cough.
It’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
In the morning you say you’re fine, better even,
but later on the video conference with your doctor:
Coughing
(the doctor doesn’t ask to hear the cough. they already have)
Can’t Breathe
(like a dictionary is sitting on your chest — that’s the words you use)
Exhaustion
(and yet, you’re still working, every day)
No fever, but you had one just the other day.
It doesn’t matter either way.
Tests aren’t prescribed to people like us.
You cough into a scarf and hang up.
For a while, it’s the same.
Every time I hear you cough I want to turn and cry.
(sometimes I do, but I don’t want you to see that)
At night I have dreams of crowded hospitals and empty grocery stores.
Who knew the supermarket was such a violent place,
I want to ask.
But my voice doesn’t rise up at the end.
The question falls flat,
no one answers,
no one laughs.
Days pass with no change.
Then it gets worse.
In my room I move from the chair to the bed to the floor.
I travel from email to Twitter to Zoom.
You move from tissues to antibiotics to codeine.
You travel from bed to bathroom and back.
It feels like prostituting out my emotions,
when I have to send out the emails.
Still, I swallow my shame.
I wrench the pain out of myself and onto the screen.
Apologies, I write.
A family member is ill, I type.
I will have the assignment by Sunday, I say.
I send the emails. I don’t work on the assignments.
We avert our eyes when you cough at dinner.
We make you tea in the mornings.
We remind you to take your medication.
We don’t turn on the news.
I sneak upstairs to read updates on the pandemic.
I whisper what I’ve learned when you’re not around.
I’ve learned how to panic quietly, alone, with no evidence.
It’s been eight days.
Does it really go away after fourteen?
Shelter in Place is a new series featuring student artists’ and writers’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.