S.J. Pendergraft

After the Pandemic

Excerpt

Atlanta, Georgia

“Kelisha!”

Kelisha snarled as she spilled the fertilizer all over the table. It might have been easier using the standard cup measuring system, but the best directions she found called for metric, so she had to measure out by weight. And slowly dropping bits of fertilizer onto the food scale to get the precise number was arduous work.

“What, dammit?!” She turned to her friend Latoya, who was standing in her small kitchen next to the fridge. She knew it was Latoya because she only trusted her with the spare key.

“So you’re really doing it.” No hello, no how-are-ya, not even a question.

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“You said we needed to find a way to get everyone to pay attention to us!”

“Yes, that’s what I’m doing. Now move please, I need to start over.”

Kelisha swept up the fertilizer, clearing the table before putting it all back into the bucket. “There’s a reason I told you to call me first, you know. This is dangerous stuff!”

“It’s a bomb, Kelisha. Yeah, it’s pretty dangerous.”

Kelisha ignored her friend, wiping the scale down. Latoya, however, wasn’t done.

“You’ve seen the news, right? How the scientist in Sweden isolated it?”

That was all the talking heads could talk about on the news networks. Once the last reported death from the mysterious disease was logged, scientists had feverishly started new lines of research. The first breakthrough had happened just this week, over at Stockholm University in Sweden. The main scientist had isolated and identified the specific RNA strands or something like that. He’d named it the LUES-One.

Kelisha started prepping the fertilizer again. “Yeah, I seen the news. A bunch of white men in Whitelandia ‘isolated the virus’ and are going to study it. You know that’s some bullshit! Since when have white men ever done right by the rest of us when it’s about medicine?”

Latoya stayed silent. She’d been there with Kelisha when the sickness had started. At first, it was just a bad strain of the flu and there’d been the usual pleas to get the flu shot, to protect yourself and your family. But then suddenly it wasn’t the flu, it was something else, although it started off with flu-like symptoms. Except the flu didn’t usually kill over a million people worldwide.

The doctors and nurses and healthcare workers were quick to respond, but the virus was quicker, and they were overwhelmed. And the most overwhelmed were the people of color, the poor, and the marginalized.

So Kelisha and Latoya had organized as well, gathering all their friends as they usually did, marching and protesting, organizing sit-ins and rallies, putting together food drives and care networks for the housebound.

But it wasn’t enough.

“Why are you building a bomb?”

Kelisha didn’t bother turning around. “Because talking and marching isn’t getting us anywhere. We talked and marched all through the pandemic. For once, I thought people were actually hearing us, that our message was getting through! And now the virus is over, and things are starting to go back to normal, back to business as usual. We can’t let that happen!”

Latoya was still standing by the refrigerator, still refusing to move.

“Kelisha, listen. Things are starting to get better. You heard how they made that black Air Force vet the President? A woman and she’s black! And in all those countries where women were downtrodden, like in the Middle East, women are taking power. The UN is filled with women now, they’ll make sure the scientists in Sweden don’t…”

“Have you lost your mind?!” Now Kelisha did turn around. “You really think, with all these white men still around, they’re going to listen to us?! They’re actually going to sit down and let us take power?! You know as well as I do, they’re going to weaponize that damn virus and use it on us! First, they killed our men, now they’re coming for us!”

Latoya tried to protest, but Kelisha talked over her. “You saw them! You saw them, same as me! Black men dying! Old men, young men, little boys, babies! Black and brown bodies, all over the place, but no white men! Same as the prisons, all color, no white!”

“Dammit Kelisha, the white women went too!”

It was true. At first, the reports were mostly about black and brown people getting sick. Latinx, Middle Eastern, African, anyone who didn’t have white skin, they were the ones most affected. Which was no surprise, that’s how things always were. But then someone took a good look at the reports and realized it was just black and brown men who were dying. Black and brown women were fine. On the other side, the white men were healthy, but the white women were gone.

Kelisha only shook her head, refusing to listen to her friend. “You really think it won’t get any worse?” She put down the scoop and grabbed Latoya’s shoulders. “How many times in history have white doctors isolated and treated a virus, some bacteria, and used it to experiment on lesser races? Remember the Tuskegee Airmen? Remember the black women who were forced into sterility? Remember Henrietta Lacks?”

“But building a bomb? Kelisha, this isn’t like you!”

“I saw them dying in the streets!” Kelisha let go, stepping back a bit. She tried to push the memories away, when the final surge of the pandemic reached its zenith. “You know how bad it got, how it affected the homeless population. You saw them dying, in the parks, in the alleys, in the road. You saw how people died, alone in the streets, with no one to care for them, drowning in their own lungs.”

They stood there, in the kitchen, surrounded by the bits and pieces needed to create a bomb, remembering how it was only a month ago. It wasn’t like the movies, where bodies were stacked five feet high and six across, spilling out of doorways and falling from rooftops. But the bodies had been plentiful: a homeless person who lay down for a final rest, an old person sitting on their porch one last time, the last healthy person in the household on a supply run who finally succumbed…. 

Kelisha picked up the scale, now showing the correct amount of grams.

“Listen, you don’t want to be a part of this, then fine. But I’m building a bomb because we need to make sure that no one forgets. Everyone’s talking about a potential cure, about how things can go back to normal. But normal is what got us into this mess into the first place. So yeah, I’m building a bomb and I’m taking it to DC and I’m going to set it off during the march.”

“Wait, the Native Women’s march?! Kelisha, those women have had it as bad as us!”

“Then where the hell were they?! Where were they when we needed help? Where were the Asians and the Latinos? Everyone talks a good talk, but when shit hits the fan, everyone just hides with their own communities. No one ever cares about us and now we colored girls need to stand together, because we don’t have any men! So what if some of those bitches get blown to bits…”

“Kelisha, those bitches are fucking Indians! They’ve had it just as hard as we have…”

“Then why haven’t they shown up? We have to make sure they understand we won’t go down without a fight!”

Latoya and Kelisha stared at each other, the silence roaring between them. Latoya finally nodded, then went over to the fridge.

“I need a beer.”

“Sure, grab me one too. I just need to adjust this…”

Kelisha heard Latoya opening the door, glass bottles clinking together. She grabbed the funnel so she could pour the fertilizer into the explosion compartment. She didn’t notice Latoya had gone quiet until the beer bottle hit her temple, knocking her out.

About the Author

S.J. Pendergraft is currently a student in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program (Fiction). She served in the Army as a Military Police officer and has written for online publications including Lenny Letter and Geek’d-Out.