Lady Corona in the garden with the bats
Art by Sharry Wright, Game of Clue Covid edition 2020
Humans have been naughty to the earth, and earth has sent us to our rooms. If my blog posts could get as many shares as the coronavirus, I’d be stylin’.
The house next to my daughter’s kindergarten teacher has put up signs saying THE END IS NEAR and REPENT OR GO TO HELL. Under those a smaller sign reads Glacier Walk B&B. If I can avoid either of the first two, I’m totally going to stay there one day.
The spiders have come out of hiding, and so have the people. It’s like the Fourth of July around here, except without parades. Even the most reclusive are reemerging, sometimes as The Dude in bathrobe and beards, sometimes as Mad Max in Burning Man goggles and Manic Panic hair.
My apocalyptic look consists of a blazer and penguin jammies—business on top, party on the bottom. Perfect for the endless Zoom meetings. I drape a wildly patterned scarf over my head and across my bespectacled face. Twisting curls of scarf dangle down on both sides like a Hasidic Jew.
The scarf keeps unraveling, but I can’t touch it because my fingers have just touched the handle on the school door. By the time I leave school, my scarf has unraveled so much it has fallen off my head and wrapped itself around my throat, practically cutting off the air. This is the whole reason I am trying to avoid the coronavirus in the first place.
When the mask I ordered from Euphoria Festival Wear came, I figured I could finally nail this quarantine thing. I strap it on, and feeling like a boss dystopian fairy, march my sexy mask to the grocery store.
My breath fogs up my glasses, and soon I can’t see anything. When I take the glasses off to clear them up, my mask starts slipping. I heard you aren’t supposed to touch your mask with germy fingers, so I put the glasses on my head to pull out the hand sanitizer, causing my glasses to fall on the grimy floor.
When I bend over to pick up my glasses, my mask falls off. Here I am, juggling mask, glasses, sanitizer, and groceries like a Rube Goldberg Pandemic machine of what not to do, struggling to remember which hand is the contaminated one, which one is clean, and I still can’t see because I’m blind as a bat with coronavirus.
So much for protocol, and so much for quarantine chic.
. . .
About the artist:
Sharry Wright started making collages two years ago as a poetry exercise. “I was trying to write a group of poems as collages,” she says, “using a collaging method to generate them— and thought I’d try some collages that might work as visual poems. Instead, I ended up with these tiny flash fiction stories about my family, and lately with a pandemic theme.”
You can view more of her work on her Instagram page, link here.
