In the Time of “In the Time of”
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Hope in the Age of Covid
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Liesl Schillinger
When the news of the Covid-19 epidemic emerged from China in January, alongside shocking images of the residents of Wuhan (population 11 million)—I felt a sense of alarm, but not, as yet, dread. Watching footage of hazmat-suited rescue workers delivering baskets of food to quarantined apartment dwellers—who pulled the baskets into their...
Hope Interrupted: Organ Transplantation in the Middle of a Pandemic
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By Tiffany Winters
Even under the best of circumstances, making it onto an organ transplant list is no easy feat. Simply needing an organ isn’t quite enough; rather, you undergo a battery of tests, procedures, and consultations over a series of weeks to prove you are not only healthy enough to survive a transplant, but also have insurance approval to foot the...
My Body Has Failed Me and Now I’m About to Die
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By Cecilia Hansson
translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson
It starts like a great spring exhaustion. But after a couple of days the spaces between my ribs begin to tingle, and my head hurts like I have a migraine.
I think about the Easter eggs, the cake that needs to be baked, and the family excursions we...
Militarizing the Police
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By Roxana Robinson
In 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain, the United States no longer needed a powerful physical military presence in Europe. Congress passed legislation allowing the Department of Defense to release six billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment to our local police departments across the country. This...
Around the Bend
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By Saskia Vogel
I think about the role smell plays in memory, touch as a communication. How will it impact the baby to have only us? (For how long?) I discipline myself to stop thinking about California as a point of arrival or departure, of...
The Blue Vial
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By Mui Poopoksakul
I found it on May 19, I told the detective.
Coming home from the post office and waiting for the elevator, I checked our mail as usual. Nothing but a vial with blue liquid. I couldn’t be bothered with whatever free sample someone had dropped in our mailbox and...
Something New
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By Caille Millner
A few weeks before my city issued a shelter-in-place order, I gave birth to my first child. While I was learning how to be a mother, the coronavirus pandemic was decimating economies and cleaving communities. It was disproportionately killing Black Americans and laying bare the brutal costs of the country’s collective unwillingness to invest...
Pain and Coping
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by Christine Henneberg
Recently an old knee injury from my twenties flared up. The knee aches every time I walk down the few steps into the garage. In bed at night, I can feel it throbbing; it distracts me from the book I’m reading. I blame it on the fact that the pool is closed and I haven’t been swimming. Instead I’ve been walking a lot—almost exclusively...
White Fantasy: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Covid, and the Myth of Self-Sufficiency
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It’s pure fantasy of course, this American myth of self-reliance. It’s also, let’s face it, unapologetically white. Much has been made of the racism in Wilder’s books. In 2018 the American Library Association removed her name from a children’s literature award due in part to her crass portrayals of indigenous peoples and people of color. Laura’s mother’s insistence that “the only good Indian is a...
Uncertainty Ever After
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By Jon Roemer
Late February/early March felt like a horror movie, the fast, almost tidy way the pandemic was unfolding and the way cable news filled an expository role. It looked like a Soderbergh split-screen concoction, like Contagion on replay from a decade ago. Until the spectacle got repetitive, the numbers got close to home, and angry people started filling my streets.
AUTISM in the Time of COVID: Guilt, Histories, and the Village
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By Barbara Fischkin
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The Covid test for my son came back positive. Great, I told myself, first you gave him autism, now the plague. Dan, 32, has been unable to speak since he was three and a half, a rare case of Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. Doctors told my husband and me to expect...