In the Time of “In the Time of”
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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...
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...
Corona in Istanbul
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By Zeynep Camuşcu
I have been sleeping. Midday naps to kill some time. Without a constant occupation, quarantine in times of Corona has meant that there’s much more time to spend. From mid-March to May, we stayed at home as a family, but we weren’t terribly concerned. The only thing that...
Living Between Two Worlds
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by Cheryl Pearl Sucher
It was the middle of January and my Kiwi husband and I were packing for our annual holiday to our other home in New Zealand. The Covid-19 virus was wreaking havoc in Wuhan, China but seemed confined to that Asian province. However, in the short time between preparing to leave and the actual date of our departure, January 28, Wuhan was...
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...
Masks and Gloves
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By Rebecca Chace
Today a man died in front of our building, or maybe he didn’t. It’s spring 2020 in Brooklyn, New York. Yesterday, the death count was only forty-six, the day before it was sixty-one. Up and down have replaced north and south on the compass. I opened our front door, masked and gloved, inhaling Pine Sol from the spray bottle we use on the door...
Rooms and Clarinets
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Clifford Thompson
Malcolm X has been on my mind lately. I’ll get to that in a moment.
In my early and mid-teens, I played the clarinet, badly. I gave it up after that, and I don’t even know where my old clarinet is. But I have another one now, given to me by a friend who found it in her apartment, left behind by a previous tenant; my friend thought of me as she herself was...
The Daisy Assassin: Incidents from a Time of Plague
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by David Winner
Most risks have immediate consequence. If you get caught in a riptide, you drown. Not that afternoon, not the following month, but then. But if I catch a dribble of Covid sputum on Lookout Hill, I may wake up one morning two weeks later not with one of the mild sore throats that have been scaring me but a deep exhaustion so I can barely make it to the bathroom to pee. A...
The Double Feature
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By William Cody Maher
To go out with me for fresh air or for some sun and to listen to the birds. . . to go out with me is to watch behind my back to be anticipating what is ahead to look for kids suddenly lurching out of the bushes out of my mind. . . to be out with me is not to be out with me and I don’t know how I can change that unless all the stop lights...
Corona Report
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Andrea Scrima
The invisible enemy hit Italy just as I was preparing to leave Florence; containment measures had begun a week prior to my departure. At first the “red zones” of Codogno and other municipalities in Lodi were subject to quarantine, then the whole of Lombardy together with provinces in Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont, and...