Statement of Record

TagQuarantine

Domači glasovi

by Andrea Scrima

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I studied the explanations of astronomical quadrants and astrolabes and the armilla equinoziale, the armillary sphere of Santa Maria Novella, made up of two conjoined iron rings mounted on the façade that told the time of day and year based on the position of their elliptical shadow, when all at once it occurred to me that I’d wanted to write about something else altogether, about a...

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 massive bills—and a...

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 kept my physician father...

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 cut off from the world as...

We Are Dreaming of the Future Season

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By Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer

J and K, the owners of the house, come out to greet us when we pull into the driveway. They live next door in another house mostly hidden by trees. J, a big man in jeans and suspenders, keeps at least ten feet from us. K hovers another ten feet or so farther back. With her straight grey bob, she doesn’t exactly remind me of my mother but she...

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 knob we share with other...

Quarantine Diary (excerpt)

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Matthew Vollmer

Trying to read David Markson’s Reader’s Block during a plumber’s visit. Yesterday, E, my son, clogged up the toilet in his bathroom. Upon further interrogation, he admitted that he’d flushed something called a “Magic Eraser” down the commode. Spent twenty minutes pumping a plunger, trying to get the turds of a person I helped create to disappear down the...

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 Marche. And then, on...

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