The Plague Doctor
Another peaceful night of rain and fog and silent rain floating in the beams of passing headlights. Distant engines sounded like rain pouring down the gutter. Muffled highway traffic splashed over the bridge over the black whirlpools of the river. Main street businesses went to sleep, but left adorable Halloween men with open candy slots propped in flower pots on the sidewalk. Young people hugged each other outside the only open bar and took photos with their phones under street lamps. Down the street under a bank balcony, a man in a leather jacket huddled out of the rupturing clouds above. Downpour filled the air for two minutes, then silence resumed, a few cars passed by, and then the rain fell once more. He made himself comfortable with the magic rocks in his pocket.
The witch of the Apartments gave them to him because his tooth worms needed a dentist visit but he lost his job in the lung parasite plague when the motorcycle factory closed. He told her he needed medicine to cure his sugar addiction and a new set of teeth, so she hooked him up with what she had. Joint tissue in his knees tore away and it hurt to walk. Vision in one eye fogged up until only a few needles of light entered his cornea. His kidneys hurt until his urine turned bright orange. The magic rocks put a sleep spell over him, and he needed them otherwise he’d stay up all night listening to the thunder of his own terrified heartbeat.
The owner of the bank knew this guy liked to sleep under his balcony, and since the counsol cancelled all major events, he had no desire to chase him away. A drunk young man walked past the bank and rose a curious eyebrow when he saw the damaged vagabond. Despite sleeping on cement, he kept his hair neat, his beard neat, his face remained unblemished and supple, his jaw and chin sharp, his eye brows narrowed by bold eyes, and his eyelashes floating spearheads made a damn handsome bastard. The drunk young man smiled at him, and offered a brief wave before going on his way up the shining wet streets in search of a better party.
Almost alone, the vagrant took out the cartridge containing the essence of the witch’s rock magic. She sold them to other tenants of the apartments, but gave them to him., and equipped him with a handheld vaporizer. He inserted the essence, and just as he stuck the pen into his mouth the sheriff truck rolled down the street past him. Heavy wheels cracked rocks on the street, tinted windows concealed the driver. Close to this chest, The loitering vagrant kept a folder of his nephews paintings, and he wondered if his blood might saturate and destroy them, or if bullets might shred them to pieces. He shuddered and brushed hair behind his ear, but the sheriff kept driving towards the business district along the highway side of town. He filled his lungs with fumes and exhausted them into the midnight air. Ailments numbed to mere burdens, and for the first time in a long time he felt cozy in his new coat. The rains started up again so he scooted against the wall besides purple thistles growing out of the wall to keep splattering torrents from reaching the black leopard leather. Alone at last, he felt comfortable being himself. He kept inhaling the vapor essence, looked over at the bigger buildings with bricks where windows used to be, to the catwalks up against the top apartments of small shops, counting the passing headlights, he noticed someone watching him.
At first the nocturnal vigilante thought he saw another stranger passing by, but this one stood perfectly still. By the costume he assumed for a few brief reliving moments that one of the Halloween Men perhaps blew from the pot and leaned against a window until he saw the streams of hot moist breath life from his mask and lifting over his eyes, and dissolving over the rim of his dark hat. He sat back looking around for any sign besides himself attracting the attention of the costumed watcher lingering in the dark across the street, but the unbreakable fixation of the stranger’s stare told him that no mistake compelled such scrutiny. They watched each other for the next burst of rainfall.
The stranger let the rain wash over his feathers. He never blinked, instead batted the sides of his face with an outstretched wing. His cape fluttered in the wind even when dripping wet, and even when the fog drifted between them, his beak remained illuminated in the street light. He leaned on his cane, watched closely, stepping out of the dark to get a clearer view of the vagrant. In his hand rested an open tome of dust and stiff fiber, he used his beak to turn the thick pages. Fear thawed and dissipated. The fabled pandemic guardians arrived at last from the regions of neverwinter.
The Plague Doctors showed up first on the coastal cities first to warn the poor souls of the real cause of the lung parasites that sullied the world of its ambitions and yearnings for the decade to come. “Squawk! Poison ivy doesn't cause rashes” *swab *swab* went the plague doctor. They'd show everyone the portrait in the book of demons of a red fleshed dragon man digging its claws into the soft vulnerable bowels of the innocent peasants. “Rashes are caused by Abaddon. These so-called lung parasites? They are the work of Leviathan's Mouth. Don't listen to the naysayers. This so-called quarantine is just the Devil's way of removing the faithful so his demons can take position to conquer souls of this world!”
This one kept flipping pages with its beak, looking back at the vagrant, swabbing fluids from its eyes with oily black feathers, then going back to holding the book into the street light.
The vagrant stood up, told the plague doctor to go back to Naples, then wandered away from his nest with the pen warm in his lips. He heard rain falling from tree leaves hit car roofs of the parking lot but his jacket remained dry. Rotting veins of leaves stuffed the street curbs and the narrow trenches along the sidewalks away from mainstreet to homes sinking down deep hills, red doors on cat infested porches, green windows over RVs in the driveway. Swing sets moved on their own, and whispers came from the trees in the creek. With the essence almost finished, he saw all the glowing ones still wandering their old brick streets holding hands, or sitting in clusters on patio chairs slamming back whiskey, others undressed each other and jumped into naked heaps on the roof of abandoned grocery stores, others argued about crimes committed over one hundred years prior until someone pulled out a knife and sank it into an empty eye socket.
In an empty playground, the vagrant found shelter under an empty hut. He sat down on a toppled picnic table, tore up some old cards in his wallet and took a match to them in a small grill, and enjoyed the short warmth. He planned to wake up here at sunrise, and get back to finding a way back home, and he came so close to falling asleep when he heard something wrestling in the grass. Old legends went on about the kinds of creatures lurking in the creeks, under bridges, who only come out at night to raid abandoned hospitals, and peer into the windows of sleeping children. Never did he believe he’d face something so hideously composed, never did he smell something so potent with dead rotting sweetness, and the sound it made when it limped towards him twisted his stomach and the way it breathed brought frigid tears to his eyes.
The body surged over him by three feet. pieces of dead animals held together by staples rested on one solid leg before rolling the other one forward and rushing ahead. When one arm lifted, he saw upside down fox mouths fall open, maggots spilled from netting of gelatin bones and dangling feet, then it reached out with an outstretched hand composed of a rabbit's head with dripping syringe needles as fingers.
Once gentle breezes turned a violent corner and shook the water from the branches and heavy leaves dropped over oozing antlers. The old hidden brick walkway he creaked along grew moldy grit around deep reflectionless puddles under its stifled feetthings composed of cat parts stapled together to form twisted mockery of human feet. Rain quit and blew away, but even as the wind stopped frigid air lingered numbing the wrinkled flesh on the neck and around the eyes of the vagrant.
“Where have you been?” The vagrant demanded. “They told me you died years ago.”
“Please, please, turn me back.” all the little mouths nailed to its body begged.
“You broke the windows.” The vagrant explained. “Now you should suffer.”
“I’ll show you the tomb. Yes, I’ll bring you there and show you the way in. Then you will turn me back.”
“The tomb got filled with concrete twenty years ago.”
“Yes, but not all. There are parts that remain. Hidden tunnels and secret doors.”
“You’re still a liar after all these years.”
“No! I’ve been dwelling in its labyrinth since my Grandfather left me there to die.”
“That old farmer?”
“Yes. He’s right here now.” It pointed a drooling needle at a pig's ribs, then pointed to several different festering organs. “And here. And here. And here.”
“Wow. Wow. I can’t believe you really followed through. Good work. I am proud of you.”
“The days when I needed your admiration are long over. The key to the tomb is here. I took it from the old man’s safe.”
“Did he have any gold?”
“Melted into this key.” A glimmering shaft projected from green bubbles foaming from one of its mouths. “This is to the trap door. Turn me back, and I let you have it.”
“You used to ride in the parade wearing the sash of Miss Beauty. Now it's time to accept your curse like a man.”
The appendages stopped and choked on its words wrestling with the sounds, the growls, the bitter spit blowing chunks of purple carnage out of broken bones to splash on the iron trellis it clung to hold itself up.
“You- you- are a cruel, unreasonable little urchin peasant.”
“Why don’t you go back to your family catacomb and stay there.”
“Ah! You should educate yourself. Perhaps then you’ll be more careful of where you choose to sleep.” The mass of reeking fur matted with red jelly and sharp teeth rose its needles one more time into the light, struck the vagrant in the chest again and again as the other hand constricted around his skull.
Too hungry to garner the strength to resist, the body of his attacker too slippery with substances of different colors and textures. When he grabbed it, he ripped a piece of animal away, but did little to slow the charge of needles impacting any unprotected flesh. Needles punctured his eyelids, his neck, his thighs and crotch. Again and again against the wind. Needles broke off in his empty stomach then fell out under the rupture of more stabbing on his hands, forearms, and the top of his skull. A scarf of cold wet fur wrapped around his mouth until the smell of dead animal leaked out from his eyes in red tears.
Nightowls howled from broken tree knots. German Shepherds chained to trees outside meth houses in the far reaches of the creek in buried bones licked clean from miserable cold cages. Chicken wire blew over under pressure of thunder wind drowning out pathetic screams of weak, frail Vagrant waste. A platinum necklace with a heavy pendant cut in half and dropped to the cement in a river of blood. Once on his knees and completely at the mercy of the grip of the creature, it drove a needle down the soul of his shoe into the bone of his heel, and then one more directly into his heart. Cold tingles raced into his bloodstream, and the attacker left him there quivering on the family picnic platform as it retreated back into the murk of the creek behind the trees.
Miserable cold cages of despair closed around the Vagrant. He’d been attacked before by thugs with shivs and tasers under bridges, chased by tigers he freed from the Zoo, left alone in the bath with an old man with webbed fingers. He lay there letting life drain from his body, but he knew great stockyards of pain awaited him before death brought him to rest in the Underworld.
First his hair fell out of notches and gashes in his skull. Every pore with hair growing out of it itched like worms trying to wriggle into his brain. He dug his claws into his scalp, even the raw injured flesh felt relieved by his digging. He pulled out fistful after fistful and let it blow away until he felt only a bare skull, and even then it burned and itched.
There he lay thinking that perhaps death approached him, only for his head to swim. Hallucinations of dragons swarmed the moon. Swollen cheeks plugged his throat shut, and mucus formed glass in his nostrils . The piercings in his eyebrows ate the rings as flesh swelled over his eyes and ears. Blood vessels broke and big purple splotches appeared in his pale flesh like stars. The bleeding no longer warmed his legs. Arnage on the cement cooled and drew the attention of hungry coyotes They scamped from the bushes, took the meat, and streaked down the court into their dens to feed it to their young. While he lay there suffocating, the coyotes licked the blood off the floor of their caves and started to mate.
The last few thoughts the vagrant had before his heart gave up and the last cells of oxygen made it to his brain caused him no grief, but still as his organs failed he wondered about the last tie he had sex close to ten years ago. Every other semi-sexual experience flashed before his disappointed eyes as the shrill voices of fertility haunted him from the graveyard holding his ancestors. The methheads whose upper story windows remained lit up, they mated all the time, and every time he passed, he saw they had more babies, and more babies, each one stupider, uglier, more deformed than the last. All by accident. Wind blew through holes in his hand. With the last strength in his body he tried to find his crotch but muddled holes is all he discovered.
His phone rang but he knew better than to raise his hopes. Only a debt collector hoping to let him know that collections has his info. All of these things in trash bags in a shed in another town his sister, he expected, will dump it all in a furnace. Every heirloom from his grandma, every toy his dad kept safe for him, the autographs and trophies, not to mention his stacks of research. To the picked faces of the methheads, it’d be paper meant to be burned. The words, the power of his demon images, all meant nothing to the clueless prowlers plaguing the gravel alleys at night in search for more magic rocks.
Before he felt himself slip away, the vagrant realized he had no family, no friends, no one to identify him. Maybe the witch of Arbor Apartments, but unlikely she’d talk to the cops even to confirm a dead body. He’d have “Doe #0082” label over his frozen toe, and he’d be washed in the cleansing heat of the vet’s crematorium because it's cheaper that way. He never got to leave his hometown, but at last he felt himself drifting to sleep. Two painful, loud snores ripped from the dislocated nostrils as he flung his head back against the pavement, and he lay still with his tongue jamming his lips and teeth.
The Plague Doctor saw the whole thing. He stayed one step out from the light. Once dead, he came by to poke him with the cane. He whacked the body a few to expel remaining demons, then hooked chains to the body. He hauled the corpse off the platform into the dark leaving a rich copper trail after him. The incineration pit in the ruins of a burned church awaited. Ribbons of his leather jacket lay out as the wind blew in a downpour.
After the rain slowed and ceased, just before the knife of twilight pierced the morning gloom, but while the fog remained over the grass, a pair of headlights shook up the small winding path, smashing blankets of leaves into pavement, idling in the dark, it shut the light off in a parking space by the sand of the playground between the picnic tables and the entry archway.
Just as the sun cut apart the watery raptures of yellow fog, the window rolled down and a pale smooth leg rested on the door. A tender barefoot bounced, painted toes made rings in the air, and delicate humming fell in tune with the cadence of emerging daylight. Thunder still purred off beyond the abandoned farms, white and black rabbits zipped across the grass, bats flew by her window, and a single deer tip toed from the creek bed fog. The singing stopped, and a syringe needle spun out from the window, glittered in the air, then landed in the playground sand. The car reversed back into the street and peeled away in a clutter of smoke and garbage bags fluttering in the wind back to the parking lot of Arbor Apartments just beyond the limestone pylons.
Every peasant of the Apartments wore the same dagger scars on their chests, thighs, ears and lips. The landlady carried the weapon in a violin case she carried from dim floor to dim floor. The tenants already paid their rent, and no one is sure why she needs the money because the lights flicker, the water is rusty, and bed bugs swarm up bedding from the carpet, and small children do all the nasty dangerous work, so nothing gets done. Everyone usually wakes up around 3am to smoke more marijuana and prepare for another day working in a dented, soggy helmet, or in a shower curtain smeared with cow blood. Girls search online for old men across the world to marry, people with fake names drop off applications, kids smash windshields to steal cigarette butts from the ashtray.
Where the mighty night meets the weepy morning, their headlights float over dark streets between empty mansions lost in the early 19th century when the rotary can opener was invented. At work they are mauled, poisoned, fed to animals, crushed by coal, burned in a furnace, melted in a power generator, hit by a crane, electrocuted, screamed at, lose eyes, lose hearing, lose fingers, grinded up by machines, and that’s just what gets reported. Early morning trucks drone down the highway heavy with frozen meat. Packed shelves are a rare thing in the days of the Lung Parasite pandemic.
That byproduct paste goes back on shelves and the peasants eat it out of a tube. The dog in the alley licks its greasy plastic casing. People so morose and so fat that their calves are four inches thick come home from work and gorge their stomachs on this because they know they’re going to wake up and vomit it all up anyhow. Decades spent consuming this factory diet created a generation of Boomers with bodies that can’t digest much. They hiccup over coffee and ice cream.
At noon, Homeschooled children woke up and made a mess of their homes in Arbor Apartments. Exhausted single mothers sent them outside to play. Packs of crumby obese residents sat outside, smoked cigarettes and watched who went in and out of the buildings all afternoon. Their young kids all drank water out of the same plastic cup. They wiped sneeze mucus onto their clothes, and went around hugging all of their favorite elders.
Inside the apartments, an underweight emergency room nurse finally came home reeking of sweaty hands, bloody hair, and latex. She re used the same mask for six days now as all of the hospital supplies moved to the bigger cities in the back of Army trucks. She took her shoes off and stretched the knotted muscles in her three webbed toes, then hurried to the medicine cabinet to recover a gasp from her inhaler. She checked the number of how many she had left on the back since the hospital started rationing rescue albuterol. Dirty towels covered the swampy bathroom floor. Roaches ran into the pipe when she turned on the water. She left to let the water heat up, and to check on her daughter in the other room.
Mildred sat at her desk finishing her homework under a mantel of toy cars. An empty plate of toast crumbs lay at her feet. Spilled orange juice dripped onto the carpet. She turned around and welcomed her weary mother home with the dinosaur salute. “I made coffee for you.” Mildred danced across the floor and hugged her compact fat.
“Thanks. I’ll have some after my shower.”
“Did you have anyone with the parasites today at work?”
“No.” Her mom turned her head away and thought about her own homework for the online EMP class.
“They say you don’t know if you have them until they’re so big that they’ve already eaten your lungs, and the nno matter how many you cough up, its too late, and you die.”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there a vaccine for it?”
“Vaccines aren’t real.”
“Really? What’s corn time?”
“A quarantine? Just the fake news trying to scare us.”
“Ok. My homework today is easy. When it's done can I go outside to play?”
“Fine, just clean this mess up, take the trash out, wash your dishes there, and wear a jacket. But not your nice one. That stays in the closet.”
Mildred’s mom coughed on her way back to the moist floor of the shower. Once the door closed, the girl sent her homework to her teacher’s email, checked off *school on her to do list. After finishing her chores she put on a scratchy cowl to keep hair out of her face, and a soft ranch coat. She tied her boots up, and ran out the door. All the children played in the park's playground.
All the rain from the night before dried up under the sun high in the cloudless sky. Fall cold rose from the ground and chilled her knees and her chin. The more she ran the less it bothered her, and the playground lay just beyond the planks, over the short bridge, past the old Underground Railroad cabin, over a parking lot to the park. Other kids built sand castles and chased each other up and down the slide. Candy slipped from their mouths in a sharing offer to likewise. They coughed on everything in sight, tore down yellow tape, and kicked down polyesterboard warning signs.
Mildred played by herself. The other kids liked to smash windows to steal cigarette butts from ashtrays, and dig through garbage cans to find treasures like whole pineapples. She listened to them herald to others about their shitty homelives. Two pregnant teenage girls pulled on each other's hair and hurled one another onto the parking lot pavement. Mildred hated combat, so she stayed in her own shady corner of the playground sand. Last night's moisture and mud turned the sand into hard balls of clay. Broken glass, bullet casings, paper fast food cups littered the ground under her feet on her way to the swing.
No one bothered Mildred on the swing. From its height she saw the roof of the hospital, the steeple of the old burned down church, even the trees that looked like a big monster took a bite out of them. Once the fable of flying bored her wits, she let go of the chains and jumped off into the clumps of hard sand. She landed hard on her knees and hands. Sand grinded against her teeth and eyelids. Fresh petrichor filled her nostrils. Other kids laughed at her for rolling and swelling after her wrist flared in numb pulses.
Warm blood trickled down her arm and stained Mildred’s favorite shirt. Bubbles of dark blood oozed one glob at a time from a small spot on the blood covered base of her palm right on the muscle under her thumb. She flexed her fingers and found her wrist remained intact, no fingers broke, nothing even sprained when she caught herself, so she shifted around in a small square looking around until she found it. A broken syringe lay with its needle poking up towards the sky. A small piece of impaled flesh drew ants to the growing blood puddle under her arm. Mildred picked up the needle, and put it in the pocket of her jacket, then hurried off to tell her mother.
The other kids heard something gurgling and giggling in the reeds of the creek, and they ventured down below the bridge to find it, and only the dead animals held together by staples knew what they saw in the collapsing mud of the creek. Hand in hand they joined together sedated with syringe fluid, their heavenly screams music beneath the shroud of all concealing fog sparkling over the cement tunnels underground. The last child crawled out on his own chipped claws, but sinister vines pulled him down the muddy embankment to a stealing pit.
Mildred looked back at the sound of screaming, and remembered the old one- eyed men who used to tell her things about the curses that linger in the air. He walked everywhere and lived in a shack in the grass where the cops can’t get their cars, and died after a van plowed him into the courtwall walls. She tried to kiss her wound, blood spilled over the corners of her lips, but no superstition ever cured her wounds. Only the methed out sons of the wealthy families believed in powers like that, and along the way back home she saw their familiar faces all across the lawns. Despite quarantine, more people were out than ever before. For the first time since before 1910, the town appeared populated. None of them read books, some finished high school. They carried flags of their dear leader, a tyrant they all believed was chosen by God, by the courthouse lawn to burn heretical books that dare say he is not the best, most dear, loving leader they’ve ever had.
The haze in the sky obscured the orange disc in the sky under a neon cloud. Air reeked of smoked wood despite the fires being on the other side of the country. Traces of mucus suffocated Midre’d lungs, and she worried about all the terrible things she read Lung Parasites can do. The infected remain mostly undetected until after your lungs fill with fluid, and the lung parasites have grown fat, then you cough up mouthful of leeches swollen on molten lungs, and the doctors can hook up to an air machine, but it doesn’t help if lung parasites have eaten the insides, but most people suffocate once they get stuck in bronchial tubes. Usually people choke to death on the lung parasites themselves once coughing begins, and no drug, no amount of heat can hurt them, and they breed even in freezing water.
Mildred pressed her thumb against the bleeding opening in her hand meat. She felt tingles of pain under the layers of sweaty soft muscles and flesh. It didn’t hurt but the blood loss made her head wobble on her shoulders, and made her steps sink into the ground. She never saw so much blood before. She never saw droplets kiss her shoes and get in her hair when she reached up to wipe it away.
The Witch held the apartment door open for her. She just lit a cigarette, and pouted at the sight of the calm girl holding her injured wrist. She recognized Mildred from the parking lot
“Oh no, that doesn’t look good. What happened?”
“I fell off a swing and got cut.”
“You’ve better hurry. Find your mom.”
Mildred walked carefully without taking her eyes from the blood on her shirt. She went up the first flight of stairs. The schizophrenic marched up and down the hall hitting doors with a broom, and she hoped he didn’t see her because he went to jail before for doing bad things to children, and the cops sent him to live here. She went up the second fleight and saw a 22 year old with the mental capacity of a 13 year old walking out of an apartment. She went up the third flight and before she reached her own apartment, the door of a stinking room filled with garbage bags stuffed with pissy towels swung open, the knob cracked the wall, and children's bikes fell over. A plague doctor walked out carrying a bleeding gallbladder under one wing, and a book with a dusty leather cover in the other.
Mildred ceased moving and nearly fell backwards. The plague doctor wore a big beautiful cape, a gentleman's hat, an oiled beak and oiled feathers, and soft fabric around its wing to wipe its lidless eyes. Heavy mud trached boots buckled up his talons. Over his back slung a tether with all the things he needed in a small bag. He zipped it up with his beak before she caught a glimpse, but she thought she saw the handle of a skull drill, a scalpel lance, and the blue blade of a hacksaw. A shorter, sleeker plague doctor in second rate robes came through the door. It took the book away from the other plague doctor, and started running through pages, as the other scanned the girl with one eye, then the other. It examined the blood in her hair, the holes in her clothing, her wobbling legs, her paling flesh, tired eyes, and quivering throat. He stabbed the cane into her solar plexus, tilted his wing to tip her head back until her mouth fell open. Inside he noticed cavities, canker sores, then relaxed he cane. She kept fiddling with buttons on her jacket, a fabric that enticed the doctor. He breathed harder and louder. His chest expanded then deflated with whistles from the nostrils in his beak as the doctor behind him flipped through colored illustration after colored illustration of flat yet intricate monstrosities. The taller, larger plague doctor didn’t even broke his concentration to wipe his eyes. He watched her, seeing the blood continue to pool by her unstrapped boots.
Once the book slammed shut, the imposing dark figure of the plague doctor rolled his head to his smaller associate, squawked. The smaller one nodded and handed the book back. The older one ushered down the steps, and the smaller one went away, but the older one remained. He got down on one knee, hot spit breathing into the young girl's eyelids and cheeks as veldt herbs and purple perfume relished her eyes and nostrils. His wing lifted, and the theater lid from under his cape of feathers. The lace fell out, and inside she saw a mask with glass scopes and a beak that perspired holly fragrances like a garden of moths. His beak opened and his neck muscles tightened like a wheezing cat, growing louder until the mucus and foam splash sounded like a rusty brake, then a choir of winds escaped as mourning, fasting, and winter reeled out his best human voice.
“Don’t feel guilt. Thank you. Thank you for being here. I can’t imagine this is easy for you, and I want you to know how grateful I am. Of all 18 of us who first met in Venice to bring healing to the city so long ago, five died fighting the plague demons, twelve lost faith and fled the land. I can scarcely imagine what the demons plan to do with you. Be wise to know that you do not suffer alone. Here, take it. This will protect you from the fiercest of them. Help me pull it over your head.”
The plague doctor bit the mask with his beak and moved the mask from the bag. He plopped it on her uncombed locks, and took hold of different tabs to pull it down over her head. Once it covered her eyes, she shook and slapped and cried. She smelled death inside of it, and felt cool fluids that didn’t fall from her body. The compacted leather tightened around her nose and mouth until her voice sank and her tongue tasted the stitches on the sweaty inner mask. She tried to pull it off, but she felt the combed feathers rest over her hands, and a shiny cross dangled before her eyes once the leather collar slipped around her neck, the contorted glass scopes revealed the black eyeballs of the plague doctor, and a shining silver cross dangled before her. “ It is enough to be present for my patients, sharing this mortal risk with a masked face, I can now see, is better than none at all.”
Another small girl came from the shadows and handed him a cane, and whispered into his ear of a demon living in the creek composed of dead animals, who spread terrible and awful demons to children. He ordered Mildred to lash herself with the cane until the angels completely purged her body of whatever demons caused her ailment, then the plague doctor took the stranger’s hand and walked outside in the current of wagons taking coughing, sneezing, dripping children to school.
Happy October 1st :)
Thank you for reading.
