Tell me: Is it wrong to take the shoes of a dead man?
In another age, necessity was the mother of invention,
they claim—
but they didn’t live through the pandemic, did they?
They didn’t see the viral videos of first-wave victims
bleeding out over the Atlantic Ocean
on flights bound for North America.
They didn’t see metropolitan emergency rooms,
overflowing with sufferers,
desperate for treatment and guarantees.
They never read the increasingly unnerving headlines
publicizing curfews and proclaiming daily death tallies.
How those casualty figures mushroomed in the early days.
They never learned the unspoken secrets—
they never encountered a corpse shambling down the sidewalk
or recognized a friend or lover they’d watch die
knock on their door in the middle of the night
or crawl into bed with them
heavy with the stench of death.
It was one for the record books, that virus—
more lethal than the Black Death and the 1918 Spanish Flu combined—
killing off more than three quarters of the world’s population
and triggering an ongoing war with the walking dead
that may never end.
Society unravels, slowly.
The lucky ones—the ones with a natural immunity— are soldiers now.
Soldiers and scavengers and pilferers.
Necessity is the impulse behind thievery.
