COUGHERS
I mean, what else were they gonna do? Those kids from the council blocks. You know, the ones whose mothers left and whose fathers—well, you know. What else were they gonna do? Kids who sat each night frozen as their fathers leaned over second-hand dinner tables, glaring right in their small and wetted eyes to make it clear, absolutely clear, beer-breath and all that it was their fault the last good thing in the world had ended. I mean, those kids couldn’t even understand what the last good thing had been. They didn’t remember. All they knew was that they were alone. And so of course—of course—when those same kids got told a few months back that they had gained this great and sudden power to become a Vector of Transmission, to exact some abstract revenge—and you thought they wouldn’t go round coughing on every immune-compromised looking man and dog? You thought these kids weren’t gonna run rampant quoting Oppenheimer in the empty streets as they tore apart their throats, screaming out from behind ghost gum branches: Now I am becough death, destroyer of worlds? You thought these kids had limits? Cops couldn’t catch them; cops are slow, and were too busy besides dealing out fines to worried middle-aged women texting anxiously as they drove: R u outside, R u alone, I’ll b there soon, Don’t worry. These kids weren’t getting texts. Those texts were for other kids, inside kids, kids who didn’t mind being at the dinner table or on the deck, or in the garage after lunch playing ping pong. But these kids, the loud ones, the ones in the street—well, I think I’ve figured out why they yelled so much, why they coughed so damn loud on no one in particular, is that they thought maybe they could become a siren, and that maybe some harried-looking woman with a smart phone might have come out of her house and stopped them, if they were lucky, if they read the map right, if they had ever managed to get close enough to the retirement village on their own.