Breath, Breath
Whenever my online classes end, so do human lives. They cry in languageless agony. But thousands of miles away, I’m deaf. The news is my hearing aid. Maybe the news glitched, because it’s on a loop: COVID-19. COVID. The virus which won’t be named. The fancy-sounding variants. India. I scroll through before crashing into paywalls. But the little snippet reads about overfilled hospitals. Crowds. Infection Rates. Rampant spread. Flip to another story; it's still there. I’ll read about the horrors: their frail hands clasping each other with a vicious panic. The colorful saris and kurtas fall prey...