Rancho Tarzanadu: "Writer's Emporium Club"

     Miss Linda was one of four founding members of a writing club that met once a month, or once every three months, or once a year, depending on a variety of things which are unnecessary to go into right now. The club was formed in 1995…which seemed to Miss Linda another world ago. That was a world full of not only pens and notebooks, but red wine and various kinds of exotic cheeses, and fresh fruit, and chocolate, sometimes whiskey, usually marijuana and occasionally sexual trysts; not much had changed since then, really, except now there were no people. Well, there were people, but you couldn’t actually see them or touch them in “real life” now; you could only communicate with them via screens (per the governor’s order) due to the recent pandemic, which wasn’t so recent considering that Overlord L’Orange had known about it for two months before he let on that it was actually something serious.

     At this particular moment, there were 11,000 people dead in the United States and 75,000 deaths worldwide. The entire world was on lockdown mode now, except for some God-fearing states in the middle of the country, where people believed that their particular religious beliefs would save them from catching and/or spreading the plague. The Overlord said he would love to see everyone back at work by Easter Sunday (which was rapidly approaching), and was a really stupid day to pick anyway, because who would actually be working on Easter Sunday itself even if people did go back to work? He probably assumed that all the servants in the service industry would go back to work on that day, so they could serve him up some fattened mutton or pig. He’d love to see all the little people scurrying around again and waiting on him hand and foot (God, how he missed his rallies)! He had no scientific reasons for choosing Easter Sunday, other than he said it was a “beautiful time, a beautiful day”. He made Miss Linda want to vomit into her own hand, the way she did in the Target food court recently, because she had gotten sick with something (she may never know what), and coughed so hard she threw up into her own hand, right in front of Starbucks, while holding a Matcha Green Tea Latte in the other. She ran to the bathroom and continued to cough up phlegm for another half hour, sweating and shaking profusely. This was right before the “Stay-at-Home” order was issued, so there’s no telling who she spread what she had (whatever it was) to whom. The Overlord kept proclaiming that there was “nothing to worry about” and “it’s going to miraculously disappear” because he cared more about the Stock Market taking a nose-dive than he did about people living or dying. Miss Linda, however, now felt extremely guilty about being out and about in a public place and coughing so hard she threw up in her hand. It caught her off guard when it happened. There were no regulations in place at that time. She should have been at home.

     Now, being sequestered, her writing group “Writer’s Emporium Club” was meeting for the first time on Zoom, to express their pent-up feelings and to get a little socialization, like chimpanzees learning a new skill. It was an excuse to take a shower and put on some mascara, if nothing else. When all was said and done it was much more needed than she had initially anticipated, and she ended up spending over five hours with them, her long-lost friends. She could feel their spirits through the screen, and found them comforting. She ate goat cheese and fig butter on rosemary-raisin crackers, and had a vodka cocktail and a bite of a “special” candy bar. She laughed so hard she cried and clapped her hands and shouted things out. It was almost like being in person with humans. Almost. It was hard to let them go, to hang up the line, to say goodbye.

     This was Miss Linda’s stream-of-consciousness exercise from that night: “It has come to this…make-shift connection through a device. All these beautiful people make my soul ache, like a bruised melon. Some are not here…I hope they’re still alive. I feel like I’m living on the inside of a movie – not the movie itself, but inside the flat, sterile film roll that is wound-up tightly inside a cannister reel and shown only periodically, then re-wound and put back on the shelf to sit and sit and sit and wait and wait and wait…for what? The “End of Times”? For my life to start again? My “real” life? It’s all an illusion, but I still need to eat and still need toilet paper, which is running out, winding down…finite, like me.”