The Plague has descended on this par-frozen city like a fisher’s net upon a school of blind mullet. Every morning we feel it threads biting a little closer about our necks. Every evening we thank the St. Peter that we at least are still breathing water.

On the Corner John has built a gollum of organic compost and mud scraped from the inside of his wormery’s lid. He supposes that it will protect him somehow, and it roams the neighborhood by night, snuffling at the garbage cans and uprooting bulbs planted during the warm days of the early autumn, when we had faith that we would live to see them flower.

From another time or another place we could have decamped, I suppose, to the countryside. Holed up in some picturesque spot and abandoned ourselves to the pleasures of good food and storytelling. But the countryside here is infested with Catholics who huddle in their rags amongst the corn stubble, the blood of infidel babies smudged about their mouths. Mumbling imprecations against the heathen city dwellers, Porkers, Pork-eaters, Swine lovers, who brought down the virus wrath of their angry, airy God. So we stay put, protected only by confiscatory public-transit rates against an invasion of these corn children, but sitting prey for the Plague.