Chris Landon

Quarantine Cleanse

I still see humans twice a week. The freeways empty at times, the international airport deserted counters and food vendors haunting even as I sent my dream girl, at ICE’s urging, into exile in Australia on the last plane. The Yeti out the window on her flight was Covid. The New Zealand crew fired mid-air because the airline could no longer afford the luxury of fourteen days of quarantine if one of the passengers had smuggled the virus on board. And passengers had been denied boarding, luggage taken off the plane, if their passports did not match up with a petty bureaucrat searching frantically for proof of their very existence in the all wise state computer.