Patient Xerox

Sometimes, when she got very tired, she also got very angry, and she wasn't quite sure why, and was aware of how silly it was, really, but that realization didn't keep it from happening, and besides, she didn't even know what had started its happening.

Which isn't to say that it hadn't happened before. There was indeed a period of her life when she had looked for fights which she knew she would probably lose. Not physical--never physical. Everyone knew to not leave marks, even the far-gone sick, because marks are ways back to places, marks, like words, are some solid shit that must be acted upon, except worse than words, because they cling to the skin for days and days, purple and nervous and wanting.

So it had happened before, but that didn't explain why it was happening again, a done thing trying to be done again. There wasn't any reason for it.

She covered her hands and her shoulders and her brain because that is where it began, this strange, childish rage. She clipped her lips so she would not be tempted to bite strangers (and most everyone slipped in and out of her strangeness at that point) for this reason, this perfectly-no-reason-at-all reason. Later, she would skirt around such things entirely, fearful that even the sight or sound would irritate the constant nausea of her gut into a violent case of vomiting.

And whatever she had, she didn't want to pass it on.

So she avoided things that she suspected made her sick, as well as things she feared she would make sick.

And the world she inhabited was called Quarantine.

It was not often described, because its actualization in description broke many rules and pissed off agencies. What agencies? Just agencies. Inciting panic--this is against the rules of the just-agencies. The agencies themselves did not know of Quarantine, because making them aware would, still, require description, and there were no allowances to the rule: description led to trouble. People like to believe it leads to good noise, but more often than not, it leads to bad noise, because bad noise isn't necessarily 'bad noise,' it's simply everything else but good noise--it's just noise. You need not announce your presence to a zombie; make a sound, any sound, and it is the wrong one, because all are rendered down to "here I am/ come fight me."

There is a way to bypass this reduction of meaning, she suspects, and she has been trying to figure it out in all the long hours of her solitude. But she is no scientist--the work is slow. Sometimes she becomes frustrated and grabs the nearest thing to her and chews on it. Sometimes this is a pen; sometimes it is part of her lunch; often it is the first segment of her first finger. This is a distracting habit, and sometimes she forgets which it is, of the two, that she is supposed to be focused on; is it the chewing that distracts her from her work, or the work that distracts her from her chewing? It is slow work. She is determined, though.

Those that are immune were those with very good heads on very good shoulders and those who did not speak the language (as mentioned, it was not physical, but a sound disease). And this is very good company in Quarantine. And this is very good company in any world, really.

Something something something a copy machine on a coffee table something something covered in beetles.