Flu Season

Before I leave my house, I make sure my winter jacket is packed with the essentials: wet wipes, hand sanitizer, propolis throat spray, an N95 mask, disinfectant spray, and my "transit glove" that I use to open doors, press buttons, and move through the city. It's not craziness. It's flu season.

I spray the elevator with disinfectant before entering—only when nobody is there, of course, I'm polite—and I don't share elevators, at least not by choice. When someone steps in while I'm riding, I hold my breath. I can hold it for a long time now. Practice makes perfect, and I've been holding my breath around strangers in enclosed spaces since I was 16 and Mimi died.

I leave my house and walk five feet from the other passersby. If they cough or sneeze or their noses are red, I cross the street. Red noses are tricky. Sometimes it's just the cold, the wind. But I cannot afford to be generous with my interpretations.

I'm waiting at the crosswalk on 6th Avenue when a pigeon flies past me and I lurch down, as if a rock is falling. They carry so many diseases, my mother used to say—the sewer rats of the sky. Histoplasmosis, cryptococcosis, psittacosis. All ending in osis, which I've learned is Greek for condition. My condition is knowing this. I looked these up once and wished I hadn't. Now I know them like old enemies.

On the sidewalk, I walk against traffic so I can see who's coming. A man eating a hot dog is a biohazard. A child is a biohazard. Tourists are the greatest biohazard of all—they walk in packs, hands everywhere: the Charging Bull, the railing you'll touch tomorrow, the windows of the M&M store. It's not personal. It's math.

Inside the studio, I wipe down my reformer before class. The straps, the headrest, the foot bar, the carriage. I go through three packs of wipes a week, Subscribe & Save, 15% discount. I like the Subscribe part. It suggests continuity. It suggests I will be here next month, needing wipes, alive. As I'm getting the underside of the foot bar, the girl on the machine next to me watches. She's new. She'll learn not to watch.

The class starts. The instructor's voice is hoarse, but everyone's voice is hoarse in mid-December New York, so I try not to think about it. I think about it anyway. Her mouth to the microphone, the microphone to the speakers, the speakers pushing air across the room, the air finding my face. Six feet away, maybe seven. The particles disperse. They have to. 

My hamstrings burn. My lungs expand. We move through the sequence—bridging, leg circles, the hundred. I like the hundred. I watch us in the mirror—twelve pairs of grip socks pointing at the ceiling, twelve ponytails swinging with each pump, twelve high-waisted leggings. A room full of women doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. There's something safe in that. Something clean.

Then I see it. On the machine to my right, tucked beside the girl's water bottle—a tissue. Used. The mucus is yellow.

I look away. I look back. It's still there, crumpled and damp, six inches from my reformer. The girl coughs into her elbow—polite, contained—but I've already done the math. She's been breathing this air for twenty minutes. I've been breathing this air for twenty minutes.

I hold my breath through the next three reps. My face gets hot. I release, inhale, and immediately regret it.

The girl coughs again.

I don't look at her. I look at the ceiling, the speaker, the emergency exit sign. I think about the particles. I think about how I was supposed to have dinner with my friend Rhea tonight and now I'll have to cancel because I can't see her after this, not for at least five days, not until I know. I think about Dayquil, and EmergenC, and washing my sheets tonight in case I can’t get out of bed tomorrow. I think about Mimi. The doctors said hepatitis, but what they meant was: the world is covered in an invisible film that wants to kill you. I was fifteen and didn't understand how a person could just catch something and then be gone. 

Mimi was twenty-three. I loved her the way only younger sisters can—completely, studiously, without any sense of where she ended and I began. I wore her old clothes. I copied her handwriting. When she laughed, I laughed. She was the first draft of my life, the proof that it could turn out fine. When she died, I lost my future and my mirror at the same time. What replaced her was simpler. Just the knowledge that the world could take someone between breakfast and dinner.  My mother stopped touching subway poles after that. I stopped touching everything.

I get off my machine mid-exercise. I don't wipe it down, which means I'll think about that later too. I grab my jacket from the hook, skip the stretch, and I'm out the door before the instructor can say my name.

The cold air on 23rd Street hits my face and I breathe it in, deep and sharp. I walk west toward Sixth, my hands in my pockets, my chin tucked into my collar. The cold wind comes at me sideways, finding the gap between my neck and my scarf, begging to stay there.

I'm halfway down the block when it starts. One flake, then another. I look up without thinking—a mistake, usually, in this city—but the sky is doing something quiet. The snow falls slowly, softer than I expect, and I watch a single flake drift past a fire escape, past a window with Christmas lights, past a woman walking her dog who doesn't notice any of it.

I stop. I don't mean to, but I stop. Right here, next to a dumpster and a stack of crushed cardboard boxes, in front of a shuttered nail salon with a faded pink awning. The least beautiful corner of 23rd Street. But the snow doesn't care. It falls here too.

I look up. The sky is white and close, like a ceiling coming down to meet me. The flakes come down crooked, bumping into wind, landing wherever they land. Never knowing what they'll catch. Never knowing where they'll go.

I tilt my head back. I open my mouth.

A flake lands on my tongue.

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About the Author

Ella Torres is a Brazilian writer and translator and a graduate of Barnard College, where she earned a degree in English and Creative Writing. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at The New School. Her work has appeared in Litbop, Literally Stories, and other publications. She is currently querying her debut novel "The Midnight Saints," about female friendship, ambition, betrayal, and the women history forgot to name — set in the 1970s music world.