Children trapped in teeny, tiny boxes

Bouncing up and down, side to side

An eyeball fills the screen, a single eyeball lashed in wonder

Blinking away isolation – a 9 year olds energy compressed, framed by 90 degree corners

Troy substitutes his face with a plastic Sonic figurine – its blue, spiky hair pressing against the screen attempting to unsuccessfully transform 2-dimensional space into the soul’s longing for a 3-dimensional world

Shuttered-in Emma sits prim and proper – legs criss-cross applesauce on her pink, ruffled bedspread – reaching with adult-like professionalism to carefully unmute, share her thoughts, and mute again

Ryan’s right hand extends maestro-like searching for the reaction button, eyebrows raised in confusion, his left hand clutching his latest Lego creation

Jonathan unmutes himself and announces he has to pee while Ethan continues to ping-pong along the edges of his Brady Bunch square

TikTok dances zigzag across Alison and Michelle’s individual screens – “Renegade, renegade, renegade” – hands criss-cross, lift, and cross again, somehow their bodies in time with one another

Warren jumps in and out of his rectangular space – video feed mainly turned off – he fills the chat with lines of “e’s”

Stop spamming

“e”

Stop spamming

“e”

Stop spamming his annoyed peers type while the line of “e’s” continues

But my heart is happy he has joined us in the lattice of lines that separate and isolate

and yet mysteriously connect us all in teeny, tiny boxes.

(Notes – children’s names have been changed but all represent real students and their antics).

She imagines herself in “The Walking Dead” wandering the abandoned railway tracks with Daryl Dixon. Both on high alert, silent, listening for Walkers – the dead who feast on the living. Bow and arrows slung on sunken shoulders, a dead squirrel swinging from hip to hip whispering of dinner.

She hefts a backpack full of journals. He shakes his head and mutters, unable to understand her need to “scribble” long into the night under the star-shot sky. But for her, it’s part of her very breath – without it, she may as well be one of the infected with nothing more than the desire to mindlessly consume.

Enter 2020. Who would have guessed that her actual Zombie Apocalypse journals would be full of scribblings about toilet paper shortages, statistics, politics, and anxiety. Shuttered at home mindlessly watching CNN. Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, and Don Lemon invited like family night after night into her living room. Her Facebook posts becoming a collection of memes designed to embrace and manage the absurdity of it all. Trying to teach small children trapped in tiny little boxes. How could 2020 bring in so many subplots, too many subplots? And whatever happened to the murder hornets?

She doesn’t eat squirrel, the dead don’t wander the street, but the world masks itself in fear. She lies in bed, listening to the rain, wrapped in freshly washed sheets, thankful that she found success earlier in the day in finding bananas, eggs, and milk – but still no toilet paper.

Perhaps she is infected. Not with COVID-19 (she had the nasal swab to prove it), but with something more insidious consuming her mind, eating away at her flesh. Worry, anxiety, fear, confusion, helplessness. So she writes and scribbles to prove she is still human. Of blue dawns and watercolour skies, of birdsong, and the colour green. Of cleaning with Lysol wipes. Of how each number flashed on the daily news represents a person, a real person. Of nightly cheers and echoes of gratitude spilling from highrises around the city. Of hummingbirds, and bee balm, and spider webs. Of a world that seeks to find new and unique ways to show beauty and resilience and innovation while breathing the pandemic-filled air.

Perhaps today she will wander the abandoned railway tracks watching for squirrels and then return home to eat her Kraft Dinner.

(Note – since writing this, the murder hornets made a brief reappearance in the news only to promptly vanish once again).