Weekly Writing – March 23 2024

The best thing he could have done for anyone was sleep. Gather his strength for when the alarm bell would ring in the morning. But knowing it was coming, knowing all the strength they could gather that night might be less than the disease did, kept sleep far from him. He stared up into the dark, holding his breath like a corpse in rehearsal, trying to justify that lethal delay to himself. There were people who would die before morning, never knowing they’d been in danger.
Would the preparations they had made, resources stockpiled and plans laid to avoid mass panic, be worth that? Only morning would tell, and he couldn’t close his eyes to make it come any faster.
Only morning would tell whether preparations would change anything at all. It might have been too late before they’d even gathered to agree that they would wait to ring the bell. All they truly might have been doing was giving that town one more night to sleep soundly, thinking it still had a future.