This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited.
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Taye Jones was a big man when he came home.
Taye had grown up in Swainsboro. It’s in deep southeast Georgia. Most of the people in Swainsboro are black. Most are poor. Taye was both. Only half the people in Swainsboro own their own home. In the summer, when the temperatures shoot up near 100, and the mosquitoes come out to play, there’s little to do but sit outside on the porch and swat them.
But there is a college in Swainsboro. East Georgia State College. The Bobcats. It was founded as a junior college. It wasn’t given permission to offer bachelors’ degrees until 2011. In 2012 it enrolled its first four-year students in Biology.
Taye Jones was one of them.
It turned out that Taye Jones had a gift. He had a gift for science, for research. He could explain what he wanted to do. He had the skills to do it, thanks to years spent helping his mother cook.
Two years into the program, Taye was offered a full scholarship at the main Georgia campus in Athens. There he found mentors, sponsors, people who believed in him. When he graduated in 2016, he was offered several fellowships and chose MIT.
He lived frugally and was able to send money home from his stipend of roughly $30,000. He worked hard and was able to propose some important experiments involving kinases and other protein structures.
Then the virus hit. Taye Jones was told to go home.
He returned a hero. The neighborhood was the same. But now it had broadband. Taye could join Zoom conferences with his colleagues, access the Internet’s vast stores of medical knowledge, and get something like a day’s work in.
His co-workers admired him. He Zoomed from a phone and would reverse the picture so they could see his home, his family, and his neighborhood. Even in May there were just 20 COVID-19 cases in all Emmanuel County. Everyone felt immune. Taye’s brothers and sisters laughed at him when he wore a mask to go to the Walmart.
Because Taye’s mother worked at the Retirement Inn, his sister was a checker at the Walmart, and his brother cut meat there, the Jones family was considered prosperous. They hid it well. They kept their money in the Spivey State Bank. Taye started a Robinhood investment account for them and taught his siblings how to play the market. Both now had a whole half-share of Walmart common.
Swainsboro is filled with fast food, thanks to the college, so Taye took his family out twice a week. They ate from the Burger King and the Dairy Queen. They bought Zaxby’s Chicken and Subway sandwiches.
There was a cute girl at the fried chicken stand. Her name was Candy. When Taye looked at her, while she was filling their order, his brother and sister hooted. Taye was embarrassed but Candy was entranced.
What Taye didn’t know was that Candy had just been to see a cousin in Lithonia, outside Atlanta, returning just the day before. What even Candy didn’t know was that, when she and her cousin were walking around the neighborhood, they passed a man who was sweating, an attractive man without a mask. They ran alongside him for a few moments, then stopped with him as he caught his breath, laughing at how they were distracting him.
What even that man didn’t know was that he had the virus. He had no symptoms. He would never have symptoms. This was the virus’ secret weapon.
Now Candy had the virus. Candy blew a kiss toward Taye. She kept the gloves she was serving them with as she went to the stand’s cash register. She took Taye’s credit card and handed it back. She gave him a big smile, and a “hurry back soon” as they left.
Now Taye had the virus.
A day later, his brother and sister had the virus.
A day after that, their mother had the virus. A few days after that so did most of the people at the Retirement Home.
An epidemiologist, trained in contact tracing, could have followed the chain leading to the great Swainsboro outbreak of that May. It killed 20 people. Most of them were at the nursing home. But Taye’s mother was also a victim. So was Taye’s sister. So was his brother.
Taye didn’t get sick. He nursed his mother until she needed the hospital. He nursed his brother and sister too. His co-workers followed him on his Zoom meetings. They sympathized, but there was nothing they could do.
By the time Taye left Swainsboro for the last time and returned to Boston, he was filled with COVID-19 antibodies. But he was also filled with sadness because, the night before he left, he returned to the fried chicken stand.
Candy was there, gaunt, tired looking, but feeling better. She hadn’t needed hospitalization, but said she’d had headaches, body aches, a fever, and something strange in her feet.
It was only then that Taye knew he’d killed his family. When he took an overdose of sleeping pills and died a few weeks later, the Boston Globe called his death a great mystery.
