Where Gargoyles Come From

It's been four years since the outbreak started. There's definitely fewer people about. The city's less crowded. There's less litter, less pollution. No one ever looks up at the architecture, though. Eyes stay nailed to the ground ahead.

You'd think the virus spread through eye contact, because everyone looks away from each other. They stay masked, and gloved. The extra careful ones, the ones who have survived this long, they've all got indoor and outdoor clothes. They leave the house hardly at all, have no guests. Their bodies stay healthy and supple while their mind crumbles. They clean the outdoors off everything before they permit it into the house.

Some people didn't take these sorts of precautions. They didn't survive long. Soon enough, they started itching. Blurred vision, headaches. Loss of taste and smell. Grinding pain in the joints, especially the shoulder blades. Extreme thirst. The itching would intensify, the skin start greying and flaking off. Slowly, surely, the grinding would get worse, features distort, stubby wings sprout.

I'll be honest, I scoffed. I thought it was nothing. A big government scare. A scamdemic. A ploy by Big Pharma to earn even more money. Maybe it was, but us little people were just as fucked either way.

It was maybe half a year after it first hit that my wife, Maya, started itching. For some people it was over quickly, but for her, it dragged out for months. I sometimes wondered if it was better to succumb fast. But then I thought, this way, we still had chance of a cure, didn't we?

She isolated herself from the rest of the family. No chance of goodbye embraces. The children were devastated.

We waited until they were asleep, and then we had The Talk. When is the best time for her to leave, before the kids saw the last stages of the disease? I've never felt so alone in my life, and I'm sure she felt worse.

Today, I'm taking the kids to see her. I'm not sure if she can see them, with those stone eyes, and her gaze fixed on the horizon, rainwater in her ears. But it feels like the right thing to do.

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Word count: (excluding note): 366

Submitted on: 14th April at 23:50

*Quick Author's Note*

First, and most importantly: thank you for reading!

A Year of Stories: I'm writing a story every day this year. This one makes an 105 day streak since the 1st January. I can't believe I've come this far. I'm collating them all here.

Prompts: If you'd like to have a go at my unofficial April Challenge (Fucked Up Fairytales) I've linked it at the bottom. If you'd like some more prompts to get your creative juices flowing, I've posted a list of prompts for April, and I've linked that as well.

Thank you

Thank you again! Especially if you are one of the people who has been staunchly reading these daily scribbles since the start of the year. I see you, and appreciate you 😁

I do my best to reciprocate as many reads as possible. If you leave me a comment, that makes it much easier.