<aside> 🔥 Flash Story based on the song *All This Love* by JP Cooper for a workshop around Music as Muse.

</aside>

She’d been careful. Oh so careful. She wore two masks when she went out. Avoided peak “people’ing” time. She ordered in whenever her budget allowed. But it didn’t matter.

It never fucking mattered.

Because she had gotten sick, anyway.

Ana laid in her bed, the sweat accumulating beneath her body, soaking through the sheets. She’d have to do laundry… again.

She would have cried from the misery of it all had something not caught her eye at the edge of the closet. It was navy… the kind she could stare at for hours and get lost in.

Ana peeled herself up off the bed and tried to stand. She was woozy. Disoriented. But alert enough to be drawn to the closet. When she yanked open the doors and pushed the hangers to the side, her hand moved to her mouth.

It was JP’s suit.

The one he’d been buried in three painful weeks ago.

“No, no, no, no. This isn’t real,” Ana said, pulling the fabric to her nose.

When she inhaled, beneath the musky earth aroma, she could smell the cologne  she’d spritzed on the fabric before they closed the casket and lowered him into the ground.

They had lowered him into the ground, hadn’t they?

Through the brain fog and exhaustion, Ana tried to remember if she had actually witnessed it. She must have.

Ana let the suit drop from her fingers, as if it were a mirage that there to taunt her.

A wave of nausea rolled over her and she made it to bed before she heaved in the bucket beside her.

“Argh! I hate this fucking virus,” she said to no one before closing her eyes and drifting back to sleep.

Ana woke up to the sound of sirens blaring and the pock-pock-pock of rain against her windows. It was dusk and when she glanced at the clock on her beside table, it read five thirty p.m.

How long had she slept this time? She couldn’t remember even falling asleep, but that wasn’t unusual these days with the sickness.

Ana got out of bed, her bladder full and her throat craving a warm beverage. She shuffled toward the bathroom, turning the light on the way there.