Covenant

After a long (looong) hiatus, I have been inspired by an old writing buddy to pop back and post about an old, fictional friend. Melanie never ages, so she is still 7ish, but now Sebastian is 7 too; he wasn’t born when she started being 7 in my head. Yesterday we chalked our walk (and those of some friends we are missing!) – the blue writing above it is hard to read but says “We’re in this together”.

 

Covenant

When I stuck the last red heart to the living room window it made a complete rainbow of hearts and I couldn’t see so much of the street outside. For a whole week now, we’ve been stuck here, in the house, waiting. Waiting for the government to say we can go out again? Waiting to get bored? That’s happened already. Just waiting, I guess. Every day, I’ve folded and cut and pasted up tissue paper hearts of a different colour. Now the rainbow is done and I’ll have to think of something else to do with the long hours indoors.

Looking out of the window doesn’t help really. There’s nothing to see. A few people wearing those little blue paper masks. They wear those at the hospital a lot, but they’re everywhere. Do they really help? Does the invisible enemy really care about a tiny scrap of paper?

Mrs Mwana has put up a rainbow too. Mrs Mwana always has amazing sweets that she keeps in a little jar and now the wrappers shine their colours across the street. “It’s like hugging,” Mrs Mwana said, “Put something in your window each day and I will do the same. That way we know each other is there.”

I said we should do a rainbow because the rainbow is the symbol of God’s covenant not to kill all the people again in a massive flood. Mrs Mwana doesn’t believe in God, so she said “I’m not sure about God, sweetheart, but this is our covenant. You and me.”

Mrs Mwana’s rainbow has stopped at the orange line. I should go across and check she’s OK, but Daddy said nobody was allowed to go outside or touch each other. It’s why we can’t visit Mummy at the hospital any more. Not even to say goodnight.

I wonder what Mummy is doing right now. Sleeping, probably, Mummy spends a lot of time sleeping. Last week, I was watching Mummy sleeping and I wondered how they would know when she died. Would she really look any different? I asked Mrs Mwana. Mrs Mwana said not to worry, the doctors would know. Then she said “And when it happens, you come and see me so that we can say goodbye to her spirit.”

Except now I can’t even hug Mummy goodnight and I can’t visit Mrs Mwana and if Mummy does die, there’ll be no way to say goodbye to her spirit because I’m locked in this stupid house with this stupid rainbow that doesn’t even block out the weird, broken world or the horrible virus that’s flooding across the planet to kill everyone I love.

I want tear down the hearts, because God broke his covenant and Mrs Mwana broke her covenant or she’s lying dead in her kitchen and can’t even tell me. Then I see something moving in her window. Mrs Mwana is taping red sweet wrappers over the top of the orange ones. She sees me and points upwards to where a cloud catches the light from her sweet wrappers, or maybe it’s God, painting his promise back onto the sky.