Fear

 There is a lot of fear around at the moment. If you are up early enough, still and quiet you can smell it in the air. 

Every night all the fear collects, as people’s filing-cabinet brains process it all and dump as much as they can into the trash. Every morning, since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve smelt it. It’s a damp, sulphourous, musty smell and it hovers over the grass, waiting to find another victim to jump into. This morning, there was so much of it you could see it. The weather people didn’t predict fog because that’s not what it was. It was fear, looking for a home.

By 8am there were enough people awake and the fear crept into enough brains for the fog to have lifted and the smell to vanish. 

Ron woke up and his first thought was, “What if I lose my job?”

Bert woke up and thought, “It’s still out there. I could die.”

Jane thought, “What if I can’t see my mum in her care home before she dies?”

Simon wondered whether bubbles were going to be enough to protect his children in school.

Lisa thought, “How am I going to get shoes for my Poppy to start school? I’ve seen the queues for Clarkes on Facebook.”

Poppy thought, “Will Mummy miss me when I go back to school.”

Karen went down her list of things she still needed to do to make her school safe before welcoming the children back in September and cringed at the idea of making another video.

Stuart tried not to think about his school budget and how much time, money and effort it was going to take to help the students that had been failed this year.

Ollie thought, “What if my GCSE results are as f-ed up as Will’s A level results were?”

Will’s worries spiralled out of control.

Fear is a dangerous beast. It can make people run away, feel stuck where they are or fight. 

None of these are a good option at the moment.