who in America will fall prey to Ebola/ part 4

who in America will fall prey to Ebola/ part 4

fiction
Edward w Pritchard

Those days past it always seemed a pretty girl child first to fall to Ebola virus.

We took the girl out to the well near the Johnson farm and lowered the girl on ropes down the dried well and even though she was quite sick with the Ebola by then she laughed a bit thinking it was some kind of a game.

Her Mother laid out by that well for days and days as the girl died talking to the girl at first telling her stories and things but after a few days the Mother was so hoarse she couldn't barely talk and she sang softly and it was a little creepy. We had to drag the Mother away because she was threatening to jump down the well at the end as the girl started the coughing; we took Mother to the other side of the village and tie her to a tree. The Mother had other children and if she was gone who would care for them?

For a day or two Monkeys would come out to that well and drop fruit to that baby girl, I saw them monkeys when I went to shoot arrows at the Monkeys to drive them away so they didn't spread the Ebola. When I walked up on the monkeys before I shot they looked so bewildered at me that anyone would put a child down a well and not go near it. After the Monkeys left and the baby seemed dead we used our feet and hands to push dirt down the well until it covered the bottom well and then filled it with tree branches. Next Spring that Mother planted a bush out near that abandoned well.

That was a long time ago the stuff with the well. Now when anybody dies of the Ebola we put them in a large plastic bag the government gave us and a garbage truck comes along and picks it up and hauls it away. Early in the mornings when the trucks come to get bodies I put my hands over my ears because the drivers always crush and grind up new additions to their load and I can't stand to hear the squishing or think of visual images of things crushing and grinding together as the noise of the drivers compacting their load goes on interminably.
end