cutting the bridges, turning the plain under the carriageway embankment silver and flat. The disease lingers and probes like the fingers of the flood as we wait to be jabbed. I read Cancer Ward and dream of mountains and the black-wooded taiga, feeling time has stretched and thinned, my minutes and days dragged out to months under plague confinement. The gulags seem a thousand years ago but the shacks and roadways still scar the snow. My last drive out to the country feels a decade back. I must constantly remind myself of time’s calendar.
