Death didn’t come like a knife, it came like a cough that gets worse and worse until the knife seems like a better way. And a cough is how it started. Because of the timing, we all thought it was Covid; a new variant with stranger symptoms. But the cough itself didn’t turn into death. It was an inconvenience. Something familiar to be ignored.

Until Iryna Melnyk posted a video to TikTok.

She held up a sign saying the cough had tried to steal her voice, but that she would speak with an action. Then she rasped something incomprehensible and ran a kitchen knife across her throat. The video cut shortly after, but not before we saw something that couldn’t be unseen. Fingers creeping out from the wound.

The video went viral, but as with anything like it, there were skeptics. Or people who saw it, didn’t think anything and so just didn’t care. But the cough spread, and people didn’t die. They disappeared. Thousands of missing persons cases turned into millions. People would wake to find empty pillows where their husbands and wives had been; empty cribs. Always when no one was looking. Usually when everyone was asleep.

It just didn’t seem like the cough and the disappearances had anything to do with one another. When it finally did, they gave the phenomenon a name. The Curtain.

I lost my fiancée to the Curtain around a year ago. By then, the human population had dwindled to less than a billion. The world faltered without the cogs to move the machinery of civilization. People grew wary of their neighbors. They stayed indoors. We stayed indoors. And behind a different curtain, Vivian’s disappearance went unnoticed by anyone but me.

I think it would have been easier if I had watched her die. Instead, I tried to stay awake as her coughs grew less frequent and her voice vanished and her notebooks filled with questions I couldn’t answer. The fatigue was stronger than me in the end. Stronger than us.

For weeks I blamed myself for being weaker than a biological imperative. I blamed myself for staying healthy as the fear crept into her eyes. Then I blamed myself for thinking she was the lucky one.

When I stopped blaming, I wondered if a time would come when I would be alone in the world without knowing it, if I would wander out for water or to hunt for food and breathe in the solitary air of a missing species.

The windows around my neighborhood are dark, the streets without movement beyond the rustle of fallen leaves, and today, I felt a tap in the back of my throat. And then two more. And then slow scratches.

I didn’t cough though.

TapTapTap

I couldn’t—the taps and scratches won’t let me.

ScratchScratchScratch

And the cadence…it almost reminds me of..Morse.

ScratchScratchScratch

So, I looked it up in an old reference book.

ScratchTap

• • • — — — — — — — •

S-O-O-N