Howl: A Story in 500 Words

During time spent on lock down in the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, I produced a series of character studies, short shorts, poems, and vignettes in 500 or fewer words. Enjoy!

My favorite time is the edge of night, when the sky darkens and the liminality of the coming darkness is visible in the shift from pale to pink to dark. The air cools and the wind falls silent.

Tonight, I walk across the park alone in a city silenced by quarantine. A virus stalks the streets, unseeable sickness driving people indoors. We wear masks that all the evidence says are largely unnecessary in open spaces. I wear mine in a show of solidarity; I don’t think it will keep me safe.

I’ve been avoiding other people all my life. It’s week three of quarantine and I day dream about having the whole world to myself. I want to walk the rooms of the Louvre alone, lie on my back in the Sistine chapel and examine that marvelous ceiling for as long as I desire, break into the burial vault of the Taj Mahal, and walk through the forbidden passages of Al-Karaouine.

A firework, a large one, goes off with a bang and I’m pulled from my reverie. I do not see it; it’s too far away for that.

Then I hear a howl rising. Then another and another, ghostly on the air of night. I stop walking and just listen. The howls rise in the gathering dark.

Humans do a passable impression of their canine friends but the intonation is different. Humans howling together is just as magical though, all those voices joined in a community of sound.

We began to howl to commemorate and thank essential personnel working the front lines of a pandemic that no one really understands yet. The news is full of doctors and nurses but I think of the janitorial staff, toiling in danger for minimum wage. My thoughts go to the warehouse workers, and the people cleaning those warehouses. I wonder if it is any better harvesting food from fields; at least the air is fresh. But those people are probably marginalized the worst, livelihoods held ransom by an administration that reveals its deep xenophobia and racism more and more every day. Oppressed by hate-filled politicians and targeted by racists on the street. And yet our lives depend on their work.

Then people began to howl for lost loved ones. Beloved dead lost to the virus but that quickly expanded to include any lost loved ones.  Every night at 8PM cities across America fill up with the sound of the human experience: a long, undulating cry of pain and fear and togetherness and hope. We are conscious beings screaming into the Nietzschian void, terrified that the abyss will look back. Terrified that it won’t. We are scared of what it all means. We are scared that it means nothing.  

We howl because the world is burning up and we know it and none of us can stop it. We howl because we are in this together and yet we cannot seem to come together to impact change.

I throw my head back and howl.