I watch as the coffin passes in front of me. I stare at it, thinking of the body lying inside it. Thinking of the weak, fragile, dead body. Thinking of how she died, like all the people that have been dying these days. These days, these years really. I watch as they put the coffin in the hole they buried in the ground, slowly lowering it down. I turn around, see the few people who have come to her funeral. They are hardly recognisable, with all these masks covering their mouths and noses, and their miserable faces, their hungry eyes, the constant thirst in their mouth. I hate looking at them, I’m still not used to it, to this new way of living. Even if it’s been going on like this for years. I look away, because I know I must look exactly like them: unrecognisable, just a normal person in a bunch of hungry, thirsty, dying people in a terrible world. I watch as they start putting dirt on her coffin, leaving it to all the worms to go through the wood and eat her body. The ones who are still alive. People start going away, back to their dirty houses that they all share. I walk closer to the grave. She was my best friend, the only one I had; there aren’t many children around now. She was like a sister in a family I didn’t have. I don’t cry though, haven’t cried since this whole thing began. You get used to losing people you love, it happens all the time.
I’m alone now, as I walk down the road going back home. What I call home, but in fact it’s just a big room where everybody sleeps. I walk trying to avoid all the rubbish that there’s on the floor, piled up. Even through the mask, I can smell it. I smell it all the time. Still haven’t got used to it though. I walk, thinking of her. Of the stupid way that she died. She drank water. Normal water, that we drink all the time. Only it’s not safe anymore. It’s the same with food; you don’t know what you are going to find. People have stopped eating, and so they die from hunger. You die both ways. So they risk, they risk and die. People die every day, every second. They bury them straight away, so that there aren’t any diseases. They bury them wherever they find a space; everywhere I walk, I walk on dead bodies. People keep dying, and people stop being born. So this is going to be the end of humanity. After all these years, centuries, the human race is going to die. We all know it, the few of us who are still alive. We are all going to die. We are all going to die, so dying now or later is the same. Just living other days in this world not worth living in. I’m alone now, my family died at the beginning of all of this, they were always weak. Oh, how I wish it wasn’t all so dirty, and that we could all just breathe some clean air. But maybe I wish too much.
I adjust my mask. It’s so uncomfortable. I stand in the middle of the road. Take my mask off.
And breathe. Breathe in the dirty, horrible air of this world.
