Fiction
What I Saw From the Rooftop
The Quarantine Diaries, Part One
This is the first in a series of short stories. To read them all, head here.
When the virus put the city into lockdown, I spent my mornings on the roof of my apartment building. I liked the routine; I walked six flights of stairs to the twelfth floor, leaned against the rusty railing that ran the length of the building, and tried not to think about the world ending.
The roof wasn’t a very interesting place. Mostly it was just air conditioning vents and the pipes that spidered out of them. The only sign that people had ever been up there was a faded green stool and a small card table next to the door. Underneath the table was a rusty old golf club.
I’d never played golf. It didn’t interest me. I didn’t take much notice of it on the television, and I only knew the basics; you hit a ball until you put it in a hole somewhere further than where you started. But at the same time, I was a bored human on the roof of an apartment building in the middle of a city-wide viral lockdown.
So one day I picked up the golf club, and I started swinging it.
There was something that just felt good about swinging that club. I don’t really know how to explain it. Maybe it was the sensation of the club…
