Aldo thrust his hand forward eager, anticipating. What could I do but shake it? I didn’t have a coronary, a brain bleed or a meltdown but shouldn’t we have touched elbows instead, feet [‘The Wuhan Shake’], given a fist bump to each other or even the Tibetan Tongue Greeting though it seemed as warlike as a haka, something a little less intimate than a handshake? Are we loosening up too early? I wash my hands furiously with sanitiser & keep 1.5 m from myself for the rest of the day. You can’t be too careful.
There was a man in our street who had an apparition in the middle of an afternoon.
He was driving on a country road where on a whim he took a detour. His wife was beside him. They drove down the avenues and streets and occasional crescents till they realised they were caught in an infinity loop. The man began to panic. It was like that time he was stuck in a lift. He could feel his heart fibrillating, his bladder wanting to burst, his vision blurring but he held this from his wife who would accuse him of weakness.
That’s when he saw it, the apparition. It came for him, lumbering down some labyrinth in his brain, a Minotaur bristly and bellowing, big as a tank, barging into him. His heart stopped.
His wife never knew what happened but she found her way out.
John Malone 