Part 1: Meet Nadine | by Swati Sudarsan photograph by Michel O’Hara
"If Nadine had known that the tyranny of normalcy could unravel over the course of just one day, she might have savored this last morning of illness." The first installment of a four-part novella.
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Part 1: Meet Nadine by Swati Sudarsan | photograph by Michel O’Hara
If Nadine had known that the tyranny of normalcy could unravel over the course of just one day, she might have savored this last morning of illness.
She woke up with a throat full of phlegm. The run-down feeling in her seemed to have settled deeper into her body over the course of the night. She had been recovering from a cold for weeks now, and her skin had turned ashen from the illness.
Dev thought the best remedy was bedrest and no social interaction. Something about the passiveness of his remedy irked her, but he was a Very Important Surgeon so she considered his advice with great weight.
For now she’d taken to copiously ordering new moisturizers online. It was a good middle ground, because she could just sit in bed and let the packages arrive while still feeling she was using her brain toward something.
Her other thought had been to get some natural sunlight. Just a quick soak outside her door. Unfortunately, it had been gray skies for weeks. She checked the weather app daily in case it let up, but the only colorful thing lately had been the app itself. It had been saying the strangest things. The first time she noticed it, she had been in the middle of a raging fever, so she chalked it up to a hallucination. When the strange reports continued, she deleted and redownloaded the app, scoured her bills for scam activity, and even gave her phone a few smacks. In the end, she decided the weather station must have hired one of those melodramatic subway poets to write beta reports, and she had gotten an early rollout.
Today the app said: Flurrious cloud cover will succumb to histrionics by the end of the day. Shafts of shy sunbeam may sporadically prickle through, depending on lunar regressions…
Read Part 1: Meet Nadine.
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