Summer Never Came

By H. C. Turk

A Memoir From The Future On How We'll Survive COVID-19

 

A story predicting the challenges facing us, and how we'll overcome the coronavirus pandemic:

 → Hospitals that become a second home.

 → A diet of beans and beans (and beans). 

 → The "unusual" foods we'll learn to eat when we get tired of beans.

 → People so accustomed to isolation that every new acquaintance becomes family.

 → Communicating by coughing and sneezing.

 → Military engagements with China, Iran, and Congress.

 → Toilet paper worship.

 → Coping with outages in water, sewer, and electricity.

 → Worldwide politics turned upside-down.

 → The foolish joy of singing with your friends when you all have pneumonia.

 → People whose final goal is to help their neighbor at the end.

 

A down-to-earth, in-the-trenches view of day-to-day adjustments, provocative but positive. Narrated by an average man whose life has been upended, SUMMER NEVER CAME is a thought-provoking vision of a world changed forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: H. C. Turk
• Release date: Apr 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393229469

Book preview

Summer Never Came

FICTION by H. C. Turk

• • • • • • •

©2020 H. C. Turk

Transcendent Generosity

↓↓↓

I'm still here.

Let that sink in.

I survived. Whew. Yes, I contracted BEER-19, yet here I am complaining about it. Let me brag instead. The sickness? It didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Gulp. I can't even say that without having a wet dream. A hill of beans. That would be heaven. That would be the light of life.

I stole that line. I don't remember where I saw it, but it was from a book I didn't read, my favorite kind. A four-word quote: that's my favorite kind, too. Get it over and done with. That's a type of mercy. For some, it’s a way of life. Not me. I’m still here. Didn’t I say that? Am I repeating myself already already?

I don’t even remember what that quote referred to originally. The light of life is the smell of new car? Is it talking without coughing? Cheeseburgers? Toilets that flush? Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with your friends watching a game in a stadium? Saying, Bless you when somebody sneezes instead of yelling, Unclean!?

All of the above.

BEER-19 is not my joke, so don’t complain. The beer jokes ended right after the death toll hit 100,000. That’s not a world tally, but purely American. If you don’t know someone who died, you must have self-quarantined in a cave. If you did that, look around. Take a sniff. I guess you do know someone who added to the total, don’t you?

That’s where I come in. I have to tell you what I smelled.

Why do people write memoirs? Maybe each book and each author has a different intent, or need. Such as: I’m telling you about the Holocaust because I want to share the truth with those who disbelieve that something could be worse than the virus killing everyone right now. Or: I write about my life as a poor shepherd in the desert to demonstrate that anyone in such a low position can rise above the dunes and become a successful swindler selling knock-off ventilators for a fortune (more on that later). Or: I feel compelled to tell my life story where I started rich and became very rich and then felt so guilty that I decided to lead a simple life as a shepherd in the desert living in a $75,000 yurt with plumbing (gold).

As for myself…. I’m not sure. Yes, I’m sure of my story, but not the motive for conveying how I feel about it. One thing’s for certain: you’re bound to be interested. You want to know just how soon this bitch virus infestation will end, please, get right to the good part. So, here’s the good part: if you’re healthy enough to read this, consider yourself blessed. If reading this is one of your last acts in life, consider yourself average. Writing it is one of my last acts in life, and I don’t know how I feel about that fact. It’s true I have nothing better to do. I no longer have a job, but no longer need one. That can be a very positive or an absolutely terrible position. Now I have nothing to do, though not in the sense of having achieved everything in life. During the Beer Plague, doing anything is a success. Finding food isn’t difficult (if you’re willing to eat anything), but when eating doesn’t do you any good, well, that’s a bad sign.

I remember being hungry, when food supplies were really low. That’s a wonderful feeling compared with utterly lacking interest in food because what would you do with it? You can’t taste it and it makes you gag and doesn’t add to your total lack of strength, not when you lack the biological strength to digest that food, or the moral strength of giving one fat damn about even trying.

So, why am I writing this after all? Because in the end, I am so sick of dying.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

You know something is terribly wrong when you want to yell at a bunch of kids who are quietly playing. They’re just hanging out along the fence not too close to anyone’s home. They’re talking and dancing around and bouncing a ball (tennis) and showing off the jewelry they made in their own bedrooms where they have been trapped for weeks, enough of which become months, and you don’t want to hear how that ends. (It doesn’t for some.) Seeing these kids, you want to yell at them but you’re probably too weak for that. You might want to paddle them, but also lack enough energy to follow through with that bit of meanness. Why so mean? Because they are gathered together. They are physically intermingling. They are within four feet of one another. They are expelling respiratory droplets like there was no tomorrow (there won’t be for some). Let’s look into this. By now it’s been literally, objectively, numerically determined that if six people have gathered, one of them is infected. One of them is a carrier, a transmitter of the Beer Plague. For whatever biological reason, kids handle the virus well, and they pass it along like fleas dog-to-dog even better.

That’s why I want to yell at those kids, and maybe I will when the two who live with me return home.

You know the one about crying over spilled milk? How about crying over expelled airborne particles? Aren’t tears the same thing but less infectious?

Now we’re figuring out who I am. I promise that by reading this, you will better understand yourself. And if not, what are you going to do, start a Twitter war? Beat me up? I’ll meet you outside. One of us has nothing to lose.

You don’t know me, but think you do. You presume the identity of any author, don’t you? Those gay mountain climber cannibal romances you adore? Are they written by a gay mountain climber cannibal?