Proem: The Story of a Plague
This story is always the same. In all the historical accounts, far into the future, the era reads as collapse, collapse, collapse. Caskets in the streets of the cities, animals running, bellowing, from the zoo. Moneylenders kissing their relics and holy books. The government falls apart. Violence grows at the margins and then explodes all language, a confetti drop of death. All you hear is coughing, day and night, in the kitchen, on the phone, in your daydreams, like rain.
The internet, in this version of reality, becomes a kind of docile tyrant and ill omen and forest of thieves—all the perils of life at once. You turn down the wrong chain of recommended exposés and find yourself in a personalized torture chamber. Everyone’s favorite irony is that we are all going through this terrifying era alone. Alone we doom scroll, alone we shuffle to our mailboxes, alone we stare out the window onto the unrecognizable street.
My dear visitors, I am the queen of the story garden in which you find yourselves today. In the real world, I am named Rachel Something-or-Other and work assiduously at the local university, tending to my dog and mail-order plants in a northern corridor of the city. But in this story garden, set apart from the terrors of everyday life, I call into being all forms of art—songs, stories, arresting images, games, poems, and plays. This art will populate and enliven our shared and treasured space. You may tarry as long as you like in this place, but before you go, you must tell me a story.