Fred was a simple man. For him, the world was a scary place. His wife, Wanda, worried all the time and cried herself to sleep every night. They lived in a rental in a small town and Fred worked maintenance for the park department. During long winters, he had to work through the night, driving the snowplow and keeping the streets free of snow and ice. As bad as it seemed, their life was tolerable until the pandemic came to town. The pandemic was brutal. People fell like leaves in the fall. News of countless deaths followed the days of the months.

Attempting to slow the spread of the disease, the mayor mandated face masks. But it didn’t help because over time the virus reached everyone. Many citizens fell ill from fear alone, and Fred grew frightened as the toll mounted. He worried that the pain in his stomach meant he had the virus. Hospitals were so crowded with the sick and dying that they closed their doors to the public. Moving to another town wasn’t an option, they didn’t have any savings and it was tough to pay the rent. Besides, they learned from the news that the disease had spread worldwide, and no country on earth was safe. Depression became so oppressive he built a bunker in his basement. Reinforcing the door and collecting everything from toilet paper to guns. Every night after work, TV news droned in the background, adding to his trepidation. At first, alcohol dulled the fear, but whiskey was outside of his budget. 

One night, he watched a show discussing treatments for schizophrenia. Peace and calm came to those who went through the operation. At the library, he studied the procedure in fine detail. All he needed was a long, sterilized needle. His first experiment would be on the dog, an excitable little thing, constantly underfoot and yapping at every noise. Fred parted the fuzzy hair on its little head and completed the process without a whimper. Immediately, the dog became docile and lay on the floor all day. It was hard to tell if it was dead or alive. Flush with success, Fred proposed the idea to his wife. Wanda was a worrier, so a splash of whiskey helped. Then, after positioning the sterilized tip under her eyebrow, Fred closed his own eyes and eased it upward a good eight inches. The result was positive: like the little dog; she stopped worrying and sat in the chair all day and watched soap operas.

Fred stood looking at himself in the mirror, planning his own procedure. Wincing as the point touched the flesh above his eye, he figured another shot of Wanda’s whiskey will keep him sober enough to control the angle. Fred gritted his teeth and inserted the thin rod of stainless steel. Sharp pain vanished, replaced by mild euphoria, his thoughts blurred, but he felt the operation had been a success. His feet were unsteady as walked into the bathroom to look in the mirror. Blood ran down from the metal rod sticking in his head. But a smile greeted him that he hadn’t seen in years.

Tim Hildebrandt is a writer in metro Indianapolis, Indiana. His short stories have appeared in print and online publications such as Misery Tourism, The Boston Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, and Literally Stories. He also paints in oils and shows in select exhibits. Current projects include assembling an anthology of short stories. You can check out his work at: https://www.instagram.com/ax_beckett.

The post Frightened Fred appeared first on Pandemic Magazine.

Pieces of your soul

Gasp at the medieval jumble
Weʼre swimming in the abysmal soup
A plague that has spread
We live in infested quarters

Culture fails in this new world
The Dark Ages are alive and well
Theyʼve found their dwelling place
In the bowels of the states

Can you grasp the reality?
We live our lives on the screen
Hoping to find some meaning
But it slips out of our grip

Modern day renaissance man
Looking to beautify the world
When everything looks bleak
Pick up the pieces of your soul

Lux Lucis Ferre

Die solis invikti nati
When the Sun rises again
Saturn spins around our head
We see the solstice occur
Knowing that light is on the horizon
Weʼve gotten over the darkest days
But new challenges lie ahead
We cannot back off
Especially now when nature needs us the most
Let the rays of Phosphoros shine
Lux-Lucis Ferre

Abu Rowash

Subhuman enemy
Apocalyptic axioms
Simplest stratagem
Biowarfare blankers
Cataclysmic specie
Hellbent messiah
Unholy matrimony
Scarred Disciple
Temple of Abu Rowash
High Priest exalted
Mysterious omen
Torn Scrolls
The end is the beginning
The prophecy foretold
In ancient scripture
The numbers align

Gordon Lewis is a writer, musician, photographer, and artist currently residing in Colorado where he enjoys being in nature and working on his creative endeavors.

The post Cataclysmic Age appeared first on Pandemic Magazine.

The pandemic of 2020 brought forth a wide array of unanticipated emotions for me, my friends, and my family. In April and May, as the reality set in that this was going to be a long haul, I wrote a batch of songs to capture some of the fears and frustrations precipitated by this new normal, but with some humor. 

My go-to genre for this project is punk because this artform allows for gross exaggeration — I can push each theme to its extreme. 

Safe Distance

Way back when you really broke my heart
You had that technique down to an art
So now for the sake of my mental health
I plan to remain completely in stealth

Here in these pandemic times
There’s another reason to draw the line
If you get too close to me
I’m gonna call the governor, can’t you see

So now there’s reasons one and two
For me to stay away from you
And it’s as simple as it can be
Just keep a safe distance from me

Don’t know why you’re coming around again
Since you ran off with my best friend
You really put me in my place
Now I want you out of my personal space

My therapist said “don’t analyze her
Just use a stronger sanitizer,
Gloves and bleach are not enough,
You really gonna need some toxic stuff”

So now there’s reasons one and two
For me to stay away from you
And it’s as simple as it can be
Just keep a safe distance from me

If you cross my border
I’ll get a restraining order

I could list many reasons more
But I don’t want to be a bore
6 feet away is the minimum
Cuz you belong in the sanitarium

So now there’s reasons one and two
For me to stay away from you
And it’s as simple as it can be
Just keep a safe distance from me

Karl Meyer is a musician and songwriter based in Chicago. Karl has pioneered the “Punk for Adults” genre. For more information on Karl check him out on Bandcamp.

The post No Mask No Music appeared first on Pandemic Magazine.

This is a comic looking at the wild promises from politicians and the sheer incompetence in managing the virus, as the second wave rushes towards us.

Dave Miller’s artistic interests lie in telling political stories which engage with current issues, and forces affecting our lives. See more of his work at DaveMiller.org.

See the comic in the upcoming book PANDEMIC; WHERE ARE WE STILL GOING WRONG published by Bite-Sized Books.

The post Project Moonshot appeared first on Pandemic Magazine.

One look through the window, and it confirms that the world outside is still in a state of quarantine. The roads are deserted and the people out there are few and far between.

Working-from-home has become the new normal. While we continue convalescing from the effects of the deadly virus, unsure of what the future has in store for us, we find ourselves acclimatizing ourselves to this more shut-down lifestyle.

It is this uncertainty that has been central to our emotions and thought processes over the course of the last few months. Amongst the plethora of saddening news and negative developments around us, we have been swiveling inside the cycle of being down and depressed, to something more optimistic and back to being sad. Confined to the rigid walls of our homes, there is not much we can really do. It is during these dark times that I find myself drifting towards films, and books, and quietly hoping for them to take me to some far-off foreign land. A new place, different from the constructs we’re all stuck in.

On rare occasions I turn myself to my camera. Looking through the viewfinder, I somehow hope to catch something new in the rather familiar surroundings around me. The pictures I take in black-and-white are monochromatic like life itself, myself also devoid of colors.

I try to look through the pitch-black darkness outside. Sometimes I succeed in doing that. It gives me a thrill and I feel a little better, albeit for a minuscule moment.

Doing street-photography in these times has become quite challenging and carries a huge amount of risk. 

I try not to get bogged down by the limitations and use my Canon 1200D wherever and whenever I possibly can. I look for hours and hours out of the window, gazing at the ever-changing cloudscape, the setting sun, the bright moon and the occasional airplanes flying in the sky, free.

By switching to my handy zoom-lens, I manage to capture the far-off things easily. In my eyes though, they too are devoid of any real colors. I shoot them in monochrome only to saturate them with excess colors in post-processing. It looks a little unreal, but then isn’t what we’ve been experiencing a little unreal too?

Feelings of loneliness and seclusion have often been central to our feelings during the lockdown period. To make myself less lonely, I try to consume myself, watching an unhealthy number of films and relentlessly obsessing about them. More often than not, it’s all for a lost cause as I again look out aimlessly and long for companionship and intimate conversations. 

Watching and analyzing a huge amount of movies has influenced my photography in a lot of ways. For example, my preferred mode for shooting pictures has become the landscape mode, usually in a very cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio. Also, I keep yearning for more drama in the pictures I click. 

However it very rarely comes out the way I imagine it in my head, which in turn leads to disappointment. 

Throughout my photography, I have refused to conform to a particular style or form. Always experimenting, I am perpetually on the search for a style that I could and would stand by.

But as I keep clicking more and more pictures, I realize that one cannot just choose a style for themselves. In the course of making images, the style chooses them. One does not have to force it. Till that moment though, I shall keep trying different approaches and methods in making pictures. Hopefully, my own distinct style will break out soon. 

Growing up, I had a natural affinity towards good artworks. I’d stare with awe at the paintings and with time, I learned to appreciate them. However, I wasn’t particularly talented with the paintbrush in my hand. Nor was I good at poetry. Not even sculpting.

So, I looked to other mediums to satisfy my artistic desire. That medium turned out to be photography, and the camera became my paintbrush. I caught on to it like a house on fire. Immensely curious, I’d spend hours every day learning about this beautiful device called the digital camera. 

My primary method of shooting photographs involves going out on long photowalks, on the most crowded of streets and shooting amid the utter chaos, in an act of uncomplicated honesty.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to indulge in this during the ongoing lockdown. There was only so much I could do inside the confines of my home.

While photographing things, I don’t really start-off with a lot of frames in my mind. The shooting process comes rather naturally to me. I tend to walk a lot and whenever an interesting object pops up, I take out my camera and frame it.

Technical details don’t matter as much to me as long as there’s a heart and soul to the photo. It’s only during processing later, that I really look at the pictures, analyzing them, and unearthing the hidden meaning behind it. 

I’m self-confessedly not the happiest person out there, and I don’t go out looking to capture pictures with a particular theme either. But as I’ve realized during the course of my two years of photography, there have been certain themes that continue to be present.

These themes, as I’ve analyzed, include feelings of isolation and loneliness in the modern city.

Especially at a time when we are legally prohibited from going out and about for our daily routines, such feelings are sure to overwhelm us. I sometimes wonder what kind of lost universes I would capture if I actually decided to undertake the task of photographing the emptiness of the long and unending network of streets.

Probably nothing at all.

Arkadeep Mitra is a 20 year old photographer from Calcutta. As a very disillusioned engineering student, he often indulges in photography to escape the realities of life. 

Though refusing to conform to any particular genre, you can usually Arkadeep in the streets looking through the unlikeliest of angles trying to frame the unlikeliest of pictures.

You can contact him and view more of his works here:

Note: All the pictures were taken in Singapore (where I was fortunate to visit before the pandemic kicked in) and in my hometown of Calcutta, India before and during the course of global-lockdown. 

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/arkadeep.mitra.54/
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/wongkarwhyy/
500px – https://500px.com/streetarc

The post Looking Through the Darkness appeared first on Pandemic Magazine.