The woman looked out the window. The empty, silent street was a strange thing at that hour. Months ago, the children were leaving school and running to the central square. From there came screams, deafening sounds of children's throats and electronics. The strange thing was not the silence, but the loneliness that came to be heard, felt, as if nothing was left out there. It was as if, from one day to the next, everyone had gone, disappeared, died. Or it wasn't just a matter of time, thought the woman, trying to remember how long she had been confined to that house. She couldn't remember anything. She kept looking through the window.
The wall of the house was cracked and through its cracks the echoes of silence could be heard. The woman closed her eyes and thought she didn't know what was behind the door, but she sensed that it was the ghost of death that was covering everything. They had long since become accustomed to a country full of voices, full of misery, with hunger tattooed on their starving, yellow faces. Perhaps that was why the plague had not caught them off guard, she thought, her face glued to the glass. We have been waiting for you for a long time," she said aloud as if she were talking to someone, as if someone had really arrived.
For days now the only contact with the outside world was a ramshackle car that passed by twice a day, giving figures for the number of people killed in the last few hours and warning people not to leave their homes. The woman did not know if she was the only one left in the country, but she was the only one in that destroyed and old house. Her children had left the country years ago, her husband had died. She had always kept in touch with the children via telephone or internet, but after that, she never heard from them again. The woman looked out the window and thought that quarantine had begun in that country a long time ago. Death had been eating at their heels for more than 20 years.
Everything was already dark and the woman felt hungry. There was so little left in the cupboard. She looked at the package of rice and grabbed 10 grains. Raw, one by one, she began to put them in her mouth and began to suck on them. The woman discovered that this was a distraction from hunger, despair, and misery. Of course, there was no electricity, no gas, no water, but that was not a problem: the people of that country had trained themselves for the shortages, they had learned to survive on almost nothing. The woman thought that at that point they all looked like ghosts rattling their chains of caged animals, because they had lost their freedom and their soul.
The houses also looked like night and grey spectres, doubled up in the pools of rotting water. The woman returned to the window and there she leaned against one of the walls as she closed her eyes. What day it was, what month, what year. She heard the alarming voice that always came from the car: Don't go out. We will shoot anyone who comes out. The health of the country comes first. Don't leave your homes. The woman felt her eyes close by themselves and asked God to give her a little place in heaven.