A red spot appeared on your arm. Strange. You don’t remember being bitten by anything today, and this definitely wasn’t a flitting ember from the ashes.

It starts itching a few hours later. Your chipped fingernails run across your skin to seek relief, rubbing traces of grime and flayed skin around the length of your sweaty forearm. Such a large patch of raw skin remains that the mark becomes a little more than a memory, buried under other distractions of discomfort by the end of the day, like the aching of your muscles. Soreness is a constant in your life nowadays, although today’s severity is enough to elicit groans.

These are the moments you long to return to your apprenticeship at the forge the most. Had you not been young and able-bodied, perhaps the parish would have passed you over once they became desperate for more hands— once they recruited any and every man capable of the job. Soreness was inevitable either way, but you would gladly take being sprayed by flecks of hot metal over the constant scent of death and ash permeating your skin and hair.

The sun kisses the distant horizon and blacks the earth right as you make it back home, a rarity for you lately. The rising demand for labor means you’d sometimes be digging until the sun returned to circle the Earth again, and it was starting to get to you. You yawn. Treating yourself to an early night sounds like a good idea.

It’s cold.

The beginnings of winter have been nipping at your nose over the week, but this was a very sudden change. You’re unwilling to separate from the warmth of your bed, the unsourced chill of your environment plaguing you with a deep internal discomfort.

Your teeth click together involuntarily. You hope that clutching your threadbare blanket closer to your limbs will stave off the cold produced by your heavy cobblestone flooring and walls, but the shivering only worsens. You grip the blanket tighter.

Your knuckles brushing against your cheek only grows your confusion. Despite shivering as if left out in the snow, your skin generates enough heat to be classified as a furnace in its own right. You’re hot. Very hot. It’s paradoxical, and only makes you more hesitant to part with your bundle of blankets, but you do. You long for the heat again.

To find a semblance of warmth again, you sacrifice your only other linen undershirt—one placed underneath the same reworn and unwashed clothing you wear for collection. Even disregarding the added layers, you feel ill-balanced and stiff as you leave your abode.

On the way to your shift today, there are the sounds of children screaming in delight, a rare occurrence these days. You see them before you hear them, a chorus of glee cutting through the tense, stagnant air filling the streets. There is never much sound lately, other than the intermittent bells from churches and wagons. You want to interrupt the children and tell them to head back inside, but it’s much too dangerous to approach anyone lately. Even if you wanted to, the only glimpse you get is the dark linen dress of a girl rounding a corner, presumably chasing after the rest of her peers. Their lighthearted screeches grow fainter as they disappear down the narrow road, taking their glee with them.

The demands of the day’s labor are hard, just as they are every day prior. You lose count of how many thresholds you cross, how many corpses overextend the muscles in your arms, how many times you avert your eyes to avoid the gaze of death boring into your skull. You work in silence with the men beside you, the creaking of the wooden cart being the only noise that regularly interrupts the grunting. Sometimes, the sounds of families weeping travel through their handkerchiefs and out their doorways. People watch you steal their loved ones away. The pile stands higher than you by the time your shift is done.

You’re not tasked with digging today, so you collect a hefty payment from the parishioner and make your way back home. The vinegar-soaked cloth tied around your face comes off before you even hit your doorstep, eager to be freed from its itchy dampness.

The first hour of your night is defined by tossing and turning. You blame your restlessness on missing dinner, though you’re not really all that hungry. The bed feels even colder than it did this morning, and the temperature discrepancy keeps you up for a second hour. Not even the heat radiating from your body supplies enough warmth to your bedspread.

After the third hour of fretful shifting, you finally achieve a position that quells your curling nausea and adds an iota of heat back to your limbs. Comfortable now, or at least convinced by the illusion of it, you drift into unconsciousness with prayers that the feeling will wear off tomorrow morning.

It’s before dawn breaks that you’re thrown back into wakefulness.

Your head doesn’t appreciate the sudden change in orientation when you jolt awake. It spins and swirls, and you have to catch yourself on the edge of the bed when the world momentarily goes dark.

Though it takes longer to chase away the shaking in your legs, you get up and prepare for work, donning the same semi-soiled clothes you wore the day before. Today you’re expected to bury, which means you most likely won’t see nary a bed nor wink of rest for the next fifteen hours.

The acrid smell of decay inspires a headache behind your eyes, though the labor distracts you from the discomfort. The first half of the day features beads of sweat running over your eyebrows despite the chill in the air. You push the cart with quivering arms, much to your embarrassment. It goes unnoticed by the four other men in your group today, all preoccupied with shouldering bodies and their own burdensome thoughts.

Tucked away in one alley lies seven bodies stacked in a toppled pile, all in various stages of bloated decay. Each of you silently collects a heavy linen-wrapped parcel.

The one you end up moving towards is smaller in frame than the others. You peel back a corner of the crudely-wrapped sheet and are greeted by the ashen face of a woman, cheeks sunken and brushed with the limp, matted coils of her formerly yellow hair.

Beside her, you realize, is a smaller linen wrapped in her arms. Short, brunette hair peeks out from the sheet atop her nightgown—a child. A boy, to be exact, too small to be any older than four. His own filled cheeks still have the faintest bits of rosiness on them, obscured by blackened flesh and festering, decayed sores.

The position they’re in makes them too awkward to carry together. If you want to get them to the cart, you have to separate them.

The mother is stiff as a board. You pry her arms away from her offspring, fighting with some unknown factor in death that makes the body harden. She’s stubborn and unforgiving; you practically have to twist her arm to wedge him away; even in death, she carries the maternal instinct to shield her offspring from the world. As you lay the body of the boy gently on the cobblestone, you ignore the wisps of the wind curling around your ear that carry her voice: Please, please, return my child to me.

Once you have her secured on the edge of the cart, you turn back for the body of the boy.

Her wailing follows you—Please, please, bring him to me. Please. Fortunately for you, no one seems to have touched the messily-splayed sheet containing the boy. You bend down and scoop him into your arms, the lightness of his corpse disturbing you.

In your momentary distraction, you stumble on a cobblestone. Reflexively, your arms open wide to catch yourself, and the exchange for your balance results in you dropping the body of the four-year-old. He thuds against the ground. The collision squishes a blister on his back, and dark, congealing liquids leak through the sheets. You wince. You’re not unfamiliar with the smell, but today it’s more repugnant than usual.

You fight back the urge to retch as you take the boy into your arms once more, holding him a bit tighter than necessary as you bring him back to his mother. You feel like her expression darkens at you, not only for the rough treatment of her son, but also from the way you’ve permanently altered the embrace of her child. Her arms will not go back down.

The plots of land beside the churches were filled to the brim weeks ago, so you and the men undergo the grueling task of taking the cart several miles out to a trench only partly used. There, another group of men works tirelessly to pass and arrange the bodies in a deep grave, their heaving only broken by the shifting of dirt.

The strong stench of decay knocks your headache firmly back into place. A man hands you a shovel and tells you to pack dirt over the bodies they’ve already laid out. As you scoop dirt from the pile, you try to ignore the rows of faces looking back up at you. Some contented, free from pain. Some with half-lidded eyes thick with delirium. Some with faces frozen in perpetual agony, marred with deep bruises and crusted blood on the corners of their mouths. Mutters of endless prayers spill out from your lips the entire time.

You shovel for hours. Your hands garner ripped callouses that fold away from your palms, revealing the raw, wet flesh underneath. It stains the length of the handle with traces of blood and clear fluid, where thin splinters lodge themselves into your fingers. The stinging makes it hard to grip the shovel correctly, but still, you persist.

On one row, you come across a familiar face. It’s the mother again, looking perturbed and restless, like she’d dart her eyes about if she were still able to move them. Her arms are empty again, encircling nothing but air, and it’s there you understand her agitation: her son is missing. You realize he must have fallen out of her linens again. She looks to you, pleading, knowing that you’re responsible for fixing this. You have to.

Your eyes scan around, and finally you spot him. He’s nearby, the collectors having placed him between the hulking bodies of two grown men. That won’t do.

You set down your shovel and scoot alongside the edge of the grave, slipping down the side until your feet are planted on a soft surface. Carefully, you maneuver over the bodies and make your way to the boy, cautious to only step between them. Your ankles sink deep into the carcasses arranged several feet deep. It’s hard to keep your balance, but you get to him with success. Slowly, you bend down, rescuing him from where he disappeared between the bodies beside him. You cradle him close to your chest, promising this time to not drop him, even as fluid moves thick down your forearm.

Once you get to the mother, it’s as if she knows her son is in range. You stoop down again to place the boy back against his mother’s bosom, adjusting her arms once again to envelop her offspring. Her arms are more malleable now; maybe it’s because she’s more relaxed. Perhaps you’ve corrected your earlier sin in her eyes. Her turbulent expression settles into something more calm, more warm, and maybe what follows is a thankful smile. Her shoulders seem to relax around the frame of her son, and with a deep exhale of contentment, the mother finally rests.

Your palms burn as you lift yourself out of the ditch, and tiny granules of dirt cling to the sticky, open flesh. You return to shoveling with little else on your mind.

The underside of your arms burns. Even lifting it away from your torso produces a burning discomfort like no other, and the inflammation limits your range of motion. You slip your fingers between the slight opening to palpate the swollen, tender mass.

You know what this is, as horrific as it is. You see the same things on the people you carry out to the street—the same large, angry boils engorged with pus and fluid. The kind that will overtake your skin in legions of lesions, decorated with decayed, charred flesh.

Your mouth goes dry. You thought you felt something hard on the underside the day prior, but you figured it was just discomfort from shoveling. Now, the mass nearly consumes your underarm, pulling your skin taut with a milky, foul-smelling fluid. A second bump forms nearby, too premature to do anything other than kill off the hair above it. It won’t be long before it swells to twice its size.

The collectors have already lost several men, so you drag yourself to work for what’s shaping up to be the final time. Your teeth take the brunt of today’s abuse. You grit your jaw with the use of your left arm, which only stiffens more by the hour. You stop any whimper that tries to slip past your lips, including the one that nearly rings out when you lose your balance and bump your arm into the doorframe.

You spent hours making up for the work of another downed man, an older gentleman whose name disappeared in the foggy recesses of your mind. You can hardly recall the events of today, every memory a slew of aching muscles and burning, reddened boils. Even your lips feel fatigued; although, through your febrile haze, you recall the nonsensical ramblings of the final rites you try to give to the carcasses at your feet.

When you collapse into bed this time, you’re careful to avoid your injured arm, which is now completely immobilized from a swollen, blackening boil underneath. Heat pours off the infected skin in waves, enough that you can feel it burning through your tunic.

You lift your sleeve. Two more ugly pustules begin to mature under your arm. Another tries to sprout near your neck.

If there are more in any place you can’t see, perhaps you would find yourself happy through ignorance.

The violent twitches overtaking your body rouse you from sleep. The sun has barely chased away the dawn, though the cloud of disorientation still weighs heavily on your mind.

When you turn away from the window, subtle bits of liquid agony shoot through your limbs. You don’t fight the cry this time. Something on your stomach hurts.

You build up enough courage to flip yourself over; your short, jagged breaths of exertion are interjected with moans. You can hold yourself upright just long enough to prop yourself up against the freezing cobblestone wall.

The tousled, thin blanket draped across your hips falls lower, and your crumpled shirt catches against itself, leaving your abdomen bare. You’re quick to move aside the remainder, where you’re greeted by a sickening sight.

Dark blotches paint your chest and abdomen, and pieces of your skin shine as the early stages of buboes begin to form.

Your breath hitches, then quickens. You crane your neck around to see your back, but a hardened mass on your neck forces you to turn the other way.

Across your back, more discolored flesh. Dark patches black as night climb up your torso like mold. One pustule on the small of your back has already erupted, leaving sticky, crusting fluid and discoloration on the waistband of your leggings.

The revelation leaves you feeling weaker, and you slump back into a horizontal position, too weak to adjust yourself into a more comfortable position. If you can hardly support your own weight, there’s no way you’d be able to lift anything today.

The parishioner will surely come looking for you; although a sudden absence after weeks of routine attendance typically meant one thing these days.

You conjure up just enough strength to place the sheets back on your body, and for the prayers to be muttered from your lips.

It’s dark outside now. So little moonlight filters into your room that you can hardly make out your nightstand. You have no idea how many hours you’ve been sleeping.

Despite only half-emerging from sleep, you’re already stricken by copious amounts of aches and pains. Even breathing becomes a shuddering tale of agony.

You can’t sit up anymore, although you lift your head just high enough from your pillow to catch sight of your toes. Already the blackness has spread to your feet, turning them into curled, blackened nubs. Your fingers aren’t too far behind; the tips are already succumbing to minor discolorations. You wonder if your nose already looks the same way.

The sweat building up on your forehead starts to dribble in your eye; weakly, you muster enough movement to wipe it from your eyelid. Your other arm lay useless at your side.

Every time you wake up, you’re surprised. You’re not sure what to expect anymore. The leaden heaviness that strikes all your limbs makes them as useless as your left arm. Soon, you will be no different from a log.

Through haze, you long for water to quench your thirst or a bowl of soup to fill your stomach. You wish you had family left to attend to you, or a nun who knew where you were.

A wet, hacking cough rattles your ribcage. The action throws your body into unwanted movement, sending a burning pain down your shoulders and spine.

The cough worsens, and it’s vigorous enough to bust another pustule on your back. Warm pus spreads out on the underside of your skin, and the smell that creeps out from under the overs makes you gag. It’s uncomfortably sticky.

You want nothing more than to wipe it off, but you’ve lost the ability to sit up. You have no idea how long you’ve been bedbound, how long you’ve been on the verge of consciousness and failing health. Your body trembles, the entirety of it damp from sweat.

You wonder how long it’s going to take for the collectors to find your body. You live alone and never married, so there was no one to put you outside. You sometimes came across houses like that—where every member of a family perished, entombed in their humid homes until somebody either noticed the smell or that they were gone.

You think back to the mother and child. You wonder if they died together in that embrace—if she soothed her offspring while the figure of death slipped into their rooms and whisked them away forever.

You wonder who went first, whether the mother wept at the ceasing of his little breaths against her skin, or if the child became gripped with confusion when the vibration of his mother’s heartbeat stopped filling his ear. You wonder if you would feel the exact moment your heart went to rest, or whether you would realize that you were dying.

When you’re discovered, what would happen to you? Where would they snuggly fit you amongst the ranks of strangers? Would you be left out on the streets, unattended for days by men overwhelmed by carcasses piled high—all-consuming and forever replicating—until death swallowed everything whole?

From somewhere across the city, church bells ring. Your eyes are too heavy to open. No matter what hour they announce, it’s all the same for you.

You find comfort in the melody, and through cracked lips, you hum it to yourself. It brings forth the comfort of a mother soothing her child with a lullaby, or like a sermon bringing a soul to rest.

You grow sleepier. The humming continues, and the vibrations from the bells fill every inch of your insides. It fills your ears, fills your head, fills your heart, and when it escapes your lungs in an exhale, you embrace the sound as it beckons you home to be with your Lord.