Lord of the Butterflies: Chapter 1

An optimistic retelling of Lord of the Flies in the Time of Coronavirus

The place they normally went for coffee was closed. A handwritten note stenciled CLOSED FOR CORONAVIRUS with a tiny purple heart punctuated next to it. Was that supposed to make people feel better, the stress-doodled heart? Or was it just the mindless scrawl of an anxious employee who didn’t know what to do other than close during a pandemic that was killing her coworkers? Star’s hands were red with cold and she blew on them even though all the social workers had told her not to touch her face.

“Where are we gonna find food?” Mo whined.

“Yeah, everything is closed. Even the shelter because all the staff are sick,” Waldo worried.

“I don’t know,” Star said. “We’ll find something to eat. Somewhere.”

They continued walking, trudging up the steep Denny Way hill.

“Can you imagine what this used to be like, a hundred years ago? To be a horse, slipping in the mud up this hill?” Waldo mused. Star shivered. Those poor horses in the Seattle rain. She pictured their hooves slipping in the mud as they carried Seattle’s lumber baron aristocracy up First Hill. Yesterday, before the library shuttered for the pandemic quarantine, Star had read that Trump’s…