100 Words: Zoom-zoom

Zoom-zoom all the lifelong day, the calm or anxious or exhausted faces flashing up at me from my screen like fish coming to the surface of a pond, out of habit or hope. Walked in the rain. The face of the lake between squalls seemed every shade of gray and blue, faintest at its penultimate edge before a dark ribbon of crayon lined up the horizon beneath a slow-changing violet sky in which gulls dawdled. The world only seems to be on pause; nature takes its way like fate and has its way with us. The virus is not alive.