The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

Back when she was twenty-four and newly divorced, Charity had rented a small apartment. The place was on the ground floor of a building in a dicey New Orleans neighborhood that got away with describing its units as “luxury” only because they were new. For the first time, she had her own porch. It was protected by an iron fence but visible to anyone who walked by. She felt a need to make it not just presentable but charming. “I was trying to be my mother,” said Charity. “I wanted to show I could be a homemaker.” She bought wind chimes and flowerpots and flower boxes and dirt and fertilizer and some huge number of brightly colored flowers and turned her front porch into the Luxembourg Gardens. The young professionals and graduate students who lived in the building and passed her porch on the way to their units showered her with compliments. Neighbors came over just to sit on her porch. Even strangers on the street paid her compliments. For a short stretch Charity Dean was the young woman with the porch bursting with flowers. Then her flowers began to die—though not all at once. The first few deaths left only a bald spot in one of the pots. Charity happened to have a bouquet of plastic flowers. “That’s how it started,” she recalled, “just to fill in the blank spot in the pot where the flowers had died.” From a distance the fake flowers could pass for real; the combover was a success. Then more real flowers keeled over. Charity was studying for two graduate degrees at once and...

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