Gesundheit

Priya was mid-gesture, fingers spread toward the green screen, mouth open, about to say warm front, when she sneezed so hard her earpiece bounced off Camera Two and slid across the studio floor.

She straightened up.

Marcus was wiping his nose on his clipboard.

The cameraman had both hands over his face. His shoulders were going up and down.

Priya looked at the earpiece on the floor. She looked at Marcus. Marcus sneezed again, a small one and looked personally offended.

"Cut," he said.

***

Emeka was reading the C-minus for the third time when he sneezed his glasses off.

They landed under Kenji's chair. He got down to retrieve them and from down there he could see the whole classroom sneezing, twenty-three pairs of shoes shifting, chairs scraping and Mrs. Hashimoto's comfortable brown sandals turning toward the window as she pressed both hands to her face.

From the corridor came the sound of the principal saying "ah-" and then walking into the door frame.

Emeka put his glasses on and sat back up.

He smoothed the essay on his desk. He looked out the window at the Wednesday sky.

He said nothing.

***

Fatou was hanging laundry, corners first, always corners first, when the street outside made a sound she had never heard before. Not loud. More like a held breath letting go all at once.

She lowered the bedsheet and looked.

Three boys on bicycles had stopped pedalling. A woman with a basket on her head was laughing so hard the basket was tilting. A man in a white boubou was standing in the middle of the road looking at his own hands like they belonged to someone else.

Fatou looked up at the sky. Blue. Completely blue. Not a cloud anywhere.

She went back to the laundry. Corners first.

***

Yuki was eating breakfast when her phone went. She read the message. Put the phone down. Picked it up. Read it again. Pulled her laptop across the table without looking, knocking her bowl sideways, rice going across the table and onto the floor, not noticing, already typing.

***

Bernardo was somewhere over the South Atlantic when the plane dropped a shoulder, just briefly, like a dog shaking water off.

He looked at his instruments.

He looked at his co-pilot, Daniela, who was pressing a tissue to her nose.

She looked at him.

Outside the windows, unbroken blue in every direction, the ocean below them flat and silver and very far away.

"Did you-" he started.

"Yes," she said.

They flew in silence for a long time.

***

Three weeks later Priya was live on air when it rained in the Sahara.

Not drizzled. Rained. She was explaining an anticyclone over the Bay of Biscay, pointing, smiling, completely confident, when her producer appeared behind Camera Two making a face she had never seen him make before. He held up his phone. She read the screen. She looked at the green screen behind her showing her own forecast. She looked back at her producer.

She kept smiling.

"And, uh," she said. "Slight update on North Africa."

***

Emeka's mother showed him the TIME magazine in the kitchen on a Sunday morning. She put it on the table next to his cereal bowl without saying anything. His own face looked up at him, slightly blurry, taken in the school playground.

He looked at it for a while.

He took it upstairs and pinned it on the wall next to the C-minus.

He went back downstairs for his cereal.

***

The rain in the Sahara lasted four hours. It turned the dust dark and sent up a smell that rolled ahead of it like a wave. A man named Sidi, who ran a small guesthouse at the edge of a village that saw perhaps eight tourists a year, walked outside and stood in it. He was sixty-three years old. He stood there with his face up and his arms out and his good shoes getting ruined and he did not go inside for a very long time.

Fatou talked about Sidi in her third video.

She was standing in front of the kitchen window the same as always, the same light, the same way she held her hands when she talked. She said the sky had been saving that rain for a long time and had simply decided now was when it wanted to use it. Her daughter laughed behind the phone. Fatou ignored her.

That video got forty million views.

Her daughter bought a proper microphone and Fatou put it in the kitchen drawer.

***

London was warm. Actually warm. Day after day after day of blue sky and actual heat and the city responded to it the way it always did, with profound suspicion and then helpless joy.

People sat on every flat surface eating sandwiches. Parks filled up on Tuesday mornings. A man on the Central line took his coat off and stared at it folded on his lap for three stops like he was trying to remember what it was for.

Priya stood outside the studio one afternoon on her lunch break with her face tilted up and her eyes closed.

Her producer came and stood next to her.

"I got the forecast wrong again," she said, eyes still closed.

"I know," he said.

They stood there in the sun.

***

Yuki stopped sleeping properly around week four.

Not in a bad way, exactly. More that she would lie down and then remember something and get up and check it and then it would be 4 AM and she'd be eating crackers at her desk surrounded by printed satellite maps with things circled on them in three different colours of pen.

She got a message from a pilot named Bernardo in week six. He had attached his incident report and written one line underneath it: I don't know why I'm sending you this. I think maybe you'll understand it.

She read the report. She read it again.

She wrote back immediately even though it was 3 AM: I understand it completely. Can we talk?

***

In Ōpōtiki, on the eastern coast of New Zealand, Mrs. Parata started opening her café at 6:45 instead of 7:30. She didn't advertise it. She didn't have to. By 7 AM the queue stretched down the street, people with cameras, people with children, people who had driven four hours and she moved between them with the coffee and said the same thing every morning to whoever asked.

Seven fourteen, love. Don't be late.

At 7:13 everyone went quiet.

At 7:14, two rainbows appeared in the eastern sky, one inside the other and held there for eleven minutes while everyone stood in the street looking up and the only sound was the occasional involuntary noise that people make when something is too much for them.

At 7:25 they were gone.

Mrs. Parata collected the empty cups.

***

Snow fell in Nairobi on Christmas morning.

Forty minutes and then it was done and it never happened again. But for forty minutes it fell on the jacaranda trees and the red rooftops and the shoulders of people who had stepped outside in their Christmas clothes and stood very still.

A woman named Grace stood on her doorstep with her hand out and a flake landed on her palm and she watched it disappear.

Her daughter, seven years old, pushed past her into the yard in her nightdress and stood with her mouth open and her tongue out, turning slow circles with her arms out.

Grace stood on the doorstep.

She didn't go inside for a long time.

***

Bernardo flew to Tokyo in March.

Yuki met him at the station because she was already nearby and it was practical, not because she was nervous and she was not nervous. She was holding a piece of paper with his name on it even though she knew what he looked like from video calls and when he came through the gate and saw it he laughed, just briefly and she felt immediately better.

They went to her favourite place for ramen and talked for four hours and she spilled tea on his sleeve within the first twenty minutes and apologised three times and he said it was fine and she apologised a fourth time and he just looked at her and she stopped.

***

The anniversary fell on a Wednesday.

Nobody organised anything. There was no committee, no logo, no announcement. But somehow, everywhere, people found themselves outside at 11:40, 11:45, drifting into streets and playgrounds and rooftops and doorsteps, not saying why.

Emeka's school let the children out at 11:40. The teachers came too. They all stood in the playground in the cold and nobody said anything about why they were there.

Fatou turned her phone off and went and stood in the street.

Priya stood outside the studio in the same spot where she'd stood in the sun that afternoon with her producer. Her producer stood next to her.

Yuki and Bernardo were on a roof in Tokyo, her laptop open, his coffee going cold, the city spread out below them doing what cities do.

11:47.

11:47:22.

11:47:23.

Nobody sneezed.

In the playground in Osaka, Kenji looked at Emeka. Emeka shrugged. And then Kenji started laughing, just at the sky, at nothing, at 11:47 arriving and leaving without incident, at all of them standing there in the cold waiting for something that didn't come. It moved through the playground like a wave, one child and then five and then all of them, the teachers too, helpless, doubled over, not knowing what was funny except that everything was.

In Dakar, Fatou heard it from down the street before it reached her, this sound coming closer, house by house and then it was inside her and she was gone, laughing in the road in the middle of the day at the blue empty sky.

In London, Priya put her hand over her mouth but it was no use.

On the roof in Tokyo, Yuki laughed so hard she knocked her coffee off the ledge.

Bernardo caught it.

She looked at him. He was already looking at the sky, still smiling, the city below them going about its Wednesday, the sky above them doing whatever it wanted, the same as it had been doing for a year now, beautiful and wrong and completely its own.

***

End.