Pods
A Work of Fiction
When the mandate came down, it was hard to fathom. I mean, we were prepared for worse, but still, we didn’t know how to do what we had to do. To choose. To choose, and all agree, on a pod for the next year.
Ten people. That’s what you were limited to. For the next year. No one else in. No one else out. No commingling of pods. No inter-pod romance. Nothing but these ten people who all agree on these same ten people.
I thought it would be easy. I didn’t have kids, but my sister did. And I would need to be with them. That already made five, a sister, two nieces, my brother-in-law, and me. It already wasn’t easy because I was worried about who she wanted in our pod.
Knowing her, she didn’t want anyone else in our pod. But it was going to be a full year. I needed someone else, or at least I thought I did. Having just phenomenally crashed and burned yet again on another dating site, I started to think about who I could spend a year with. And who could spend a year with me, and my family.
This was the odd thing about the mandate. It made you think in weird ways. I started to bypass the inherent underlying danger as to why we had to do this and became over-focused on how to do it and whom with. And where. Yeah, it was much harder than I expected.
