A Day in the Life of Quarantine (from A to Z)

Snapshot of a day in modern times

Four apples nestled in a bowl at the beginning of the day. Marcy was tired of watching her weight balloon during the quarantine, so she vowed to eat at least two by that night. She also vowed to stop eating so many cookies.

“Thank god I have a dog to keep me company,” she told her dachshund, Pepper. “Although it’s still pretty noisy since the kids upstairs stomp around like elephants.”

Her molly fish investigated the fake treasure chest at the bottom of the tank, unaware that anything in life was different.

Up on the roof, one ambitious family tried to create a raised garden bed. They ran into difficulty, however, when they discovered they had wood and nails but no hammer.

Marcy considered the bowl of apples at lunchtime but chose to eat ice cream, instead. Then she spent a while on YouTube watching a juggler handle increasingly dangerous objects mid-air.

The rooftop family gave up on gardening and decided to fly a kite. While their son ran in figure eights pulling the string, the parents indulged in some hard lemonade.

Marcy watched the full moon rise over a world in which more people took time to notice the moon. She wondered whether an increase in DIY haircuts would lead to a new variety of textures in bird nests.Then she got sucked into an octopus special, contemplating how bored one had to get before it started eating its own arm.

During a 10 minute “let’s be productive and clean out my desk” break, she found seven different pencils with broken tips.

“I am the Queen of superfluous items,” she said out loud. She hummed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as she conducted a fruitless search for a pencil sharpener.

“Don’t run with those scissors!” she heard the mom upstairs yell at her elephant-stampeding children.

“Maybe they could be trained to be quiet like you, what do you think?” she asked Pepper. “You don’t mind that I walk around in my underwear, right?”

After viewing a half hour instructional video on how to play a violin, she decided it wasn’t going to happen.

“Thank god for the inter-web,” she thought out loud. Then she googled if an x-ray would reveal how many cookies she’d eaten that day.

“When we’re allowed to get together again, I’m going to rent a yacht and invite everyone for a huge party,” she announced to her family that night. Marcy noted the skeptical smiles as they finished their nightly Zoom call, trying to ignore the bowl of apples that sat, untouched, on the counter.

A story based on the Week 14 prompt from Swap52Club, consisting of 26 sentences using predetermined words from A to Z.