" The Carrier "

It's horrible, what happened. I hope you'll see that I'm the victim in all this. Because I am. None of what happened was my fault.

How could I have anything to do with how it started? Blame the fishermen. They're the ones who brought the fish in. Most of the workers were undocumented anyway, they probably didn't even care what they caught in those nets. They just dumped the whole rotten mess on the market for us to buy. To make sashimi and soups and jambalaya. To gut and scale and rince under a running faucet so the slime from them splattered everywhere. Those fish.

Those fish.

Everyone got sick. I even did in the beginning, don't pretend I wasn't affected by all this. I got a runny nose and my chest hurt and I felt like my head was sloshing full of water. I got sick too, that's what they always ignore. Sure, I got better. And yeah, nobody else did. Do you think I'm proud of that? Do you think I wanted to outlive my family? You think I wanted to bury my mother, my brother, my baby niece? I suffered.

Yes, I breached the quarantine. It was an accident, okay? I thought the barriers were for some parade or something. Nobody stopped me, but do they ever say it on the news? The way they do it in the movies, there's always an army swarming all over the place. In my street there was one guy and the barricade wasn't even complete. I thought it was a parade or something. Anyway, by the time I realized it, it was too late to really do anything about it. I was out, what was the point of going back when I had nothing to go back to? Plus, I had gotten over being sick. Maybe I had a little bit of a cough. Hell, it's not like I went to a buffet and stuck my head beneath the sneeze guard. I kept to myself. I was careful.

I really was. I was watching the news, watching them dissect my old town, stack up bodies like they were nothing. They dug up my family and burned them after they filleted them. I suffered. I ran. Can you blame me?

Of course they caught me. There were people still alive, people I knew who saw me leave one day and never come back. I hadn't gone that far anyway, it's not like I was a fugitive. I was upset. They didn't have to shove me in a tent like a house being sprayed for termites, but they did.

I got needles stuck in me and hoses stuck up me and I didn't have a single second's privacy. There were biopsies and cultures and swabs and through all of it they kept telling me how sick I was. I told them that the only thing making me feel bad was all the crap they did to me. It was true. I felt fine. I felt like I'd never been sick. They tried telling me that there had been outbreaks in the city where they'd grabbed me, but that was ridiculous. There's lots of germs in a city. They just wanted to control the story, I knew. If everyone found out how sloppy the regulations were, they'd stop trusting the government. I was an inconvenient truth. Anyway, it was the fish, not me, that got all those people sick.

Look, I think you'll agree that someone could only take so much of that. Telling you things you know are wrong. Putting you through all kind of painful tests you don't need.

It was wrong, what they said. No one can be sick and feel as good as I do. So of course you can understand what I did.

I'd already lost everyone I ever loved. I didn't need to be poked and prodded so some egghead could hold me up as an example. I'm a human being and I deserve to be treated like one.

And it's not like I won't be careful. I'll cover my mouth when I cough and use hand sanitizer and maybe even one of those surgery masks.

So I'm going. I won't let all the things they said scare me. I feel fine. I feel fine.