For the past few weeks people have been saying, “nothing like this has ever happened in my lifetime”, “this doesn’t feel real” and “I really didn’t see this coming".
There’s a huge sense of disbelief despite the prescient warnings from people like Bill Gates, infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm and epidemiologist Larry Brilliant who, along with being chair of the board of Ending Pandemics, was also the senior technical adviser for the pandemic horror film Contagion, now a top streaming selection for the housebound along with the docuseries Pandemic.
A few weeks ago, when things were bad but not lockdown bad quite yet, we started to think about what would happen next — how would this coronavirus story play out if it were, in fact, a novel?
So we asked eight of the Mzansi's most talented storytellers to pen a work of fiction inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of these short stories are dire, some are funny and hopeful — all are beautifully written by popular authors such as Fred Khumalo and Paige Nick.
No doubt when the crisis is over, there will be films and documentaries, fiction and nonfiction galore coming out of this bizarre moment in human history. In the meantime, lose yourself in these short stories until real life stops feeling like a movie:
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