Got to be birds flying higher

Scene 1 (Very vivid in my brain):

An outdoor tent at the fictional Wiltwyck Hospital under which people gather when they think they have COVID. The tent is pitched right outside the very oldest part of the hospital complex, the original building constructed in 1874, and it fronts a grove of very old trees (sugar maples? red oaks? white ash?) where birds sing and squirrels scamper, so the whole scene is very surreal, like a demented Hamptons garden party.

Since the pandemic went official, Grazia has barely been inside the hospital. Her job is to assess patients who score positive on the antigen test. Most of them are dispatched home. A few are culled from the herd and sent inside. It's kind of like a conveyor belt job in a donut factory. Simple. Mindless.

The 2020 summer in upstate New York was the hottest summer since they started keeping records. (That record has since been broken.) Inside her scrubs, beneath her full-isolation drag, Grazia is sweating like a pig and her breath rises up from her surgical mask & fogs the non-prescription glasses she's taken to buying at the Dollar Store because the hospital is too cheap to spring for protective eye gear.

She wants an N95 mask. The hospital won't spring for those, either. She even goes to a strip mall Home Depot for painter N95s though she knows they don't reliably protect against fluids.

She buys the last one anyway, wears it to work one day.

When she takes it off that night, her face is bruised.

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Scene 2 (a jump):

The ER Director tells Grazia she is being floated inside the hospital because they're short-staffed. She objects to no avail.

Status detail about how the interior of the hospital where the ER once was is practically unrecognizeable—temporary space dividers cordoning off the space in weird ways.

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Scene 3 (murky!):

The ICU. Six COVID patients. They look like extras in some weird science fiction movie about what happens after the aliens invade and start doing weird experiments on humans. Grazia is not taking care of the humans, she is taking care of their medical equipment. After all, the humans die. But the medical equipment can be reused!

Lots of grim medical status detail.

Grazia befriends a nurse named Julie. They do black humor banter.

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Scene 4 (not thought out at all):

Julie gets COVID & ends up in the ICU, where she dies.

Grazia has a mental breakdown & ends up joining a religious cult.

Scene 5 (not thought out at all):

Neal rescues Grazia from the religious cult and nurses her back to mental stability.

Last bit has to be a conversation on Neal's front porch in the Catskills—so the prose can segue back to the opening scene of the novel when the five women are congregating there.

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The religious interest is already pretty well foreshadowed, but I'll have to do some serious foreshadowing around the cult itself, plus decide: Is it a Christian cult or some weird Eastern Yoga cult?

When I first began tromping the local rail trail, I was flabbergasted to discover a Muktanada temple abutted it. Muktananda, an Indian yogic transplant, had a huge temple complex in Oakland; I once actually had a boyfriend who was a devotee. Muktananda's spiritual superpower apparently was the spontaneous awakening of kundalini in others. He particularly liked to awaken kundalini in underage female acolytes.

So, you know. A weird yoga cult appeals!

Except weird yoga cults are rarely evangelical, and I think Grazia must first become conscious of the cult because they set up some kind of recruitment station on the outskirts of the hospital's COVID tent.

But, hey! It's my party, and I can write what I want to. (Cue Leslie Gore.)

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In other news...

Submitted a client invoice, which means I'm going to spend the next five days having massive anxiety attacks. (What if they never pay me???)

Also, the nearest train station to Betsy's house, where I will be spending the weekend, turns out to be on the Harlem Metro North line. Which means I'm gonna have to drive there.

At least the weather is temporarily warmer: Rumor has it temps will hit 50° today!

And RTT moderated a meeting between Ithaca's mayor & the downtown merchants last night. He looked spiffy: