They say he bloomed overnight.
Skin budding in sickly petals,
eyes sealed in the yellow hush of honey turned wrong.
A man becoming plural—
flesh forgetting itself.
The air bent around him,
thick as milk and humming.
He tried to speak,
but the sound came out moss-green,
like a small creature dying in the throat.
In the fields, the wheat remembered.
It leaned away,
the way it once did from rabbits—
those soft implosions of fur and fever,
their bodies mottled like bad fruit.
We called it kindness:
the clean percussion of the club,
the mercy that bruises only once.
But a man is harder to unsee.
He stumbles through the town square
and people scatter like startled birds.
The priest lifts his robe as though disease
were a puddle.
A child laughs,
not knowing what laughter costs.
He becomes folklore by evening.
The body—
a myth no one wants to claim.
Windows close like eyelids.
Dogs whimper beneath tables.
The moon watches,
pale and complicit.
And I think:
perhaps the virus was never in the rabbits,
nor in him,
but in us—
in that quiet place
where pity curdles into disgust.
Tell me, then,
if the same swelling bloomed on your brother’s skin,
if he rasped your name through teeth like gravel—
would you fetch the club?
Would you still call it mercy?