RONA, a short story anthology about the global COVID-19 pandemic

Themself

The knock on the door came nanoseconds after her phone screen lit up and vibrated with the UPS notification: "Your package was delivered".

Nadia quickly ran to the doorway, put on her leather gloves, opened the door, and brought in a huge cardboard box. After sanitizing the package and everything used to handle it, she ran back to her phone, ignored the several notifications waiting for her, and texted Ruby: "Did you get yours?"

Those days, time was a construct. Some days, from waking up to sleep, felt like a couple of hours. Other days you couldn't even distinguish being awake from being asleep. The only things that kept Nadia present within space and time were the messages and video calls from Ruby. So, the lack of response for 5 minutes really made her unease.

Maybe she just got hers... it does take some time to sanitize. Plus, she has to sneak it in without her family seeing.

"Just got mine. OMG we're really doing this! lol"
"r u turned on?"
"Not really. Not yet. Are you?"

Nadia replied "same", and while turned on wasn't exactly it, she couldn't say she wasn't intrigued by what was right in front of her:

A ReLoMa.

Being in Advertising herself, when she first read about the ReLoMa her first thoughts were exactly how that was a terrible product name but now, being alone in the bedroom with that 4-feet tall body of plastic meshed with rubber silicone, and supported by steel wires articulated via electric signals sent by computer boards, Nadia realized ReLoMa - an acronym for Remote Love Machine - was the best possible name for such a weird object.

The following thoughts that invaded her mind were about how sad it was the need for such a device. But now, 6 months later and 14 months into quarantine, that seemed like the most foreign of feelings. The ReLoMa was the most needed, longed for happening in a life defined by the lack of events.

After months of turning everything into an experience - zoom parties, role-playing dinner dates, Instagram lives - Nadia (and everyone locked down due to COVID-19) started appreciating loneliness and re-signifying it into solitude. In a world where, for people that lived alone, a look in the eye was not factually possible, humans stopped caring about it or, at best, started treasuring so much it became something reserved for very special people. Either way, intimacy became something rare. On their sparse emergency outdoor explorations, men and women would avoid physical contact; but also emotional and even eye contact. That sense of self-care/protection, together with the notion of respect towards others and how one life affects all lives, made linguists coin the term "themself"; the entity and feeling of an individual being one with the whole.

So, to most people, the ReLoMa was just a device for physical sexual incentive. A way to have different stimuli and experiences whenever themself wasn't enough. But for Nadia, it was much more than that. The ReLoMa was the materialization of a notion that only recently invaded and overwhelmed her.

The lockdown forced people to stay at home and confront everything they didn't like about their houses - both literally and metaphorically - and for her, that meant something very deep and transformative. Having spent her whole adult life dating men, Nadia realized that the lack of fire within her wasn't a natural characteristic but a suppressed emotion. It wasn't the fact that the fire inside was weak. The repression was strong.

She thought that was it. Adult life is supposed to be boring. Responsibilities are turn-offs. We will never return to that state of pure joy; pure bare beings whose only duties are to being on time. And survive massive shootings.

But in the second month, as quarantine crushed, Nadia had an epiphany. Quarantine was a chance at second childhood. Her only duty was to stay at home. And survive a pandemic. No job - New Zealand had decided for a universal income for all citizens and a rotation of workers - no worries.

Her first action was calling her 5-year boyfriend over for goodbye sex. Felt nothing. Told him she was done. He didn't put up a fight either.

Alone at home, with her city closing its borders and no prediction to return to normal, she freed herself from any connections to the former "normal" and explored a new world within her house, within her self, within herself. Marijuana, molly. No alcohol; didn't like the feeling. No thongs, she hated the string in her crack; always in the way, pinching. Left the house dirty for weeks. Slept slept slept. Took cold showers, walked naked. And couldn't stop thinking about once in college when she kissed a girl during truth or dare at a party. Those 3 extra seconds of kissing after everyone stopped laughing and moved on to the next person to be dared felt so... fresh.

Fierce as the new Nadia was, she got in contact with the girl. But things didn't flow like she pictured: the girl was married, with kids; seemed embarrassed when Nadia remembered their kiss. The backlash was strong. She felt bad about it all. Dirty for feeling that. Embarrassed to have acted on that.

Rekindled with her former normal, Nadia decided to stay a stalworth of the old. A denier of what was in front of everyone: nothing could ever be the same.

And that's when one usually gets broken: when they are too sure of something. Doubt is an essential aspect of human nature. We can't be sure of anything.

It was in the most unexpected of places where she finally felt connected with someone that brought her fire: the message boards of pottermore.com. It was Ruby, a 23-year old girl that got stripped of her prom due to the pandemic and its social distancing rules, and was crying about it on the boards. Nadia sent her a message with a picture of her looking very dorky in prom clothes and an extremely oily '2000s hairdo - a truly terribly embarrassing picture - saying "not having a prom can be a good thing, and I can prove". She said Nadia didn't prove a thing with that, because she looked very hot.

Ruby had always been fluid regarding her love life, which made Nadia comfortable with exploring that side of her. Because: what was to say that was not just a side? Wasn't that a time where people were finding out that the part was complemented by a whole and not the other way around? There were no limits to the feeling, only to the physical manifestation of it.

And ReLoMa came to fix even that.

So, for Nadia, the ReLoMa was the doorway to a new world, the stairway to a new era, the vehicle to her new ID.

"Need more minutes. Mom is nagging me."

Seeing that machine bare, already out of the box, shining, Nadia felt confused. That wasn't sexy at all. She needed to exercise her "one with the whole" a lot to be in the zone with that weird machine. She closed the curtains, lit some candles, put on a Spotify playlist called "Lovemaking" and slowly undressed herself. She sat next to it for a while. Took a deep breath and laid down, grabbing it and putting on top of her, adjusting the phallus near her vagina. She turned it on pushing the button for "auto-pilot".

It didn't take much for her to start enjoying it. As soon as she closed her eyes, the vibration of the plastic body warmed her juices and the phallus easily slid into her. It was... ok. ReLoMa's arms had a nice feel and tight grip. But she still needed the mental stimulation. She started thinking about Ruby but the images in her head were all of herself. All Nadia could think of was herself, naked... gloriously fucking a weird-looking machine - which would always cut her vibe. Still, she struggled to persevere. Pleasure was needed. She forced herself to moan, thinking the brain reacts to stimulations we propose with our body.

If we force a laugh, the brain understands it's supposed to produce happy hormones, so with sex is the same; if I moan, it will make the brain produce the pleasure that I'm not feeli--

*TOOM DOOM DOOM TA DA DOOM DOOM DOOM*
*TA DA DOOM DOOMDOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM*

Her iPhone - connected to her Bluetooth speakers - loudly blasted through alerting that Ruby was calling.

"Hey babe, got rid of mom. Are you ready?

Nadia took a deep breath, looked to her bed, with the ReLoMa laying by the bed with its phallus a bit red - she was in the second day of her period, where she usually felt the horniest. Looked at her image in the mirror: tits hanging out, hair messed up and socks still on. Thought about the whole struggle she was enduring for something that's supposed to be so natural.

"Something's come up. Raincheck?"