Rona, a tiny spherical bat-kisser who wears a blue coat covered with bobbles, lived for her first 19 years in the jungle with a colony of bats. But one day the bats were seized by an intruder and taken to an animal market in the town of Wuhan. In the market Rona fell for a smiling local man called Wang and jumped on him and began kissing him all over. Several days later while going home on the bus with Rona, Wang let out a piercing cry and collapsed.
Read on!
Episode 2
Rona found herself on the floor with Mr Wang and continued kissing him like crazy in the hope that this would make him stand up again and carry on as before. But after a while – by now the bus had juddered to a halt and the other passengers had backed away from him – she realised that Mr Wang’s days of standing up, laughing, shouting, cooking, eating, kicking footballs, sleeping and waking up were over. Mr Wang was dead.
She kept kissing him anyway – Rona was a kisser, it was the only thing she knew how to do – but she felt her strength ebbing away. Kissing dead Wang was no good: if she kept doing it, she too would soon be dead. She needed another live person to kiss, and fast. She looked around and surveyed the possibilities.
Nearby, at a distance of approximately 199.9 centimetres, a lady passenger was gazing at Wang’s dead body and screaming her head off. Rona reckoned she was just close enough, so summoning the remains of her strength she hurled herself into the woman’s gaping mouth. Inside, she soon discovered, there were lots of interesting things to kiss, starting with the lungs.
Ten days later, the woman, whose name was Woo, was eating a dish of bat soup in Wuhan’s market when she had an attack of coughing. Rona had been quietly kissing the lady’s tongue and savouring the piquant flavour of bat wings cooked in black bean sauce, but when Ms Woo coughed she was blasted out of her mouth like a rocket, and crash-landed on the face of a man wearing a uniform, a peaked cap and sunglasses who was shouting down a megaphone.
Rona kissed him experimentally – he tasted strangely salty – then looked around and noticed that all the stall holders were chucking their merchandise – wolf cubs, snakes, turtles, guinea pigs, rats, otters and badgers – into bulging, squirming, wailing sacks and throwing the sacks into pickup trucks and driving off. Wuhan’s animal market was closing down.
Rona’s new host, a policeman called Zee, was still bellowing down his megaphone, and Rona looked around for someone less noisy to kiss. Standing nearby was a young fellow holding a camera up to his face and snapping the market scene, taking photographs of everything and smiling broadly as he did so. Rona stared in admiration.
The young man’s name was Pete McGonagall, he was a press photographer from England, and the reason he was smiling was because he had had an amazing stroke of luck. In Wuhan to photograph the animals penned up in the city’s notorious wet market, he was the only foreign snapper in the middle of the hottest news story in the world. He had the catastrophe all to himself! Covid19 was going to make him rich!
Rona looked at the shouting, glowering, sweating policeman on whom she was perched and she looked at handsome, grinning Pete and it was no contest. She took a flying leap and landed on Pete’s nose, and a brand new emotion flooded her tiny heart. Rona was in love.
Continued in Episode 3