My name is Tommy Orange. I'm a fiction writer from Oakland, California. I wrote a short story called The Team for the Decamaron Project for The New York Times magazine.

The Decamaron Project is based on a novella written by Giovanni Paccaccio during the time of the Black Plague.

The Decamaron Project mirrors it. It's like a collection of stories put together. Everyone wrote it in the time period above coronavirus happening.

I think it's interesting to write fiction that is trying to be relevant to its time period. Often fiction is written after years having passed, especially when the news is moving as fast as it is.

But I think something that stays constant in fiction when fiction is doing its best is its ability to build our empathic intelligence.

By reading about fiction, you get inside the character's heads and their hearts and you understand their context.

And I think we need more nuance when it comes to thinking about other people in their lives can really help in divisive times and in times where the divide seems so massive and our fellow Americans seem so far from each other as to be almost a different species.

Fiction can help us understand our humanity better in ways that sometimes journalism in the news can't.

So here's my story, the team, read by me, Tommy Orange, as well as another story written in red by a Dweeage Tantika.

You'd been staring at a wall in your office for what amount of time you weren't sure. Time slipped that way lately, as if behind a curtain and back out again as something else.

Here is an internet hole. There is a walk on your street you insisted on calling a hike with your wife and son.

Here is a book your eyes look at that you don't comprehend. There is crippling depression. Here is observing circling turkey vultures. There is your ever imminent anxiety. Here is a failed zoom call. There is a homeschooling shift with your son.

Here is April may already gone. There is the obsession of the body count, the nameless numbers rising on endless graphics of animated maps.

Time was not on your side or anyone's. It was dreaming its waste with you as you hidden in loud as the sun behind a cloud.

You were thinking of when you were last in public. This wasn't counting the masked and panicked weekly grocery store runs or the post office box cramble you with your precariously stacked boxes of the unessential keeping as much distance as you could from anyone you saw.

Especially after hearing a podcast that introduced you to the disgusting idea of mouth rain. You don't even make eye contact with anyone anymore. So afraid are you of the spread.

The last mask gathering public type thing you'd done was running your first half marathon. There is your medal in your office, hung like a deer head.

A half marathon doesn't sound like a whole lot. It's just being the half. But it was a big deal to you to run and run for 13 miles without stopping.

When you first started training, you actually paid money to join a running team that gathered together and pumped you up about how grueling it all was.

You did chance and listen to your team leaders rant about their race times and the superior foods and energy sources they carried in plastic sacks around their wastes. You hated the team training so you quit and started to think of your whole body and health and routine and running songs playlist as the team.

You got up early to run and you went on more than just one run a day sometimes. You kept to the mileage you planned and kept to the diet prescribed by the app you downloaded to train. The app then was also part of the team.

The team kept its promises to itself.

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