Moore’s story describes the unsettling circumstances of socially distanced bedside visitation and communication with sick loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic. That bedside visits in hospitals are rendered impossible due to quarantine protocols and the risk of infection leads Moore to ask, what is lost when visitation and communication are reduced to mere virtual interactions (FaceTime calls and Zoom meetings)? How does our sense-making of illness change when suffering is not experienced as a proximate and physical presence but as a projection on a screen? Bedside visitations can be meaningful haptic experiences. We might feel compelled to reach out, touch, and hold the hand of a loved one—to be pulled into the orbit of their suffering, even if we cannot understand it. When hospital visits become remote aural and visual experiences, the capacity of non-verbal communication (i.e., the touch) can no longer bring the singular comfort it provides. To some degree, Moore’s story unsettles medical worker hagiography popularized by national news and social media. Nurses, for example, are characterized as faceless beekeepers (much can be said of this larger apiary-hospital parallel), “their voices the high, chipper kind that children and the elderly are supposed to prefer.” The protagonist and her sister even order a pizza for the hospital staff, a kind of offering for more attentive care. At the end of one FaceTime call, the nurse gives a cheery “Goodnight,” but the protagonist muses that she is only “performing the role of saintly nurse,” that “her loving-kindness would vanish as soon as the iPad went dark, and her demeanor would reveal an eagerness to be rid of this covid-ic old guy with his bedsore and immobile hip, his catheter and oxygen tubing.” Perhaps Moore's character is not casting doubt on the nursing staff at all. It is more likely the case that this cynicism is somewhat inescapable when one’s suffering and grief are circumscribed to virtual space, when one’s sense of ephemerality is heightened because human connectedness is experienced only as long as technology sustains it. The glow of computer and smartphone screens, the cool solicitude of hospital staff, the isolation of quarantine—these are the severe contours of Moore’s COVID-19 world.