Medical consensus is that autism is not caused by Covid infections. However, I beg to differ. The birthday party today was held in the full humid heat of afternoon, at one of those obstacle courses they build for children outdoors. Plastic, rope and timber sweating in the sun. My son was born in 2020. He came into a world that had already decided to forget. There were no real lockdowns here. The stay at home order ended June 1, 2020 and we all went back to normal, as if normal were a door you could close behind you. Today at the party a boy in his kindergarten class punched him in the face. Not in play. A closed fist sudden as a crack of thunder. When I knelt to him, his cheek blooming red, I asked, “Was he a bully?” Then my son said, “No. He has autism,” as if reciting a prayer he had been taught would end all questioning. And the other mothers and fathers nodded as the cicadas screamed in the pines. I felt the old stark reminder of being the only one still keeping common sense. I am not interested in attacking autistic children or their parents. That is not the haunting. The haunting is this generation born since 2019. My son’s kindergarten class have had Covid and Covid and Covid again because no one around us masks or vaccinates, not even at the start of all this. I watch them in their classrooms and at these gatherings and I see a new, sudden, explosive aggression in some of these kids with a short fuse. And when I call it out, I am told to be tolerant, and to absorb the blow. But tolerance has become a kind of crypt. We are asked to bury what we know and what we have seen since the pandemic began. That continuous infections are not free. They settle in all of us and touch the brain, nervous system, and the soft architecture of a child still becoming, and forever onwards just like us parents, 2-3x per year. I am left holding my son’s hot face in my hands, listening to the laughter and screams of other children over the obstacles, understanding that I live in a place with 2 stories. One where everyone insists the plague is over or never has existed, and one underneath, where the price is still being counted in blood and in bruises, and I am expected to call it tolerance and say nothing more.