two opposing endings in response to “Our Organs Would Explode Inside Us” by Matthew Salesses

I.

We looked in the mirror and saw people we used to know, and the hunger stopped.

And the questions began.

Why such a constant, rangeless vacuum, our patch of ocean? How long had we allowed our insatiable whims to hijack our brains, our days? More importantly, what was wrong with us, that we cast epidemics about like shadows? We lost the will to eat. We slept spastically. We sipped orange Gatorade and gathered in living rooms, coffee shops, church basements. We had much to process, but when we saw each other in the cold light of banality — the loose-hung curtains of skin, the mayonnaise-and-bile-stained clothing, the beards interlaced with bits of dried flesh and broken glass — we saw utter complicity. We told each other there could be no truth found amongst ourselves. We needed keener perspective, sight milked from untainted eyes. A voice seeped from the hills into our ears and whispered of clarity. Of lenses.

We went to the stores, the banks, the hospital, anywhere with security cameras mounted high on walls or fish-eyed into ceilings. We burned years worth of their binary truths onto DVDs and thumb drives and drove each other like prescient cattle into the high school auditorium on a Friday night, the very same night we built a bonfire in the middle of the football field and burned everything we ever wrote about our island.

The images made us heave and hive and tremble. We watched old men eating handfuls of bolts right out of the bins at the hardware store, women who cast off clothes and lives for their obsessions, children robbed of their memories left crying in alleyways. We squirmed in our seats, felt the upholstered cushions beneath us, and despite our nausea, wondered how easily the padding could be ripped out from under us with our fingertips, no longer caring how it would taste on our tongues, but whether it could plug up our expanding voids, even for a moment. We realized, too late, that we were gnawing at the root of one of our epidemics. Or of all of them.

We walked home on glacial footsteps, our new lens-eyes making razored boulders of every mote in our path. We felt hollow, then cold, then bruised inside, for nothing was left to slow the fear in its ricochets. We were inner-nude, birth-raw, self-lethal.

Out of sheer habit formed during our previous epidemic, we headed straight for our kitchens, but found we had already nailed the doors shut. We remembered doing that, and we remembered that we kept pry bars in our medicine cabinets, behind the mirrors. And then we remembered that we were trying to forget that we kept pry bars in our medicine cabinets. We put both our hands on our spinning sinks, to steady ourselves. Our lens-eyes saw all of this at once, and too much more, that final day on our island, the day our self-inflicted epidemic of unease displaced all other diseases.

We looked in our mirrors for the last time and saw how much we resembled the man in the hills, the sad and magicless one, the one immune to bloodspark and overgrowing hearts and sweet oblivion, and we clawed at our lens-eyes and wept like adams and eves as we packed our belongings.

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II.

We looked in the mirror and saw people we used to know, and the hunger stopped.

And for a time we were without epidemic, yet our island felt strangely still, the way our white gulls roost and fall silent when green-black clouds collect in the west above the September sea.

We noticed it first on clock faces. Some had but three numbers left; others had swelled to thirty. The sun began to hug the horizon, even at mid-day. In fear, we sent one of us to be Tallykeeper, locked him in the basement vault of our town hall so he could sort seconds into minutes into hours into days, without regard for the cracks developing in the air around us. We sent an Assistant Tallykeeper to watch his count, another team of Tallykeepers to spell the first pair while they slept, Tallykeeper Keepers to attend to their needs, and Tallyguards to ensure the count continued without interruption.

The rest of us, outside, learned to live anew; ate and slept and worked and sexed to no other framework than our bones. Time became uncomfortable — an ill-fitting shirt – and we cast it off on April the 12th at 1:04 in the afternoon, the moment we opened the vault and ceased the count and cut anchor from all we held familiar.

The vault we made into the centerpiece of the Museum of Epidemics. Mounted on the walls of the corridor leading to it we hung original, hand-written love notes from the King of Unrequited Love to his famous Samantha, each encased in plexiglass. Our schoolchildren visited the vault on field trip days, and always the unlucky misbehaving one was made to sit in the tally chair and count out loud for the rest.

Our radio and television signals from outside world gradually faded into static. Sunsets became paisleyed. Constellations grew foreign. We learned to track days in truths we discovered about ourselves, and nights in how much we had yet to know. Mostly, what we did not know was how happy we would be. The only ones among us who could understand were those sailors who had spent so many nights adrift on the open ocean, too excited to sleep. They taught us to lie still in the dark and feel the waves roll through us and trace the new stars with our fingertips and wonder what curiosities tomorrow’s light might bring.