FICTION

The New Version

Flash fiction about endings and beginnings

When it was all over they studied how it started. When it was all over they rearranged their calendars. When it was all over they kept the pets they’d adopted, but allowed their closets to fall back into disarray. When it was all over they had new leaders, new songs, new science, but old habits, old hatreds. When it was all over they went on vacation.

When it was all over they joined a book club, feeling suddenly as if there was nothing they couldn’t do. When it was all over they congratulated each other on their survival without forgetting the numbers, the numbers that had kept them up at night all those many long months, wondering. Feeling frightened, feeling electrified and tight-chested.

That feeling had been what propulsed them through many days they weren’t sure how to endure — and when it wasn’t that feeling, pushing them to just get through, that wide-awake electrified terror feeling, it was outrage. Just your basic low-level torrent, fueled by angry questions with no answers, like how could we have let this happen, how is this still happening, how are people not getting that this is really happening.

When it was all over they went to the movies, went shopping, spent money, ate out, drank more, no, wait, drank less. Or wait, no, more. Much more.

When it was over, it really seemed like the world they returned to had been waiting for them just where they’d left it, like a patient animal, with all its mute hurt.