The Vitreous Heart

Not because of the rust but because of the silence. Seven years of living in the “Salt-Box,” a dilapidated lighthouse standing alone by the shores of a forsaken sea, which had long pulled back from its former position for miles and miles. These were the remains of a war that had ended so peacefully that there was no need to let any losers know about it. They hid in the spaces between words. Silas saw to it that the solar panels functioned, whereas Calla managed to obtain salt from the sea. They even behaved as if they were dealing with explosives, being extremely careful and accurate about everything . Their love was their fortress, and the blocks of their love built up walls through which no tears of “Before” could seep. It began in the short wave radio station. The hoarse voice from the North declared "the Fever Strain." It wasn't about the virus moving around in the blood vessels but about something in connection with the earth, "Vitreous Bloom."

"Just more white noise, Calla," Silas muttered. His voice was hoarse, and he didn't even have the decency to look at her. She had overpowered him, and he did not have the patience for the dark smudges around her eyes. “She told me that the salt will become glass,” whispered Calla. “She told me that it will have the taste of rain.” On the third day, a flower grew from Calla’s hand. No normal flower grown in a green house, but a stone flower growing from Calla’s calloused thumb. No pain but the feeling of fire within and a strange sense of life. She said nothing. She had put gloves to cover up the revolution taking place beneath them. The Bloom, however, was a ravenous thing. As the week drew to an end, the salt desert stopped reflecting light, and began diffusing it. In other words, the desert of whiteness was now broken into pieces of glass. Glass flowers rose up high and pieces of blue ferns grew from the desert. It was Silas who became sick first. He had passed out by the generator, his body dripping sweat of diamond dust.

"Silas!" exclaimed Calla, bending over and trembling hands encased in gloves reaching out.

"Don’t touch me!" he said roughly. "It’s happening…. the salt…. the salt is mutating.”

“Everything isn’t about the salt,” she said in a hoarse voice. She took off her glove, and now her hand was not a human hand anymore but a work of art created from amber and rose quartz—a tree made of glass without her fingers.

He looked at her. The defenses that he erected throughout decades, the “I’m okay,” and “pass the water please” that he uttered hundreds of times, turned into dust.

“If I had not loved you,” Silas said quietly, “and I had to witness your death in this dismal environment, then definitely I would not have been tormented by my emotions.” "'I’ve been dead for seven years, Silas,' she told him, bending over his body. "Both of us."

The rotation of the earth matched with the rotation of the heart. As soon as the screams of the glass forest went forth amidst the storm, turning into an orchestra of a thousand bells, Calla bowed down.

Their first kiss wasn’t even tender in any manner. It was a kiss between two beasts desiring one another, replete with minerals and salt, fearing the fierce fever taking hold of them. The union of two such individuals made the “Salt-Box” stop being a cage. The walls of stone crumbled away because of the union’s strength.

No longer surviving, Silas and Calla had become the ground on which they stood. The arid desert around them transformed into a cathedral lit up with lights, and it morphed into a sapphire forest that was now blue enough to meet the heavens. In everything, Silas and Calla existed as a living piece of quivering quartz.

And so the world did not come to an end. It simply bided its time until the fever subsided.