ORGAN STAMPEDE

My organs had grown accustomed to ignoring one another, each with his own duties, et cetera, but one day the pancreas announced his intent to visit the outside world. Here I feel confined, he said. Spleen is cramping my style. His voice carried in such a tight space and soon others agreed they too felt like prisoners in a cell of suffocated dreams.

Sensing my vulnerability, the organs chose to revolt during one of my Harley rides through the country. I felt a wrenching pain, then my arms stopped working as they should and I lurched forward onto the pavement. The wreck opened a seam in my side from which organs crawled, liver and kidneys and brain sluicing free.

Once exposed to dry air and sunlight, however, the organs, browning there on the highway, recognized the magnitude of their blunder. As machines they’d performed admirably all these years, yet as creatures acting of their own free will, the organs could be said to lack a certain savoir-faire.