Organ Atlas
An Autopsy of the Universe Inside Me
I went to the doctor yesterday, and the air, it’s like bleach, like gauze.
Fuck, what is that even?
It’s so clean it makes you believe hospitals aren’t packed with warm meat and gut-work.
Doc says my organs are rearranging themselves in the Milky Way’s constellations, and I nod through it.
Sure, doc. You’re the graduate. And who am I? A worm. A worm with a body that keeps betraying him.
He’s doing bedside poetry with all this shit. Terms I don’t understand bounce off my skull. Or maybe he’s talking and talking to soften the blow. It’s a possibility. At least I think so, until he finally swivels the monitor and the CT scan gets its teeth into me, into my peanut-fuckin’-brain.
And I see it.
Grainy black-and-white image.
There are nebulae in my liver and black holes chewing through my ribs. Their tiny yapping mouths, patient as termite little fucks gnawing bone into scalloped lace. Stardust floats where soft grey should be; it’s basically sawed-off bone, making glass-sand cyclones in me.
Diagnosis is clear-cut: My ribs are being eaten from the inside by a birthing singularity, doc says.
I tell the bastard: I’m sick, not blind. I know a galaxy when I see one.
Doc’s so afraid of what’s happening in me that his pen trembles. When he jots with it, it shakes and points.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I smell his fear amidst the sharp antiseptic punch. As if the screen might bite him. He ain’t got no balls of his own. Pathetic.
The universe is growing within me, waiting to explode out. My stomach bulges and swells, skin on the verge of cracking. Violet, taut, glossy with sweat and pulled tight. We’re in for a fucking ride.
They keep me in “for observation” for days like I’m a weather system.
Physicists in wrinkled suits swarm the hospital like fire ants. The entire government body studies the phenomenon, egghead after egghead. Like I’m another violent sunset.
Their words ring in my ears. We can’t contain it, they said. The growth is universal. It cannot stop.
When my stomach ruptures, this reality goes with it.
I shrug. What can I do?
Every heartbeat comes with a sound I feel in my teeth. With each laboured breath, tiny planets pop into existence behind my navel, injecting hot-iron pressure, haemorrhaging my insides. The sick little click of mass becomes boils of creation, pimples of gravity.
I will be the singularity, one and only.
Word gets out.
They announce we’ll all watch a reality-ending event televised nationwide from my house. It doesn’t make goddamn sense: humans watching all life end on TV, choosing screens over grabbing the scraps of love they’ve got left.
Are we all that hopeless?
The hospital discharges me. They say: “Be comfortable. Just make sure you’re at your address for the live telecast crew.” Comfortable. Just a word, as if comfort exists inside a body that’s becoming a new galaxy.
I sign the papers and go home. I walk heavy, carrying the end of the world in my gut. The pavement feels too thin under me. I’m much denser, but stronger too.
I picture collapsing right here, singularity opening in the street, sucking up hospital, city, Earth, Moon, every undeserving fucking mouth.
At home, I make it to my own bathroom and vomit. It comes up black-flecked and glittering, bile threaded with stardust, sweet-copper stink, and asteroids, lots of them. My mouth tastes like burnt ash with blood. My tongue feels furred like I licked a charred star.
In two days of resting and pain, my flesh splits in cracks, reaching the threshold. Warm blood trickles down my sides. Pressure builds toward a catastrophic birth. Suddenly, my body feels too large for the room.
They ring my doorbell.
I try to stand. I can’t. I’m stretched across the whole room, a human horizon on the verge of a breakout. The telecast crew doesn’t wait—of course, they don’t.
They ram the door.
They flood in with cables, bright lights, and eager faces.
They want a good shot.
Here we are. The reality is ending with me.
My chest aches as black holes devour my failing heart. It’s all erupting soon. It’s all finally here.
And I think, smiling:
Good. Let it all rot. We don’t deserve any better.
Third Eye Horror
© Mac Sitko, 2025
All rights reserved.
I like how it starts out small and then just takes over in a squeezing, brutal way. And of course, the media has to be all over it. Haha. Good tale.
Oh hell yes. Body, cosmic, horror, collision. Furious, resigned, darkly funny in that if I don’t laugh I’ll scream way, and it carries the escalation beautifully from clinical unease to full scale annihilation. Adore how the medical setting becomes just another failed containment fantasy. Language, protocols, the TV broadcast... every human system meant to manage catastrophe collapses into spectacle leaving the body to hold the universe alone! Pivot from diagnosis to weather system to televised event? Wrecked. Choosing bitterness over awe, rot over reverence, yes, more! This one made my teeth feel all tingly.