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Our Island of Epidemics

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Matthew Salesses

2010

Gina Myers

In Our Island of Epidemics, Matthew Salesses presents a series of fourteen pieces of flash fiction which work together to tell the history of an island of, well, epidemics. On this island, one epidemic follows another and the community suffers collectively. While epidemics of oversensitive hearing, hunger, and farts may not be so appealing, the epidemic of memory loss brought immigrants to the island who “came, after a bout of suffering, to catch the disease and stay.” Other epidemics the island must suffer through include unstoppably growing hearts, bad jokes, insomnia, obsession, unrequited love, magic, lost voices, and talking to animals, to name a few. The narrator writes:

In Our Island of Epidemics, Matthew Salesses presents a series of fourteen pieces of flash fiction which work together to tell the history of an island of, well, epidemics. On this island, one epidemic follows another and the community suffers collectively. While epidemics of oversensitive hearing, hunger, and farts may not be so appealing, the epidemic of memory loss brought immigrants to the island who “came, after a bout of suffering, to catch the disease and stay.” Other epidemics the island must suffer through include unstoppably growing hearts, bad jokes, insomnia, obsession, unrequited love, magic, lost voices, and talking to animals, to name a few. The narrator writes:

The epidemics were relentless, like the epidemic of laziness—during that one I couldn’t have even told this story, not that I am sure I wanted to tell it, not that I am sure I want to tell it now. The telling is relentless, too.

While the majority of the pieces are written from the perspective of first person plural—our and we—with some using the first person singular, the reader still meets some interesting characters, from the King of Unrequited Love; to the object of his love, Samantha, and her animal god carved from stone who comes to life during the epidemic of magic; to the community member who develops immunity to the epidemics and is chased into the hills.

Much like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Our Island of Epidemics is richly imaginative in its variations, as we see how affliction after affliction affects these islanders. And, much like the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the strangeness is not really all that strange. In “An Intervention,” which describes the epidemic of obsession, the narrator relays:

We started leaving our lives for the things we thought we loved: quitting our jobs for our hobbies, leaving our spouses for crushes, disappearing from our homes to go back to the places of our youth, dreaming the same dreams night after night. What we wanted was for what we thought we loved to last forever and for what we wanted to be the same as who we thought we were, and we grew obsessed with the epidemic of obsessing.

The Island of Epidemics makes for a quick read, coming in at only forty pages, which includes several full pages of illustrations. However, in these brief shorts, Salesses is able to render a fascinating world completely.

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