My Heart

On learning to trust yourself. I spent nearly a decade writing for clients, now I’ve got nearly two dozen books I can’t claim, a hefty folder of NDAs on my computer, and a slew of old contracts that brought me little joy and less pay.

It took me four more years and a pandemic to finally stop trying to fit a mold that had never brought me peace for as long as I’d pretzled myself into it. I can’t say I’ve found my peace yet, but I’m learning to listen to my imagination and be a better writer— simply.

Enjoy.

My Heart

The heart lay before me on her worktable, still pink, but cold and silent. I was nearly done with my greatest creation, if I could only make it beat again for her. I looked past the heart to the body on the table stitched together just like my favorite cadaver lab professor, Dr Frank had shown me. I chose my materials well, the face of the pretty waitress at the popular diner near the train tracks, the legs of the girl in school who walked like she’d never in her life stumbled or missed a step, the arms of a pair of twins, one left-handed, one right, both artists of amazing skill.

“Rachel, I’ll make it right again. I promise.”

Rachel, who had met my eyes when no one else would-- and smiled at me. Who had pushed my Coke bottle lenses up the bridge of my flushed nose and said that girls in specs (it was so cute how she called them specs) were the prettiest.

Rachel, who had perfect breasts and an outie belly button, and a pussy that tasted like old-fashioned honeyed candy. Who stole my smocks and wore them around the glorified closet that was our apartment with nothing underneath and curled up warm and naked behind me in our double bed and kissed my neck in the shower.

Who had shrieked and jumped on the bed in joy when the pregnancy test turned blue and kissed her way down my body to my thighs and nipped me, telling me what a good girl I was, and what a good mom I would be to our baby.

Rachel, who had sounded so calm on the phone when she called me to tell me she was bleeding. Who kept bleeding as I tore through red lights and prayed to a god I’d never believed in to stem the scarlet tide for just a few more minutes. It was Rachel who clung to that calm when the staff looked at us and curled their lips in disapproval and sometimes disgust and told us they couldn’t help us.

Fucking Catholics.

I turned my attention back to the heart under the magnifying lamp. These procedures were time-sensitive. Every moment I wasted on memories was a further assurance of failure. I’d tried so many times already. So many sweet, beautiful women sacrificed, but I had yet to raise my monster.

I attached electrodes to the heart and flipped the switch.

One pulse. Nothing.

I turned up the dial and tried again, examining the stitches in the firm pink flesh for signs of leaks or fresh tears.

Pulse—nothing.

Fuck.

“Please, please, please, please… I need this one thing and I’ll never do anything bad, never ever again…I’m not a monster. Please…”

I turned up the dial again, my hands shaking. The voltage was so high, higher than a bolt of lightning. High enough to set flesh on fire, if one had not taken every precaution.

Pulse—a pause so heavy it nearly drove me to my knees—and a second pulse. Then another, and another, as the heart fell into its familiar rhythm. I had never made it this far before. Fear anguish and grief had always stayed my hand until my harvested materials had been too far gone for use.

In the other room, Amelia began to fuss.

“She has missed you, our little girl. Oh, Rachel, she’s so strong. The doctors said she wouldn’t last the night, do you remember? She sleeps through the night now, nearly. I only left her alone in bed to work, and I fed her on the schedule you set from your books.”

Another indignant croak and the baby stilled. Just a dream, this time.

I set the heart inside Rachel’s chest, my hands already beginning to numb. Science, after all, could only go so far.

“I gave you my heart so long ago, in the courtyard at school, the first time you smiled at me. Amelia deserves her mommy. I love her, but you wanted her more than anything. She deserves that. Not a mother who wastes away looking for her love in every stranger’s face, but a mommy who lives for her.”

Under the bright surgery light, I tied my heart with its familiar whoosh, ska-whoosh, into her beautiful network of veins and arteries. I closed layer after layer of her mesentery, muscles, and tissue as my body responded to my mental commands less and less. If I had a heart still, it would have been pounding with anxiety.

I felt my face slacken with the final stitches and strained to tie off the end of the surgical thread. My sight went dark, and the last image burned on my retina was not the face of my love as I had planned, but the neat row of minuscule stitches that would heal to leave hardly any scar at all.

Professor Frank’s science had served me well, if not quite to my hopes.

I love you, Rachel. I have always loved you and now, you will feel that love with every beat of my heart.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

I opened my eyes and blinked against the bright light. I couldn’t remember how I got here—or shake the curious sense that I was not alone in the cold hum of machinery around me.

“Hello?”

Sudden panic hit me and I clutched my too-flat stomach. “Oh god,” I remembered. I remembered everything, bleeding in my bathroom, calling my wife to tell her things weren’t right without alarming her. Sophie could be so anxious about my health.

Sophie. She’d done terrible things to give me everything I wanted. Things I should have regretted. I deserved this. I deserved to lose my precious baby, after what she had cost us in our humanity. Sophie didn’t know that I knew. That I’d come to during the procedure when she stole the womb from that poor girl and gave it to me. But gods help me I wanted a baby so badly. We could have saved up and gotten Sophie one of those new “uterine transplants,” but people already hated us and feared her. She was the sweetest woman I’d ever known, and people feared her.

They made her a monster.

My beautiful, brilliant, perfect monster.

“Hello?” I sat up carefully, aching in every muscle, every joint, and every inch of my skin. The room was clearer, but my eyes refused to make sense of the horror that surrounded me. Women, some barely more than girls, on tables, partially wrapped in sheets, missing limbs and swathes of flesh…

I stared down at my knees as my stomach churned. There, just above my patella was a tight, tidy line of stitches.

Oh, Sophie, what have you done?

I examined myself, finding stitches all over me, and with each discovery, I remembered. The bright fluorescent lights of the hospital. Two Emergency Room doctors who refused to treat us. No one said the word “lesbian” but they wore it on their faces like a curse. Then, so much blood.

“Oh, my baby.” I couldn’t hold back my sobs. My body shook until I was sure I’d undo every evil stitch Sophia had sewn into me. Instead, a curious warmth spread through me, cradling my pain, holding me as my sweet love had when we realized we weren’t going to make it to the next emergency room.

I took a shaky breath, then another, and carefully stepped off the table, only to kick something soft on the floor.

Sophie.

A fresh wave of horror welled up in me as I stared down at the form of my beloved, her mechanical arms splayed wide, her chest open revealing the last of her humanity and the hole where her heart should be.

“Sophie, my darling, what did you do?” I knelt with her, pulling her into my arms and kissing her cold forehead. She had been my greatest joy and my greatest creation. I loved her from the moment I saw her hooked to the machine in the ICU. Did she ever know it was me who saved her? Were the bodies strewn about me my fault, for taking so much of what made her human, to keep her in my life?

In the other room, I heard a small, fitful commotion. My breasts tightened in response, and I knew.

Amelia Anne.

My baby.

I struggled to my still disobedient feet and staggered out of the lab clinging to machines and tables to stay upright. There, in the crib just beyond the door, was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. One brown eye, one blue, head covered in ruddy peach fuzz, wearing a petulant scowl on her chubby cheeks as she reached for me.

I put the fine line of healing stitches across her chest out of mind. We’d heal our scars together. I picked her up, my arms stronger with each second, and stronger still for contact with her healthy baby weight.

Amelia. My Amelia.

I carried her back into the lab and strapped her into her seat near the respiratory machine, giving her an unused robot finger to play with.

“Your mommy needs a new heart, sweetheart. Of course, she does. Always sentimental, our Sophie.” I hooked the lift to her frame and hoisted her onto the table I’d just vacated. “Luckily, I know just what to do.” I kissed her soft mouth and pushed her messy curls off her forehead. “Tonight, the baby and I will rest. Tomorrow, I’ll go visit that diner you like. It’s such a trendy spot.”

I picked up Amelia, who continued sucking Sophie’s spare finger like a pacifier.

So much to do, but it would wait until morning… and until the lab no longer smelled like a butcher shop. Human flesh was so unforgiving, not like metal. Metal and circuits can be repaired nearly forever.

My heart thudded comfortably in her chest, and Amelia cooed in my arms. Tomorrow would be a good day. A creating day.

“Amelia, don’t you think your Sophie mommy should give you a little brother?”

End