Heartless
Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Dani could not find her heart, believed her body beatless.
She held still, scared she might collapse when she poured breakfast, the marshmallow shapes falling into the bowl of stars and four-leaf clovers though the wish her mother would return from her new life and family states away never came true. The pink hearts swelled with milk, sour again because her father was always forgetting, like paying the electricity, the house shrouded in darkness some nights. She watched the hearts swell and burst, disintegrate like they were nothing.
Dani was scared while she ate, when she took the clattering bus to school, thankful her hair was long enough the boys thought her pretty, didn’t throw pencils at her like they did at Megan who slouched in her seat, dug her fingers into the crack like she was trying to climb inside. She was scared while she took careful notes—dotting the I in Dani with a heart—reviewing them later when she did her homework, though anatomy was a kind of disassembling she understood, the body reduced to parts, immobile and exposed.
And she was scared at night when her father drank, beat his fists against the table when he called her mother on the phone, her voice pulsing back to them before clotting. “Have a heart,” he would coo, and eventually, “Heartless bitch,” before hanging up and pacing the yard like their haunchy cat, kicking bear cans and dandelion heads to burst.
In the mirror Dani looked like her mother, dark hair and scared eyes. She had the same smart mouth, her father sometimes said, slapping her too. He mostly said sorry when he sobered, but warned her not to roll her eyes or give lip, the body dissected and faulty.
At night she heard the cat hunting, found in the morning a half-eaten bird on the porch, entrails left behind like they were worthless. She kicked at the tiny heart with the toe of her sneaker. She heard her father sobbing, cursing, and she agreed with him, could not believe a woman would leave her family if not for a missing heart.
On TV the Tin Man rusted without a heart and she thought of her mother’s copper eyeshadow, the metallic sound of her many bangles. Her mother’s mother had died of a heart attack, a cold unfeeling woman, her father said after their visits when Dani was still a child, her grandmother asking her father why he finished a six-pack so quickly, when he planned to find a job. Perhaps, Dani thought, clutching at her chest and gasping for breath, the women in her family didn’t have hearts at all, she too destined to leave, though she promised her father she wouldn’t when he held onto her shoulders and made her swear.
While Dani was busy holding still, refusing to breathe so she could hear the beat of her being, she thought of hearts. On the bus, she knew, Megan’s was scared and lurching, a canary thrashing in a cage; Ben’s a black pebble he threw at the girls; the bus driver’s pink and gummy like the strawberry lemonade he sucked from a Big Gulp. At school, the principal’s was a Lego set, rigid and precise, sharp if you got too close, and the anatomy teacher’s was a blue whale’s 400 pounds of muscle you could fit into if you got a bad grade or needed to stay inside at lunch because you were too scared to move, thought you might rupture aortic.
Her father’s was a wounded gray mouse, darting and shivering, licking its wounds and sharp claws, eyes red and ready to turn on you if he felt attacked. And hers was like her mother’s—gone, an empty ache where they both used to be.
“Heartless bitch,” she whispered out loud, unsure who she was even talking to anymore.
Dani began collecting hearts like her father accused her mother of doing. She ate all the marshmallows from the box, plucked them out and into her mouth. They were tasteless without the milk, saccharine and brittle, but she didn’t mind. She found a heart-shaped stone, lopsided and rough to the touch, and put it beneath her pillow, listening to it beat in the night. She held tomatoes in her hand, the same size, she knew, as a heart or clenched fist. They were full of pulp and seed, bursting between her teeth while her father moaned, “You ate my heart and spit me out” to her mother on the phone.
She took a heart-shaped locket from Britany’s locker and a can of artichoke hearts from the grocery store when her father was restocking the beer and forgetting the milk again. They tasted briny, a sting in her mouth like when she called her mother sometimes and heard her sigh, “Did your father put you up to this?” the sound her of new family thrumming in the background. She did not like the taste, but swallowed it down, hoped the choke heart would settle where her own should be.
In anatomy they dissected a sheep’s eye, the tissue squelching under Dani’s scalpel like when her father slept in the yard again, pissed himself under the stars. She sliced carefully into a frog, legs splayed wide like her slut mother under her lover, her father shouted at her voicemail until the restraining order arrived.
When the time came to dissect a cat, Dani worked alone, Megan home sad again. She moved her scalpel around the liver and stomach, located the pale heart behind the cage of the body.
She could almost feel her pulse again as she pulled loose the organ, felt a familiar tearing. She palmed the heart, meat and seep in her clenched fist. When no one was looking, she placed it in her shirt pocket, right over her own emptiness.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery.