Ghost Heart

Hi guys! I want to start off by thanking everyone who has stuck with me over the past three weeks—I’ve been very erratic with posting and I’m sorry for that. A couple of not so cool things have happened and, sometimes, I just don’t have the energy to write. Thanks for your patience!

Today’s short story is inspired by a friend of mine who’s picked up the pieces of her life three times since I met her. Her strength has always inspired me, but not as much as her kindness.————

-—

The grinding emptiness is a new feeling, Cadie thinks. She stares at her ceiling and idly tracks the empty reverberations in her chest as they sink down from her sternum, to her shoulder blades, and then back up again. She thinks if emptiness had a sound, it’d be like a basketball deflating slowly--a never ending hiss and the crushing disappointment of a game never again able to be played.

She thinks she’s turned into quite the poet since Joey stole her heart. Ironic, really, since her English professors were rather insistent that all the famous poets possessed not one but multiple hearts accumulated over long and hard lives. 

“Mary Shelley eat your heart out,” Cadie says to the ceiling and it’s almost funny enough to make her laugh. According to her professor, Mary Shelley had taken her husband’s heart shortly before his passing at his request. Which heart would Shelley eat? Hers or the only remnant she had of the man she was rumoured to have loved all her life?

If Shelley ate her own, she’d probably have regretted it though. Cadie can’t imagine anyone choosing to live like this. 

Her alarm goes off an hour after the sun rises, the sound bouncing around her hollow bones until her teeth are gritted against the vibration.  She swings her legs over the side of her bed, feet thudding against the floor and yanks the plug out of the wall rather than fiddling with the small buttons on the damn thing.

Her clothes for the day are already laid out from last night’s tired bedtime ritual. She used to love the spontaneity of choosing her outfits in the morning, loved matching colors to her mood, to her makeup, to the clouds outside, but that’d been one of the first things killed by her absent heart. Now she has to pick her attire carefully before the morning saps all motivation. There’s only so many times she can let herself show up to class in sweats, heart or no.

She idly notes that the purple v-neck used to be one of her favorite shirts and the dark jeans her second favorite pants before heading for the dining hall. Another day, another list of things to do, another series of listless moments that tick, tick, tick through her whole body.

She eats raisin bran for breakfast because it’s the closest thing when she enters the dining hall. That, more than anything, really sets the tone for her life without a heart.

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It happens like this: he’s hot and she’s the life of the party. She’s dancing because everyone wants to but nobody is, hands over her head and hips shaking to a 2008 boy band that she will never admit she’s forgotten the name of. All around her are her sisters, nervously chittering as they sway to the beat, eyes on the fraternity boys loitering around them in a loose circle.

Predator behavior, she thinks as she executes a sloppy spin. She’s not quite as drunk as she’s pretending to be, not quite as loose as her movements convey, but she knows that no one besides her will ever know that. She’s a master of body language, a regular spy, and knows that her greatest weapon is that nobody cares. 

The predators aren’t looking at her, just the person they think she is, waving her arms in the air and grinning something fierce as her sisters finally start to dance with her instead of at her.

Except him. She doesn’t know it yet, but he cares about her, wants her in a way that people aren’t supposed to want other people. Wants her like he craves oxygen in his blood, wants her like a writer craves ink in his pen, wants her like she’s an answer to a puzzle he’s worked on his whole life.

And she doesn’t know that this is a different sort of want than the one she’s been looking for her whole life. That this is nothing like the movies, nothing like the books, nothing like the way her grandmother looked at her grandfather’s heart on the mantle after him being dead for years and years and years.

But. She doesn’t know it yet. All she knows is that he’s one of them, one of those boys who think they’re wolves around a flock of sheep, one of those boys who can’t see the brass knuckles on her sisters’ keychains or the fangs that life has already put in a couple of their mouths.

So when he invites her upstairs, she takes in his square jaw, his white teeth, the sparkle in his eye, and is even a little regretful when she shakes her head no. It makes her feel powerful to say no-- to see the chagrin in his face at the quirk of her lips-- but he’s just cute enough that that’s not all she gives him.

She darts forward and presses a kiss to his cheek, winking at the surprise on his face before taking one of her sister’s arms and helping her out to where the Uber is waiting.

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It’s her fourth week living without a heart and her grades are...fine. They’re not great like they used to be. As the semester marches on, the creative assignments are pouring in and she always gets the same comments on her stories.

There needs to be something more.

There is a disconnect between audience and character…

..no tension…

...no intrigue…

...no heart.

She looks at the board outside her Advanced Writing Workshop with pursed lips. The best assignments are pinned there every week, a sort of award for those who improved and excelled. The first two weeks are her stories from Before. The next one is from Tiana, a sister, and the last three are his.

Moving.

Incredibly well executed emotional pay off.

See me to talk about the future of this short story. 

That last one is new and makes her feel raw because she recognizes the lines of this story. They’re words that have sat heavy in her heart for years and somehow Joey, Joey who’s had her heart for only a month, has managed to unlock them.

“Cadie.”

She turns to find him, not nearly as handsome as the devil, standing behind her with no shame in his face. He’s smiling at her, warm and happy, bag slung over one shoulder like he’s out of a 2000 school rom com.

“I missed you last night,” he says. He reaches out to tuck her hair behind her ear, the gesture easy and possessive like he has the right to her. “What happened?”

She remembers something about going to see a movie with him and some of her sisters. She remembers them asking her about it, remembers them trying to pull her out of bed, remembers giving them a smile and an excuse that wasn’t even compelling enough for her to recall.

“Homework,” she says instead of how seeing him is almost enough to make her heartlessly homicidal. Her eyes flick to his bag and back away again. “I need it back.” The words fall out of her mouth like the tide--slow and inevitable.

Expected. It’s not the first time she’s asked.

He coos at her, slinging an arm over her shoulder like she used to love and leading her into the classroom. “Sweetheart, you know it’s still yours. I’m just holding onto it, but it’s always yours.”

His words are sweet and calm, something out of one of those romances she used to love, but there’s something sharp in his deliberate ignorance. 

She peels herself away from him and sits at the far edge of the classroom, no longer the primary contributor to discussion. It’s been four weeks since he stole her heart and only one since she realized it.

She wonders what she’s going to do about it.

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The first date he takes her out on is...magic. They trade quips and barbs, all with the smile of people who are honestly delighted to have found a match. An equal.

“I’ve felt too fast all my life,” she confesses to him into the third hour of conversation on the bus stop bench. Seven buses have passed them by, seven times she should have gone home but hadn’t. “People have always told me to be smaller. Quieter.”

He’s silent for a moment and then reaches out to cover one of her cold hands with his warm palm. “I don’t want that. I think you’re...perfect.”

There’s so much sincerity in his voice that she looks down, heat rising in her face. “For a given value of perfect,” she quips, trying to hide how hard her heart is beating.

“My kind of value,” he whispers into her hair, so close.

She looks up, a beat, his eyes slide to her lips, a beat, she leans in, a beat, and--

They kiss.

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She writes enough about witches that she should have known all magic has a cost. Should have known that the price was written in the heat of his gaze, the ragged ridge of his teeth, the question of his hands.

It’s a cost she didn’t know she’d be paying.

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“Did you know,” Tiana says idly during the fifth week of Cadie’s heartless existence, “that scientists have found a way to make a pig’s heart suitable for human transplant.”

Cadie, sitting and staring at a blinking cursor, looks up with brows pinched. “What?”

“It’s called a ghost heart,” Tiana continues, taking the seat across from her at the breakfast table. There are layers and layers under her voice, layers that Cadie can’t quite separate like she used to. “It’s not really a replacement. It’s a framework. They think they can graft the remnants of a human’s heart to it, make it so that it grows the hurt parts of itself back. Like stem cells.” She looks abruptly frustrated. “I’m not explaining this very well.”

Ghost heart. The words echo through Cadie’s head. Ghost heart. She looks into Tiana’s eyes and sees a different sort of ghost there. She unwelds her back teeth to ask, “What do you know?”

“Nothing,” Tiana says and sighs. “But you changed since that night. I can see it in your writing.” She quiet for a moment. “I loved your writing.”

Tiana flinches at the past tense. Cadie does not.

Cadie sighs and leans back, head spinning. Ghost heart. “So did I.”

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Cadie writes her autobiography in her head and she knows what she’d title the chapter of her life that changed everything.

Chapter Ten: That Night.

That night she opened her mouth and he heart tumbled into his waiting hands, warm and pulsating like a star that’d forgotten to rise in the sky. She’d watched the wonder on his face with pride, with love, with excitement. No one but her parents had seen her heart, not like this, and she’s so overwhelmingly pleased to see him track the veins of color that run through it, the imperfections, the parts that shine brighter than others.

“Cadie,” he says breathlessly, eyes sparkling from the light in his hands. “It’s beautiful.”

There’s a distant discordance there-- she listens to words and what he’s said doesn’t match the script she had her mind set on. You’re beautiful. She shakes it off like water and smiles helplessly at him.

“I wanted you to see,” she says, bringing her hands up under his. She imagines she can feel the heat from her heart through his hands. She’s always been proud of who she is. “I wanted you to know.”

“You love me,” he whispers. His eyes don’t rise to meet hers, locked onto her stories and dreams and fears. 

“I do,” she says. She thinks it’s fast, but she knows that’s how love works sometimes--fast and reckless and so alive it hurts. She licks her lips. “C-can I see?”

He stills, skin going cold under her palms. He takes a step back, inadvertently (she thinks), bringing her out of contact with him and her heart. It makes her cold, down to her bones, and her mouth fills with ash as he takes her light with him.

“I-I need time,” he says finally. “You-- I’ve told you about my childhood. Please, give me time to believe this is real.”

She swallows her disappointment, her fear of rejection, everything, and pulls up a smile just for him. “Of course. I can wait. As long as you need.” She reaches for him (for her heart) and blinks back confusion as he, once again, steps away from her.

“Thank you,” he says with relief and warmth that manages to ease the bite of cold in her bones. He shifts nervously. “Do you think I could-- do you think I can keep it? Just for a bit,” he rushes to add. He pulls her heart towards his chest. “I can tell it’s real when I hold your heart like this. Next to mine.”

She thinks about his loveless childhood before she answers, arms unconsciously wrapping around herself. She’s been socially trained, a social mockery of love, and she brings all the warmth she can no longer feel to her voice.

“Of course. Whatever you need.”

And his smile is so close to being the sun that she’s able to keep believing.

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Tiana had said framework. A graft. Bare bones for the ghost to cling to, something, and Cadie doesn’t feel much but she feels the need to do this.

She looks around her room for inspiration, chest throbbing with the ghost of memory. There used to be piles of construction paper, pools of pastel, mountains of clothes and pens and creativity strewn all around, but her heartless state has changed that. She doesn’t think to be clean is to be heartless for everyone, but, for her, it’s...rather plain.

Her notebooks are lined up on her bookshelf, pushed flush against the back. In front of them are the little things she tries not to step on-- tacks and keys and hair ties. Things she’d have to move if she ever got the will to write in her books again, if she ever tried to take them down again. She hasn’t.

Her bed is unmade and bearing what were her least favorite sheets. They’re brown and orange, muddy colors from a muddy childhood, and she can’t remember how long she’s had them on her mattress. Her bedside table is holding the same book from a month ago, no progress made. 

She realizes that she isn’t going to find inspiration. She’s not capable of it. She curls her hands into fists and squares her shoulders.

Okay then.

She gathers the relics of who she used to be. A pen her big sister gave her during last year’s rush, one with a pink fuzzy top and big greek letter hanging on three links of chain. A paintbrush with the bristles clumped together from ill use and ill care. A figurine of a raven her mom gave her for her birthday, a notebook she’s had since high school filled with story ideas, a small stress ball absently grabbed at her freshman orientation. Bits and bobs that she fishes from the back of desk drawers, behind hair products and crumpled papers, underneath books and bags.

She lines all these things up on her desk, nudges them and fiddles with them until the form the crude shape of a heart.

“Ghost heart,” she says to herself. The sun has gone down as she ponders these things, as she constructs and destroys and molds, and the only light comes from the yellowed streetlight outside her window. She places her hands alongside each side of her framework, heart racing as the slivered glow coming from between the blinds creeps across her knuckles. “Okay.”

She feels like Victor Frankenstein standing over her creation, half mad, half wild, half alive. She’s either the inventor or the monster, not quite sure which, and that’s fitting too. 

Mary Shelley, she thinks, baring her teeth, eat your heart out.

---------------------------------

The first line of her next story isn’t like anything she used to write. There’s so little inside of her that it’s hard to find the passion she once spilled onto the page, hard to find motivations for her characters, just plain hard to find the point.

She works on her final story of the semester for hours and hours. Some days she feels like she’s in a dream, automatically pecking out letters to words to sentences on the keyboard. Other days, she sits lifelessly in front of the dark computer, fingers growing cold, from dusk til dawn. Not a single word written.

Only when she feels a whisp of something—of anger, of frustration, of helplessness—do her fingers fly over the keys, attempting to capture lightning in a bottle. Each time the feeling lasts a little longer, gets a little warmer, becomes a little more.

She doesn’t try to tell a story this time. She tries to become one.

She works long into the night that final week, not answering Joey’s calls or her sorority sister’s pleas for study parties or movies. She works and works until she begins to feel something in her chest all the time, not just in flashes of inspiration. It’s hard and heavy and tastes like blood in her mouth, but it’s there.

It’s there.

She writes and writes until the smoke that’s swirling in her chest billows out onto the page, smudging and tainting it until, like the heavy thing inside, it begins to beat.

——————————-

Cadie stands in front of the classroom, grinning so fiercely at the board outside the door that she’s sure it looks more like a grimace than a smile. The final papers have been graded and the few the professor loved are pinned up for all to see. 

She recognizes the words of the story there again, but this time she’s the one who put them down on paper. They’re words that have been pried from the walls of her chest like gemstones and bloodied across the page.

I hate him, the story begins, and I hated him before my heart learned what it was to hate.

At the top of the paper is written one word in red, red pen.

IMPORTANT.

Her lips close over her teeth as she hears footsteps behind her. The fierce joy in her chest is burning red underneath her ribs and she basks in the warmth. He can’t take this away from her.

But that doesn’t mean he gets to keep what he’s taken.

“Congratulations,” he says quietly from behind her. He’s looking at her paper with something like resentment in his eyes. When he turns back to her, they’re just blank. “I thought I was going to keep my streak going.”

She doesn’t have the energy to even begin to answer that. “I’m breaking up with you.”

The few students in the hallway are listening, she knows, but they’re not going to say anything. She knows Tiana is one of them, pressed against the wall, arms over her chest. Backup.

He stalls, eyes sliding to their audience and then back to her. “What?”

“I’m done,” she says. Her lips quirk. “My heart just isn’t in it.”

He flinches at the bite in her words. His jaw clenches as he recovers. “I—this is about me not telling you I love you? I told you I needed time.”

“I don’t have any more time,” she says. And, she adds silently, I don’t believe you. She holds out her hand. “Give it.”

His fingers are white-knuckled on his backpack strap. “You told me you’d give me time. You told me you understood.”

He’s playing the sympathy card. She doesn’t owe him understanding. She doesn’t owe him time. But, to the students, it looks like she’s abandoning him when she swore to be with him. It’s the standard in their society that the woman fixes the man. Never the other way around.

“Either give it,” she says quietly, “or we’re going to have this conversation right here.”

“I don’t have to,” he says. He takes a quick step forward, eyes darting all over the hallway. “We don’t have to. I promise I’ll be better. Just—I need it. I really need it, Cadie. You’re the first person who loves me like this.”

She thinks about her heart in his hands, how warm it had been. She thinks about the way his hands turned cold under hers. She thinks about months of his distance and his excuses all just to keep her heart.

If he leaves now, it’s going to  be nearly impossible to get her heart back. Vacation is coming up soon and he lives across the country. Filing a police report will be time consuming and hard—she gave him her heart willingly after all. It would take days of interviews just to convince them that no, she didn’t intend to give it to him. Only share it.  

Panic sparks in her chest, another new emotion for her ghost heart, and is quickly burned out by anger. She won’t let him play the sympathy card anymore. She won’t leave herself defenseless anymore.

They’re doing this in front of their audience then.

“You don’t love me,” she tells him. She matches his step even though she has to look up to meet his eyes now. “You would have tried harder if you did. You can’t just take someone’s heart and give them nothing in return. I won’t live an empty life because you don’t want to put in the effort to love me the way that I love you.” She holds out her hand. “Give me my heart back.”

There are whispers all around them at her words, but she can’t hear them. She’s staring him in the eyes, willing him to do it this time. She can see the panic in him, the fear, and the anger that she’s brought it out into the open. Hearts are secret things and he didn’t really think she’d be willing to expose hers.  He’d been banking on her never telling anyone that he took her heart so that he only had to keep lying to her. Only her.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” he says. 

She stares at him. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Joey brings his bag forward slowly, hands moving as if through molasses. His mouth opens as if to say more, but slams shut. There are too many people for him to say anything else. Too many people know for him not to listen to her now.

He unzips his bag, the sound loud in the (quickly filling) hallway. His lips purse as he reaches in and takes out her heart.

It’s shocking, her heart in the cold light of her college. There’s a gray film over the colors and veins and imperfections now. She would be embarrassed that everyone can see it—the ultimate vulnerability—but her mouth’s gone dry. After weeks, she’s within reach of it. Her heart.

“You could have at least put it in a bag,” she says, eyes locked on the beating organ. Her new heart is beating in time with it and she can feel them calling to each other. They both belong to her.

“I kept it safe,” he defends. His fingers twitch around it and she can feel his pulse in her chest. He looks around. “I kept it safe, I swear.”

She reaches out and, before he realizes what’s happening, takes her heart.

Joey cries out as it leaves his hand, staggering back as all of her passion and love and warmth come crashing out of him and back into her heart. The grey cracks and the light turns yellow as her heart shines through the film that had covered it.

“Wow,” someone whispers as the last of the grey slides away. 

Cadie agrees. There are new rivers and scars on her heart, but it’s still just as vibrant as they day she gave it to him. It’s still alive. It’s still hers.

She drinks her heart back into herself right there, right in front of them, and feels her world come alive. She’s aware of the professor standing at his door, arms folded over his chest and a tight frown on his lips. Is he angry? At her? At him?  She’s aware of Joey looking down at his feet and she’s nearly swept off hers by the pity and resentment that surges up in her chest at the sight. She feels Tiana, gentle and understanding, behind her and remembers how nice it is to be cared for. She remembers all of these things she felt, she remembers how to feel, and her two hearts beat in sync.

She promptly bursts into tears.

Tiana swoops in, whisking her down the hall to the ladies restroom, murmuring her apologies to the professor as they go. Cadie can’t breathe around her sobs, the painful aches in her chest, and can only nod.

Tiana locks the door behind them.

“I—I’m okay,” Cadie says. She can’t stop crying. “I don’t know why—“

“You don’t need to know why,” Tiana interrupts. “You did it.”

Cadie gasps around her tears. “It’s so much. I didn’t—I didn’t realize how little I had when he—“

Tiana throws an arm around her, comforting. “I know. It’s okay.”

“How could I live like that?” Cadie asks. “Why did it take me so long to do something about it?” The horror of life without a heart is just hitting her now with it safe. She doesn’t understand why she didn’t—why she couldn’t—

“It’s not your fault,” Tiana says. She strokes her hair. “You didn’t know he would do that. It’s not your fault.”

Cadie shudders. “I should have known. I should have—“

“I hate him,” Tiana says. Quotes. “And I hated him before my heart knew what it was to hate.”

They’re the words that started the story of Cadie’s second heart. Her sobs ease and the tears slow. She’d written those words through a veil of helplessness. She’d written them thinking that if her heart only knew how to hate—how to defend—she could have gotten away from him so much sooner.

But her heart hadn’t known. 

“I’m different now,” Cadie says. Her heart knows how to hate (or grieve or guard) now.

Tiana keeps stroking her hair. “I know.”

Cadie feels new tears fill her eyes. “I didn’t want to be different.”

“I know,” Tiana says. Her arms squeeze around Cadie. “You’re going to get through this.”

Cadie’s two hearts ache in her chest. She’s more now than she’s ever been before, but the ghost of her emptiness is still there. Haunting her. She’s not sure how she can ever forget that.

But, she thinks, maybe I can use it. Another story is scrawling across her bones, letters into words into sentences.

“Yes,” Cadie says, “I will.”