Five Hearts by Jamie Pike

Five Five Hearts Hearts

by Jamie Pike

CW: graphic imagery, blood, and self-inflicted harm

The day I was born, the doctor pried open my rosebud fists and found them completely empty . Nobody knew why . They ran every test they could think of, but found no answers . Nothing in the ultrasounds had indicated that I might be deformed . All of my sisters had come into the world complete, each of them clutching a hot little wad no bigger than a marble, pulsing and vermilion . Yet here I was, lying in the bassinet, somehow in perfect health, giggling and cooing despite being born without a heart . I would have five hearts in all, and I found the first when I was eleven. I didn’t need it until then: as a young child, I was much the same as everyone else . Our mouths were all empty, still too small for our hearts to fit inside, so when I pulled the cat’s tail or smacked someone over the head with a wooden block, it didn’t attract much notice . Since none of us had our hearts yet, every other little kid acted that way too . All the parents kept their kids’ hearts in jars on top of their fridges, where they waited until we were ready . In middle school, my friends decided it was time, and they all began coming to school with that peculiar bulge of the cheek, that lump under the jaw . There was no heart for me to put there, so I made a habit of wearing a crumpled paper towel to school in its place, wadded up and damp in the too-deep cavity beneath my tongue . This became my first heart, and of my five it hurt me the least. I had trouble making friends at school . To me, they were all interchangeable . I had no special affection for any of them. I forgot birthdays, then I stopped being invited to them . They sent me to the nurse the day after Riley’s memorial . She’d been

the closest I’d had to a friend . She was in the car with her older brother when a drunk driver struck them from the side . They asked me the next day: Why weren’t you at the assembly after school? I said, I forgot. They thought I’d better have the nurse check me for heart issues . She asked me to take out my heart and show it to her, and I was made to pull out my soggy paper towel, coiled like a whitish-gray loop of intestine, speckled with bits of lunch I’d been unable to fish out, in front of her. My friends were colder to me after the memorial . I think now they must have suspected . That was when I realized with a dropping feeling that there was a circle drawn around everyone in the world and I was standing outside it . Sometimes I lay awake at night and tried to feel what other people could feel . It was like trying to move a phantom limb I’d conjured up . The feeling slipped like sand between my fingers. I started experimenting with prosthetic hearts . I’d take small objects (a marble, a grape, an eraser) and slip them into the space under my tongue, just to feel them roll around in there, to feel the pressure on my jaw and the roots of my teeth, and wonder if that was what kindness felt like. Maybe, I thought, it had a flavor. Would it be meaty and savory, the way flesh would taste? Sweet and lingering, like the heart-shaped candy we exchanged on Valentine’s Day? Could I simulate it with a wedge of orange, a small handful of almonds or peanuts, or a piece of hard candy that dwindled to nothing over time? I tried all of these, but never felt any different. None of my prosthetics ever lasted long; after a day or so I’d abandon them when they failed to give me what I was looking for .

My first love was confusing and contradictory. Somehow I recognized the feeling, though it had never happened to me before . I wanted to spend time with her, I wanted closeness to her, the chance to touch her dark curls . The pinch in my groin and lower abdomen left me no room for doubt: she was the one . Around her, I pretended I wasn’t heartless. She’d make out with me in her car; I felt lucky and guilty; I became entirely committed to the act . I wasn’t good at it . When she walked into the room my body lit up, but I still forgot our anniversary until it arrived, rushing to buy her limp flowers from the stand by the grocery store exit doors . Once, on a date, I made the mistake of ruminating on how bored I was, putting a hurt look into her eyes which I had no idea how to fix. Around her, I desperately monitored my every step, trying to be somebody kinder than myself . Time spent with her left me exhausted, drained . But everyone around me, those who knew what I couldn’t know, said that real love was worth doing anything for . I wanted to feel what that meant, I wanted us to be one of those countless happy couples with joy under their tongues . Our courtship ended quickly. We were about to have sex for the first time, and she asked if she could first look at my heart, hold it for a minute. “Take it out,” she said . “I want to see it .”

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