he day after I met Grace – her pierced little mouth, her shitkicker boots, her hands as small as goosebumps writing numbers on my palm. The day after I met her, I went to the heart rental place.
I hadn’t rented in years, and doubted they would have my preferred model. The window display was different, the hearts sleeker and shinier than I remembered. The first time I had rented it was considered high-tech to have the cogs tucked away; now they were as smooth and seamless as a stone. Some of the new hearts had extras I’d never seen, like timers and standby buttons and customised beating patterns.
That made me think about Grace, her ear pressed to my sternum, listening to the morse 10 code of her name, and my own heart started to creep up my throat so I swallowed it down and went into the shop.
An hour later I was swallowing lunch and trying to read the instruction leaflet. They made it seem so complicated but it wasn’t really. The hearts just clipped in, and as long as you remembered to close yourself up tightly then they could tick away for years. Decades, 15 probably. The problems came when the hearts got old and scratched: shreds of the past got caught in the dents, and they’re tricky to rinse out. Even a wire brush won’t do it.
But the man in the rental place had assured me that this one was factory-fresh, clean as a kitten’s tongue. Those heart rental guys always lied, but I could tell by the heart’s coppery sheen that it hadn’t been broken yet.
20 I remembered perfectly well how to fit the heart, but I still read the leaflet to the end as a distraction. A way to not think about how Grace looked when she bit her lip, when she wrote the curls of her number. How she would look later tonight, when she. When we.
It was very important that I fit the heart before that happened. ***
Ten years ago, first heart. Jacob was as solid and golden as a tilled field, and our love was 25 going to last forever, which at our age meant six months. Every time Jacob touched me, I felt my heart thud wetly against my lungs. When I watched him sleep, I felt it clawing up my oesophagus1. Sometimes it was hard to speak from the wet weight of it sitting at the base of my tongue, but I would just smile and wait for him to start talking again.
The more I loved him the heavier my heart felt, until I was walking around with my back 30 bent and my knees cracking from the weight of it. When Jacob left, I felt my heart shat- ter like a shotgun pellet, shards lodging in my guts. I had to drink every night to wash the shards out. I had to.