Small Hearts

It was a Tuesday morning and, shut in by the inevitability of December rain, I had decided to shuffle some artifacts in the old attic. There was no one coming to the house for weeks and I felt a hazy sense of something waiting to be discovered. I donned a moth-eaten sweater and ascended up the house, expecting any manner of dust and termites–the ladder had grown rusty with neglect, and the attic itself had lain untouched for years. 

At the foot of the ladder, an old fear returned; as a child I had frequently prayed for safe passage when some errand sent me up, afraid of monsters and spirits musting in the unknown. I began to assemble a quick line of prose, something about still being young, to offer a higher power if the attic was too much like my childhood visions. On the third word, I stopped myself–I had inherited the house, not recently, and I felt a little foolish at the quickening of my heart on each new step. The urge to move higher, too, set a silly hum in my bones, pushing me farther–was it just solitude or resolute boredom that propelled me up the ladder and into the past?

The door clattered shut at my arrival, now entirely inside the old vessel. The room was a dusky sort of dark, though it must have been early, because my coffee mug painted a soft ring on the wood table, resembling the circularity of lines on a cut log. The walls smelled of cherry and garlic. At some point after sweeping the room with my eyes, I could have sworn I saw a rat in the corner, but my own footsteps either warned the animal or revealed what was never there. I glanced quickly at all the under-spaces, checking for other movement, and then set to work. 

The sweater, I quickly learned, was unnecessary, as the only dust had long since settled on the marred floor. The objects themselves, tucked away on shelves and between relinquished furniture, were as clean as wet skin. As their individual shapes began to emerge from the horde, I picked up scattered relics in hopes of finding something telling. 

The first was a tarnished locket, which I had plucked expecting some vestige of the past in its inner chamber, though the opening was locked. With disappointment, I slipped it in my pocket for later, still waiting for some rediscovery of an ancient romance or family secret. I turned the locket over in my palm as I glanced over shelved books–mostly retired versions of dictionaries and almanacs–and the corpses of photo albums, their covers stained with time. There was no fresh memory there, other than my own. 

I had almost completed my final scouring when a flash of metal glinted in the half-light. It was the only object retaining any sense of newness, calling me to it like a song. As I drew closer, the metal expanded into a vaguely heart-shaped box, alone on the tabletop of some ancient dinner unit. Carefully, I lifted the box into my hands and withdrew the lid. It was as light as breath.  

The contents made my hands tremble: a collection of perfect bird hearts, clustered like a string of pearls inside the tin cage. I knew they were bird hearts because of a science class I had taken in school–the particular pattern of their chambers and ventricles was unmistakable. I counted thirty in total. They were as smoothly muscled as oysters, their small valves the size of a sewing needle. Lying together in the metal organ, their fleshes swirled together and formed a single heart, complete and wonderfully preserved. Their age was indiscernible–no smell of death accounted for their years in captivity, and they appeared almost newly halted from life. 

I was scared to move. Breathing felt inconsiderate in such silence, their own bodies lost and incapable of anything but quiet. I didn’t want to remove my eyes, either, afraid that one tiny heart might hop and skitter down the staircase, in search of its missing remains. It all felt ridiculous. The hearts were more alive in my own beating instrument than they must have been before their final pulse. 

Having nothing better to do, I slowly replaced the lid, missing each heart as it disappeared from view. When the box was once again anonymous, I took a long time choosing where to place it in the attic’s many nooks. (Part of me wanted to close my eyes and drop the box on the nearest surface–their mystery intact once more–but the thought of such a baseless exit sent a pain to my stomach. I never wanted to see the hearts again, but I needed to know their rest was absolute.)

If I had returned the box to its place on the tabletop, nothing would have changed. I could have left the ether of that room as if fate had only briefly waved to me from the ladder rungs. While tempting, I couldn’t bring myself to walk to the corner of the room, to do the simple act of return. I required some movement to prove that the discovery had taken place. 

Box in hand, I brushed clean a solitary shelf with my shirtsleeve, wanting a proper burial. I knew that once I set it down, I would never again return to open it. I barely turned my back to look as I descended the ladder; to see the shadows blur once more would have devastated me. 

I questioned the strange power the hearts held over me, but as soon as I wondered why, the answer was already clear. To hold such delicate life, thirty things that breathed and thought, was like standing on the edge of a precipice, closer than usual to the quick line between life and death. I could scarcely imagine how their collector felt as the life-breath left, though envisioning the process was sickening. (Clearly they were sickened, too. There was no other reason the box required a hiding place.) What person, likely my ancestor, had felt the cliff edge miss their feet, closing the distance between a beating heart and nothing? The absolute power they must have felt was cruel. I was disgusted and enchanted. 

Hours later, sitting dumbly at the kitchen table, head pitched up toward the attic some levels above, I heard the faintest noise–an unmistakable beating. It was only then, prompted by this proof of life, that I remembered it was my birthday. I was older every minute, closer than ever to the invisible line.