The Heart Response by Nathan Batchelor

The Heart Response by Nathan Batchelor

Luther knew better than to open his chest and look at his Heart. Still after he got off the phone with Khloe, after she told him, “No, I don’t feel the same,” he worked open the gate of his cage and stood with a hand mirror and looked at his beating Heart in the bathroom of his apartment.

It was, he thought, a wilted flower. No, it was a willow tree. A dying one. There were cobwebs in the corner of his cage strung to the branches of his Heart like a kind of Spanish moss. He brushed the cobwebs away, careful not to touch his Heart. On the floor of the cage were a few dead bugs, some cigarette ash from some years ago when he’d smoked.

Later, he told himself, I’ll clean the thing out. I’ll give it a proper cleaning. I’ll have to be careful though.

Seeing his own Heart did not help with the pain of rejection. On the other hand, it didn’t seem to make the pain worse.

After he’d looked the heart over, inspected it thoroughly, going so far as to cup his hand around the heat of the Heart, he lay down, thinking about the swell and the pulse of it, the fact that, anyone, even him or his mother were to touch it, it would kill him. You could give someone your Heart, you could let them destroy it with cruelty or rejection or hatred, but you could never let someone touch it. How strange it seemed to him.

In the morning, after he’d kissed his sick and decrepit mother, after he’d ridden the bus to work in the artificial light of the predawn city, standing at the end of the cage assembly line, Luther couldn’t clear his mind of what he’d seen the night before. He watched other workers, their greasy hands and blackened faces hammering metal, fitting screws into the cages, wondering what lay in their chests. Did their Hearts look like his? Or did their Hearts look differently? Shrubs perhaps. Or benches, like those found in city parks? He’d seen anatomical drawings of hearts, those things that pumped blood through the body. But a Heart was different. Why did they share the same name again?

He now thought he understood why seeing a Heart was such an awful thing, why almost everyone headed the warning about looking at one. He had turned some corner of knowing.

Luther was an inspector at a replacement Heart cage factory. He checked the integrity of each cage’s structure, checked the metal for rust, checked for cages oblong or malformed, things that couldn’t contain a healthy Heart, let alone one hurt, like his. If he found a problematic cage, he sent it to Ralph, who would log the cage’s defects on a computer and send it to another employee who would see that the cage was fed back into the Machine.

The first cage he saw that day was defective. He walked to Ralph’s station. Ralph’s delts bulged from his shirt. He had a square jaw and large cheekbones that you could balance a marble on.

“Something bothering you?” Ralph said.

“Why?” Luther said.

“Look at your hands,” Ralph said. “You’re usually pretty anal about cleaning them.”

Luther’s hands were caked with grease. His fingers were callused and arthritic and ached when he flexed them. He’d worked at the cage factory for nearly a decade now. He couldn’t imagine what Ralph’s hands were like. He’d been here nearly twenty years. Luther imagined him soaking his hands at night with his shirt off while he watched a football game on the TV.

“I’m just thinking about things,” Luther said.

“Things? A lover probably. Hard to tell with you,” Ralph said. “You’ve got that look about you, a kind of uncertainty.”

Luther showed Ralph the cage. The cage was certainly defective. But what had happened to it Luther couldn’t say.

He didn’t know how the Machine worked. None of them did. It occurred to him that he’d never been curious about the workings of the Machine until he’d seen his own Heart.

“Yes,” Ralph said. “I’m sure now. It’s someone special.”

Luther caught himself looking at Ralph’s shirt, imagining what his Heart looked like behind the bulging muscle beneath.

“Why don’t you come to dinner? I know you’re cooped up with your momma all the time,” Ralph said.

“Dinner?” Luther said. “I shouldn’t leave her alone.”

“My wife makes damn good tikka,” Ralph said. “We’ve known each other how long? Years now, and I’ve never invited you over. Why don’t you come over? Say, tonight?”

“Tonight?” Luther said.

He looked at the defective cage, now sitting at Ralph’s station. How the strange milky surface of the bars glimmered and oozed. The cage had burned his fingers when he touched it. This demanded a report. This demanded a recall.

“Well?” Ralph said.

Luther wanted to go to dinner with Ralph, wanted to taste of the ride deep into the city, wanted to see men walk down the cold evening streets with their phones pressed to their cheeks and their cigarettes clutched between their lips. He wanted to sit and eat next to a human that he didn’t have to feed with a spoon.

“See you tonight then?”

“Yes. I just have to feed her,” Luther said.

He went back to his station and wrote down the words, “defective structure,” on the cage report. His fingers burned.

& & &

When Luther came home, when he’d poured himself a glass of vodka and gone out to his balcony, Khloe was sitting outside, swirling a glass of gin with one hand. Her other hand tugged at the long fuzz at the base of her neck, a spot she’d missed with the hair clippers that she couldn’t be bothered to fix. She seemed a feral girl.

“You off work early?” Khloe said.

She painted dark things, commissions that came in from dead soldier’s wives or aging widows. She worked during the morning and evening, taking time in the middle of the day to “think.” But there was more drinking than thinking, more empty bottles of gin than ideas brought into reality. That’s how Luther saw it at least.

“I hope this doesn’t change anything between us,” she had said the previous night.

“I hope this doesn’t change things between us,” he had said back and bit his lip.

He wanted to go back to when he hadn’t spoken his feelings. He wanted to go back to letting the unspoken things hang between them. He wanted to go back to a time where he wasn’t so aware of his Heart. Seeing her felt now odd. Her pretending last night hadn’t happened felt odd.

They were repeating, he knew, a kind of ancient script, one that existed back when people didn’t read nor write, when people lived on plains beneath tents of animal hide or huts of dried plant matter. Boy loves girl. Girl doesn’t love boy.

It was clear in those first moments when he came out to the balcony that something had changed between them. Things always change whenever words are said between two people. People moved together or they moved farther away. On that ancient plain, the boy snuck into another girl’s tent, and they fucked, caressed by the fur of the hunted; or the boy walked off into the ruthless wild, unable to look at his unrequited love ever again, seeing her face in waking dreams as he died cold and hungry.

Luther looked at Khloe. There was a streak of cyan on her upper lip as if she’d painted herself as a drowned or suffocated woman.

“Yeah, they let me out early. Burned my fingers,” he said. “Occupational hazard.”

“Plans tonight?” Khloe said. “You’re still dressed, and you’ve got that look about you.”

“Meeting a friend for dinner,” he said.

“A date?” she said.

How could she think this? No, she was engaging in the handshake of conversation, saying words in order to fill the silence, to get away from something. She wasn’t trying to hurt him. She was incapable of that. It didn’t mean anything, he told himself.

“No, dinner with a guy from work,” he said. “Ralph. I think I’ve mentioned him.”

“I didn’t think you were into guys,” she said.

She pulled at her low-cut shirt. He could make out the outline of her Heart compartment. His stomach fluttered at the thought of her pulling her shirt over her head, seeing the red lines on her stomach where her body folded over when she sat. He imagined her digging her fingers into her chest, pulling the flesh back, opening her cage, showing him what was inside.

No, he thought. No, no, no.  

“How’s work coming?” he said, trying to get his mind away from her Heart.

He’d never thought about someone’s Heart before today. Now, it was all he could think about.

“A woman came to me,” she said. “A former dancer. Husband stabbed her eleven times, seven times in the heart. Not the capital-H Heart, the other one, the blood pumper.”

“Jesus,” Luther said. 

“Doctors had to freeze her, do the surgery, bring her back to life. It was only the malformations of her cage that saved her from her husband’s knife. The cage bent the knife, warping its blade just enough to minimize the trauma to her cardiac system,” Khloe paused. “She had to learn to walk again. She wants a nude portrait. She wants me to paint her Heart.”

“Her Heart?” Luther said.

“I haven’t done that before,” she said.

She’d told him stories about her past. Living on the streets at twelve, scraping by for food and, occasionally, a roof over her head, sometimes—no, often—sharing beds with men thrice her age. She’d been in and out of homeless shelters. In and out of addiction centers. He wasn’t sure what all she’d done for money. He didn’t want to know. She’d come so far. That’s one of the things he liked about her.

“I had to scrape peanut butter off one of your plates,” Zach, her boyfriend, said.

He was standing in the doorway.

“It’s your turn to do the dishes, I thought,” she said.

She took a drink.

“It’s been my turn for months,” Zach said.

When Luther saw them together, he felt the tension between them. He felt Khloe’s hate for Zach in the way Khloe tugged at her hair.

He nearly said, “Why are you with him?” But he didn’t. Instead, like he always did, he took a long sip of vodka and let it sit on his tongue until the alcohol burned the words from his tongue.

After Zach walked back into the house, Luther and Khloe sat and talked about nothing. Luther found himself wondering what her heart looked like. Was it nothing but a small, charred thing like a furnace coal? Granite-like, incapable of tenderness. Is that why she said she didn’t feel the way he did?  

“You know what next month is?” she said.

“Lease renewal,” he said.

How long had he been here? he wondered. He’d stopped counting the years when his mother began needing his daily care. It was no longer a question of whether he would sign the next lease. It was only a question of when.

“I threw it away,” she said. “I’m going to leave when the lease is up.”

He doubted both of her statements.

“I want to move as far away from this place as I can,” she said.

He looked at the sliding glass door, the silhouette of his mother behind her curtain.

How he dreamed of helping her run away, of the two of them packing their bags, changing their names, and vanishing, living in a city far away from here. He could take a job in a lab somewhere, perhaps even go to medical school. But there was a kind of gravity to the past and present, keeping them grounded to the current lives. And every day, the gravity pulled harder.

Was that gravity why she’d said, “No, I don’t love you like you love me. No, I could never”?

But still, he had to help her. He must. It was a chapter in his life. Perhaps it would be the only great thing he ever did. He owed her that somehow, some gift for all these days he came out here to get away from his mother, his life.

But how could he help her?

& & &

Luther and the doctor stood over Luther’s mother in the living-room-turned-bedroom. Today was the doctor’s scheduled monthly check-up, which Luther had forgotten in the chaos of the day. There were deep purple circles beneath the doctor’s eyes. The skin on Luther’s mother’s face draped over her cheek bones like a shroud. He raised her head with his hand and eased the spoonful of food into her mouth.

“Good,” he said. “Eat up. I’m going out tonight.”

Food dripped from her mouth in a dark-colored foam. He wiped chunks of half-chewed oats off her face. Something like blood was on the kerchief. He wasn’t sure what was wrong with her. Neither was the doctor.

Luther had draped up sheets around the living room to block out daylight. For years now, his mother moaned in disgust or pain from light, a high-pitched squeal that sounded like a distorted bird song. He’d boarded up the windows in the previous summer, but found the darkness was something he couldn’t take on the weekends. He drank doubly those days, trying to block out his mother’s song.

“How is she doing?” Luther asked the doctor.

The doctor showed Luther a chart of arcane symbols.

“I don’t know what any of this means,” Luther said.

“Isn’t it enough?” the doctor said.

He didn’t know what the doctor meant by that.

“I’ve got to go, Mom,” Luther said.

& & &

Ralph lived in the apartment stacks on the other side of the city. If it wasn’t for GPS, Luther wouldn’t have found the place. Ralph’s place on the 124^th floor was far different than Luther’s apartment. There were signs of a family here. A pair of children’s blue slip-on shoes sat by the door. Finger paintings of dinosaurs and dragons hung on the fridge.

Luther wondered if he could have something like this with Khloe one day. He wondered that often. Perhaps, in light of things, he needed to readjust his expectations.

“You made it,” Ralph said and placed a glass in Luther’s hand. “Take a drink. Relax. No girl here to bother you.”

The glass was cool and sweating. There was a heavy yellow liquid inside. Luther took a sip, and his mouth was on fire, but he felt a bit less on edge.

There was more food on the kitchen table than he’d seen since his childhood. Noodles and buttered corn on the cob, pots of beans and a large pitcher of sweet tea.

Ralph’s wife appeared in the hallway. She had a pretty face, short, with breasts pushed up cleverly by her dress. Luther took another drink, a longer one. He felt hot in her presence.

“You must be Luther,” she said. “I’m Jenna.”

Jenna extended a hand. He took it. Her skin was warm and moist.

“Luther lives with his mother,” Ralph said. “He takes care of her.”

“Ralph said you studied medicine in school,” Jenna said. “He said you were going to become a doctor, but you stopped school to take care of your mother. That’s admirable. That’s touching.”

They ate. They drank. Laughter sounded often at the table. Then Ralph said:

“We’ve been thinking…I see how you’re looking at her.”

Jenna smiled from across the table, unzipped her top down below her breasts. The red of her nipple peaked out. Luther wasn’t sure what was coming. He wasn’t sure if he liked it. He felt a stirring below his waist. He thought of Khloe. He felt something bordering on shame.

But he was old enough that he knew such an opportunity as the one he was in now appeared rarely in a life. How long had it been since he’d felt someone’s touch? Years, perhaps a decade now. His mother had changed their home into a place where he waited for death to come and take her away. He’d fallen into his routine of changing bedpans, of bringing a spoon to her mouth, of the constant fear of coming home to find her motionless. He’d forgotten all about college, about past wants and desires.

He found himself following Ralph and Jenna down a narrow hallway, pictures from their wedding on the wall, a portrait of a child with a tooth gap splashing in an inflatable swimming pool. He passed the child’s room and shot a glance to Ralph.

“Staying with Jenna’s parents,” Ralph said. “The adults will play while the kids are away.”

He smiled. He had a tooth gap like the child’s.

The bed was king-sized. Luther had only ever fucked someone on an air mattress and on a gym floor. He told himself he’d see her body, then he would leave. That’s all he needed. He didn’t need to be intimate with her.

Ralph slid his shirt off. His silhouette seemed like an anatomical drawing, the thick round shoulders, the thin waist. You couldn’t tell that he was twenty years older than Luther in the dark.

“I thought it was her,” Luther said. “I’m not into—”

“Yes, of course,” Ralph said. His voice was kind and calm. “I’m only here to watch.”

Ralph opened the cage of his chest. Jenna sat on the edge of the bed, undoing her bra.

“Come closer, Luther,” Jenna said.

Luther held his sweating drink with his bandaged hand. With his other hand, he cupped her breast. He could feel himself giving in, being sucked toward her gravity. Certainly, the smell of her sweat, her slightly sour breath, and whatever deodorant she’d put on this morning were intoxicating. His mouth moved toward her neck. Then he saw, in his mind’s eye, not Jenna, but Khloe, turning to gaze at him.

“How could you do this to me?” Khloe was saying.

Ralph was touching himself with one hand. His chest cage shone in the lights pouring in from the towering streetlights. Somewhere out there, someone played a saxophone or horn of sorts. It was the sound of a real instrument, playing an upbeat melody that Luther should have found comforting. But it only created anxiety.

Jenna leaned back and pulled Luther toward her. He felt her body beneath his, the bones of her hips, her hair brushing his jaw. He pulled away.

“Don’t get all shy on me now,” Ralph said. “I’m giving you this.”

“We’re giving you this,” Jenna said.

“I can’t,” Luther said.

“Why the hell not?” Ralph said. “Is she not good enough for you?”

The scent of alcohol on Ralph’s breath stung Luther’s nostrils. Ralph was swaying slightly. Had he slurred his words when he’d said, “Why the hell not?”

Luther backed away from the bed. Ralph approached him. The door on Ralph’s chest cage flapped. Ralph’s fist was clenched by his side. Luther hadn’t been hit since he was in middle school, since a bully had sat on his chest, cage creaking as it curved inward, fists raining down on him like hard heavy pancakes.

“You fuck,” Ralph said.

“I’m sorry,” Luther said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Luther took one step back, then Ralph’s knuckles connected with his jaw. Luther dropped the glass. It shattered on the floor.

“Ralph,” Jenna said. “God, no! Let him leave.”

She rushed towards Ralph. Her shadow melted into his. Glass crunched beneath their feet. A thud punctuated their scuffle.

Luther couldn’t see much in the dim light. But he could clearly make out Jenna getting up, Ralph down on the floor. Jenna whimpered. Luther edged closer. Ralph was curled in a fetal position, his hands cupped over his chest in a position known, in the medical field, as the Heart Response.

Blood dripped from Jenna’s hand. A shard of glass emerged from her palm like a stigma from flower.

“He’s dead,” she said. “My hand went into the cage. His heart. I don’t—”

This was trouble. A dead man. A naked woman. None of this should be happening.

“Help me,” she said.

“Help you with what?” Luther said. “You killed him.”

“It was an accident,” she said. “God, if you’d just went along with it.”

After he’d wrapped her hand in bandages and she’d put on some clothes, the two of them dragged Ralph’s body farther down the hall.

They were going to put him in the in-house garbage chute where his body would be diced to bits, compacted, shat out in a landfill miles outside the city. There would be enough time before people started asking questions for her to get away, for him to figure something out.

“He decked you good,” she said. “Your eye is nearly swollen shut.”

What a strange thing to say, he thought. Now was not at all the time to worry about his eye.

Luther couldn’t stop looking at Ralph’s curled body.

His college professors had not said why the Heart Response happened, and when he’d combed the literature, he’d found no answers. An idea struck him, one he knew he wouldn’t have had a week ago, a year ago, a decade ago.

“There’s something I want,” he said. “Before we put him in the chute.”

“Me?” she said. “I still have a good hand.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not that at all.”

& & &

When Luther returned home, he sat the suitcase beside his mother’s bed. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t breathing. He stared a long time at her chest, blood soaking through the suitcase down into the dirty carpet.

It’s over, he thought. It’s over, and it’s got something to do with Ralph’s Heart, or, perhaps, my own.

But then her chest rose again.

He went out to the balcony, but Khloe was not there. He got a sack from the laundry room, put the suitcase in it, and took it to his room.

He moved things off the dresser—a mirror, a pocketknife, an empty bottle of whiskey—and opened the suitcase, pulled out Ralph’s chest cage, and set it on the dresser. The cage was not pretty in the light. Fascia and nerves spotted the cage. Blood and lymph dripped from the lowest bars. He removed his shirt which smelled like Jenna’s perfume, opened his chest cage, and studied how the Hearts compared to one another. He found they were hard to look at in the light, especially his own. It made his head hurt.

Ralph’s Heart was different altogether than Luther’s. It was a smooth stone, or that is what it seemed. Luther couldn’t bring himself to touch it. That was going too far.

Doctors didn’t diagnose problems of the Heart—they weren’t even pictured in anatomy books. Their function was the realm of philosophers. Staring at the two Hearts, Luther wondered if he had gotten the wrong degree.

It was wrong to look at a Heart in the same way it was wrong to have a picnic on someone’s grave. Sometimes dirty magazines filled with pictures of Hearts were passed around in high schools. There were rumors of shops next to truck stops where you could buy magazines with photos of girls and boys staring dead-eyed into the camera with their cages open. He’d never seen any of those magazines or been to any of those shops.

His phone buzzed. It was, thankfully, not someone asking him where Ralph was. It was a text from Khloe.

Help me, the text read.

& & &

The whole of the city glowed like a cool blue supergiant. Luther looked across the balcony at Khloe.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “I’ve got some money, enough for us both to leave. To be gone once and for all,” he said.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

She raised the glass to her lips. She’d been drinking all night, he thought.

“Don’t drink,” he said. “I need you sharp. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

She nodded, slowly at first, and then later enthusiastically. She was scared, she said. She wanted to leave with him but couldn’t. But then, in a moment of clarity she realized it was time to leave, that tonight was the night.

They talked for a while, ironing out the details, then as soon as he believed things were worked out, she said:

“I have to stay.”

At first, he didn’t understand, but then he thought about how he’d come to appreciate the musk of his mother’s bedpan. There was some comfort in being trapped, in knowing the walls of your cage. Was that what Khloe felt, a kind of security in imprisonment?

Soon, the police would be coming after him. Soon, Jenna would be sitting in an interrogation room, perhaps saying, “Yes, it was Luther who did this to my hand. It was Luther who reached into Ralph’s chest and stopped his Heart.”

“It’s now or never,” Luther said. “I need you to commit to this.”

She nodded. He couldn’t read the expression on her face.

& & &

He maxed out his credit card ordering a nurse for his mother.

“The nurse will come today?” he said into his phone. “You’re sure?”

“Three months. Hospice, is that correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct,” he said.

He packed the things he needed: a toothbrush, clothes, Ralph’s Heart.

It was three AM. Zach would be gone, she said. She was afraid to pack, she said.

The door was unlocked. It opened to a much different apartment than his own. Here things smelled like paint. Like pencil shavings and charcoal. There was the smell of hot dogs cooked earlier. There were dishes piled high on the counter, mail stacked on mail, stacked on mail. There were no pictures of Zach and Khloe together. There were no children. There was an aura about the place in the way things were arranged that suggested unease. There was something he couldn’t put his finger on.

Khloe came into the kitchen. Her shirt was stained with paint. And her eyes. He saw fear in those eyes.

She would say, “No, I can’t go with you. No, I must stay here,” and when she did, he would turn around and leave forever. This was it, he realized, the last time he would see her.

He was ready for his heart to collapse down to a single point, the blackest, darkest thing, the size and texture of an apple seed. But he couldn’t let that stop him. He had come this far. He had touched a Heart. He had looked at his own.

“We need to get ready,” he said.

“I can’t pack,” she said. “I need you to watch me.”

“Watch you?” he said.

“Watch me pack,” she said. “Please.”

He stood at the threshold of her room. He’d seen the place in cellphone pictures. But here in the flesh were signs of life: underwear, towels, food wrappers, beer cans scattered about the floor. There was a bookshelf with mold-covered art books. There were paintings on the walls done by her friends or artists she admired. Troubling gray paintings of women on fire, of women bone thin with needle tracks up and down their arms. Blankets were balled at the edge of a bed that hadn’t been made in months, perhaps years.

She kept looking around, checking the doors. He realized what was going on. It wasn’t him she was afraid of. It was the person she wanted to escape, Zach.

“You should have told me,” Luther said. “We could have gotten out of here earlier.”

That was perhaps a lie, but he would have done something, right? Yes, of course, he told himself. He had to tell himself that.

He watched her pack in silence. After every piece of clothing, every brush or tube of paint, she’d look up to make sure he was still in the room. She said:

“I don’t know what to do about my paintings.”

“We’ll have to leave them,” Luther said.

“They are a part of me,” she said.

“Sometimes,” he said, “you leave a part of yourself behind.”

They were looking at each other when they heard the door open.

Zach was standing there, dress shirt half undone, half untucked from his slacks. He was wearing gloves, sleek, black, tight-fitting ones. He seemed to carry the weight of a long day, a defeated man. Luther saw something of himself there. How entirely not strange. Perhaps it was the very similarities between Luther and Zach that Khloe was drawn to.

Zach looked at Khloe, then Luther.

“You think you are any better?” Zach said. “Everyone she’s been with—it doesn’t matter what you do, she’ll leave you. She’s broken like a vase. When its cracked, it can’t be healed.”

“She’s afraid of you,” Luther said.

“She’s afraid of everyone after a while. It will happen slowly at first. You’ll see that as you go along.”

Luther felt rage building inside him. He grinded his teeth. He wanted to swing at the man.

“We’re leaving together, today,” Luther said. “You’re going to stay here.”

“I am going to stay here,” he said. “You should stay over there with your vegetable mother.”

Luther pitied Zach. He was fueled by spite and sought solace in whatever routine abuse he inflicted on Khloe.

“You are just like I imagined,” Zach said.

“I’m ready,” Khloe said.

Zach was still blocking the doorway. Luther watched him carefully.

“Go on,” Luther said to Khloe. “I’m right behind you.”

She began to sob. He wanted to go to her desperately, but he realized they had never touched, they had never been so much as in the same room together until this moment. It would be wrong to touch her.

He dared Zach to not let her pass. To put a hand across her throat. He wanted that. He wanted violence. Had his encounter with Ralph awakened something in him? Did he want to watch the life go out of Zach as he stared into his eyes? Luther’s mouth watered.

Before he knew what was going on, Khloe was on the floor. Zach’s hand rose and came down, rose and came down. Luther lunged, his body knocking Zach sideways off Khloe. The two men crashed into the bookshelf. Books rained down upon them.

“Please stop,” Khloe said.

“I just need to see,” Zach said.

He pushed Luther’s head down and away. Luther tried to keep his body on him to keep him from getting up. But Zach was larger, stronger, and more youthful than Luther. Zach pushed Luther away, walked toward Khloe.

“Show me. You have to show me before you leave,” Zach said. “I deserve this. I deserve one more.”

Deserve what? Luther wondered.

Khloe sat up, took her shirt off. She opened her chest cage. The light was just enough so that Luther could see inside. Her Heart was pitiful. It was a tree, white and dead. There were leaves at the bottom of her cage, curled and brown, small enough to be the shed exoskeletons of insects. He looked away. It was altogether different for him to look at Ralph’s heart. He’d thought he wanted to see her Heart, but now with the image of it burned in her brain, he realized he wanted to see it less than anything in the world.

“Why?” Luther said.

He saw, or thought he saw, Zach’s gloved hand go into the cavern of Khloe’s chest.

God, no, he thought.

The rubber of Zach’s glove squeaked as his finger caressed Khloe’s Heart. The sound hurt Luther’s teeth. He wondered what, if any, precautions Zach took. Was it only a surgical glove Zach wore? A thing no thicker than a condom? He wondered how often Zach changed his gloves. He wondered if the fingertips had ever worn down to a single rub away from breaking, from his finger touching her Heart, from her life ending. He wondered if Khloe was the first person Zach had ever violated in this way. Had he, when he was younger, touched a heart with his own bare hand? Had he taken a life?

Khloe had her head down, with the kind expression on her face one makes when waiting for laundry or watching a clock in a waiting room tick down to the time to her name was called. He couldn’t say how, but in that moment, Khloe reminded him of his mother.

Something burst inside Luther, a damn out of which rage flowed. He rose and launched himself at Zach again. There was a scramble. Zach’s limbs intertwined with Luther’s. Luther had a plan.

In a scramble, things could happen. He searched for the scent and texture of Zach within the limbs. And when he found it, he slipped a hand over his chest, feeling for the lines of his chest cage.

He found purchase on Zach’s cage. Zach’s hands were pinned beneath him awkwardly. Zach struggled with every ounce of his energy, but he couldn’t work his hands free in time. Luther opened Zach’s cage.

There was Zach’s Heart, beating as much as a small, shriveled thing could beat. Strangely, it looked like his own Heart. For a moment, Luther believed it was his own. That made what he was about to do easier he thought.

“Unlike you, I’m not wearing gloves,” Luther whispered to Zach.

Zach’s heart seemed to recoil away from Luther’s hand. He reached out and touched it. He could feel the blood rushing through the Heart. Then he felt all of Zach go still.

Luther pulled it from the cage, held it like an infant.

Heart cage for sell. Never used. He giggled to himself.

Something else came lumbering into his consciousness, something other than the Heart in his hand. Yes, there was Khloe. Yes, that was he had come here for, right?

He looked among the downed books. The floor was a swirl of colors, brighter than the ones he’d ever seen her paint with: golden yellows, shades of red, deep vibrant greens.

He saw her there, slumped against the wall.

No, no, not like this, he thought.

Her arms covered her chest, palms over her shoulders. The Heart Response. He guessed one of them had grazed her heart with their flesh, with their hands. But how could it have been Zach? His hands were still gloved.

He closed his eyes hard. He felt nauseous.

He rolled the gloves off Zach’s hands and filled them at the sync with water. They ballooned. But they did not break.

“It couldn’t be me,” he said. “I’d never do that to her.”

But he could see no way that Zach could have touched her Heart. Perhaps she herself had done it, he thought. There were such suicides, though they had fallen out of favor in recent times. He couldn’t imagine her doing it, but then again, he couldn’t have imagined anything that had happened this day.

& & &

He wondered dazedly out the hall. He found himself walking back toward his own apartment. Khloe’s suitcase was in his hand. There was the faint sound of sirens. Were they coming for him? He passed a woman in the hall, who when she saw the blood dripping from the suitcase, called out the name of a god.

The warm smell of his mother’s urine comforted him. She was awake and turned to look at what he carried in his hands.

“Luther,” she said. “What have you done?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I got caught up in something.”

“Why would you do such a thing?” she said.

For a moment she looked like her old self, the one who used to make him oatmeal every morning. Then, a moment later, he was aware of how very old she was. Then, he was aware of how what felt like one year had become ten, how much he’d aged himself taking care of her.

He felt that he had missed so much, that there were so many hearts he could have touched. If his mother had never become sick, perhaps he could have run away with Khloe years ago. Perhaps he could have saved her from the pain that had built up over the years. But he had waited too long.

He suddenly hated his mother, his hatred so piercingly intense that he wished he could wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze so hard that her eyes bulged from their sockets. How much better it would have been if she had died long ago, if he’d never had to move her in, if he’d never had to abandon his dreams and take the job at the factory. He started for the kitchen.

“Simon?” she said. “Simon, where are you going?”

“I’m not Simon,” he said.

He sat down at the kitchen table. He opened the suitcase and took out Zach’s Heart and placed it on the table. The sirens were closer now. He opened his own cage and his hand hovered over his Heart. His mother was still calling the wrong name.

“Simon! Simon!”

There was nothing left to do.

Perhaps now was the time to clean his cage, he thought. Perhaps he wouldn’t be so careful. Yes, now there was no better time.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Nathan Batchelor 2025

Image Courtesy: analogicus from Pixabay