Annabelle’s heart was a hard nut to crack. He should have known it the moment she stepped into his study and remarked not on the human hearts lining his shelves, but the antique jars he displayed them in.
“Nice,” she said. The hearts, suspended in fluid, seemed to throb in response. “I once worked at an auction house that sold things like these. Rare.”
Annabelle had had more careers than he could list, traveled more places than anyone he had met. She spoke like she was used to being listened to. It was a change from the girls who treated his every look as a tremendous kindness, as though his attention were a prize they might one day deserve. With Annabelle, he could share his opinion on anything—art, science, society’s ills—and she’d respond in the same droll way, like she had heard it all before but found it mildly diverting to hear again.
She kissed him on the cheek when he saw her to the door that night. It was brief and business-like, as always, but when he slid his fingers across her wrist he felt the hummingbird thud of her pulse.
Heartbreaker, they called him, but that wasn’t entirely fair. It was tempting to see him as wicked; some cackling collector of misfortune, like Bluebeard’s more genteel cousin. But if a girl ever returned for her captive other half, he imagined she’d be surprised at its condition. A little chastened, too. After all, hadn’t all those girls been rather reckless? Hadn’t he taken better care of their hearts than they had?
It was like how some people could commune with animals or the dead: he was simply gifted in drawing out pain. Separated from their owners, the hearts came to him.
The first time had been by accident. It was a school ball break up, mundane as any other. He had told Emilia the truth about what she was to him, about what she was to everyone, and she had cried until the mascara ran down her cheeks. And then there it was. It hovered outside her chest, caked in glitter and teenage perfume, and neither it nor its owner were aware of its extraction.
He awoke in the morning to a phantom at the foot of his bed. It drifted uncertainly by the open window, wreathed in a kind of coppery haze. It was paler and more fragile than the previous night, but he knew it was Emilia’s heart. The coppery light dimmed as it sailed down toward him, and he knew he couldn’t let it dissolve into so much dust; that he needed to preserve it in this faded state, or it would be gone from him forever; that she’d never be whole as long as he had it.
He let the heart settle into his hands, and he put it in the jar he used to catch fireflies.
It wasn’t any crime. Emilia was at school that day, alive and mostly well, though she shrank from him in the hallways. It was like that for the rest of the year and into college, which he heard she left early because of some breakdown or another. This hardly shocked him. She was weak when he met her, bright but terribly insecure. There were problems with her family and problems with pills and problems he never bothered to find out about, but he allowed her to cling to him like a life raft, until that night he let her go.
He learned that what he had of her heart was the part she had shed when he hurt her. At first it was like an imprint or an outline. The longer the pain endured, the more that outline filled, until what he owned was more real than the thing that beat inside her chest. He learned that wherever people lost something, they left something of themselves behind. Some would move on from that loss; not shattered beyond repair but never quite restored. Others, like Emilia, would sleepwalk through the rest of their lives.
As time went on he learned the limits of his skill. He wandered everywhere from funerals to emo concerts, expecting to find a sea of sorry hearts awaiting him. But he couldn’t claim what he hadn’t caused. He needed to wound its owner before it revealed itself, like a flower that opened solely at his encouragement. To say he enjoyed this made him sound like some kind of sadist. He had a keen sense of where he stood compared to all the worst men of the world (or so he thought he did). And yet he couldn’t deny the pleasure of acquisition: the primal desire to take and to hold in his hands.
It was only natural he’d gain a name as an inveterate ladies’ man. The reputation was useful. It drew more women to him, the downtrodden ones especially; each one riper for the challenge than the last. Each one aware of what he was and still so eager to be his savior. Was it any wonder? Broken women loved having someone to fix.
He began with Emilia’s friend; the quiet one who hesitated to meet his eyes. Then her sister, and the sister’s friends. Soon he could scarcely trace how the girl had come to him or he to her. She was just there, filling the space beside him, while he bided his time until it was over. He initiated the same tedious dance of feigning interest and then affecting avoidance, drawing close one moment and keeping his distance the next. He waited until her doubt in him became doubt in herself, so she forgot everything that was his fault and forgave none of what was hers. Then came the good days, when he let her think the two of them would last. It was usually at this point that he ended things.
The heart was always tender when he received it. Near-translucent, as Emilia’s had been the morning after the ball. The pain was fresh enough that he had to be careful when handling it, but if he didn’t contain it firmly, it might just slip away. This window of time was the most important. He once had an idea that a heart that healed and healed too quickly might go back to its owner—that the hearts which appeared the faintest might be the most elusive, capable of finding their way into the body that surrendered them. He dismissed this theory the day he finished his second row of hearts. Lining his shelves, looking as impressively substantial as they did, it was difficult to imagine them simply melting into the air.
He worked to make them impressive. A week or so after extraction, most of the hearts would harden. Being more solid made them more resistant, but he always captured them in the end. Their luminosity dulled, he’d remove them from their makeshift cages (often an old vase or fishbowl) and lower them into the vat of fluid in his garage.
Even the toughest ones were lovely to him then. This was the heart disrobed, no longer cushioned by its soft surrounds. It was like a set of fuses firing in a useless machine. There was something poetic about the way it sighed through its emptied chambers, palpitations slowing as its courage waned, as though it had begun to understand its situation. The palpitations normally ceased by the time he readied it for display. He cleaned the arteries and dabbed at the valves, slathering it in fragrant oils as a final touch.
Suspended in their jars, it wouldn’t be right to say the hearts retained their animation. Nor would it be right to call them dead things with no decorative purpose. He had hated clutter since he was a child, but he liked the way they filled out the old bookcase. Sometimes he picked up a jar just to feel its weight before placing it back down in the shade. It felt important that they stayed in the shade. Still, he was fond of how the sunlight took liberties with the empty jars on the table, playing off of their embossed necks to throw rippling shapes onto the wall.
He didn’t think about the girls, whose names had largely slipped his mind. He didn’t wonder where they were, or who loved them and how much. He only thought of what he took from them — no, what they’d cast off for him to take; to take in and care for as his own.
All in all, he considered himself kind.
Annabelle’s heart was much stronger than it should have been. After all, she had been born with a hole in it. Doctors and nurses worked into the dawn, haloed by the glow of surgical lights, and when the sun came up she was new.
No one in the town had seen anything like it. Her parents gave interviews at the hospital the day she was discharged. As a toddler she appeared in the local magazine, grinning impishly under the words Her Mother’s Miracle Girl. It was this miracle her mother blamed throughout Annabelle’s young life. She said her recklessness had resulted from the near-miss at her birth, and true enough Annabelle was determined; as a child barely able to stand she’d crawl into the swing and demand to be pushed, once soaring so high it made her brother cry out. Her mother came running, and her father pulled her inside, but scolding had never deterred her. She loved the sound swinging made in her ears, the view of her lawn from above as she sliced through the wind like a hawk.
At six, she climbed the trees outside her school to sit astride the tallest branches. It was clear she had a preference for the precarious. By the time she was leader of the high school hiking club, she was used to choosing the most treacherous paths to conquer, the most unruly weather to pitch her camp. Yet Annabelle never truly believed she was invincible, except in the way all teenagers do. It was fitting, then, that as a teenager she became aware of the hardships of others. Soon there was no charity cause whose banner she wasn’t waving. She threw herself into it with the same passion she gave her athletic pursuits: fundraising outside the supermarket on weekends, recruiting volunteers in the parking lot on school days. The mockery of her peers didn’t matter. She was there as often she could manage, rain or shine or after a storm when it was still some uneasy in-between.
Annabelle was fifteen, raking debris off a beach after one of these storms, when her hands set a squid’s hearts in motion. It was one of so many creatures washed up unmoving on the sand. Her clean-up group said to leave it, but she knelt beside it instead. She was overcome by a feeling like none she had ever had before; an insistent feeling, inexorable as the tide. She didn’t know the architecture of its body, but she knew somehow to stroke along its mantle cavity. It felt like slippery velvet. Annabelle couldn’t say when its tentacles started twitching, as if rehearsing life. She couldn’t describe when all three of its hearts began: just that there was nothing, then nothing no longer.
Her best friend’s dog was next, a slow old thing on heart medication who now bounded out the door like a puppy. The sparrows lying in her garden flitted away like they’d never seen the jaw of her neighbor’s cat. Even her aunt’s horse was given a clean bill of health, and he was so weakened by years on the track.
It felt ironic that with all of her years in volunteer first aid, Annabelle never learned what she could do for a person. She never had the chance. Every human hurt she saw went deeper. She watched the people she graduated college with fight to survive under an uncaring system, dashing their hopes of building something better. There were friends torn apart by a thousand ordinary cruelties—the cruelties of strangers, of family, of people who claimed to love them the most. People who thought their paths in life could be carved through someone else, Annabelle thought bitterly, who cleaved others in two and kept their own hands spotless. She could tell those kinds of people when she met them.
Annabelle knew, of course, that some pain was meant to be. Some wounds could never be closed, some losses never made good. But then she remembered how her planting group went to places strewn with nothing but stumps and dead branches, where every tree had been felled for industry; how they buried seedlings in that same old dirt, and watched them grow, and grow.
Her mother called her a fixer. You can’t save them all, she said, but Annabelle had never stopped wanting to try. The want was a white-hot tingling, like catching alight. It started as a stirring that wouldn’t leave her alone.
When she met him at the art museum, having seen the half-lives led by the girls in his wake; when she walked into that room and saw each smothered heart displayed like prey in a hunter’s lodge, she felt that stirring more powerfully than ever, and it grew, and grew.
The story he told her was ludicrous, but he had experience in telling ludicrous stories. Experience taught him that women so rarely investigated. They were forever finding ways to deny the irrefutable: This can’t really be happening. He can’t really mean to hurt me.
If he had ever had to explain the contents of his study, none of his previous girls would have thought the house wasn’t his late father’s; that his father, a surgeon, hadn’t had a fondness for both eccentric artwork and the human body; that those interests hadn’t inspired the collection of alarmingly lifelike sculptures lining his best shelves; that he himself wasn’t repulsed by the things but let them remain in honour of the old man’s memory, though the pieces were expensive and really ought to be shut up securely.
If Annabelle doubted this account, she didn’t show it. Her stumbling on the room was pure accident—he had left the door unlocked (a rare oversight) and a draught had done the rest. She hadn’t mentioned the hearts since. But that was just like Annabelle, he decided. Her interest came and went like lightning; it lit everything but didn’t linger.
She met him for lunch the next day in a deep red dress. His hand sought hers as they walked into the café, wanting to feel that flash of her pulse, but she stepped away to argue with the waitress. There was an issue with the booking; something about his name not showing up in the system. If he were alone, he’d have forgiven this with a boyish grin. He’d have asked the waitress to squeeze him in when they got less busy, and why didn’t she just take his number and give him a call? But he didn’t come here alone. He came here with Annabelle, and Annabelle wasn’t interested in negotiation.
He remembered how she had approached him that evening at the museum. He had been pretending to admire the work of another sad-eyed painter when she walked up and asked what he thought of it all. Her frankness took him off guard; generally he was the one who spoke to the girls first. He told her he didn’t think much of the exhibition. He told her he didn’t care for sentiment or excess, and she listened, eyes fixed on him in cool appraisal. They talked until the museum closed and they had to head back into the city for Annabelle to catch her train. The wharf seemed endless that night, stretching out so long he felt like they could go on walking beyond its end into something else entirely, something new.
When all of it was over, he’d keep her heart in pride of place.
It was a week after she discovered his collection that he started to hear it: a kind of rustling, almost imperceptible at first. He paused while dusting the shelves, daring it to come again. It did, quiet and determined, accompanied by the faint clinking of glass.
It happened again a week later, a few hours after Annabelle left early with a migraine and he went on the walk he took every evening. He had made sure to lock the study, though he was beginning to wonder what difference it made. What did it matter if she didn’t believe his story? He was a heartbreaker, vulgar and inaccurate as the term might be. He was a heartbreaker and everyone knew it. The girls who said they wanted to get to know him knew it, and they gave themselves over without a second thought.
Everything was in its place when he opened the door. Yet it was like the air in a room after a party; something had shifted. The hearts appeared more alert, as though newly curious about their surroundings. They made him think of shoots turned up to the sun. He took a wide-necked jar off its shelf and unfastened it. He scarcely remembered the girl — she might have been the poetic one, or the athletic one, but either way she had fallen for him quicker than most.
Nothing happened at first. Then the heart began to shudder against the glass. He felt a thrumming inside his fingers like a static shock, and the sound continued after the heart had stopped moving, lessening in its fury until he could hardly sense it. Usually the hearts only let out the occasional tremor; there was never anything so long or so violent as this. He wondered what had caused the disturbance. There was construction work on his street, though that was several houses away. Could it have been the slamming of a door? An errant breeze? The rain had been persistent that last week, and at times he’d had to open the window to stop dampness setting into the room.
But none of that should have affected the hearts, he thought, replacing the lid. He had preserved each one so carefully, insulated from the outside world. More likely than not his brain had exaggerated what he had felt. He looked down at the heart he was holding and saw that it was still again. Yes, he decided, it was nothing really unusual; it was his imagination, at least in part. He stood there for a few moments longer, and then he set the jar on its shelf and went to bed.
It had seemed so easy in her mind. All she had to do was sneak into the garden while he was away, force open the study window and pull herself into the room. And it was easy, in a way, or perhaps everything felt easy on a day as unseasonably sunny as this. She watched him leave the house, concealing herself behind the symmetrical hedges that looked like they were from some bygone era. It had intrigued her how something could be so completely perfect and yet not at all beautiful. She could only guess his sense of beauty was order; he kept to his habits like a monk or a rich man, and he was just as miserly. It was apparent no one had been hired to reinforce the window frames, even the ones at ground level, which were so old and weather-beaten they gave way with a few strong wrenches.
Annabelle wouldn’t say she was well-versed in deceit, but she knew enough to use for a good cause. She had used it for less noble causes. As a teenager she and her friends would explore abandoned houses, jimmying locks with whatever they had on hand, trying to leave behind as few traces as possible. Prying open the study window had given her a different thrill: the thrill of setting something in motion. It was exciting to be around him from then on. She’d alternate between playing shy and playing hard to please, letting him think she was difficult, but not so difficult he’d never get his way.
He had never thought that Annabelle wasn’t on the train when she said she was, that so many times after saying goodbye she had stayed back to watch him and memorize when he came and went; that she wasn’t impressed by his stories and his qualifications; that she found his minimalist tastes painful, like the tastes of someone who had never known the messiness of real joy; that she hated the way he looked at her as if he liked the idea of owning her.
The first time she stepped into the study alone, she was overwhelmed by a sort of stage fright. The rows of jars spread out before her like an audience, demanding something she didn’t know how to give. She had never dealt with a heart severed from its owner. What if it was the girls she needed instead of these muted echoes, these things that had forgotten how to be whole?
Knowing she couldn’t turn back now, Annabelle reached for one jar after another. The hearts inside quivered to greet her. As she cradled them in her hands, they began radiating a soft, whistling glow. After a while there was a jolt. Then another, and another in rhythm—not yet a beat, but the memory of one. She waited, the familiar tension gripping her body. It was more strenuous than all the times she had worked on a heart before, and maybe it did take a little too much out of her, maybe her mother was right. When she needed a break, she sat down at the round glass table and assessed her progress.
The hearts looked both more insubstantial and more certain of themselves, coated in some kind of pearly dust that flickered in the dimness of the room. At first she thought they were dissolving, before her alarm turned to astonishment and she realized they were unmaking themselves. They were shedding the shape he had forced them into and reforming as what they had been. The hearts knew the bodies that they called home; the hearts had not forgotten.
Annabelle didn’t take breaks this last time. They were ready for her when she arrived, rattling the lids of their prisons so hard she half-expected them to clatter to the ground. She unscrewed each jar and brought it to the window, watching the glass glint in the honeyed light. She held them until her palms were sweating and the hearts were simmering with new electricity, and it was like being fifteen years old again at the beach and sinking her fingers into the sand, her warmth pouring out into every grain.
When most of the hearts were drumming in unison, she pushed open the window as wide as she could and set their jars down on the sill.
“You know where to go,” she whispered. It took her a moment to realize she had said it aloud. It took her another to turn and see him frozen in the doorway; the one day he had come home early, the one day he had departed from his routine. Of course it was, she thought. Could it have been any other way? She saw the red thread of fate that had entwined them all, him and her and the girls he kept like pinned butterflies.
Suddenly everything was thrown into sharp focus: the dour face of the clock on his shelves; the uncreased spines of the books beside it; the sun coloring the wall in a room that had no soul, in a house that had no soul, except for the hearts that fluttered beneath her hands.
He could have tried to stop her. He might have succeeded, and that might have broken her, might have made her give up her own heart in the process. But all he did was stand there like a man in a dream, the disbelief plain on his face. He had not known the hearts could free themselves.
Annabelle turned back to the window, where the hearts were hovering over their cages. They were all beating now, strong and sure, even as they faded from sight. She held them up one by one, and she gave them to the sky.
Anuja Mitra lives in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her fiction and poetry with a speculative slant have appeared, or are forthcoming, in places like The Forge, LampLight, The Deadlands, Haven Speculative, and Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy. Her Twitter and Linktree can be found @anuja_m9.
Translunar Travelers Lounge 