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 fh 24
