Chambers

I find it in a soggy little cavity underneath footbridge.

1.

I find it in a soggy little cavity underneath footbridge.

It rained an obscene amount last night. Turned the path into islands. I almost step on the tiny thing trying to flee the currents of my policy lecture. The heart hops. Flips over. Water lines tessellate around its veins. There is gravel studded along the arteries, crushed twigs, and a serrated Snickers wrapper corner glued to the side. It looks messy, a little shy. Reminds me of myself after a night out. I dunk it into the pocket of my hoodie and take it home.

I don’t realise it then — the way it moves. But I will.

2.

The heart sleeps in a tank under my bed. It used to belong to my girlfriend’s toad, but I relocated Toadette into a shoebox under my house. I draw the tank out in the morning, fingers cleaning ribbons in the frosted glass, and start rubbing circles into the pocket near the atrium. It’s so raw, so bleached of colour. Frozen in a perpetual blush.

“Cute,” I say. I pull away from the muscle. Then it happens all at once.

The smell of fresh iron streams up my nose. The heart pinches into a plum-sized thing, then swells, then rolls through the motions again. And again. It beats. Squelches out a plasmic river. Red coats everything.

“What the fuck.”

It stops.

3.

Tuna holds my hand as we walk against the molten 5 PM commuter mass. It’s dark outside. The rain slants with the breeze and flutters into our faces. “Piece of shit!” Tuna yells. Every stoplight wants us to drown. She tucks me deeper under her twig-boned umbrella, and the backs of her hands catch all the rain.

“Um.” We walk to the brick curling outside her flat. Tuna stares at my nailbeds. “Are you on your period or something?”

Crusted into my cuticles and wedged beneath my press-ons, is blood. Fuck.

We’d been getting to know each other that afternoon. I had drawn the tank out, laid flat on my buzzcut carpet, and started reading out the Wattpad novel I had written seven years ago. The heart is a bit conservative. It was static the whole time.

“Was it the kidnapping?” I asked. The heart shrunk, caught in an aborted flinch. The little pool of blood and plasma slurped back into its sallow flesh.

“I’m sorry. Taylor Swift.”

It flushed, flesh jumping.

“Handwritten letters. Pining. The hand flex from Pride and Prejudice.”

The entire tank flooded. There was a moment, barely real, where I felt it beat in time with mine.

“Do you want—” Tuna clamps her chin down on the spine of her umbrella, and fishes Dettol wipes out of her bag. Chin multiplying with every second she strains against the open canopy; she starts cleaning my fingers herself.

“Geez, Tuna!” My heart starts beating in my ears. Something stutters in my chest. A second sound. “Stop being dumb!”

4.

Blatella Germanica — the roach’s courtship.

Tuna told me about the way they copulate. It’s a saccharine mating ritual. Watching them on piss-slicked concrete, it's traumatic. The male unfurls, preening the humble offering tucked into his wing. He’s charming. Juicing himself of maltose and maltotriose for a chance of catching her affection. The concrete is so dark. They look slimy in the night. 

The cockroach curls over the other. Their wings flutter in a dampened harmony. Every slant of lamplight resurrects them —lovers beneath one flicker, stray Mars wrappers in the next.

The thudding in my chest turns slippery. It moves like it’s discovering spaces between my ribs and lungs. Ninety minutes. Tuna said they go for ninety minutes.  My heart beats too fast. It swells unlike itself.

5.

It’s Valentine’s Day, Tuna is coming over, and the flowers I’ve torn from my neighbour’s garden are being wound up into a purple ribbon.

There must be love behind my computer screen, somewhere beyond the sliced body of the monitor, because the heart is beating relentlessly. Or it must just be the date, the flowers, and the romance of it all.

When Tuna comes in, she presses a jar full of paper into my chest. “Some reasons why I love you,” she says, but the jar spans the entire length of my torso.

“Some?”

She laughs, a pretty sound, and I give her the flowers that have now turned boneless.

“They were a lot more upright when I found them,” I say.

“What’s this?”

Tuna holds the tank up.

“Um.”

“Where’s Toadette?”

The heart wilts behind the glass, shrivelling until its wrinkles look like fault lines buried deep into the flesh.

“She’s just — away.”

“Away where?”

“In the…. crawl space.”

Tuna’s expression is unnervingly blank. “Under your house?”

“…Yeah.”

She’s swift out the door, leaving the weedy bouquet scattered by the doorway. Grabbing the tank, I try to yell after her, but the sound is garbage. Syllables pulped with breath and wheeze. She finds the shoebox, flicks it open, and bursts into tears.

Toadette was so slimy, so vapid. It’s not a big deal. But Tuna cries into the cardboard like she’s emptying out her viscera.

“It was just a toad,” I say.

Then it happens all at once.

My chest caves like it’s gripping onto one huge breath. The fleshy partition between my trachea and oesophagus dissolves. My airways squeal shut. I try to gag out a breath, but it’s seized by a throb. My chest is too full. My pulse is layered. A twin beat punching my ribcage.

I look behind me. The tank is empty.