Body Parts
Anna Koltes
“July,” I croak. “That’s when you get my heart. I told you this, remember?”
My chest burns when it’s empty, my voice a pathetic wheeze. I’m cold all the time, but things will be better when I get my heart back to pump adrenaline into me.
Friday. That’s when Marco, my other lover, will be finished with it.
Jack just takes the lungs and goes back to wherever he lives these days. Sometimes I imagine it’s a rustic log cabin he built with his own two hands, scented with cinnamon-stewed apples and aglow with firewood he chopped himself. I imagine him alongside me tonight, listening to my slow breathing in him as he sleeps. Calm and ruggedly handsome, he’s like one of those mountaineers on the news who survive an avalanche and live to tell the tale.
He doesn’t even say goodbye. If I had a heart, I know it would twinge with longing as I watch him walk away.
But tomorrow the working week starts, so I won’t have my brain left to tell me that, either. They say it’s impossible to survive without one, but I make do. It pays the bills and it doesn’t last long. There are only so many of your thoughts they can take, after all, before you’re forced out of a dreamless sleep.
On my time off I go to the park to recover as much as I can, picking at a sandwich until I end up feeding it to the birds. I watch the children on the swings, jealous of their healthy legs, plump arms and raucous voices. The way they hurtle over dangerous precipices and plummet from monkey bars.
I was like them, once. Whole, unaware.
“Can’t I have all of you at once?” he asks, and he isn’t the first with this question, as conceited as it sounds. I try to explain, like I explained to Jack and Marco and all the others, but no one gets it.
The truth is, I don’t give my heart to just anyone. It’s encased in an icebox, padlocked in a double safe in my basement.
Even my parents have tried to guess the combination.
“You were always so aloof,” my mother scolds. “One day you’ll have to let someone in. Honey, tell her.”
My father pauses mid-raid of my refrigerator. “Hey, your mother still keeps my spine in her jewelry box. Don’t listen to her.”
“Don’t you want to come in?” I ask, despising the neediness in my voice, thinking of the painful epilation session and the many more hours scrubbing the obsolete corners of my apartment from a chair. I even made moussaka, proud of myself for patiently reading all the instructions in the cookbook, cool-headed when the fire alarm went off.
Marco says he has a thing: his friend’s stand-up, or concert, or birthing, I can’t remember which. He’s already moonwalking down the street, and I try not to notice the other body parts – finger, lock of hair, studded ear – sloppily falling out of his jacket pocket.
I’d run after him if I could. Make him stay.
It’s when I’m huddled in a cigarette-soaked sweater he left, perched on the fire escape hate-watching the neighbor couple clink glasses of orange wine, that I decide I need a distraction. Something to keep me from checking my phone and stalking Marco’s social media.
Crammed among the tone-deaf inebriated, I give my lips to a man at a bar. There’s no talking, only a hungry exchange. He takes more than I bargained for, and in the morning I find myself hobbling down the sidewalk in the ashy dawn, hailing a taxi, cold air filling the cavities in my flesh.
Jack’s waiting on my doorstep, clutching my lungs.
He looks me up and down, but his eyes are kind. Hearth-like. I imagine curling up in front of his fireplace while he reads me poetry about trees.
Inside the house, Jack gently places my lungs on the kitchen counter and makes us tea. For a while I do nothing but watch him; his quiet, assured movements. I don’t even tell him where anything is located, his intuition seems to guide him to the right cupboard, the correct drawer.
When we’re cradling oolong, I brush wood shavings off his shoulder. I ask him to stay. I don’t know why. But even before the question is out, I wonder why I never asked him before.
We feed each other burnt moussaka and I wonder if Marco will ever know what he missed.
When Kyle returns my feet, I take them off the market.
When she’s old enough, we take her to the park. But I’m too weak to walk, much less push a stroller – no recovery days now. I wheeze on the bench, seeing stars, knowing my body will never fully recover.
Throughout the park, limbless mothers push swings and fathers play tag with eyes yanked from their sockets. They trip and limp like victims of an epidemic, crawling after their healthy children and completed spouses. I don’t know why I never noticed them before.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I accuse my mother. “Why didn’t you warn me this would happen, that they would take everything from me?”
My mother rolls her eyes through the phone. “Oh please. What else would you have done with yourself?”
I watch Jack twirl our daughter in circles, their twin laughter caught in the autumn breeze, their cheeks pink and round. Healthy, greedy, unaware of all they’ve stolen from me, as blood drips from the holes in my body and onto my tennis shoes.
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