Briefly, the Heart

with apologies and nods to bpNichols The Book of Hours in The Martyrology Book VI

Briefly, the heart forgets to breathe, forgets ventricles, extremities and the rest and knows

the technician won’t meet the eye of the storm the three have entered

in the ultrasound room. There’s no sound for what happens while there’s blood

pounding through headfuls of the worst thing that could happen. Or has happened

already. Is that why the outer reception uniforms shrugged, handing back health cards after

looking up and down, making not of size? Briefly, the heart simply is

what keeps the room from screaming or crying or making any noise at all, what

keeps the husband so close to the wife, in fact he’s holding her hand while watching

the screen as if he’s seen this movie before albeit with subtitles and a different director, and

knows it ends abruptly. The technician, who in another time and place probably

laughs and tucks her gray-streaked hair behind the apprehension she feels

dating since the divorce, could be hoping for the best, wishing this time

she’d be wrong and not need the doctor specializing in this kind of bad news

who’s been called not for any obvious reason but policy, the technician said swallowing

her hair loosened from its hinges and avalanching the room. To recap, we have

two looking at the silent picture and the third on her back having swallowed a lake she now prays

will engulf her before the next word, engulf the way amoebas would in cell biology class long ago when

she never paid enough attention and can’t help wondering if that miscarriage of her studies is

why this is happening, why the heart’s no longer talking to her

or her husband or the hospital staff and why she’s thirsty as if in deserted sand and more aware of

vultures and what they do. The heart is the clock on the wall clicking institutionally and barren

when the doctor arrives and he too cannot make eye contact. In this script

the actors deliver their lines to the side- long glance the audience gives or to others like

the woman across in the waiting room chair, before all this

. whose arms slid out of her sleeves like charms

not fastened securely to the bracelet so skinny that drug marks were not

- out of the question and yet she was big as a house

filled with at least one child. Briefly, the heart

gets up blighted from the examining and makes its way to the adjoined washroom, it seems

this hospital thought of everything, you don’t ever have to go back out and face

right away, the technician said after Doctor fled, Take your time. Your time. You roll it over

like a Lifesaver, the orange one your grandfather unwrapped you as a kid. Your time

was supposed to be this time, you thought, shaking head and heart, unable to separate

breaths and sobs, milk and cream, and you think where is that awful sound coming from, someone

should help her. Green shoes under the sink in the discreet washroom

needle their way into the heart to stabilize after having restarted the cycle of in and out

and in and out and pretty soon compassion is what the wife pulls on

toward whoever owns the green suede shoes and with mindful enough to leave them where a heart might have

held its breath or stuck its head underwater too long. It’s a long way walking back

where mercifully the film was turned off— not much to see anyway, the doctor had said

running away. So now the husband is against the wall, leaning or holding up, it

can’t be discerned from this distance though there’s dampness. The heart mulls over

the ways in which yellow means caution and so must ask what were they thinking when painting

this room and thank god for green which under the circumstances would mean go on.

Lesley-Anne Bourne