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