Born With a Heart

It was an unfortunate thing to be born with a heart. If there was one thing an average person pitied the most, it was those unlucky few infants that bore a lumpy mottled mass of muscle some doctors controversially defined as an organ. Of course, the medical classification of this tumor-like weight had been debated since the very beginning of time, and it seemed there were never two who behaved exactly alike when one introduced the subject into conversation. Some were very vocal about their fervent disgust at the thing and some had a visceral gag and some just sighed and squeezed their eyes shut.

The head doctor only hung his head, gaze pinched and painful. The writhing child in his arms was just a few grams too heavy, and everyone here knew precisely what that meant. Even if they hadn’t initially, there was a faint beat throbbing in and out that was now impossible to ignore after all had gone mournfully silent. Despite the hum of fluorescents and the shuffle of polypropylene under shoes and the clatter of scalpels and rongeurs it was by far the loudest sound in the room.

The mother was out cold, and it seemed a true blessing. She would be spared from the awful reality she’d just been thrust into by this new development. While she slept she would dream in blissfully ignorant grey for the last time before the hands of cruel life closed their fingers around her throat and turned her face purple.

When the doctor spoke again, for the first time since the birth, his vowels were small and tight and sounded as though they hurt him greatly to create.

“Do we think we could…” he croaked, “do something?”

But he already knew the answer.

A med student previously occupied with scribbling notes onto a cheap pad of paper burst into tears, shuddering. The anesthesiologist on call just shook her head, her features grim. She looked about ready to cry, too. It was gross, gross and deeply upsetting, to witness the birth of a deformed thing.

Wetting her thin lips, she replied, “Too late. It would’ve had to have been removed within a minute and even then we'd have had to have the mother sign off on the risk of killing him.”

A fourth person lent her voice to her opinion. “Better off dead, if you ask me.” She shook her head. “Kid like that is going to suffer a fate worse than anything we could do to it.”

“Dr. Lynn,” the anesthesiologist chided, “That is entirely inappropriate.”

“It’s uncomfortable, you mean, but we’re all thinking it.” She fiddled with her glove.

When no one replied she added, “Watters is crying,” gesturing to the student.

The first doctor gently rocked the baby in his arms, eyes glued to its small chest. His mouth was sour with bile and his throat felt tight. Still, nobody spoke.

Lynn continued, gesturing again with her arms to the doctor. “Richards can barely look at the thing. He’s probably about to throw up.”

“It’s not a thing,” he said, looking at Lynn now. “He’s just an unfortunate child. If there’s–”

“The world is a cruel place,” she cut him off. “Mark my words, he’ll kill himself with that thing before his twenties. If someone doesn’t do it for him first.”

More swirled in Richards’ stomach. He looked back down at the infant and everything else went out of focus. Distantly, he heard the anesthesiologist speak again.

“Lynn,” she snapped, “Please refrain from–”

Richards didn’t hear the end of the sentence. Instead he was taken somewhere else entirely. A future. A modest red-brick house at the end of a short Texas street. A mother sat with a toddler on her lap, a boy of three with a three ounce heart trapped inside of him. She was as kind to him as she possibly could be with her words, but he had started showing and it just was not acceptable.

It had just been a small incident. Someone on the playground had crushed a beetle with their shoes. But the toddler launched himself onto the asphalt, scraping the skin on his knees and knuckles red and raw, and his heart contracted with pain as he gasped between spurts of sobbing. He’d been just about ready to pass out entirely before his mother had dragged him away.

When in private she struck him across the face.

“Oh, go on and just tell everyone you’re a horror, why don’t you? Shout it from the damn rooftops!” She’d been furious, boiling with rage. “Don’t. Don’t make a scene like that.”

He’d only cowered, promising not to do it again. But it just wasn’t in the cards for the toddler to be discreet. He’d been doomed from conception. Doomed from the moment the cancer formed in him. Feeling one person’s feelings was a lot. Feeling everyone’s was unnatural, too much.

A cloudy three in the afternoon in the middle of August when the toddler was no longer a toddler, but a child. Twelve ounces heavier than he was supposed to be. A group of other boys rode by on bicycles and wove between stones and pebbles. One did not manage to, and it caught in his wheels and sent him down, gravel up his bloody nose. The child had rushed forward, grabbed the boy’s arm and begun to cry, snot dribbling down his nose onto his orange shirt.

“Are…you…” he heaved in between words, clutching the fabric over his chest where he felt his heart constrict. The other boy kicked him in the face and hissed, pulling away. Blood still dribbling down he yanked his bike back to where the group awaited him, and in hushed voices they talked of shame and blasphemy and embarrassment. Words they shouldn’t have known at their age but they did and it was the fault of people like him. He disgusted himself. Because he had the audacity to exist as he was, others would always be burdened with knowledge of things they never wanted.

The child’s birthday cake read twenty-six now. He sat in an oak chair in his single-bedroom apartment picking apart white frosting by himself. Monday he’d had an incident at work where he’d almost died because a car accident had happened on the adjacent street and his three-hundred and twenty-nine gram tumor had almost exploded. He didn’t blame people for their distance. If he himself could separate from the disease he carried with him he would’ve done it a long time ago. The scars on his face and his arms and the rest of him from these incidents were far from the most unsightly thing about him.

The more he thought about it, the more he understood others’ impulses. All of them at the same time. His gaze shifted to the clean knife sitting by his place, untouched and sharp. That night he went to bed with a brand new scar, one on his pectoral that went deep enough to cut but not deep enough to do anything serious.

Annoying, it sure was, to be too much of a coward to go all the way.

By thirty-two he’d stopped trying entirely. His heart pained him more when he tried, and life was already hard enough as it was, attempting to keep the incidents to a minimum. He’d given up on trying to fight it. He was already constantly in pain as it was. A sharp sting on good days, and on bad ones he was bedridden and therefore starved. It incapacitated him too much to move at all.

The dark eyelashes parted in front of Richards. The infant blinked, still silent, blue eyes some of the widest he’d ever seen. Lynn and Reynolds were still yakking on about something, back and forth, while Watters just stared at the ground.

“–you can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like. It’s so much. It’s too much. We aren’t built for people like that.”

“Who’s we?”

“Society. People in general.”

Slowly, wordlessly, he walked to the table at the end of the room. He set the child down on a cold tray, and its lip trembled at the contact. Before it could begin wailing he picked up a scalpel and placidly twisted it down right into its heart. Skin still warm, he swept it off the tray and into a bin at the end of the table. Richards was able to feel his own heart slamming at his ribs urgently before it finally gave out.