a heart tale in the telling

(based on true events)

You left your heart in my fridge.

That didn't seem right,
and I thought, hey,
you might want it back,
so I cycled round to yours
with your heart in a plastic bag
in that old black milk crate
on the back of my bike.

At first you were glad to see it.
But then you forgot about it,
don't know why -
you might've been busy.
And your heart started to go off
and it started to smell
and it didn't look right
and even the neighbourhood cats
wouldn't touch it
when you left it in the backyard.

And your heart was a sorry sight.
Sitting in the dirt,
covered in flies.

I thought that maybe I should've kept it.
That maybe I'd have made better use of it
than you.

This story ends like no other:
(I can't make this shit up)
you pulled the car over
you kept the engine running
while I threw your heart
into a bin
outside the co-op on Splott Rd.

continued from Monday's post:

...At first, she dismissed them as coincidences, the kind you notice, think of as a little weird, and then shrug off. Like the day she finally accepted that her favourite pair of shoes - an old pair of combat boots she picked up in a flea market and wore into the ground - were beyond repair and threw them out, and the next day, on the riverbank, there were fourteen shoe soles washed up. Fourteen. She counted them.

Later, the connections - that’s the word she uses for them - moved out of the realm of coincidence and into that of just plain creepy. It was the week after her Aunty Doris died, the old man’s last surviving sister, and she was feeling pretty shook up. She hadn’t spoken with that side of her family in years - still hasn’t - but she’d always liked the old lady. Most of the few memories she can bear to hang on to from her childhood have to do with Aunty Doris, a floral-patterned and talcum-powdered counterpoint to the old man’s tobacco-bitter darkness. So she goes to the river, because thoughts have been stirred up that she figured were burned fast to the bottom of the pan years ago. She doesn’t have her camera with her - she still regrets that now - because she’d jumped on her bike on a whim straight from work. But she can recall the image like it’s a photo of the objects she found on the shore: waiting for her, that’s how she puts it. There was a tea cosy, sodden and mud-stained, sure, but otherwise the exact likeness of the one her Aunty Doris gave her for Christmas the year before she moved away for good. There was an old lady’s cardigan, the loose-knitted kind, short in the waist, like what some old folks wear to bed. She’d never seen her Aunty wear one herself, but when she saw it she got a picture in her head, clear as day, of the old lady propped up in bed with the cardigan round her shoulders. And there was a pair of spectacles, one lens missing, and these she’s willing to swear could have been the very same ones she saw Aunty Doris wear every day that she knew her to read the classifieds in the local paper. She would have taken a photo of each item if she’d been able. She couldn’t actually bring herself to touch them, though she stood there staring at them for twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes solid. The whole incident creeped her out, and for a while she avoided going back to the river bank.

She did return though, eventually, and does still. She carries her camera without fail. She’s become methodical - near scientific - in her documenting of the objects she finds. She’s got a wall in her flat devoted to the images she’s taken, but it’s almost full now and they’re going to spill over onto the next wall, which isn’t as good because it’s got the door to the kitchen right in the middle. But she likes to see them all spread out in front of her - it makes the connections easier to spot. There’s not yet been anything as major as what she calls the Aunty Doris situation, but even the tiny patterns she notices give her some satisfaction. There’s a message in them. Maybe over time the message will become easier to see, and maybe even whoever or whatever’s sending it will turn up. Not a ghost, of course. Something bigger, something cosmic perhaps. She’ll just keep taking her pictures and see.

what happens to the sole after the shoe dies?

She has a theory that she has not shared with anyone. She thinks that someone might be trying to send her a message. She doesn’t believe in ghosts or anything like that -- only crazies believe in ghosts and she’s not crazy -- but she’s always been good at spotting patterns, and lately she’s been seeing a lot of them.

There’s a place where she goes, see, when she needs to be alone. A spot on the river, where it bends, right before the weir. It’s wide and gentle, and it reminds her of a place where she used to go canoeing. There’s a beach, of sorts. Most folk would say that calling it a beach is an optimistic description; it’s more of a pebbly midden of shoreline that juts out from a muddy bank into the shallow rapids, before tapering off into the trees and shrubbery. She cycles there, and clambers down from the path with her bike. Twenty-five minutes from town, but it feels like a whole life time away.

Every river bank is littered with junk, and for a while she didn’t think this place was any different. She’s got an eye for washed-up garbage, an interest in detritus and other folks’ discards. Sometimes she takes photos of the stuff she finds, grainy saturated images on the cheap camera she carries. That’s how she started to notice the connections...



(tbc. maybe.)