by Vanessa Nina
I have been looked at only twice today. For I have become the least exciting piece in the collection.
Outshined by the stuffed terrier, who had once belonged to some politician and had been ripped apart to be put back together, now dashingly poised with a moustache, and the gathered bones brought in on a day’s flight from somewhere in Argentina. They have now moved my box to the upper floor.
Where no child wants to climb the stairs, and no elder can.
They have built a new case for me, a transparent and symmetrical display, big enough for me to still filter air through the tiny holes they had put into it. They want to keep me alive, desperately. I could let them know, still, that I was pumping. I can do it, masterfully, up to eighty beats a minute.
The case also allowed visitors to get closer to me, way closer than ever before. Watching me through un-lidded eyes and unmoving chests; I wondered what lay behind their layers of bloodless muscle.
In Paris, they had me strung from the ceiling on some invisible thread; I was a floating piece of a “conceptual installation”, given to art’s sake so that a dancer could look up to me in woe, and then be asked about what it takes to become an artist.
“You have to have the heart for it”, he would say, making a dim-lit room croak.
In London, then, a month later, when they had opened the new National Museum of Robbery World History that would showcase the diverse cultural acquisition across from across the planetary system , they had placed me on a marble pedestal to accompany some exhibit on the “evolutionary journey of human development”. It started with me and ended with a mirror, showing the extraordinary anthropomorph subject.
Now, I have been relocated – to some small gallery in Northern Europe, a tiny town in some restored city. I was to be looked at, but exclusively; a “privatized acquisition,” they said. People were going to pay a lot to see me, yet I rarely saw anyone, anyway.
They have even given my display a new sign. It is barely readable, and uninspiring if you weren’t interested enough to know about me. But it is accompanied by a QR code that people can scan and listen to my beat instead of asking a staff member to explain what was so great about me. After all, they would talk too much, and the oxygen wasted could’ve been used to fuel a day’s worth of storage.
The sign, if you’d approach me but just close enough – perhaps mesmerized by my septum, the atrium and ventricle, my splendid vena cava, dancing along because I am chronically restless -, would tell you from where I have been sourced. Although they could not pinpoint it, it would tell you that I’ve been probably harvested from a woman’s body in the East, yet, to them, I was representative enough for the collective condition.
It would tell you in what marvellous condition they had managed to abduct preserve me, although they would not tell you about how the rest of my home has been blown apart by a sharp toothed shrapnel, how I had been squished, for days, in between the remnants of a rib cage, piercing into me. Hieving, grunting. It’s why I got these scars, you see, mended by the wonders of forgetting restoration.
But they won’t tell you that, if you hadn’t looked long enough at me to even notice where some of the stitches poked from in between my muscles. For people didn’t enjoy hearing about my past – after all, the most interesting thing about me was my contemporary existence, my strength for perseverance, how I’m able to produce enough electricity to fuel myself. Self-sustenance.
“Human Heart”, my sign would read in black print, carefully chosen, as everything was.
Then, the words next to it, barely noticeable, read: “Extinct.”
_
I once could pump up to 100,000 gallons of blood through a body. Before it blew apart, of course.
I am a child of dismissileal.
_
For a moment, I see these hands reaching, small and chubby palms, all soft and smooth, bloated and so full of blood underneath the muscles and skin. The fingers point – me, the spectacle, and I, too, imagine myself gravitating to meet the touch, to know what it would feel like to be cradled again.
Yet, I cannot stir – not more than I need to keep on moving.
I’ve been confined for more than three months now. The new place is spacious, full of bright phosphoric light that I’m not used to; I like the darkness, prefer it. Where it’s warm, where I know I’m safe.
There was a time, people couldn’t survive without me.
The movement stops, meeting the glassed membrane with a dull thud, not yet strong enough to tip me over, but to make me jump, just a little, pushing me into irregularity for but for a second, disrupting my regular pump.
Someone comes, a woman clad in a raincoat she didn’t need, clutching a paper map, and reaches for his hand, clasps it, thumb stroking over the little boy’s wrist. Where the veins would have pooled, where they would lead him to me.
She tells him that it’s not allowed to touch the pieces, explains how the glass is there to protect me from dirt and theft.
“Mommy,” the youngling would say, with big rounded eyes that would scan me vigorously. “A heart.”
“Yes, honey,”, the woman would reply, cheeks flushed. “We used to have many of those, before they were all gone.”
“Where did they go?” the boy would then ask, and I wanted to tell him. But I cannot speak for myself.
“Well,” she would start in a soft voice, tugging at his arm. “We learned that we didn’t need them anymore. Come, honey. Let’s see the conflict room.”
I see them pass on, quickly dive into the sea of people with bloating bags, sharp-edged heads and long limbs, thin-patterned shawls; families, some striding lonesome past me, all of them on the lookout for something.
Sometimes their eyes linger, looking at me, beating, and they would wonder about my authenticity.
I’ve been carefully preserved in my translucent cage, the square box. I even got a new sign, telling you about how vital I am was for the human condition. There had once been many poems written about me. Yet even then they couldn’t see me for what I am; tissued flesh. They couldn’t talk about me for what I was.
Eventually, they would all be led to me. I am the heart of the exhibition, and there are talks of a permanent acquisition, yet no one can really tell to whom I belong anymore.
My body has been destroyed by fire. As far as I know, I belong to myself.
There are particularly loud; screaming children who yet don’t understand my importance, students on an unwelcome school trip, people who attempt to know what I am, where I came from. They walk past, always, yet I cannot watch where they’d be going next. They have nailed me down, you know, right between my chambers – as if I could escape.
Stolen, not to be stolen.
They wouldn’t understand how it hurt me, because they cannot feel what I feel, and what I feel is the piercing of metal into my flesh.
_
By early September, I have been moved again, since the gallery has plans for an exhibition on wartime art, with pieces by withered veterans and Holocaust survivors.
Where my box stood, there was now a two-metre canvas of someone holding a protest sign. It has a heart on it; curved and red, and nothing like me. Black and white, no QR code, nothing.
“It speaks for itself”, the sign next to it would say, written by a ‘post-colonial protest expert.’
The day they had wrapped me up, bubble-wrapped thrice, I got a new sign, then.
“Handle with care”, it read, screaming at you in bright crimson with bold letters, as they tossed me into a new box, wooden.
Vanessa Nina is a 25-year-old, German-Polish writer and academic based in Germany, currently pursuing her M.A. in British and American Studies. When not writing, she likes to read Gothic fiction and play Dungeons & Dragons. She may be found on Instagram @wutheringshelves_
𝙾 𝙲 𝙲 𝚄 𝙻 𝚄 𝙼 