The battered hearts ran away. They left their bodies behind, and their minds too.
They got tattoos and found love on makeshift mattresses, they smashed windows and sought revenge, they popped pills, burned meth, and guzzled booze, they screamed at the wind and peddled prophecies on the corner.
Unclothed and disobedient, the hearts reeked of piss and vomit and slid along the concrete, leaking oily blood onto benches, curbs, and sidewalks. Dust, splinters, and broken leaves caked onto their meat. Sores opened and oozed rancid pus.
Some hearts disappeared—incarcerated for theft, drug use, vagrancy, assault, or disturbing the peace. They were strapped to gurneys, sedated, assigned wristbands, entered into charts, and wheeled through locked doors. Judges, wardens, orderlies, and psychiatrists whispered among themselves, then signed orders for restraints, medications, transfers, lights-out, and discharge.
Other hearts, left on the streets, pressed themselves into corners and built little shanties of boxes and tarps or pushed shopping carts, trawling gutters, dumpsters, ashtrays, and donation bins. Their people back home had stopped chewing their nails, stopped waiting for a knock at the door, or a phone call or an email.
It was normal for people to step over four or five hearts on the way to the corner store. A heart flopping arrhythmically on the sidewalk was nothing more than an obstacle, no different from a puddle or a pile of feces. People called them hazards, nuisances, addicts, head-cases, thieves, deadbeats, and bums. They crossed the street, checked the soles of their shoes, and arrived at the corner store with clean hands.
A human heart can beat more than three billion times before death. Arrests, shelter beds, admissions, discharges, violations, and deaths can also be counted. Hearts can be transplanted—carried in coolers, rushed from helicopters, met by surgeons, and sutured into waiting bodies. In death, the coroner records personal data, time, date, location, and proximate cause. There is no form to note the moment or reason a heart slipped loose, leaving the body, leaving the mind, battered, dragging its bloody mass toward the street.
Preston Fordstrom is a cell biologist, musician, and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work in science, sound, prose, and poetry is drawn to difficult material, harsh realities, and the strange forms that emerge under pressure.