If You Saw His Heart [oneshot]

Vasco Izar

Somebody found me here

Somebody held my breath

Somebody saved me from the world you left

I spent the afternoon with Yani, out along the edge of the farm, right up to the chains of the fence. Barbed wire shined overhead as she inched along, humming to herself. I pressed my hand against the cane in my fingers and steadied myself with each step.

She toddled in long strides, her sundress catching the wind as we ambled. Dust kicked up from patches where the field had been plowed, and swirled in little storms around her. She would hunch down to grasp the warm clumps of dirt between her fingers, and let the little pieces of dust scatter behind her (¡Mírame papá!). Her voice carried out across the emptiness, hot sun illuminating all that was good, and shadows blotting out the past behind us.

I died a thousand times in the last few months.

Sometimes painful, sometimes peaceful.

There were the dreams when I saw myself dragged by soldiers to a guillotine in the town square. Sometimes a thick cord of rope to have me hang, and become limp and lifeless for the rest of the district to see. I thought that someone must have wished to break me, or annihilate what I’d been. As though by hurting me, my heart could be ground to nothing, and no one.

Sometimes I would go to sleep, and imagine that I never woke, but passed to a place that was empty and warm.

I thought about staying there for a long while. 

There was nothing and everything, a gray and empty void that expanded out toward nowhere. An everlasting peace for someone that knew that life was harder, endless. It would be nice, I had imagined, to disappear, to stay warm and safe, away from troubles and pain. I could remember things I hadn’t thought about in years, of my father playing cards with me and my brothers when we were boys (he always won, but it was fun all the same), or the first time that Emma and I kissed (in the shadows of a great oak tree along the river, her face all stars and eyes like silver).

It became harder to think of myself alone, separate from all of these stories. I was looking back outside of myself to see the young boy who’d be the shortest of his brothers swim the farthest, and fastest along the swimming hole. Or the man who’d knelt on a knee and asked the greatest woman he’d ever known to be his, and him, hers. Of an afternoon next to his abuela spent listening to stories of when she’d been a girl. The nostalgia coursed through like a fever, enveloping my body in all the good I could see – the happy times, of when the world was smaller.

We lived through my life two times over, flashes of birthdays, of births, of all the things I thought I’d lost to time.

I spent a whole morning with Raquel. We pushed through her collection of cloth dolls, and pressed flowers. We talked about the boys in her class, and how she wanted to learn how to run the farm like I had. I remember the embrace she tried to wiggle from, the protestations (papa!) before I let her be, disappearing through the door frame like it’d never existed.

And there came a time when I could feel it in my heart, that the memories could exist forever, and always, or never again. At least, not the same way as now, all light and color, and sound. Fragments, cracks, and missing pieces would line them if I were awake, their luster fading with each passing day.

You could stay, I remember saying to myself. Because it’s going to hurt to go back.

I faced myself along the porch, both of us in opposing wicker chairs, staring out to greet the coming sunrise. The sky was still a blueish purple, untouched by the birth of the sun.

I thought about the boy and girl who’d been lost in the eighty-first, my useless wisdom nothing but stale aphorisms for them to choke on. I thought of the disappointment of the district, the intractable problems that plagued us. The foot that was placed squarely on my neck, even as I tried hard to press back against it. I imagined the shame I felt, not because of what I had done but what I hadn’t – of being a man lost to his own emotions, rather than thinking of others – in a time when others needed me most. I wasn’t a hero, much less a villain, but a man who didn’t prove much of anything to anyone.

"It was always going to hurt," I said, looking back at myself with a smile. "I think I’ve always known – we have – that I feel everything, all the time." All the mistakes, the anger, the way the world turned for or against another. I shouldered it, was swept up into it, pulled apart and put back together. But there was something, a resilience gifted to me. A heart that knew as hard as I warred with myself, I did not walk away, did not let darkness win.

"I’m not ready to say goodbye," I look at him, my ghost, and heart, and head, "I don’t think I want to."

All the nostalgia that fevered through my body could not dispel the longing. Even with the pain of knowing all that I’d face, of disappointment from the people of eleven, of a world that had not changed, not even a little, I missed them all. More painful than self-doubt was the desire, the heart that beat for my daughters and sons, my wife, and family. For the unknowing that I possessed but was willing to challenge, and all the times that forced me to grow out of myself. If I had never known a love like I had, I could’ve let myself disappear.

But there would be no Yani, no Marisol. No Emma, or Kelvin. No Alfonso, Lordes, or Emmanuel. No Sofia or Sebastian. Or Alfer, or Magdalena, or –

It’d been a fever, at least, the doctors said it started that way. An infection that had me sweating through the sheets, in and out of this world and the next. I spoke sentences all mixed together, in languages of past and present, Vale, do you want to dantza? By the time the fever cleared, and my head had settled, I struggled to move on my own. Breathing was hard enough, and the right side of my body seemed heavier, harder to get to work. The doctors said it would take time, that my balance would come if I spent the days working to regain it.

Emma hadn’t wanted me to leave the house but relented after the reaping passed. Soon I’d have to step into my shoes as Mayor – if I still could – and it meant at the least not spending my days bedridden.

“Venga, mija,” I crouched down into the dirt, one hand on my cane and the other against the dirt. I pulled apart some of the clay to reveal a black beetle walking along, unbothered. Yani stepped into a crouch and moved to rest a hand in front of it so that it could crawl over her fingers. “Cuidado,” I whispered. I stepped closer and behind her, our shadows cast behind us, melding together.

I stared at her gentle brown curls atop her head, swaying in the wind. The smile that slipped across her face, and the quiet curiosity in her eyes.

Little moments that I could keep inside of me for when it would be painful.

Reminders that those I love are still around me, little moments to know that life goes on.

“Te amo, cariño,” I said, kissing her forehead. She turned, then, little body pressed into mine, eyes closed as she buried a head into my neck, hands tight at my back.

Te amo, papá.

It hurt but –

I would live.

Lost & Found, Katie Herzig