405 - Setting Sun

January 20, 2012

Everyone shits, but when I shat out my heart, I worried.

There I am, minding my own fetid business, and I feel it you know? Sort of like when you’ve not been to the bathroom in a while, and sort of pressurizes shit in your bowels, and when you relax and let go, everything comes out of you and you feel lighter. That’s what it felt like … almost.

How do I know it was my hearts bobbing up and down in the yellow-turning-brown water of the bowl alongside the turds? Well, I fished it out because it looked like a fucking heart! And it was still beating.

And I felt some sort of emptiness? In my chest. Yes. I don’t know how else to describe it. And I was alive so what the serious fuck, right?

So, I fished out my heart and it stunk.

Obviously, I didn’t even bother to notice then that there was no blood, but it looked like the human heart I remember seeing in my biology text years ago. My heart. Smeared in shit, wet from water and piss, out of my body, sitting in my bathroom sink, staining everything brown (including my hands), beating away as if connected to anything, my pants around my ankles.

Panic isn’t the right word for how I felt when I was poking it with my finger, with a q-tip. I ran water over it to scrub it clean. Is that weird, doing this instead of, I don’t know, freaking the fuck out.

But I did worry.

What did this mean? Where did this come from? I couldn’t feel my heartbeat. Why was this happening? I used a bar of hand soap to clean my heart in the bathroom sink.

I looked up and I think I was pale.

What I didn’t do is worry to the point that I ran out of the bathroom screaming and telling my husband what’d just happened. That was crazy. It is crazy.

[shout out to the short story by warren ellis & marcello fruisin from HELLBLAZER #143 (i think!).]