The Broken Heart

When the end of the world came, it was nothing like how it had begun. Not with a bang, big or otherwise. No reverse evolution, bipedals crawling back into the heaving, contaminated sea. The end of the world was slow and sick and torturous, like a body in a hospital bed, no longer recognizable even to loved ones, riddled with disease.

First, it was the air. Without trees, and with the endless blaze of wildfires across the continents, the air became unfit to breathe. Oxygen masks were the first thing they gave us, then gas masks when those ran out - ugly things that filtered out any particles that made you choke and die. My sister, Callista, fashioned ours into different shapes and styles and colours, so we’d at least have some way to pick eachother out from the crowd. My mask was teal with pink borders, its gas cylinders long and extended, curling outward from the mouth of the mask like a sabretooth tiger’s. When I’d been gifted it, I’d had to bite back a morbid joke about the irony of a mask modelled after an extinct mammal.

Then, it was the water. The mountain rivers and wellsprings acidifying and choked with pollution as they were, we started to run out of backups about ten years ago. Then it was lakes – we noticed because fish started showing up on the shores in droves, their scales blistered, gills distended. Soon, the only water the people trusted was what was left in supermarkets, and without a global supply chain, that ran out quickly, too, too quick for people to even take advantage of the demand.

Now, we get our water from the seashore and boil and distill it, but it’s still not clean. You can taste the slimy taint of oil.

After our houses burnt down, most people packed up and moved to the seashore, to be close to the water. Now that we’ve stripped all the shops left standing bare, we live off scavenged food – seagulls or seals when they wash up; once, we had an albatross – and spend our time collecting driftwood and other flotsam, to make boats. A few of the encampment’s leaders want to brave the ocean, try and sail to one of the other islands to see if conditions are better. I doubt it, from the radio broadcasts. Whatever flotsam my sister and I collect, we keep for ourselves – small things to decorate our tent. You need those, at the end of the world. You know that Blink-182 song, All The Small Things? Turns out they’re the things that really matter, in the end.

Right now, Callista is in our tent, hiding from the sun and sanding a piece of sea-glass she found on one of her rockpool expeditions. When I part the tent flaps and go inside, my head brushes several pieces of hanging driftwood, studded with chips of sea-glass and pieces of nacreous abalone shell. My sister makes these ornaments for us, to remind us both that not everything is hopeless, that there are still beautiful things.

I sit down beside her on our pile of tattered cushions. The noonday sun is weak, light filtering in through the gaps in the tent, touching the edge of the piece of sea-glass as my sister works, sanding it slowly into a shape. The glass has a small hole worn into it, and Callista has strung a piece of rope through it.

‘It can be a necklace, look!’ My sister holds up the rope, the sea-glass dangling from the end, painstakingly shaped into a heart. Clumsy and uneven, but more beautiful than anything she’s made before. The heart twirls on the end of the rope, the light catching it properly now, and I can see it’s no ordinary piece of beach glass.

‘What is that?’ I reach up and cup the heart in my hands, inspecting it more closely. The sea-glass isn’t an opaque green like most – it’s more like opal, nondescript at first sight, but with a streaky rainbow of colours running through it depending on where the light hits. It feels heavy, too, when my sister lets go of the rope it’s attached to and it nestles into my palm.

Callista blinks at me from behind her visor. ‘It’s not like any sea glass I’ve found before. When I picked it up, I could have sworn I heard singing.’

I grin behind my mask. ‘Like in the stories, when you’d press a seashell against your ear?’ Not expecting anything, I hold the sculpted heart close to my left ear. All I can hear at first is the shuffling of feet on the sand outside, the waves breaking themselves to dirty foam beyond. But then, strangely, I do hear it, a low-frequency thrumming that I’d be ready to write off as my heartbeat, but my heart doesn’t beat that fast. I realise I can feel it, too, in my fingers, the slight vibrations given off by the heartstone.

‘Wow.’ I pull back to look at the glass again, at its rainbow-hued surface. I turn it this way and that, then – stop. ‘Cal. Did you do this?’

‘What?’ my sister cranes her neck over my shoulder.

‘There’s a seam,’ I marvel, running my pinky nail along the tiniest hairline fracture in the side of the heart. It’s too neat and flawless to be a natural split – it reminds me of a locket, the antique keepsakes that open onto the picture of a loved one or a handwritten note.

It reminds me of a broken heart.

I catch the lip of the seam with my fingernail, pulling it apart a fraction of an inch – and gasp as bright light spills from the crack, setting shadows dancing on the walls of our tent. The thrumming, so quiet before, becomes louder, a distinct tone, and in this moment, I swear I can smell thunder, the crackling ozone of a sky before lightning.

I drop the heart. It swings dejectedly at the end of its rope, and my own heart thumps as I look up at my sister, who is breathing hard, the visor of her mask fogged up with condensation.

‘Leo,’ she says, her voice distorted by her mask, trembling with excitement.‘Did you hear it?’

I nod slowly, still shellshocked. ‘I heard humming. And, Cal – it sounded like thunder. It smelled like a storm.’ I hold the necklace out to her, careful not to let it touch me. ‘Where did you find this?’

‘I told you – in one of the rockpools, out past the encampment yesterday. It must have washed in with the tide.’ Callista takes it from me, cradling the heart in her palms protectively. ‘Don’t be afraid, Leo,’ she says softly. ‘It’s just a little piece of magic.’

But I am afraid. In my fifteen years of life, I have seen rescue aeroplanes fall from the sky like children’s toys, trailing flame like streamers. I have seen adult men fight to the death over a carton of baked beans. I’ve seen corpses cooked inside the twisted skeletons of cars after a bushfire, melted asphalt pitted and bubbled like the surface of some alien planet. I’ve seen too many unspeakable things to touch something magical and not be afraid of the moment it turns ugly.

But Callista isn’t like me. Even though she’s older, has seen worse, she never let herself get jaded, never stopped pointing out the beautiful things in this burnt-out husk of a world. I want to be more like her.

So, when she leans forward to drape the rope of the necklace over my head, I don’t shy away, not even when the heart nestles against the fabric of my shirt. I hold my breath, feeling it thrum steadily against my chest, a second heartbeat. My head is swimming with questions – what was that light? What would I find inside the heart if I cracked it open?

My father used to say, when Callista and I were being particularly wild in our playtime, that us children were like storms in a teacup. Tiny, but raging, electrified chaos inside. Is that what’s inside the locket? Chaos?

A part of me, however afraid, wants to find out. I touch the sea-glass lightly, feeling its smooth, cold surface, and shiver with an emotion I cannot place.

Maybe it’s hope.

****

It’s night, and the last salt-fires have been put out. Every nomad in our camp is asleep, in their tents or under lean-tos made out of driftwood and rock. My sister lies beside me, in a palace of pillows, her mouth open, her fingers twitching, as if carving pretty jewels even in her sleep.

I lie on my back, riotously awake. The locket sings against my chest. So close to my skin, it’s like I can feel its thrumming in my bones, buzzing at my nerve endings. I want to move to its rhythm.

Before my brain can catch up, I am shaking my sister awake. Callista frowns, but follows as I get to my feet, instinctively ducking my head so as not to capsize the tent. We navigate across stray pillows and around hanging sea-glass mobiles, and step through the flap into the still night.

Waves are seething against the shore, churning up a bilious yellow foam. It’s the last thing a sane person would want to dip a toe in, but there is something tugging at me insistently, a wild desire to dive into the toxic ocean and float.

So I do. Fully clothed, I wade into the sea, past congealed piles of plastic and old tires and aluminium, until I’m up to my waist in water. I turn, making sure Callista is with me, and slowly let myself be carried backward by the current, the ocean’s hands lifting me so that I float on the surface, careful not to let any water touch the filters of my mask. I look up.

Once upon a time, we could see the stars from the ocean. Now, the atmosphere is too hazy, choked by ash-filled black clouds, thick with pollution. Tonight, it is nearly pitch-black, but I am illuminated – there’s something glowing beneath my soaked shirt.

I right myself and gently pull it out. The locket is throbbing, now, light cascading from the crack in its surface. My throat constricts as I realise I, like Callista, can hear singing – a low, mournful threnody that is simultaneously the most beautiful and most miserable sound I’ve ever heard. It is ancient, this sadness, and I cannot explain how I know that. I only know how the song makes me feel, as we kick our feet to stay afloat, tears pricking inexplicably at our eyes.

I run my fingernail along the crack, and it opens for me like a well-loved diary. The broken heart splits perfectly in two, and what emerges from it I could not describe in a thousand entries. It is every colour you can dream. It is the sound before lightning strikes the earth. It is the smell of petrichor, of new beginnings. It is the universe spreading across the ocean, reflecting the missing stars.

It is a miracle.

Magic spills through my hands like so much dust, beaming from the open locket in every direction, and that sad, ancient voice whispers, its words only for my sister and I. What it says makes my tears flow faster, tracking down my face to join the salt of the healing ocean.

As gentle hands and hopeful hearts shaped me, so I shape this world anew.

Go gently into the new world, and leave it better than you find it, as you did for me.

****

A storm is gathering between the cups of our hands, but we are ready. We know it will be the storm that shakes the stars, that shatters and remakes our world. We will withstand it.

And we will walk into the new world believing in miracles.