Unbreakable Heart

The waves had shook the earth in a continuous thunder. Now the sky itself seemed to fall around her. Everything had disintegrated into piles of ash—steel structures, wind turbines, even the soil beneath her feet seemed less itself, more of an ashen soot—that her feet sunk into, deeper with every step. Her body had somehow survived the fire—she knew not how. She had enclosed herself in a kind of cold storage unit and months later found herself brave enough to step outside. She wasn’t sure what she had expected to see, but in some ways the reality was far worse than her imagination. Her mind was incapable of opening up to the harsh cruelty of complete and utter destruction: the remains of hollowed loved ones, frozen in time, mostly incinerated into carbonized compounds.

In the distance she could hear a muffled cry but not where the sound originated. In this monotone landscape, the terrain all blurred together. The usual sort of recovery, in say, a house fire, did not apply here. Nothing was left to retrieve, no mementos, no photos. Any sort of sentimentality was not welcome, but also not found. A refuge, a sanctuary—none of that existed. She could step a foot in front of the next but she did not see any point or any destination. She laid down in the ash, made angel wings in the appliances, paved streets, children’s hands all now reduced to micro bits of grayness. Swishing her arms through the dust, perhaps expressing the last bit of art that would ever grace the planet, she felt something pass over her fingertips, something sturdy, something solid. She picked the object into her hands and took a long look at it. A chain glimmered even in the darkness. At the end of the chain was a heart-shaped locket. She felt her way around the heart and found a way to open the latch. Inside was a photo. She looked closely at the photo. She recognized the person—a young woman, actually—full of joy and wonder, not aware of the kind of surroundings her photo would find itself. And she began to cry. For the woman was herself. And she didn’t know who had owned the locket up until this point, but now it was hers.

She pulled the heart off of the chain and put the locket in her upper left pocket. This was where it was meant to stay. This was where it would end—whether she breathed two more breaths, two thousand, two million—she would make sure this pocket was always close to her chest. And when her nano bits of flesh became carbon, the heart would still remain.

She heard a voice in the distance and looked up to see a silhouette on the horizon. A figure of a man was waving its arms. She longed to step forward for she had not seen another living being in quite a long time. But she did not know who this man was, where he came from, what he wanted. She waited. He stopped. They stared at each other’s shadow for a while, watching each other for some sort of sign of how they might proceed. She remembered the chain gathering dust. She had taken this kind of step before. So, she stayed. Storm clouds gathered and suddenly the figure moved towards her. She could not move now. A kind of stone terror had taken over her limbs. The figure gathered enough light to reveals its image to her and she gasped. Just as the skies opened up and released a rain, the figure was by her side, his umbrella open.