Читать книгу Tiny - Mairead Case - Страница 19

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T I N Y

When she was alive, Tiny’s mother knew everything anyone could about hearts. She performed surgery on them and studied their rhythms. She traveled, and she asked questions. In one small room with plastic yellow light, Tiny’s mother looked at thousands of frozen slices of heart, and then labeled and dyed them by herself. She taught Tiny how a cardiograph is actually a map of the heart moving to escape the body, then back into it. If that line kept moving, Tiny’s mother said, your heart would burst out of your chest. Tiny used to imagine this whenever she sat down to eat with new people. Plop! Your heart’s in the noodles. Hearts are brown, or yellow and brown, depending on the amount of blood and fat. Tiny knows this fact but still imagines them as pink and red, slick and mysterious. The ability to hold both truths is a strength, like seeing a cell phone tower at sunset and thinking it could be a ghost-chandelier instead. It could be.

By now, scientists can see and name every single part of a heart, but sometimes the muscle still surprises them. This is also true for brains, which aren’t muscles even though people talk about exercising them. And it is true for death, which happens, and still people know very few absolutely sure things about it. Sometimes that truth is a scary movie, to Tiny, and sometimes it is warmth in her chest. It exists outside of her, and it doesn’t. Tiny used to read, obsessively, about all the bad things that can happen to a heart. Hearts can die in