— 2022 Contest judge Jenny Boully

How Your Heart Is Formed

I

“What is that?” a kid at the playground asked when, stretching for the overhead bars, my brother’s shirt lifted and out from under it peeked what looked like a quarter-sized, peach-colored Band-Aid with a metal wire from inside a twist-tie. We were at a park down the street from my aunt’s house, a thirty-minute drive from Los Angeles. We stayed with her when we had to bring my brother to UCLA for follow-ups, piling into the station wagon and hauling ourselves down US 99 and over The Grapevine so his doctors could once again monitor his internal organs and assure us they were still making his body one that breathes.

“Lift it up,” I said, “show them.” Other children came to see: the suction-cup buttons on my brother’s scrawny chest, skin over bones slightly convex—his heart in its shell—his belly stark as a sail against his sun-splashed but still-pale fist, inside of which he gripped his tee, scrunched into a ball.

When organs begin their existence, the heart comes first. Later, comes apart.

In the future, I will remember my brother’s body like a place. Like Area 51. Like  autopsy.

II

Visalia, Garden Grove, Downey. Clinic, hospital, medical center. Grapevine, Grapevine, Grapevine. (One-candle cake). Outpatient, inpatient, U-Haul, critical care, surgery, recovery. (Two-candle cake). Dad found a job, lost a job, quit a job, fuck the boss; landlord gave us a break, landlord gave us the finger. (Open-heart) surgery, critical care, recovery.

A whole place is hard to remember. A hand hard enough to forget. “He’s out of veins,” the white coats would say. His loose wrist. The tops of his hands. His forearms, ankles, feet—each a field of dead grass, each head of every sprinkler choked with dust. Ran him out of places. Each vein poked wide open was another gate blown shut.

            When the uppermost, the atria, separate, the human heart resembles a turtle heart.

            What has stayed—kicking around in this body all these years—is not so much memory as faith. A belief I can’t shake: it’s in my hands. Not God’s. Not Dr. Chopra’s. Not in the hands of inheritance (acquired characteristics by means of natural selection), nor in the hands of mom or dad, nor the hands clasped in their circles of prayer. It’s all of it rolled up rubbery, bubblegum mucus in my own hands. The whole of it. In my vein-spliced palms: the crisscrossing bars of sutures, their tight white lines; the aorta, agape, famished; the slippery, smelling-like-fowl muscle of my grown-up brother (the size of his fist, one third more than me); plus the quarter-pound heart of my still-baby brother. His three-chambered heart, both baby and grown, would fit. I could hold them in my heart, I mean my hand. I mean, I do.

III

We could have been. Bodies unfurling under a rounded roof of cartilaginous tiles. But we left, on our own slower than slow someday sapien evolution. We carry, in our fetus-shells, the potential/the memory of being vaulted, still mushy and wrinkled flesh-renters, but safeguarded.

In one grim hand, I hold the future like I hold the past. It would never leave, this belief. I tell you now: if I write one more step after “autopsy,” if I take that path, he will die. Die is a euphemism for I kill him. You know what they say about children. If the parents divorce, say, stretch apart like a replicating cell, the children are convinced it’s their own fault; can’t prevent them thinking it, it’s developmentally impossible. Kids: we’re all Superman.

             My brother’s speech development had stilted some for the two years he’d spent more in than out of the hospital. But he’d gone to speech therapy, caught up. By the time we were at the playground, he talked just fine. But I was first. I said, “He has superpowers. That’s what those wires and stuff are for.” Not devices hung by doctors on the heart’s door, not biological reconnaissance. No, the doctor had not told our parents to get his heart rate up and our parents had not sent us off to the park two blocks over. I had not been directed, temporary protector, to get him to play hard, but not too hard. As I said it, as I didn’t, it was so. Electronic monitors transformed into muscle boosters, making him: extra human, extraterrestrial.

At the bottom of the heart, the ventricles separate completely. The human heart takes, at last, its illustrious four-chambered structure. Distinguishing itself (as mammal, as landlocked) from other living creatures; distinguishing itself as only human.

IV

“He could lift the whole jungle gym,” I said, swinging out my arm, “anything here.” One of the kids, younger than me, asked, “Why doesn’t he do it, then?” Pointed to the monkey bars where my brother’s hands had just been reaching.

After only a single beat, I said, “He doesn’t want to waste his strength.” And because I was about four Gregorian-calendar-years older than these kids (developmentally equivalent to the distance between the Paleozoic’s Devonian and Carboniferous periods), they bought it. Hook, line, and sinker. But I know better.

Brother didn’t distinguish, between human and amphibian, he stayed, in the place before separation.

There’s that thing, older than knowing. To see. More than just looks like, it tastes, sounds, feels, and smells like memory. As though a single sapien organ of perception had taken it in, just as—exactly that—unthinking, uncritical, not one modification, major nor minor. I remembered it. I mean, I meant, I imagined. Imagine: to make a memory of the future possible. As I live and breathe, I see, under the blue-gray rocks of that now-old playground, the dirt, and under the dirt, the metal poles of the monkey-bars sunk deep, not into concrete but into their own rooting. I see/I make my baby-hulk brother as he takes the structure from the earth like it’s nothing, like nothing will stay him, one red metal bar in one pale hand, the other in the other.