Buh-bum, Buh-boom

Buh-bum, Buh-boom.

Two years ago, I asked her out on a dare, which was out of character for me to do, but in the moment, my friend and I found it funny. We were expecting her to realize it was a joke and play along, for me to be extremely corny and recite a phrase no man with a shred of dignity would utter. We were expecting:

“Cara, you’re sooo hot, be my girlfriend.” 

“You’re so dumb, Noel.”

But I messed it up. The sarcasm was supposed to be clear, but my mouth contorted in disgust trying to conjure the words, and instead, the reality was:
“Um, Cara, will you, if you want, be my- go out with- let’s hang out sometime?”
“Aw, Noel! Sure!”

She mistook my inability to vocalize the dreaded word “girlfriend” as a shy guy with a crush; later, a few weeks into the relationship, she said how she admired my courage and wanted to give me a chance, which made me excuse myself from our table during our Red Lobster date, sprint to the bathroom, collapse onto the polished brown tiles of the stall, and vomit into the toilet.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s pretty, it’s just a problem with me. I’ve never had a crush. Not on a girl or a guy. I’ve always found myself cringing at the PDA couples hiding not-so-subtly in the corners of my high school, gagging whenever my parents mentioned the possibility of me bringing a girl home, and skipping the kissing and sex scenes of every Netflix movie because there somehow always is one. It was hard to watch my friends go through a sex craze I never understood. I felt like I was left behind.

Two months after the day my life ended, she invited me to a picnic date; the weather was perfect, and I had run out of viable excuses to get out of it that week. But as she laid out the red and white checkered blanket across the grass, my ears perked up at a subtle thumping. 

“Do you hear that?” I asked her absentmindedly, examining the food she packed into the basket, not meeting her eye.

“Hear what?” she asked back, her yellow summer dress swaying as the wind bellowed; despite everything, I always thought she pulled off summer dresses the best– but, of course, I never told her that.

“That thumping sound.”

Silence fell between us as we both strained to listen. When I finally turned my attention to her, I noticed it was coming from her.

“No? What are you talking about?” she giggled lightheartedly. “Stop messing with me!”

I sat a good distance from her on that picnic date, uncomfortable by the constant pounding she apparently paid no mind to. 

Weeks and weeks passed, and that thumping was all I heard. It didn’t take long to realize it was emitting from her own heart, that “buh-bum” indistinguishable from any other thumping one could imagine. At first, I was worried for her.

“Are you okay?” I asked as her body pressed up against mine– I always hated that watching movies entailed cuddling, or God forbid something more. Can’t a couple watch The Notebook without being a mess of limbs?

“What do you mean? I’m fine,” she responded.

I tried to let it go, but I could literally feel each “buh-bum” vibrate against my chest, and it made me want to crawl out of my skin.

“Are you sure?” 

“Why are you being so weird?” she laughed.

I practiced a lot of box breathing that day to overcome the suffocating feeling of her abnormal heart.

More weeks passed. Weeks, and weeks, and weeks– isn’t it understandable that I’d eventually get a little annoyed?

“Can you stop that?” I snapped while driving her home from school one day.

“What?” she questioned innocently.

“That sound. It’s so loud. Maybe it’s a medical condition, you should get that checked out.”

She cocked her head to the side. “What sound? There’s nothing wrong with me, what am I supposed to get checked out?”

My knuckles turned white as I gripped the steering wheel harder. “Are you serious? Are you trying to hide something? Or are you THAT oblivious?”

From my peripheral vision, I could see her twiddling her fingers nervously. “Noel, I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. I’m tired of you pretending that you don’t.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”

“If the shoe fits.”

Her eyebrows furrowed. “Why do you always treat me like this? Let’s not forget, YOU’RE the one who asked ME out, so why do you act as if you hate me? Like I’m forcing you to love me?  It’s like you’re sexually repressed or–”

I swerved my car to the side of the road and slammed the brakes. A click sounded as the doors of my BMW unlocked and I changed gears from drive to park. “Out.”
“What?”

“You’ve gotten on my last nerve.”
“My house is like a thirty minute walk from here–”

“OUT!”

Her jaw dropped, agape at my hostility. She grasped her pink Jansport backpack sitting comfortably in her lap and threw it around her shoulders while simultaneously shoving open the door. I flinched as she slammed the door behind her and stormed off. A twang of regret soured my aggression as raindrops began to fall from the sky and she kept trudging on anyway.

But my regret left as quickly as it came as I became aware of that dreaded thumping “buh-bum” again. I thought it was strange that I could still hear it despite her being out of the car, but gradually the annoyance faded the further she trekked, and I let myself forget about it. 

That night, at the end of my workout, I checked my Apple Watch for my stats– how many calories I burned, how many activity rings I filled, my beats per minute. I took my watch in for repair the next day because there was no way that, after such a rigorous workout, my heart rate was only fifty-four beats per minute. When I took it into repair, I cursed out the employees who told me it worked perfectly fine and began to do jumping jacks like some fool to prove them wrong. They scratched their heads in confusion and pondered why everything else worked and the BPM app didn’t. I called them stupid because their job was to know how to fix these kinds of problems, and they made me leave the store.

When I got home, I got curious and did jumping jacks again, except this time, I took my pulse on my own. I pressed two fingers against my throat, but no matter how much I felt around, I couldn’t find it. I sighed in frustration and thought, “I could never be an EMT.”

A month later, the sound became the least of my worries. She came over to my house, and I opened the door before she even rang the doorbell because I heard the thumping the moment she pulled into my street. But once I saw her, the blood drained from my stomach as I noticed her chest swell with each “buh-bum,” as if her heart was trying to escape. Her red-tainted skin stretched unnaturally with each thump, every heart vein imprinted in the tissue creasing with disgusting detail. Bloody blotches covered her entire body, and a heavy purple bruise peeked out from under her low-cut top, and there was no doubt it was much bigger underneath. Each breath she took was shallow and sounded painful. 

“Umm, can I come in?” her voice rang out, completely unfaltered.

I gagged. And gagged again. My eyes began to water. 

“Oh my God, are you alright? Do you need to lie down? Let me come in and help! You’re so pale!”

Without a word, I shut the door, slid down to the floor, and covered my mouth with my hand, trying my hardest to keep my lunch in.

I caught my reflection in the mirror across the hall, and she was right. I was extremely pale. I moved my hand to my cheeks, which were ice cold. I blamed it on my sudden wave of nausea, but that was a difficult excuse to hold up when my skin only got paler with each passing hour. By hour five, I resorted to a bad case of the flu. 

For two weeks, I didn’t talk to her. Simply imagining her on that day was enough to cause my stomach acid to flip, and not in a lovesick way. But when I received one text after another, she became impossible to ignore, and I finally glanced at her texts.

come over

pls

rn

noel

come over

Now? Doesn’t she remember the state I was in? Doesn’t she remember the state SHE was in?
I’m still feeling sick.

Two years!

My eyes narrowed. Already? That didn’t feel right. I feigned a cough; I didn’t really know why, it’s not like anyone was watching me to see if I was actually sick, so I guess I was trying to convince myself.

Can we celebrate it later?

no

I groaned and bit my lip hard, but it didn’t bleed; the color had left them a while ago. Another flu symptom, maybe.

Omw

I stopped by Aldi to pick up a cheap bouquet of flowers; I did as much as pick out the most put-together one, but I could not for the life of me remember her favorite kind of flower, or even her favorite color, so I chose the classic red roses. Flowers were such a dumb gift, they’d live for like two-weeks-max anyway.

I rang her doorbell and stood awkwardly on her Welcome doormat. I realized I didn’t even bother to change into a button-down and slacks, but oh well, I was here now. We can just have a chill stay-at-home date.

While lost in thought, I got bored and scrolled through my Apple watch and caught a glimpse of the heart rate app; eight bpm, what BS. I rolled my eyes and stared at the door again, becoming impatient and ringing the doorbell two more times. 

And still, it remained shut. That’s when I noticed I couldn’t hear any thumping like I usually did when I was within a certain radius of her house. I took out my phone and reread her text messages again. She definitely told me to come over, so there was no way I was in the wrong place. My skin became itchy and uncomfortable as an unexplainable dread bubbled up inside me.

I dropped her roses and dug the spare key from under the mat. I inserted the key into the keyhole with a shaky hand and it didn’t unlock on the first try, which only made me panic more. I turned it again with more force and nearly broke down the door.

One stomp-in caused a splash of blood to ricochet onto my already-stained sweatpants and my mouth fell open. There Cara lay, face down on the carpet, her fingers clasped around the left side of her chest, which was now supporting a gaping hole. Not too far from her was a revolting mass of meat, slimy and red, and I had to close my eyes for a moment when I pieced together that it was her heart. No longer thumping.

I sprinted and knelt at her side, struggling to find her free hand, as her body was merely a red silhouette at this point, but when I did, I interlaced my fingers through hers. A pang of guilt coursed through me when I noted the cheap rings I got for her on our one-year anniversary were no longer silver but bronzed with rust, and I never bothered to get her new ones. I also realized that was the first time I took her hand on my own; all the other times, she was the one who grabbed mine.

“Cara, what the hell happened??” I whispered. It’s not like I had to be quiet, but a voice inside me told me yelling was the last thing she needed.

“Do you love me?” Her voice had gone almost completely to sh*t.
My grip on her hand loosened for a moment and I hesitated. “Of course I do.”

“Don’t lie to me anymore, Noel.”

I began to fidget with her fingers, but I stopped. I was already clearly unconvincing, so there was no need to add fuel to the fire.

“Noel. Do you love me?”

My eyes darted between the blood on her body and the blood on the floor and the blood on the heart and I sucked in a heavy, shaky breath. “No.”

Her head craned towards the ugly lump of flesh and her eyes softened. “I had to love you enough for the both of us.”

My eyes widened and flew to my Apple Watch: one BPM. If she supported the both of us and now she couldn’t support herself, then that meant she couldn’t support me anymore, either. 

“Why did you stay with me?” she muttered.
“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“This hurts worse,” and her lips stayed apart as the rest of her body shut down.

I released the bone-crushing grip I held between her fingers and my stare fell towards the heart. It was huge and pathetic, but it jerked in unpredictable spasms. 

It was still alive.

I stood up. I used both my arms to hoist it up. I walked out the door. And I had a heart again, even if not my own.

Author

Nico Vorkunova, a music student at heart, recently rekindled his love for writing. Though an avid writer when he was very young, he only picked up the hobby again after taking creative writing his senior year. Once this idea for his story arose, he knew he had to write it at once (and dabble in some hidden symbolism too)!

A Distant Thread Artist: Jackson Kim