Bound By A Borrowed Heart

GIANNAThe pain in my chest is a dull and rhythmic throb, it feels like a bruised fist squeezing my heart every few seconds. The things we do for love right?I press my palm flat against the silk of my red dress and force a breath through my teeth. I cannot ruin tonight. I refuse to let my failing body ruin the one night that actually matters.The dining room smells of rosemary and roasted garlic, the scent is thick and heavy in the air. I spent four hours in the kitchen, my legs shaking and my vision blurring at the edges, just to get the glaze on the lamb chops perfect. The candles in the center of the table are burning low, the wax dripping down the sides in slow and clear tears. It is perfect. It has to be perfect because today is the day everything changes.I walk to the mirror in the hallway and check my reflection. My skin is pale, almost translucent under the warm hallway light, but the red lipstick hides the blue tint of my lips. I look alive. I look like a wife who is ready

GIANNAThe dust in the air tastes like abandonment. It coats my tongue, dry and bitter, a flavor that matches the rest of my life. I am sitting on the floor of my parents' old estate, not the manor we lived in, but the dilapidated townhouse on the edge of the city that Dad was meaning to renovate before... well before everything.There is no furniture, just a wooden chair that has seen better days. There’s no heat, it’s just me, a thin blanket I stole from a shelter, and the relentless, mechanical whirring in my chest.Whir. Click. Whir. Click.My artificial heart. The machine that keeps me alive while the man who has my real heart inside his chest lives in a mansion with my cousin.I cough, the sound rattling in the empty room. It has been a week since the anniversary. A week of hell. A week since I watched them bury my mother in a closed casket because the truck left nothing recognizable. A week since I stood over my father in the charity ward, watching a machine breathe for him be

GIANNAThe vibration of the phone against the wooden floorboards sounds like a drill in the silence of the empty house. It jolts me awake. My hand flies to my chest instinctively, checking the machine, checking the wires.Whir. Click.It’s still working, still keeping me alive, barely. I snatch the phone. The screen is cracked, a spiderweb of glass over the glowing light.Dr. Laurel: We have a heart Gi, please come now. Do not wait. My breath hitches. A heart means a chance. A second chance at life, and that means time. More time to live, and more time to rise and kick those who kicked me down.I don't think. I just move, grab my purse, ignoring the dizziness that sways the room like a ship in a storm. I don't have a coat or an umbrella uni, I just have the desperation of a mother fighting for her unborn child.I run out the door and the storm hits me the moment I step off the porch. It isn't just rain; it is a fucking downpour. The wind howls, tearing at my dress, soaking me to the

SEANThe photograph was taken two years ago sometime in June. The rooftop garden at the brownstone in Park Slope, the one she refused to sell even after I bought her the penthouse on the Upper East Side."I don't need marble floors, Sean. I need soil under my fingernails." That was my mother. Fifty-seven years of choosing dirt over diamonds, and the world loved her for it, and I loved her most.She's standing between two rows of lavender bushes she planted herself, wearing a yellow sundress and that ridiculous straw hat she found at a flea market in Brooklyn, and she's laughing at something I said even though I don't remember what. I've been trying to remember everything about her for three days. I can hear the loud and unfiltered laughter, the kind that made strangers smile on the subway but the words that caused it are gone. Another thing the universe took from me that I can't get back.I set the frame down on my desk and it lands harder than I intended. The sound echoes through t

RYANThe sheets still smell like her. Not Tasha, Tasha smells like whatever perfume she finds in Gianna's bathroom cabinet, the one she sprays on like she's trying to drown herself in someone else's identity. The sheets smell like Gianna, vanilla with turpentine and the faint medicinal tang of whatever pills she was swallowing to keep that pathetic machine in her chest running for another day. I've slept in these sheets for a week and I can't get her out of the fabric. I can't get her out of the house. Every corner has a trace of her, a bobby pin in the bathroom drawer, a paint smudge on the hallway baseboard, a pair of reading glasses she left on the kitchen counter that her blind father used to wear.I should throw all of it away and gut this house the way I gutted her life and rebuild it in my own image, but I haven't and I don't examine why.Tasha is beside me, propped against the headboard, scrolling through her phone with the glazed expression of someone who confuses shopping