I tied your heart on a string. Even though you’re fragile and old, the myocardium density of the muscle sheath held firm at the center of mass. I hung it on a hawthorn branch above a three-dimensional cube I sketched in black chalk. No one noticed your heart as they passed by on the sidewalk; no one stopped to see the sketch of the cube smeared beneath their shoes. No one looked up or down. They took the pumping for their own pulse, your drops of blood for rain.
I checked on you three times a day, moving between the tree and the shed where I kept you, fraught with fear of your instantaneous dislocation. I’d come to rely on you. You had invaded my thoughts by proximity and you kept leaching time from my everyday life. You spoke to me in that code you use, the one I’m not sure I will ever get right no matter how hard I listen for a connection. I tried. I am still trying. I will try, again and again.
I’m tired, but I promise I’ll try; I’ll remain vigilant in pushing back against time. I won’t ever sleep again. You mean more to me than temporal rest.
When I check on you, I try to follow the alien thought patterns, the trials and turns of your moods. I know this doesn’t make sense. There’s something I see in you. A spark of understanding, a twist I can give by accommodating the disorienting rapidity of your action. I’m trying to explain how confusing all of this is for me, moving from past into present and back again. I’m trying to meet you at zero.
In my last check, if you’ll pardon the adherence to chronology, your mass seemed to increase or decrease in my absence. For a long period of time you stopped responding. In a frantic attempt to bring you back to what I understood as life, I recounted to you step by step how we met and came to inhabit this dark starless moment that feels so endless together on this night in the shed. Reciting unfamiliar facts, I faltered. I wasn’t sure if I’d captured you or if you held me hostage in your service. I made up what I didn’t know in a frenzied bid to keep going. I’m sure I sounded desperate and unbalanced, but I didn’t care anymore. By then I’d lost all shame.
I hoped—I hope we are in love. I still don’t know if that’s the best way to describe the unstable equilibrium point of our bonding and if we are bonded or not. Your code is too oblique for me. I can know only my own part in this, my choices, and my systematic maintenance prolonging your repeated reversals of time. To avoid your inevitable decline, I check on you three times a day, five times a day, seven times a day, day and night, back and forth between you and the plumb line that suspends your beating heart.
This conflict between two spaces that exclude me one after the other interchangeably (shed and tree, front and back, in and out) proves your extra-dimensional freedom compared to my simplicity, your sufficiency compared to my need. I’m running on the fragile hope of a homotopic return, tripping on the lack between going backward and forward in time. When you dropped into my world and onto the wrong map, I sensed by the strange tingling sensation under my scalp that I had to cut out your heart to keep you alive.
I didn’t have to lose my mind. I didn’t have to act upon you with care and deliberation. I could have let you fade and die.
I cut out your heart because it was too beautiful to bear alone. I saw how it hurt you to hold such beauty in your semitransparent gelatinous chest. I cut out your heart because I was greedy and I wanted to keep your beauty alive in my life, my ugly, loveless life. Like some poet discriminating against science, I refused to accept that all beauty must die, and I built a puzzle to restrain you from topological mutation. I held you. I hold you. I didn’t let you phase back to your invariant homeland, transforming within yourself and vanishing from perception in the same sudden peripheral flash as you appeared.
I tied a string through your heart and hung it on a hawthorn branch to hold you here and hide beauty in plain sight. The string doesn’t wind across the yard and over the roof and through the alley to the shelf in the shed where you watch me and spin in your jar. The string is too short. I don’t have any more to give. Even now, as you rotate slowly behind the glass, I’m not sure I understand the signals or make the connections. Your undulations and jerky movements could mean anything or nothing. They might not even be for me.
The heart is mine, though. It must be. It thrives in the sun where I strung it up, bleeding, pulsing, and resisting the flow of entropy that beseeches it to disintegrate into rags.
The string plumbs from the branch, slick and wet with your blood, a liquid semi-opaque, the color of old amber. It holds. When we started, I cut off a piece of the string to place inside your jar because it wasn’t long enough to reach through visible space. I’m still relying on the unseen in our future. When we started, I measured the time it took to pull your heart out through your throat after cutting it loose in your chest, the distance between each one of your many vibrating limbs, and the reflection of light on a knife edge held perpendicular to the center of your heart. I counted the myocardium spirals and multiplied by zero. With the final calculation, I made my cut.
You’ll understand the math is a paradox and the process is impossible. The best way for us to connect in real time is to pretend none of this ever happened. The center of your heart is a conjecture.
Are you listening? Awake. Let me tell you how we met, how we meet, how we will meet and depart and will meet again. Listen to the form we take in the future.
I placed the piece of string in your jar. Your many limbs nursed like leeches’ mouths at the amber liquid that effused from the segment of string. It responded as if sentient by threading the limbs together to form an asymmetrical flower shape composed of shining tubes. The form was somewhat like a sea anemone, an organism functionally immortal. In the skewed center where your throat still moaned open from my invasive fist, a color like flame arose: gold, scarlet, white, and at the base of the erect stamen a transitory cobalt blue like a cock ring carved from lapis lazuli, glowing brightly.
I tied your heart on a string and hung it from the hawthorn branch like a pendulum. It beat the air methodically, its size and swing equal to my small fist. My fist fit around it like a glove when I tore it out and pulled it through your throat. Like a small insistent fist it still beats and it doesn’t know when to stop.
This repetitive violence keeps time. Time keeps your heart. Your heart holds me here. Your amber blood runs up the string and seeps into the segment despite severance. From fluid below the threshold of visible space, continuity grows roots through hidden speculative complexes infusing you like prayer. I hold you there.
I rush to check on you again, again. Your jar floods with amber. You undulate slowly. You send out electrical signals and illuminate the liquid, which rattles the glass and shakes the shelf. The shed remains steady, however, anchored by the certainty of its unimaginative suburban construction, and I’m excited by your signals, excited you’re responding again. I’m trying to shake you out of your stasis while keeping you safe. I’m trying to hold you in constant stasis by running back and forth faster than the pendulum race can alter your fluctuating mass. I have faith in your ability to maintain these two opposing states at once.
I won’t lose control. No matter how starless this night, I blink only to refresh the contradictory stillness of your speed.
You spin ten times slower than the spiraling myocardial layers of the hanging heart muscles that twist and untwist with each developmental pulse of the pounding fist, swinging in the steady rhythm of the pendulum as I run and check again and again. Back and forth, speeding and slowing, defying the demands of my distressed body, I reek of moss and sweat, having gone too long without a shower or bath. My lips crack. I’ve forgotten to drink or eat. The way time exists in my body, I’m not made for this vigil, but I hold it. I hold you. I return.
You stare at me like a slug, eyeless. You press your overly lipped mouthparts on the jar. You pretend you have teeth or extra holes where the roots of teeth have dug in deep and bored down into the gums to leave empty channels of holes. Holes amass like inverted limbs, vibrating through the pocked surface of your more loose and spongy parts. I used to worry that you hated me, but now when I look in your cratered mouth, I have no more doubt.
Please tell me you love me. I’m running as fast as I can. I’m trying to meet you at zero. I’m trying to exert a restorative pressure equal to the violence of your displacement and hold you close. I need to hold you without risking your extinction. I need to feel you on my skin, your pockmarked holes like many lipless mouths pulling on the elastic surface of what is seen. I am begging you for this connection in our shared tangible space.
I need to enter your code like the liquid signal that electrifies your amber blood. I hung your heart on a hawthorn branch above a cube sketched in black chalk. The cube fades as excess amber falls, a simple trap eroded, not the best but the best my finite mind could make.
I need to stop us moving forward or backward in time. I swing back and forth, a pendulum trying to keep the center of your heart stable and sharpened to a single point. You exist in too many places at once. Pinning you down to a stable point excludes time. Whetting the knife tip on this map is how we conquer death. I can see it like a graph but I can’t explain how this works, how confusing all of this is for me, this moving from past into present and back again so rapidly.
I swing between your points to bring them to zero. I am begging for a sign.
I can’t explain the language of your lights blinking in and out like floaters caught in the corner of my eye, invading my thoughts by proximity while stubbornly maintaining a steady distance. Blinking rhythmically like the pendulum swing, like the pummeling fist that closes around a swelling, twisting, screaming heart until its electrical impulses flatline in a rush of panicked discharge and its very eyes and lights go black. What were we thinking when we invented the stars?
The glass rattles on the shelf. I realize I’ve slept.
The shed is dark but for a sickly glow seeping from your jar.
Your amber blood is suffused with a greenish tinge. An odor of sea rot pervades. The lid is off the jar. What rotates slowly inside appears at first glance like a pair of mating starfish burnt in the midst of their reproductive act and fused in charred ecstasy. As the object turns, the dense liquid reveals a shrunken head with wild black locks. A human face ravaged with sleeplessness and speed, with unwashed hair, cracked lips, and hunger-fraught eyes. Not burned by fire but seared and darkened with time. Not lifeless, though, for its mouth moves in sluggish ardor as if it would speak.
Bubbles percolate from the splintered lips. I try to read the light patterns in the liquid signal, but the code is in some unfamiliar past tense—inadequate to grasp my multiple locations of being forward in time. Simplistic in its funny rhythmic patter, the head drifts in a tight circle, propelled by its bubbling rant as it slides nowhere inside a collapsing dimension.
I recognize the little monkey face, the monkey that swings back and forth between my multiple states. Incremental changes accelerate with each forward pendulum motion reversed. Coming through the cube on the sidewalk sketched in black chalk, employing the functional framework in place, I root in a paradoxical shift, breaking the rotation at our phase point, breaking the axis of a terminal planet.
I hop on the monkey’s head. I give it what it wants.
The sensation starts in the scalp, below the skin, close to the skull where a thin layer of fatty tissue quivers. Hair follicles sharpen to pinpoints. Tingling starts. An esoteric sense of omen approaches spasm. Blood vessels grown near the intersection of unrelated planes divide our shared millisecond at cancerous angles. They branch in immediate contact, assimilating time to render it inept. Scalp, skull, and head speed off like past, present, and future suctioned into the ululation of the vacuum yawning between my sewn appendages. I am not a flower. Popping loose, un-mouthing prehensile tubes leak unlimited anemone holes as the swallower of light regurgitates light. The smell of exchange is simultaneous: a fire’s gasp.
The indigestible lump of the monkey’s head is excreted into amber. I’m pleased by the cylindrical match of its anatomical errata, with the way my asymmetrical form finds circular footing atop its meaty neck, and with the robust beat of the replacement heart. An old heart shreds in a tree outside as twisted rags disintegrate. Monkeys hang such rags as prayer. I stand, elevating my new vehicle, curious to experiment with the hybrid apparatus fixed in finite space.
Atonal humming vibrates from the open jar. Darkness reigns, my gift. This planet’s over-exuberant sun doused, the air is as dark as the bottom of its ocean, and the glow of old blood from the jar emits a jaundiced radiance within the shed. Green bubbles seep through ruptured lips like slow rot. Cracked lips pucker, stretch, and mewl. The little monkey head suspended in amber chatters as if it would speak to me:
“I tied your heart on a string. I hung it on a hawthorn branch to hold you here. I hid your beauty in plain sight. I cut out your heart because it was too beautiful to bear. It hurt you to hold such beauty in your chest. I was greedy. I wanted this beauty to stay alive in my life, my ugly, loveless life. I don’t know how to explain. I need to hold you and feel you against my skin. I’m trying to explain how confusing all of this is for me, moving from past into present and back again. I’m trying to meet you at zero. Please tell me that you love me. Tell me this is love.” 
Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Joe is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and the author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands, The Couvade, and Convulsive. They’ve had over fifty short stories published in books and journals such as Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Vastarien, and The Queer Book of Saints.
