Hearts

• Madison Kennewell, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2011

Some people keep their hearts in the strangest of places.
Inside bottles and jars, sewn onto their sleeves, bound and discarded into rubbish skips, Crammed between two pages of a book, under lock and key, in the dash of their car-
Some keep them inside their homes, or their homes inside their hearts – to safeguard them. Safeguard them from the people that go around stealing hearts – for their own cannot sustain them.
Some have their hearts surgically removed, threaded onto necklaces, crushed into powder and applied to the face, boiled and roasted and served to others on a shining silver platter.
Some people take very good care of their hearts with tenderness and warmth, while others watch as their own withers away – or breaks into a thousand small pieces.
These splintered fragments – sometimes forgotten, sometimes found and patched back together with glue and a prayer, or roughly forced back together and shoved back into the painful vault they call a chest.
Sometimes the pieces are hidden – secreted away – for their owners dare not look at such a thing p such an irrational organ.
Once a heart is splintered; a piece will always be missing. It takes such a long time for the connecting tissues to be regrown – but that piece will never be the same again. Scar tissues will crisscross like Hadrian’s wall- holding your heart together while you heal- and there are so little people that will proudly stand- with their scarred heart exposed.
Hearts are thrown aside into drawers of odd-bobs and trinkets, packed away into attics to collect dust, or given away.
Too often.
Too soon.
Some hearts pound with rage, or ache from loneliness or burn with sadness, or are crushed from despair...
Big-hearted, soft-hearted, warm-hearted, all-heart, bleeding-heart, a hole-in-the-heart...
Broken, Patched, Healing, Scarred, Withering, Dying, Blackened.
All these odd-bobs and trinkets cause scratches, all this dust chokes you and makes you forget, and hearts once given away and rarely returned.
But sometimes a discarded heart is reclaimed; the scratches are smoothed out, the dust – blown away, and a heart once lost returns home...
Some people keep their hearts in the strangest of places.