HALF-HEARTED
Half-Hearted
Kim Nicolini from Liars and Tryers
It was 112 in the shade the day the day Half-Hearted lost her dreams in a Circle K parking lot on the outskirts of Tombstone. Standing in the dying sun, she watched them blow across a field of dead grass and ride out of town on a wave of hot wind. One last piece of one last dream snagged on a barbed wire fence. Hanging on. Hanging. Til the wind picked up speed and took that dream too.
It was her eighth birthday as she watched the sun sink behind the mountains, an Icee in her hand and a 12 pack of Bud at her feet.
Her arm waved to the dust, saying “Goodbye” or “come back.” Her mother didn’t see her youngest daughter standing alone in the almost dark. She’d forgotten all about her as she he kept her foot on the gas and kept on driving. Half-Hearted dropped her arm, watched her mother disappear into the dissolving red glow of her Mazda’s taillights. She waited and watched the double yellow line dissolve into one. Into none.
She dropped her Icee, clenched her fists tight and never stopped.
Holding onto what was gone and would never come back. Holding onto what never was. Holding on so hard that she got arthritis in her knuckles by the time she turned ten.
Demolition of dreams.
******
Half-Hearted’s twin sister lived for twelve days before the angels sighed and took her to heaven. Twelve days with her heart resting on her chest like a smile twisted out of plastic tubing and tiny arteries. Twelve days before the plastic angels would spin their last orbit round the mobile above her incubator. Twelve days before the angels packed up their wings and headed to the next child, and Half-Hearted packed up what was left of her heart and just left.
Her twin sister never knew sunshine or rain. Never saw the strangely dark clouds hanging over Tucson the November day she died. The only sky she would know was a piece of cloud reflected in her mother’s eye, pupil black as night and dripping meth and tears.
When her sister died, words died with her. Silence fell with dust dropping from the ceiling fan onto pink balloons, deflating in their confusion.
“IT’S A GIRL!” “Get well soon.” “CONGRATULATIONS!” “OUR CONDOLENCES.”
Maybe Half-Hearted’s problem wasn’t no heart. Maybe her problem was stuffing two hearts into one - her dead sister’s and her own. The load was so great her heart became a pressure cooker in her chest. Bulging. Pulsing. Until the pressure was too much, and two hearts became none.
Now Half-Hearted has an empty hole where a heart should’ve been but wasn’t, where love should’ve been but never would be. An aching hole that a band-aid should’ve fixed but couldn’t. A hole that would never be more than a hole.
Half-Hearted says she’s always felt like only half a person, like half of her is missing. She lived her childhood in Limbo, her family so caught up in their grief over the dead twin, they forgot about the living one. Birthdays were reminders of what they lost instead of celebrations for the living baby girl they had. No birthday cakes for Half-Hearted. No birthday parties or birthday dresses. Just another spin around the sun, living her life as a shadow of a shadow.
Demolition of hope.
HALF-HEARTED
acrylic on canvas
Maybe her heart was tangled up in the blanket covering her boyfriend’s dead body after being tossed from his car like a ragdoll during a high-speed chase with Border Patrol. She clung to that blanket as if it were her heart. Buried her face in it to smell the love she lost. She refused to wash it. Day and night, night and day, she lived wrapped inside that blanket. Soaked with beer, blood, tears, cigarette burns, and love sweat from a hundred desert night fucks in the backseat. She slept wrapped inside the blanket, weaving present with past, until she had to get up to give birth to the baby her boyfriend left her with.
Or maybe she really lost her heart when she was six months pregnant and her mother began feeding her Meth with a side of Cheerios for breakfast because Half-Hearted was “a lazy cow” sleeping all the time with that baby in her belly and her dead boyfriend wrapped around her body. Perhaps her heart slipped out the window with her first exhale from the glass pipe her mother passed to her with a torch and a smile carved from elephant tusks.
Half-hearted’s lost in the story she’s been telling me when she jolts back to the present. We’re sitting in a slump cement block house off Estrella. A Raiders flag separates her reality from the world outside. She’s getting evicted today and has nowhere to go, but she’s still half back in yesterday with her ragdoll boyfriend and her twin sister’s heart. She closes her eyes, rubs her cheek against the tattered threads of a blanket that no longer exists, wraps her shoulders in dreams unraveled. Dreams that smell of High Karate and motor oil.
Demolition of Love
She slips back. Maybe it wasn’t the twin, the ragdoll, or the Circle K parking lot. Maybe Half-Hearted lost her heart the morning she did “a little errand” for her husband after packing the kids’ lunches and sending them off to school.
Half-Hearted was helping him with a little job, an easy job, a border job. One of those jobs at the border where you can earn ten grand in an hour. Money that is surely needed for a family of six living in South Tucson.
The job wasn’t quite what Half-Hearted expected. Half-Hearted ran a load across the border alright, but it wasn’t the big one. She drove across the border with 3 kilos of pot one loaded in her hubcaps, but she never saw ten grand, but she did find Border Patrol waiting for her, and she did see the inside of a federal prison cell while her old man made it across with a hundred pounds of 100 kilos of pot. Or was it 50 pounds of heroin. I don’t remember. Point is that the love of her life - the second one, not the blanket and Border Patrol one - set her up to take the fall, so he could run free with the big take and let her do hard time for the small one.
She lost her kids and 3.5 years of her life watching her dreams slip away through a tiny, cracked glass window wrapped in razor wire. The mountain in the distance was the Keeper of Lost Dreams. One day she would climb that mountain, and she would unwind her dreams from their tangled nest of blood and injustice.
Half-Hearted was tight with the woman in the next cell. They braided each other’s hair to pass time or count time. Doesn’t matter. Inside, they’re one and the same. One day the girl couldn’t get out of bed, said her stomach hurt. Half-hearted watched her mountain and listened to the young woman in the next cell cry. The crying got worse. “Help me!” echoed off cement walls. The woman was suffering from some kind of mysterious internal bleeding. Half-Hearted lost time. All she knew were cries for help and the Mountain she couldn’t reach. Then the crying stopped.
Half-Hearted passed the empty cell on the way to the dining hall. She wouldn’t be braiding hair that night. Or the next one. Back at the window, her heart lay in the dirt behind the Mountain, baking in the June heat like a desert valentine.
Half-hearted says her sister has always been with her, talks to her, and sings to her, says her sister’s songs got her through prison.
When I asked her how she makes it through each day, she said, “I lost everything, Kim. I got nothing to lose.”
Demolition of everything.
Six months later, she was reunited with her kids when her first born, the son of the ragdoll boyfriend, was murdered in an aimless street prank. Stabbed in the back and left to die.
Half-Hearted learned that she did have something left to lose.
At the funeral, her family wouldn’t sit with her or speak to her. She visits the grave on her own and grows a garden for him in a small patch of dirt in front of her tiny cement block duplex That garden is all she has now. It’s what she’s got to lose.
Half-Hearted says her sister’s still talking to her, still singing her lullabies. Sometimes I think Half-Hearted is her sister and that maybe she’s already dead.
Or maybe she never had a heart. Maybe her mother replaced it with a rock wrapped it in razor blades before she was born.
I want to believe Half-Hearted does have a heart, and the world broke it, broke her. But maybe sometimes people are just born broken. It’s hard to tell. The chicken or the egg.
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