A Good Heart
by Mike Alexander
This was my entry for the Campaign for Real Fear competition. Since you won’t be seeing it in Black Static magazine (boohoo), I thought I’d post it here.
AFTER THE OPERATION I felt depressed. I mean properly depressed – weighed down by an all-encompassing sense of hopelessness. The nurses told me not to worry; it was normal after major surgery and would pass. Nonetheless, I loathed myself for it. I’d never been the melancholic type, and considering I’d had just weeks to live before the surgery, I felt I ought to be grateful.
Then the dreams started. Dreams unlike any I’d had before. I’d never been in a jungle, and now I was dreaming of jungles. Not fantasy jungles, half-remembered from Rousseau paintings or Hollywood back-lots – this was the real thing, vivid, insistent, alien.
* * *
It’s hot. My clothes are sweaty, my pack heavy. Through the trees we see burnt-out huts in a clearing. Twenty-odd kids, the oldest maybe twelve years old. Most have machetes; a few carry AK47s. We squat in the bushes, watching. They’re shouting, waving knives. A girl is screaming on the ground. I hear the order, then the guy beside me’s cracking off rounds over their heads. My stomach tightens, finger sweaty against the trigger.
The kids scatter, but as they do a couple return fire. We unleash hell. One of them drops, knee-clutching, wailing something unintelligible. We break cover, ripping more warning shots. A voice ahead shouts: “Medic!”.
The girl stinks. She’s about nine or ten, lying naked, smeared in her own shit. Machete wounds to chest and abdomen. Eyes of a trapped animal, screaming hysterically. She’s been raped, and thinks we’ll do the same. But it’s the stink that gets me. I lean over my rifle and vomit.
* * *
In the supermarket yesterday, the stench swept over me again. The supermarket wasn’t real; I was in the jungle. Those eyes. I felt the nausea rising. I ran out, my shopping trolley abandoned.
* * *
We didn’t know what should be said at Paul’s funeral. We wanted to believe the motorcycle crash was an accident, but couldn’t convince ourselves. It wasn’t just the divorce that had got to him. He’d been different ever since he came back from Sierra Leone. Bitter.
The vicar was most understanding. He tried to end the valediction on a positive note. He said how unfair it was, how Paul hadn’t deserved this. Then he mentioned Paul’s organ donation. “I’m told that was typical of Paul,” he said. “He always had a good heart.”
* * *
The depression hasn’t lifted. The tablets aren’t working. I started drinking after four days with no sleep. At first it helped, but now I’m developing a tolerance. The worst thing is, I don’t feel this depression is a delusion – it’s more like my eyes have been opened. For the first time I’m seeing the world as it really is.
I’m in the kitchen, examining the long, neat scar on my chest. I never should have had the transplant. This heart isn’t part of me. It isn’t good. There is only one way to be rid of it. I open the cutlery drawer and take out the largest, sharpest knife.
August 7th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
That was quite a hard-hitting story. The central image is certainly strong, as it needs to be. Perhaps for a story so short, it needed a single focus rather than two – the horror in Sierra Leone, rather than the suicide. Could it be better without the final section, I wonder? – just finishing with the line “He always had a good heart”?
But a very powerful punch, nonethelesss, packed in amere few paragraphs.