Atticus NFT: 1.2
Title: “Benny and the Heart”
Collections: Purple, Turquoise, Orange, Violet Gold, Fuchsia 
Notes: Katie Zeigler’s book of flash fiction was the first runner-up in a chapbook contest at Flume Press, judged by Farnaz Fatemi. He says this: “With a freshness of point-of-view and a welcome oddness of language, The Last of the Cursive Writers notices and illuminates moments of change.”
About the Work: A charming, complex blend of satire and fantasy. The suspense revolves around futuristic heart science. What can a mother’s heart survive? What if it gets wet, crushed, or cold? What if it gets forgotten? So many questions. (Answers in the text.)
The Author: Katie M. Zeigler
Broader Strokes: It’s a hoot.

View the Minted Collection on jpg.store

Collect the NFT

When the CardiU app became available, communities of mothers were seen filing into cardiologist’s waiting rooms for the requisite tests. Some were tasked with wearing “The Queen of Hearts,” a small device that monitored their cardiac activity from afar for a ten-day period, sending clear signals of any abnormalities directly to the doctors themselves. Benny’s mother had not been given a Queen, which she attributed to good heart health, but she felt left out nonetheless. At graduation, several of her friends specifically chose dresses that showcased the small wires, a badge of honor peeking from behind a bra strap or sweeping neckline.

Benny’s mother was told that CardiU was designed like a dating app, although she tried not to take that comparison too far. Both parties, the rising first-year and parent, would need to “swipe right” to enter the program together. Benny’s mother fought hard against swiping right, not wanting to subject her child to anything that might make him stand out for the wrong reasons. But as she watched Benny cleaning the mouthpiece of his trumpet at the dining room table, his eyebrows furrowed below the cowlick he’d had since birth, she felt such a surge of love, such a desperate longing for her child, that she swiped toward what she hoped would be proof of her love, but not necessarily a binding contract.

 By swiping right, Benny and his mother instantly became members of the inaugural class, a designation they found thrilling and terrifying in the many conversations that followed. There was an escape clause, according to the email they both received, but they would need to cancel by June 15th at the latest. As the date approached, Benny’s mother assured him she would not be hurt at all, taking great pains to arrange her face in such a way that read “sincere” without tipping into “beseeching.” Benny remained characteristically quiet, but his mother could feel the wheels turning in his beautiful brain, not just about CardiU, but about the impending departure date for college itself. She took it upon herself to take countless virtual tours of the campus with him, pointing out beautiful spots under tall trees where she could imagine him sitting in a circle with equally brilliant children.

“Look, there’s the Quad!” she said, zooming in so that the screen showed magnified flower beds and a long, gravel pathway upon which students were frozen in enthusiastic conversations. She could hear how desperate her voice sounded, the lilting syllables and enunciated vowels, so she dampened her tone and asked, “What would you like to look at?”

“I’m good,” he said.

“Shall we go get a Starbucks?” she asked, and Benny’s eyes brightened.

While they waited in the drive-thru, Benny and his mother did not talk about the CardiU app or college. Instead, Benny created a queue of songs on Spotify that he played for her, introducing each of them with specific lyrics or chord progressions she should pay attention to. She listened, occasionally glimpsing Benny’s face through her peripheral vision. He seemed content, relaxed even. She fought the urge to place her hand at the nape of his neck; all the CardiU articles she’d read said that physical touch in the months leading up to college goodbyes can feel cloying to the children. So she gripped the steering wheel with one hand and the iced coffee, perspiration pooling on its surface, with the other.

When June 15th arrived, Benny’s mother woke with a combination of excitement and fear. Benny had spent most of the night in his room, which she took as a sign that he was deliberating. It was only when she received a notification at 11 a.m., in the middle of a Zoom meeting with one of her interior design clients, that she knew.

CardiU News for U!, the message read. Benny’s mother struggled to focus on the damask wallpaper she was trying, unsuccessfully, to convince her client to use in the guest bathroom. It was only when she was finally off the phone that she opened the message.

Your status has been changed to “Cross My Heart.”

Please click below to accept the terms and conditions of your status.

Benny’s mother knew what Cross My Heart meant and, for a brief second that she would never admit to anyone, she felt such a rush of joy that she had to stop herself from crying out. But then, the full picture of what her, their, new status meant, began to materialize. They had matched. Benny had swiped right.

From then on, there were so many logistics at play that neither had the chance to consider their decisions. Myriad checklists and forms, extra long bed sheets, shower shoes, small photographs of Benny’s cat printed out on glossy photo paper to hang on his future walls. It was a period of great excitement and unexpected sorrow, a two-sided coin that both Benny and his mother experienced in equal measure. They never told each other this, but each found themselves, on separate occasions, wishing Benny’s dad was still around, but only for short periods of time. Benny wondered what, if any, pearls of wisdom his father might offer his only son, and Benny’s mother, only once while sitting on the toilet, cried silently at all the milestones he’d missed. Driving lessons and chess tournaments and how handsome Benny had looked at the senior prom, holding hands with the girl he’d met at the debate tournament. They hadn’t dated—Benny’s mother wasn’t even sure if he’d had a good time—but they’d made a darling couple, and she still had their picture in the Favorites album on her phone. There was no time to wallow, what with all the errands and boxes, so Benny and his mother packed away those feelings, sealing them up with long, shiny rows of tape.       

The arrival was more practical than either of them pictured. Rows of upperclassmen lined the long drive onto campus, waving signs and making hearts with their fingers at the passing cars. Benny stared straight ahead, occasionally picking at his fingernails, and before his mother could think of anything to say, they were directed to a parking lot filled with what looked like rolling dumpsters, piled high with student luggage, lamps, desk chairs, and rugs. Students dressed in Hayes College T-shirts directed the cars into their respective spots, then bounded over to the waiting cars. From there, it was a flurry of activity; luggage in the rolling thing, and a lanyard with Benny’s photo placed around his neck with the solemnity of an Olympic medal. The small heart sticker on the photo caught the eye of one of the enthusiastic upperclassmen.

“Oh! You’re a CardiU!” Her voice was breathless, eternally youthful. “I can take you over to the health center. Hey, Brandon,” she called to a tall boy bending over the trunk of a Mercedes. “Will you take,” she paused, looking closely at Benny’s ID tag, “Benny’s luggage up to Galileo 223?”

Brandon nodded, sweating profusely as he lugged suitcase after suitcase from the trunk, placing them carefully on the gravel while a man, presumably the owner of the car, inspected the bags for signs of scuffing.

At the health center, Benny and his mother were separated by an official-looking older woman wearing a T-shirt that read “My Child and My Heart Go to Hayes.” She promised they would connect again in the late morning of the following day. Benny would be taken for a quick health scan and then directed to his dormitory where he would meet his roommate and then immediately depart by bus for an overnight in the neighboring national park for a series of bonding activities she referred to as “Hayes Days.”

“Time for a quick goodbye,” the woman said. “Then off you go!”

They’d stood awkwardly for a moment, then Benny lunged toward her, his arms tight around her torso.

“Now, there’s a good hug!” the woman chirped. “All right, let’s get moving.”

But Benny’s mother did not want to let go and, luckily, Benny moved first, loosening his grip on her and stepping back, his face already transitioning into embarrassment at the act of intimacy. Benny’s mother tried not to cry, but was unsuccessful and, as a sort of consolation prize, she was handed a CardiU Hydroflask. She held it, cradled it really, and watched as Benny was swept up in a small crowd of students. He did not turn back.

The nurses showed her where the hearts would be kept during their acclimation period, a sterile white room lined with glass cases, each with the name of the student etched on a small plaque. There, they would be subjected to a series of modifications, Benny’s mother couldn’t remember the names of them all, that would ensure their ability to survive on their own. A short video was shown to her surgery group, explaining the mechanics of it all. The heart would feel Benny’s emotions only within a distance of fifty feet. The distance would be increased in subsequent app updates, the smiling woman in the video said. She also explained that the heart would be given a mobility chip, meaning it could move on its own, but only within a small radius. Benny’s mother couldn’t imagine how that would work, and pictured the heart atop one of those remote-controlled cars that Benny loved as a child, zooming back and forth across the kitchen linoleum. But then the video showed an animated recreation of the movement, a smiling heart sliding slowly across a white surface like a starfish along a sea bed.

Once the video was over, the parents were taken to triage before being separated into groups of ten. These groups were escorted to the surgical sites and assigned one of the ten beds in each room, upon which sat a paper robe and booties. Nurses arrived to sweep the long curtains around each bed for privacy, instructing the parents to change into the robes and booties and lie down on the beds to await further instruction. There was a great rustling of paper and Benny’s mother placed her clothes in the supplied plastic bag, careful to hide her underwear between the folds of her capris. When the curtain was pulled back, a nurse who introduced herself as Carrie spoke softly to Benny’s mother as she connected her to the IV and told her to count down from twenty.  

The procedure had been quick, only requiring one overnight in the medical center, and she felt surprisingly well when she awoke from the anesthesia, the artificial heart pumping blood swiftly through her veins. The only memory she had of the surgery was a hazy image of her heart being placed in a plastic crib, not unlike the one Benny had been tucked into after his birth. She was sure she’d imagined the nurse placing a small pastel-colored hat atop the heart. The two memories merged in her mind. The following morning, released and given the go-ahead to travel, she was instructed to wait in yet another building, adjacent to the school library. A series of golf carts, decorated with heart balloons, were waiting outside, and Benny’s mom smiled at the other parents as she boarded the third cart in the long queue. The driver of their particular cart drove a bit too fast over one of the speed bumps in the parking lot, and all of the riders reacted with a similar pained expression, some touching their hands to where their artificial hearts now ticked and whirred under the skin.

As they rounded the corner to the Goodbye Tent, Benny’s mom could see her son, standing a bit apart from the other children, but could feel nothing. Not the familiar ache. Not the involuntary desire to commit some small act of violence against whomever had made her son feel excluded. She’d been warned about this. The absence of feeling. It would take a few hours for the hearts to sync, they said, and even then it might take a few weeks for maximal synergy to go into effect. It was off-putting, the space left devoid of emotion, not just for the lack of the ache, but, more devastating, the lack of sentiment, love, or grief at the goodbye that was conducted under the watchful eye of a physician who monitored the farewell hugs and kisses. Rumor had it a parent had died at the Goodbye Tent at Stanford, just fallen right over in front of her daughter, but there had been no official announcement, nothing in the news, so Benny’s mom had chalked it up to urban myth.

In the space of the next twenty-four hours, including the six-hour plane ride home, Benny’s mother, separated from her heart, anticipated the numbness of the Goodbye Tent, but when the flight attendant began to demonstrate safety precautions with her little fake seatbelt, the emotions came, roughshod, unadulterated, as if she were walking through a turnstile at great speed. Then nothing. The utter absence of emotion. This wild variation continued through the entire flight, the Uber home, and the following days. She’d called the support line, desperate to understand, and had been told that what she was experiencing was completely normal.

“No worries at all,” the lilting voice had explained. “You are still in what we call ‘Buffering.’ And you’re actually well ahead of schedule! So good job, Mom! At this rate, let me see, yes, at this rate you should begin to normalize in about three days. That means you’ll feel your normal everyday emotions, just like before, but you’ll also begin to communicate with your home unit when it is in range of your child.”

Benny’s mother had asked if that meant she could speak through the heart, send messages or receive them. The voice had laughed.

“Well, no. Wouldn’t that be something? No, what I mean by communicate is that you will begin to feel any emotion that your child is feeling, as long as the home unit, or original heart, is in range. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

Benny’s mother thanked the voice and hung up, rather reluctantly. And for the next three days, she experienced so many varying emotions, she’d had to write them down in a little notebook she kept in her purse.  On the fourth day, she woke up feeling like she’d been returned to herself, the emotions familiar, evenly spaced. She was tired. Nervous about a client meeting later. Hungry and in need of caffeine. Like stepping into an old skin, she relished the ordinariness of it all. Until she was blow-drying her hair and her heart suddenly filled with a loneliness so tangible she had to sit down on the rim of the tub. Later, backing her car out of the driveway, she was so overcome with joy that her legs straightened against the gas pedal, as if she were leaping into the air, and she almost hit the neighbor’s cat. She prayed that this sensation, the joyful one, would last through her trip to the grocery store and then to the gynecologist, but it dissipated quietly until she was left with nothing but worries about the price of salmon and her tilted uterus.

What the voice and the brochures had not explained was the mystery of the emotions, the utter inexplicability of them. This was the syncing. She could feel what Benny was feeling, but could not access the sources of the joy or pain. She longed desperately to know what made her child fill with such elation that she lost her breath, just as much as she wanted to know why she spent the morning incapacitated in despair at the kitchen sink. Meanwhile, unaware of his mother’s experiences, Benny spent the first few weeks of college trying to manage his roommate’s general distaste and confusion regarding the heart.

“You’ll get used to it,” Benny said, but Mark’s face remained doubtful, his eyes following the heart as it slid under Benny’s desk, a waxy crimson trail in its wake. Benny regularly purchased packets of Spray ’n Wash from the laundry room’s vending machine, wiping desperately after the heart. But Benny could not keep up with the nearly constant trickle that still oozed as the heart made its way around the room.

“Couldn’t you keep it in the mini fridge?” Mark asked when the heart had first been introduced. “Don’t they keep heart transplants on ice?”

But Benny explained that it didn’t work like that and, eventually, it would just fade into the background. “You’ll forget it’s here,” Benny said.

To be fair, Benny didn’t believe a word of this. But he felt that to show his own contrasting feelings about the heart was unproductive, and potentially insulting. Benny’s understanding of what would be transmitted back to his mother was slightly unclear, so he tried to keep his language clean and avoid any unnecessarily caustic comments until he was out of earshot.

Benny’s secondary goal after arriving on campus was to suss out if any of his classmates had hearts with them. At parties, he clandestinely lifted paisley bedspreads, searching among the tennis shoes and Tupperware containers of winter sweaters. He was caught only once, looking in the bottom drawer of Violet Windhammer’s desk, but he easily played it off because Violet was pretty drunk and believed him when he said he was looking for a bottle opener.

Occasionally, he saw students lugging around extra bags, totes or canvas carry-alls, in addition to their backpacks and wondered if a heart lay at the bottom of them. One girl from his Introduction to Ethnic Studies class always carried a lavender-colored insulated lunch box, but he never saw her take any snacks out of it. Her name was Eliza and she seemed quiet and intellectual, always sporting a number-two pencil behind her ear. She smiled at Benny whenever they saw each other on the Quad, or in class, but Benny never got the nerve up to ask her what was in her extra bag. Something in the way she carried herself, an unspoken sensitivity or perhaps vulnerability, told Benny that her mother’s heart came to class with her, perhaps accompanied by a sparkling water or granola bar from the cafeteria. Then, one day, Eliza just disappeared. She never came to class again and he never saw her familiar stride across the Quad. There had been whispers, a particularly hushed conversation between their professor and a few of the other female students, but Benny never heard precisely what they were saying.

By the fifth week of school, the only heart he had officially come across belonged to Gary, a fellow first-year from San Francisco who hosted a trivia night in his dorm room. Benny had found the flier for the party shoved under his door. Trivial Pursuit Night. Prize for the Winner! Drinks! Snacks! it read, with a particularly lifelike caricature of a bag of Cheetos with legs drawn below.  Benny considered himself a bit of a trivia king, and was eager to meet others who could easily recall specific dates from the War of the Roses and obscure sports stats from 1970s professional bowling.

“I’m just going down for a minute,” he said to the heart, trying not to feel guilty as the heart slipped quietly back to the corner by his bedside table, where Benny had created a nest of towels. On the way to Gary’s dorm, Benny imagined what the Trivial Pursuit party would look like, perhaps a loud, competitive evening of intelligent coeds vying for the title of trivia champ. But when he got there, only Gary and another first-year named Felix were sitting quietly on the common room futon, a Trivial Pursuit board and a bag of Cheetos open on the coffee table between them.

“There should be more people coming,” Gary said, apologetically, but they never did, despite his endless checking of the door and his phone for messages. Benny didn’t really want to stay, but felt bad for Gary, and even worse for Felix, who seemed equally paralyzed by the social dilemma the situation posed. Eventually, Benny took a seat on the desk chair and popped a Cheeto into his mouth in solidarity.

No one else ever arrived, but the evening was surprisingly pleasant. Gary and Felix proved to be worthy trivia competitors, ultimately resulting in a head-to-head-to-head in the center square. Gary chose Arts & Entertainment for Benny, which was usually a cake-walk, but Benny had forgotten that Cher was married to Sonny before Greg Allman, and so lost to Felix, who easily answered a question about Julian of Norwich. The prize was heralded in large font on the flier as a 15- percent-off coupon to the campus bookstore. Benny knew each student had received one of these on their first day but didn’t say anything for fear of being seen as a sore loser. The prize reminded Benny that the flier also mentioned drinks.

“Could I grab something to drink?” Benny asked, standing up from the futon and pulling at the wedgie that had formed during the long game.

Gary hesitated briefly, and Benny saw something familiar in that pause. He wondered, but didn’t want to draw attention. Gary’s eyes, a deep brown, shivered slightly, as if watching an insect.

“Sure,” Gary said, pointing toward a small alcove near the mini fridge. There, Benny found a Costco-size variety pack of Snapples and an equally large supply of Top Ramen. As Benny twisted open the cap to the Snapple, he caught a movement just behind the packages of noodles and, leaning closer, he saw the heart, sitting in what looked like a plastic shower caddy.

This heart was much smaller than Benny’s mother’s, a paler shade of red. The aortic arch (Benny had excelled at anatomy in high school) appeared almost identical to his mother’s, but the ventricles were smaller, slightly gray in color. Benny had the instinctual desire to say hello, but didn’t want to call attention to it in front of the others. Instead, he waved, as if to a small child. The heart seemed to peer up at him momentarily,  then nestled back against the hard plastic of the caddy.

Gary’s eyes were on him as he turned and Benny felt that look as a wave, an undulation or shift. Some part of Benny wanted to speak to Gary about the heart, to swap stories or opinions, or even logistics of care, but before he had the chance, Gary’s roommate, a muscular football player named Flip, stormed into the room with a laughing girl in tow, announcing that Gary was “sexiled” for the night. Gary sighed and the girl giggled, saying, “C’mon, Gary. You know the drill.”

Before Benny could speak, Felix offered his room to Gary for the night, since his roommate was away at a Lacrosse tournament. Gary nodded appreciatively, and Flip’s eyes only briefly grazed the Trivial Pursuit game before he snatched what was left of the Cheetos, emptying the bag directly into his open mouth.

Benny wondered if Gary would take the heart with him to Felix’s room, or leave it in the alcove. By the looks of Flip and the girl, who was currently wound around Flip’s torso like a potato vine, the heart would undoubtedly be subjected to an evening of loud sexual exploration. Presumably, the heart was not immune from overhearing such things, but still Benny felt bad for it, stuck there behind the Top Ramen.

There had been a flurry of activity then, and Benny stood, unsure how to exit without seeming impolite. He grabbed a paper towel from a roll atop the mini fridge and began wiping down the coffee table, only managing to smear Cheeto dust across its surface.

“It’s OK,” Gary said, touching Benny’s arm. “Don’t worry about it.”

Benny smiled and Gary rolled his eyes toward Flip who burped loudly before blowing the Cheeto-scented breath right into his girlfriend’s face. She laughed and swatted him away playfully as Flip reached over, retrieving one of Gary’s Snapples from the stack in the alcove. He guzzled loudly from the bottle, his head tipped back to reveal a thick Adam’s apple that convulsed as he swallowed. Finishing the drink in one go, he threw the empty bottle behind him, knocking over several bottles so they clattered against the floor. Gary gasped audibly and he and Benny simultaneously dove for the alcove, their bodies moving in one fluid motion. Benny was the first to reach back and remove the bottles from atop the heart, which cowered away from him. He wasn’t sure what the protocols were, so he stepped back and allowed Gary to pick the heart up in its shower caddy, murmuring quietly to it.

“Oh, my God,” said the girl, her voice a mixture of hilarity and fascination. “Is that…” But before she could approach, Gary hugged the caddy tightly against his chest, his eyes avoiding everyone but Benny. The heart seemed to shrink within its plastic cocoon and Gary placed his hand, tenderly, against the left ventricle, rubbing it softly with his thumb.

“Hey, sorry man,” Flip said. “My bad.”

Without looking at Flip, Gary said, “It’s OK.” And Benny thought perhaps Flip was actually apologetic, but then he saw Flip turn to his girlfriend and mimic the act of vomiting. Benny wasn’t sure what to do. Confrontation had never been his strong suit. But he felt somehow at the edge of something important. Felix, on the other hand, quietly grabbed his coat and left the room, the heavy metal door clanging loudly behind him.

Something passed between Benny and Gary at that precise moment and, without speaking, the two left the room together. Neither spoke, no invitation was given, and yet they walked, quite close to one another, across the scantly lit pathway toward Benny’s dorm. Once inside his room, Benny announced to Mark, in a voice that felt unfamiliarly bold, that Gary would be sleeping on their futon. Mark, removing his AirPods from his ears and sighing dramatically, saw the heart in its box in Gary’s arms and said, “Ah, hell no,” before grabbing his phone and announcing that he would be sleeping at his girlfriend’s.

Once he was gone, the room felt small and dirty. Benny looked around at the empty pizza boxes and overflowing trash can with embarrassment, but Gary merely moved Mark’s bong off the futon and sat down, the heart tucked next to his hip. Benny felt strange breaking the silence between them so, instead, he walked into the bedroom and lifted the heart, snug in its towel nest, and placed it next to Gary’s shower caddy. Together, they watched as the two hearts seemed to draw toward one another, their surfaces trembling. Benny and Gary stayed like that until eventually they fell asleep, sitting up, and when Benny awoke early the next morning, his neck and shoulders sore, Gary and the heart in the shower caddy were gone.     

Since that night, Benny saw Gary around campus, but they did not speak. Benny wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed by this, and would often find himself staring at Gary’s back as he walked past, his long legs loping across the grass. There were no more fliers stuck under his door and, as the days went on, his thoughts of Gary only increased. His feelings toward the heart shifted slightly as well. He would experience great surges of sympathy for his mother’s heart, an almost aching sense of irresponsibility and abandonment whenever he left for class or the dining hall. He made a conscious effort to engage with the heart more and began talking to it whenever Mark, whose bathroom rituals you could set a clock to, left the room for his evening shower. Benny would gather the heart, towel nest and all, and hold it, not unlike a swaddled infant, while looking out the window at the flickering street lights lining the pathway outside their dorm, the same pathway that led to Gary.

Things with Mark remained tense, but neither voiced their frustration with the other. Instead, they settled into an icy dynamic that mostly consisted of Mark avoiding the room whenever possible. This worked until Mark and his girlfriend broke up. Mark did not share this news with Benny, but he changed the screensaver on his computer from the two of them to a photo of the Grand Canyon. Mark also stopped listening to Pink Floyd, which Benny took as a sign. 

By October, it felt like a truce had formed between them and they would, to Benny’s surprise, sometimes send funny TikToks to one another and occasionally walk to dinner together. One afternoon, as they crossed the Quad after lunch, a surprising number of students were gathered on the wide expanse of lawn. Mark attributed it to the unseasonably warm weather, but as the days progressed, people were multiplying exponentially, until they filled the entire Quad. Neither of the boys asked any of the gathering group what they were doing there, but word soon spread throughout the classrooms and dormitories that a first-year had been assaulted at the Rho Delta house. The perpetrator, whose parents recently endowed a History Chair at Hayes, had yet to be arrested. He had been named by the young woman he assaulted, an act Benny found both brave and terrifying, but she had dropped out when she began receiving harassing messages by phone and text from anonymous sources.

Mark dismissed the protest as a waste of time, but Benny felt conflicting emotions. He wanted to support the young woman, but had never taken part in any sort of protest before. He wasn’t sure how the protestors maintained their grades when they seemed to never leave the lawn, or where they went to the bathroom.

One night, when Mark was at a party, Benny picked up the heart and brought it to the window, explaining to it in soft tones what was happening below. In the twilight, the protesters looked like one large organism, swaying slightly in a sea of black hoodies. A few were singing a song Benny couldn’t decipher, while others illuminated the darkness with their phones. They watched for some time, Benny and the heart, until he turned out the lights and went to bed. 

The uneasy peace between Benny and Mark continued and that Friday night, Mark even went so far as to share a pizza he’d ordered—not offering it verbally, but flipping the cardboard box open on the coffee table as an indication that Benny should dig in. Benny did, happily, hoping this marked some sort of development of their roommate energy, if not friendship. But when Mark opened his can of Coke, it spurted soda in a volcanic stream, landing on the heart that was resting next to Benny’s desk. The left ventricle of the heart shrank slightly as carbonation filled the pulmonary vein, bubbling softly.

“Oh shit,” Mark said, but made no attempt to move toward the heart. Benny would not forget that immobility as he lifted the heart up and ran to the bathroom to rinse it under cold water. In the unisex bathroom, two girls were putting on lipstick in the mirror, and another was turning the dial for a free tampon. Benny pushed one of the lipstick girls out of the way to get to the sink, and she backed into the tampon girl noisily.

“What is your fucking problem?” she asked, waving a long, pale blue fingernail in Benny’s face.

But then she saw the heart and her face was eclipsed by a look Benny would later recognize as pity. The girls were silent as Benny ran a gentle stream of water over the heart. None of them moved, creating a semicircle around Benny and watching as the water in the sink ran slightly pink. They stood wordlessly as Benny pulled his T-shirt out from his torso and, laying the heart in the pouch it created, opened the bathroom door and left, his sneakers squeaking noisily down the hallway.

Mark didn’t look up from his phone when Benny walked in, and the heart’s superior vena cava pulsated slightly against his hand as he tucked it into the small nook between his twin bed and bedside table. He gently laid the heart down in the bed of towels before turning to Mark.

“Please try to be more careful,” he said to the back of Mark’s head.

Mark did not reply, but turned, looking Benny in the eye and shrugging his shoulders before returning to the video of dogs dancing on his phone.

A shiver of courage flickered through Benny and he took out his own phone and texted Gary.

Hi.

This seemed to be enough for now and Benny climbed onto his bed, tucking his legs up until his knees touched his chest. He put in his AirPods and scrolled through his Spotify playlists before settling on a new one he’d called “Hayes & Confused.” Phoebe Bridgers began to sing and Benny tried not to look at his phone.

It wasn’t until Phoebe had been replaced by Maggie Rogers that Benny’s phone vibrated.

Hi back.

Benny smiled and, before thinking too hard about it, sent off an assortment of emojis: a shrimp, a flamenco dancer, and a wad of cash.

Immediately, three little dots began oscillating below and, within seconds, a cactus, a waxing moon, and a banjo appeared. Benny laughed out loud, his heart beating quickly.

Mark came into the bedroom, still bent over his phone, and Benny suddenly had the desire to be anywhere but his own room. He felt no compulsory urge to say goodbye to the heart and walked into the hallway, texting quickly before he lost his nerve.

Do you want to hang out?

Leaning against the window at the end of the corridor, Benny could see a few students walking along the dimly lit walkways. The large calico cat, known affectionately as Ada Lovelace,  that always seemed to linger around the mathematics building, dashed across the lawn like a spirit. Benny closed his eyes, and stuck his forehead against the glass, feeling the cool surface on his skin.

His phone buzzed.

Yogurt Yurt? Fifteen minutes?

Benny bit his lip and placed his palm against the glass, leaving a steamy print that he looked at for a few seconds, quite contentedly, before responding with a thumbs-up emoji, followed by an anchor for good measure.

After changing into a clean shirt, Benny crossed through the Quad toward the edge of Main Street. A few tents had been erected, and protesters were flinging sleeping bags onto the hard concrete. Benny estimated there were at least 200 of them, their arms wrapped around one another, some holding hands. Signs dotted the landscape. “Believe Survivors” and “End Victim Blaming.”  As he walked, Benny saw two students slowly unroll a giant banner on the side of the chemistry building, the words appearing one by one:

WE

STAND

WITH

ELIZA

“No means no!” someone yelled, but not before the face of Eliza, the girl who always smiled at him, who wore a pencil behind her left ear and carried a lavender bag to class, crossed his mind. Eliza who had stopped coming to class and who, now, had raised an entire crowd together in a sea of anger and sadness and hope for change. Their voices rose as Benny passed and his heart surged, a sensation so intense that he had to stop and catch his breath. Eliza had always smiled at him. Now Benny wondered if she really did have a heart with her as well; and if so, what that heart felt, what signals it had communicated back home. Thinking of his own mother’s heart, he joined in the chanting, cupping his hands around his mouth until he was screaming as loud as he could. Several of the black-hoodied protestors gave him a thumbs up in response. Benny’s phone buzzed. A text from Gary.

I’m here. Sitting outside.

When Benny arrived at Yogurt Yurt, Gary was wearing a vintage Mork and Mindy T-shirt and Benny gave him the “nanu nanu” hand signal, which made Gary laugh. They filled their compostable cups with brightly colored swirls of yogurt and toppings, each costing more than $10. Gary offered to treat and Benny said he’d get him next time. Together, they sat outside, the sky filling with the sounds of Friday nights, a combination of car engines and cumulative laughter.

They did not speak of their last interaction, but of their professors, how they were feeling about midterms, and their collective exhaustion with the dining hall’s insistence on baked chicken.

Benny was mid-bite when Gary cleared his throat, nervously.

“Do you ever wish you didn’t have it?” Gary asked, chewing thoughtfully on a gummy bear.

“Sometimes.” Benny felt a pang of guilt rise slowly through his abdomen. “Not all the time.”

Gary nodded, his brown eyes downcast under a canopy of dark lashes.  “Me too,” he said, just as a police car screamed past them, lights and siren blazing. Before Benny could ask his next question, another police car appeared, then another, all heading toward campus. People began to filter out of the Yogurt Yurt and the Burrito Brothers next door.

“What’s going on?” asked the teenager who had weighed their yogurts.

Several patrons began to walk quickly toward campus. Benny and Gary were just throwing away their cups when an ambulance raced past.

Benny’s mind filled with images of his dorm room on fire, his mother’s heart backing away from licking flames. Gary’s face was ashen and the two ran toward campus, joining a horde of downtown revelers all heading in the same direction. There was a distinct smell of pot and beer in the air, as the crowd rippled down Browning Street toward the main gates.

The police cars had blocked off the main entrance to campus, so Benny and Gary, followed by a few other Hayes students, ran around the science building toward the Quad. There, an ambulance was parked on the lawn and a wall of students, all recording the events on their phones, lined the walkway. It was hard to decipher what was happening, but Benny overheard a girl he recognized from his History of Antisemitism class say something about “an asshole” and “serves him right.”

For the next several minutes, Benny and Gary were able to gather enough information from the crowd to determine that one of the teammates of the perpetrator had gotten wasted on Everclear and Kool-Aid and tried to drive his pickup truck through the crowd of protestors. He’d destroyed the hard plastic bollards that were meant to keep vehicles out of the Quad and had driven into one of the stately elms that guarded the square. He was being taken away now, and several protestors were clambering aboard the ambulance, throwing themselves against the sides, as if to attack him through the hard metal of the vehicle.

“This is for Eliza!” one protestor shouted, banging his fists against the vehicle, and soon the entire population of the Quad was chanting. Their voices rose up against the splintered edges of the felled elm and collected in power as the ambulance struggled to make its way, sirenless, through the hoard.

“This is for Eliza,” Gary shouted, his mouth close enough that Benny could feel the hot breath against his ear.

“This is for Eliza,” Benny yelled, as they watched the ambulance lights disappear around the corner. The police announced from their bullhorns that the crowd should disperse, but the students stayed, still chanting, and a swell of solidarity lifted from them, so powerful that when Gary’s hand closed around Benny’s, he felt like he was holding hands with everyone, everywhere. And later, in Gary’s dorm room, when Benny pressed himself against Gary and the world began to spin, neither of the boys thought for one minute of the hearts that lay in their separate rooms.

But the heart tucked in its shower caddy in the alcove of Gary’s room could at least bear witness and, by extension, Gary’s mother felt a swell of joy so profound and unexpected that she swerved into oncoming traffic, narrowly missing a U-Haul van that honked angrily at her as she righted herself. She did not know the source of the pleasure, but it coursed through her own body , in a way she would later tell her friends felt almost sacred.

But Benny’s mother would not know this joy. In the towel bed in Benny’s dark, messy room in another dorm, his mother’s heart sat quietly unaware. Mark had left for a party, so the room was silent except for the occasional hum of the mini fridge and the sound of muffled laughter through the walls. The heart continued to beat, though, anticipating its next sensation. Sorrow? Disappointment? Elation? The heart could not know. Nor could Benny’s mother know. Unless he came home and told the heart where he’d been, what he’d done. He could do that, relay experiences to the heart and those would pass on to his mother, somewhat dimmed in the retelling, but present nonetheless. But would he?

Maybe not, but she was lucky. She knew this, for what emotions she had felt over these last three months! Each so distinct, so purely intended. Driving in the car. Sitting with a client going over upholstery swatches. Dancing at her Zumba class. Sensations pouring through her, but with no explanation.  The pamphlets and the physicians had not warned about this. There had been no mention of this particular side effect and the deep, almost unbearable, curiosity it aroused. Benny’s mother, and the others, merely felt. A physical reaction that, over time, they would attempt to contextualize, each in their own homes in their own ways. Benny’s mother kept the notebook, logging each sensation carefully, precisely, then trying to track or establish some sort of connection or rhythm between them. If her heart surged into joy each Monday around 10 a.m., and she cross referenced that with his class schedule, could she say with any certainty that it was because class was over? Or did he see someone every Monday at that precise time? Did he treat himself to a candy bar on Mondays at 10 a.m. from the care packages she sent every few weeks?

The happiness was easier to track, a pleasure to tabulate. The other emotions—grief, loneliness, fear, insecurity—these were more difficult. The online CardiU support groups she’d joined, mostly on Zoom given her busy schedule, did nothing to normalize or even minimize the sensations. Nor would she want them to, if she was being honest. She wanted to feel them all. If Benny felt, then she wanted to as well. Good or bad.

But she would never know the why. So they waited, the heart and the mother. Never knowing why and never knowing when. Such that when the door opened, and Benny stepped inside, his mind full of Gary and the intoxicating possibilities of each day forward, both the heart and the mother felt a simultaneous lifting. At once an ache, a surprise, a hoping.

Each time this happened, despite her worries that it might come across as too much, too cloying, too present, Benny’s mother texted him.

Just saying hello!

Or,

Just sending a hug!

Or,

Hope you’re having a great day!

And Benny, her beautiful boy, responded with a heart.