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Scream
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Woman with a Tin Can Heart

Kyle Hemmings

    He marries a woman with a tin can heart. The prognosis is poor: she tires too easily from intense foreplay; she’s reduces to rattle and hum when someone a shush away tells her she is loved. Whenever he sleeps next to her, he hears his own words echo as if someone else’s. On some nights, he’s tempted to smother her with a pillow pressed against her face so her childhood murmur will be cured, so he can hear himself think. Shortly after the simple wedding ceremony, she said, Before you, I had a hole in my heart. I leaked the names of fair-weather men who would never love me. She remembers the days of living in the streets, of being kicked around by outsider boys, how they made her swallow stones or regurgitate their reflections. They made her feel ugly, six degrees of weird. Rarely, she speaks of the father, who boasted about his collection of road kill, about his extra shoestring or two of kindness. One night, the husband discovers that the wife with a tin can heart is gone. His bed is now a one-way street with no signs, only the faint footprints of a small animal. After it rains, he imagines the ping of coins in someone’s cup. He listens to the rustle of his own thoughts: dry, unintelligible at the core, never fated to become trains. The weight of his peeping eyes shifts inward. He imagines he has a hole in his head. In that space, the sun will shine metallic. The stray cats will refuse water, will not whine, will remain nameless.



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