200 CCs - June 2016

Your Heart is Mine
by Elizabeth Archer
We sit, waiting for the cardiologist to come in
with the results. Listening to shoes squeak on
the fake wood floor. Waiting for them to stop at
the door.
It’s been an hour, and there are 64 tiles in the
ceiling. A dead gnat sticks to
the window, in the
otherwise spotless
room.
When the door
opens, something
inside my chest
shifts. Opens too,
tries to squeeze past
him, run down the hall.
The doctor is thin and fit
and tan. He looks as if he
has been running all morning,
breathless and grinning with a
smile that reaches his cheek.
pictures of the insides of your arteries. “All
clear.”
I see images of holes. Pictures of your heart.
We breathe out then, both of
us, as if we had been
sucking a week’s worth
of oxygen inside.
Exhale fear, in the
form of CO 2 .
“All good. See you in
say, May?” he says.
I can hear your heart,
beating like a distant
drum, in the silence.
That’s what marriage is, after
twenty years.
I can’t hear my own heart at all.
“Everything’s okay,” Dr. Flynn says, white
back to us, his hand flipping through notes and
Elizabeth Archer writes flash, short stories and poetry. She lives in the Texas Hill country, and haunts Scribophile, a
site for serious writers.
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