When they say good bye, she says wait. He turns, opens his chest. Listen to the rib bones stretch—not break. He leaves it in her hand, and it pulses between her fingers. All the way home, it thumps against the leather of her purse, and the muck stains her steering wheel. She places it in a jar in the back of her cleaning closet, blood collecting in the rims. The glass of the jar, the wood of the door, muffles the squelching. Now dust collects in the corners and yellow stains the toilet bowl.

A new man comes to her door, and when he leaves, she moves it under the guest-bathroom sink. With the next, under a bucket in the garage. As it throws itself against the cement, she digs between the hydrangeas, the dirt in her fingernails as she drags at the ground. She buries the jar, and now the house shakes as it palpitates.  She moves to a hotel, living off take-out and travel shampoo.

One morning, she waits in a café chewing on a croissant. She pauses as he walks in, orders. They wait for coffee at the room’s opposite ends. Rings under his eyes, his mouth is a straight line. The room quiets until someone drops a mug and it shatters. She jumps, he stands still. They look at each other. I have no heart, he says.

She flees the café, running to her yard to bring to the jar back. When she arrives, a glass flower grows in its place, blood moves through its stem and leaves.  She digs at the ground to the roots and pulls, red from the leaves soaking her hands. The roots stiffen as she tugs harder. He comes to stand behind, arms crossed. The glass cracks. Still she pulls and pulls. As the glass shards cut beneath her finger nails, the cracks in her knuckles, the lines in her palm, he shrugs and says, I’ll find another. He walks away, leaving her kneeling in the garden dirt. The glass shatters.

# # #

Julia Hands is a writer out of Seattle. A graduate from the MFA program at Western Washington University, her fiction can be found in 5×5 and Blink-Ink and forthcoming in the Evansville Review.

Photo: Nicolas Thomas