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| halcyon scythe |
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| by joseph victor milford |
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Tackle Box For A Heart
His heart was a swizzamajig. Like a tackle box. Every heartbeat releasing metal lures with their hooks into the veins as they patrolled for nutrients the hooks silver and jagged swinging under their bellies. Growing up, and knowing the condition of his mechanized, apolitical heart, he researched his condition, the particular condition of his tackle box heart. The earliest pseudo-hearts were powered by mysticism — they were hard to maintain and generally took a lot of manna or truffles for upkeep. Then swizzamajigs ran on solar power for a while, but many of the aforementioned mystical swizzamajiggers confused this with religion, and this also presented a problem because the fake hearts needed the most power at night when hearts tend to be hyperactive - you can see the moral snafu's here, the contradictions. The next were powered by coal and/or steam. Some of these are still around — Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro both sport these steaming swizzamajiggers. In any case, our protagonist had one of the new-fangled electrical models. Now, a nuclear model had been invented, but it proved to be dangerous—who wants people walking around with irradiated hearts anyway? Only Scarlett Johansen's seems to be properly functioning, but she is, obviously, an anomaly. Apparently, Tesla himself once tried to perfect the electric heart, but the design of the heart, he noted, was too human to ever be without failure or flaw. He abandoned this project right beside his electric planet and electric eel extension cord blueprints. One day, our protagonist's swizzamajig started acting up—it would no longer deploy the lures. He was dying and needed replacement parts. These took six to eight weeks to deliver, unfortunately. Even with good credit and a rush order that came with a free set of steak-knives and a Tupperware organizer for the cupboard. He was in a fix and palpitating. The doctors removed the heart only to find that it had been manufactured specially — it was the only swizzamajig of its kind, and it had the finest lures that shimmered like holograms when they left the openings of the heart-like engine. Strangely, many hearty philosophers came to study the swizzamajig, for it would not function inside of our hero's body, but it would run like the finest grandfather clock tackle box when outside of the man. It would be tethered to him with fishing line, and it would walk him around the operating room purring and churning with electrical glee. Many of the philosophers were angry that a fake heart could have so much power—after all, fake hearts make fake emotions, and everyone knows we don't need people faking their emotions around here, that's for sure. The heart walked the man around for a while, for a very long while. One day, the man snipped the line with his pocket-knife and shot away into the abyss like a thumb-released rubber-band. The heart kept running though. If you have a telescope or are an astronaut or astronomer, you can see it orbiting the earth, full of its lures, emanating its steady pulse, a renegade satellite. As for our hero, heartless, he propelled away into black, keeps propelling, heartlessly. |
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