Shark Heart

by Emily Habeck

Second-grade Wren’s reasoning was that a life too noticeable might be stolen, and conversely, a wispy existence might blow away or be stepped on. Medium was safe.

Dallas appealed to Wren for the reasons some people disliked it. At first glance unspecialized, covered with characterless concrete, flat, and landlocked, the city felt big enough to disappear in but not big enough to get lost in. It mirrored a quality of emotionlessness Wren tried to embody herself.

Lewis appreciated organization as a concept but never remembered to practice it.

On Mother’s Day, a few weeks after the wedding, Lewis went to brunch with his parents while Wren drove two hours to the lake in Oklahoma where she lived until she was ten. The first year they were together, Lewis wanted to go with her, but Wren declined with such surprising ferocity he did not mention it again. With this private tradition, there was no need to sit awkwardly at another mother’s table with a seven-dollar greeting card, wondering what to do with her hands, what to do with her heart.

With electroreception, Lewis hoped to sense her, know her, and love her even thousands of miles away in the ocean. Nothing he read indicated that electroception extended further than a couple yards. But maybe, he thought, maybe if I practiced, I would never really have to say goodbye. When Lewis finally came to bed, he took sleeping Wren’s hand in his and closed his eyes, seeing if he could sense her electrical field. “What . . . What are you doing?” she asked groggily. “Just seeing what it’s like to love you when I can’t see you.”

Wren let her mind drift to the previous summer, before she met Rachel: a brief but sacred time when Wren did not have to guard the borders of her story.

From that moment forward, Wren knew her friendship with the Tiny Pregnant Woman would be different from her others, which thrived on activities like power walking in ninety-dollar yoga pants, birthday brunching, and lamenting the cost and inconvenience of freezing one’s eggs. Wren and the Tiny Pregnant Woman shared practical, applied interests like oncoming personal devastation, terrifying sadness, and the experience of free-falling into grief and the unknown.

Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go. Feelings fled under pressure; feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.

He was an aimless kite in search of a string to ground him to the world, but instead, he’d found Wren, a great, strong wind who supported his exploration of the sky.

Wren started dining alone in cafés, diners, bars, and restaurants just to be near other people, the movements and sounds of lives being lived together. On one of these solo excursions, Wren met a man in a yellow shirt who made her feel that the world was a good place, and the world was a good place because she was someone living in it.

Maybe life has no ceiling, no floors, no walls, and we’re free-falling from the moment we’re born, lying to each other, agreeing to make invented ideas important, to numb ourselves from the secret.” “What’s the secret?” “Maybe what happens between birth and death isn’t as precious as we think.”

she took a northern detour because returning home felt like a commitment to a life that could go on without him.

Wren was so tired, so cold. Her body could sink no more. Rock bottom was the quietest, darkest place she’d ever been.

Rick could handle the sight of an open wound, work for twenty hours with no sleep, and tell a patient they were dying, but he did not have the courage to hold his own wife, tell her she needed help, or say he would love her until the day he died. Yes, he was a man of his era, one in a generation of boys who were trained to lead but never feel, one in a generation of boys who became staunch, withholding men in lonely rooms, looking out at life with no way to touch it.

Marcos drew an outline of a person who was generous, wise, and kind, and Angela’s longing animated his image with life and color. This two-dimensional Marcos, the one she imagined, was never real.

the wondrous conundrum of having more words to say to the other than there were seconds in the day.

Satisfied, Wren knew her arrow had hit the mark. And she knew it had hurt. But Wren did not know that she had also deflated the ever shrinking remnant of her mother who was fighting to hang on, fighting to remain in the world just to be near her daughter.

It seemed loving someone was not enough to keep them still beside her.

Meanwhile, a chain of genetic material from each of the people Wren most loved swirled within the small being Wren would love most of all.

Wren no longer sees life as a long, linear ladder with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, she considers how life is like a spiraling trail up a mountain. Each circling lap represents a learning cycle, the same lesson at a slightly higher elevation. Wren realizes she likes to rest as much as she likes to climb. She begins to enjoy the view.

With her mother’s strength behind her, Joy glimpses her power, gliding through the water into an undiscovered frontier, at the helm of a whole wide world. Joy, with her ancestors residing within her like nesting dolls, is a brave, flaming heart, born to face the wound of the world, and one day she will be one among the wave to heal it.