Shark Heart

by Emily Habeck

As their relationship became more committed, deep, and real, Lewis realized Wren’s gift: she would never compete with him as an artist. Now he could relax and enjoy the pleasure of never having to defend his taste.

The surface of love was a feeling, but beyond this thin layer, there was a fathomless, winding maze of caverns offering many places to see and explore. Wren used to think romantic passion only grew more intense in the depths. But this belief was naive and impractical, a by-product of a certainty-obsessed culture that equates love with longing and views ambivalence as a fatal flaw. 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.

(Like the child who passes an index finger through a candle flame to test the boundary between peace and pain, people who grow up in Tornado Alley know when to linger and when to run for their lives.)