Shark Heart

by Emily Habeck

Lewis and those trees grew up together. And now the same trees were his best men,

he also married her vast unknowns. And she, his.

Angela gave Wren a life and home but also took her childhood and innocence; her curiosity and flexibility; her imagination and wonder. Sometimes Wren said she resented her mother, and other times Wren missed her so much it was hard to move, to breathe.

How, since the loss, Wren looked at her hands first thing every morning and pretended they were her mother’s hands—hands that never left her, hands that lived on in the foggy

transition between sleeping and waking.

In books she could experience different realities and learn from the people in them. In books, Wren saw how people made mistakes. She decided she would not be one of them.

During the day, Wren could manage it through suppression, but at night, the beast overpowered her.

Like, is it ever possible to rebuild? Or, after time, is every relationship just a little bit broken?”

wondering what to do with her hands, what to do with her heart.

who could not remember her own mother’s face on Mother’s Day.

Lewis gazed at the moon and then to Wren and once more at the moon and back to Wren, realizing, startlingly, he could not tell the two entities apart. In this evanescent moment, the love of his life and the moon became indistinguishable from each other, casting everything Lewis feared about the future in the real but temporary light of goodness.

Wren was simply a human being existing on the surface of Planet Earth, and he, and he, and he—Man of Sea. It just was. They were, at once, thirty-five and a hundred years old.

If we don’t value artists as the most visionary among us, what will be left of this world? What is left but the pursuit of more money, more things? But

The students learned lines and constructed worlds, but most of all, they came in as strangers and left as a collective of best friends.

a world where invisible energies made all words feel new and made up;

the discovery of danger, of the edge, of the nameless, tireless dragon breathing not fire, but hope into the experience of being human; it was their duty, he’d say, to deliver the message: Faith lived in the darkest rooms.

This critical lens sustained Lewis for a very long time, but it also made him bitter. In his lowest moments, Lewis wondered if he might be the average one after all. At times he felt he would rather die than find out the truth.

He wanted to be an actor because he loved to transform.

The stage also was a wonderful place to grapple with life’s ambiguity, and because there was an audience, Lewis felt seen.

He missed driving and parking lots. He missed big skies and the prairie. He missed small talk and people who took their time. He missed January weeks with all 70-degree days and the football hype in the fall. He missed his parents.

All those years, while he was so focused on one thing, being an actor, he took for granted all that was already his. All the colors to see.

He would make it on his own terms. Lewis still had time to be a Great.

“It’s a love story about forging ahead while facing great and immediate change.”

A few minutes passed, the hammock cradling them into each other like blobs of soft clay molding to each other.

can’t look at everything hard enough, Lewis whispered into the stars again and again. The combination of words belonged to a character he would never play, but in that moment, he felt that the line had been written for him.

Like the bird.”

her hands were like spoons turning heavy cream to whipped cream to butter, stroking down the pool and back and down the pool and back and down and back and down and back and down and back. Her body, controlled by her mind, the machine; her body, lightning in the water.

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.”

I’ve had it wrong all along. If magic exists in a real way, it is not here to dazzle us with all that is unreal to the naked eye. What if magic is just mislabeled peace? A peace that says suffering doesn’t have a purpose or reason. A peace that says meaning is the medicine. A peace that says I don’t need to know how or why. But she’ll be all right. Wren will be okay.

In their innocence, they failed to grasp the labor of losing a partner, how the tasks of simple existence would become logistical feats and one person’s burden.

When life was erratic, numbers gave Wren solid ground, but lately, even her relationship with the measurable was transforming.

My world has no space for your ambiguity. Perfection is real, and I have to give it to them all the time.”

smelled like the wind.

by the end of the session, the disparate collection of students in the class felt like a gathering of old friends.

How in the world had she arrived at this moment in her life, one that seemed both small and inexplicably large?

“I don’t like to talk about myself,” Wren said, trying not to sound defensive even though she was. “I feel like you don’t want to be known.”

“You can’t get an abortion if you’re having birds?” The Tiny Pregnant Woman felt herself on the verge of tears for the first time in years. “The Church says angels have wings, too.”

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.

Her ribs felt like the hard keys of a xylophone.

All the hours he spent theorizing about magic seemed so naive now. The main ingredient in transformation was not magic. It was pain.

“Do you think Nurse Tammy showed her hairdresser a picture of Nick Carter or Justin Timberlake?”

Then they both busted out laughing, the kind of whole-body laughter with its own lifespan, laughter guffawing at itself, laughter that made one involuntarily cry, laughter that took one’s breath away.

maybe we’re the matter being rearranged. Maybe it’s us.”

A good director treats the cast members as equals while knowing every actor is not.

Lewis tattooed her with beautiful poetry in a place she would never see but somehow read every second.

their blood and bones ripping away from humanity’s known, narrow lane; their life and family broken and rearranged.

For the first time in his life, Lewis was not the main character, reality’s most reliable witness.

the teenager studying hard, not primarily for the acquisition of knowledge but for the opportunity to convince a better place she belonged;

a man who taught her how to notice beauty and convinced her she was worthy of it, too.

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.