Shark Heart

by Emily Habeck

He looked to Wren to remember. He always remembered Wren.

joy and grief are human birthrights, but mostly, being alive is everything in between.

Are we all just actors, performing some unbound art form for God, the audience of space? I wish I could have seen then what I know now.

All along, I had the starring role.

Take me to the sea.

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.

She sat on her knees again, pulling Lewis’s head onto her lap while the tide’s stronger arm tried to pull him into the ocean.

I need everything, and could it be that everything is too much for one woman to seek and grasp, alone?

I know I deserve to be happy. I hope you realize that you do, too.

Numbers provided certainty. Certainty provided control. Control provided protection.

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.”

she didn’t want food at all but rather, the feeling of emotional fullness,

The canyons would not be impressive if they weren’t balanced by something infinitely vast.

Rock bottom was the quietest, darkest place she’d ever been.

the symphony of hearts, the internal music that plays when one decides to renew their partnership with life.

Suddenly, with such insatiable yearning, Wren wanted to fill her lungs. She did not choose to be born, but she chose, in this moment, to live.

She was open to the stars.

a guy with ideas for hands and dreams for feet.

Marcos replied before doing a donut in the empty gravel lot and driving off.

Along with the bracelet, she felt she’d lost part of herself. The part that used to make paper dolls. The part that bicycled to the courts by herself. The part that remained in her parents’ house in the lonely bedroom above the garage. The part of her that was still innocent, a virgin, somebody’s little girl.

which gave her thoughts the quality of warm taffy, expanding and condensing in long, heavy minutes.

The family’s lives and the land were bound to each other as if they were the same body.

somehow, that she might belong to everything and everything to her.

Then Angela’s mind left her body, and she tried to return to the stars. Why didn’t she go with them, gleaming, when they called her to join them in the dome of bright sky? And where was God now? Was there anyone out there, anything real, who could protect her now?

with every splash of water or swish of fabric, she knew she was covered in him.

grieving Marcos almost as long as she’d known him,

she saw the real Marcos—not as an idea, dream, hope, or possibility—but as he really was.

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 Ma...

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

Moving toward them: the regal dark column, hungry for the good life, ready to receive the objects of the world.

thirty swollen minutes,

So, the atmospheric shimmering of greatest happiness, two girls greeting life hand in hand, was theirs to borrow, not keep. Angela and Julia’s ending was one of decay, not shattering, a vague and gradual slipping away. Angela would puzzle over the mystery even many years later, never quite understanding what happened, or when, exactly, their friendship ended.

Were they meant only to share a moment and pass on, alone, taking opposite forks on the road to womanhood?

When will I stop becoming new versions of myself but something else?

look up to their drooping, dappled heads, and see not only the seeding part of the plant but also the many faces of a benevolent, adjusting God.

How was it that her self’s container, her only true protection from the world’s elements, had only ever betrayed her,

Wren sharpened a pernicious, worded arrow and lobbed it at the bull’s-eye, her mother.

What a privilege it was to mark time with the sun.

faith lived in the darkest rooms.

I AM SO LONELY HERE, Lewis screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. But no one heard him. No one came.

Plants were probably the most sentient of all living things: rational, bloodless bystanders, witnessing the great horror of it all.

In the rare hopeful hour, I tell myself this darkness has a purpose: to help me recognize light if I ever find it again.

Lewis discovered a layer of sadness even deeper than his previous depression: a bleak, gorgeous fog so quiet and still it resembled peace.

who at times seemed like a character in a wonderful book, a static entity whose movements, while profound, would always be limited to a finite story.

I’ve been thinking lately, maybe we do get new performances of the same day, opportunities to be more accepting and loving. Maybe practice, rehearsal, is also the way to freedom. We can start over. Time can loop back on itself, and here I am again with you, Margaret, trying.

Wren was a perfectionist not because she wanted to be but because she felt she had to be to survive in an unfair world.

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

these fragile mystery-meat globs that contained a complicated mechanism for sight,

Joy is a little girl who has no qualms about taking the space she needs with her voice, physicality, and huge emotions.