Shark Heart

by Emily Habeck

The color left Wren’s face, and her heart dropped one thousand stories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is never a right time to say goodbye.

Lewis thought all children came into the world knowing some truth about magic and God. He thought the journey of adulthood was to forget about these things and then partake in the path to remembering. Lewis said one of the purposes of art was to point people toward what they already knew. Now Wren really needed to know: Where is the art here, Lewis? And what path?

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.

Angela had been grieving Marcos almost as long as she’d known him, and finally, like a rainbow against a bruise-hued cloud, 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 Marcos, the one she imagined, was never real.

With help from her dad, Angela bought a car to replace their increasingly unreliable truck. “What do you think?” Angela asked Wren, who was standing with her hands on her hips, like a discerning adult. “It’s my favorite color.” “I thought your favorite color was red.” “I just changed it to blue. To match.”

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.

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.

The world is a big and small place, and life, a terrifying and sublime journey.