Our Missing Hearts

by Celeste Ng

Sometimes, though, when he saw her squatting in the corner of the playground, head leaning against the chain-link fence, he turned away, so she wouldn’t have to pretend to be brave. To let her be alone with her grief, or whatever heavier thing she’d put on top to hold it down.

There was something else in his father’s voice in the library, not just anger but an acrid thing Bird can’t quite name, and then, suddenly, he knows. It’s fear. The same loud, blustering fear that he’d heard that day with the posters, when his father spoke to the policemen. A hot metallic musk, the hiss of claws drawn.

Monks live there, she’d told him, and when he’d asked what’s a monk, she’d answered: a person who wants to escape the world.

She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility.

Lines everywhere, everything in short supply except anger, and fear, and grief.

No one agreed on who to blame—not yet—and with no focus, outrage and panic and fear swelled over everything, hot and thick, rasping your lungs. It was there in the silent darkened streets after curfew, in the slate-gray shadows of the buildings and the echoing footsteps of your shoes on the deserted sidewalk. It flashed sharp and bright in the lights of the police cars as they went by, always on their way to somewhere else more urgent, which was everywhere.

Another piece of the eternal mystery, life’s need to make more life. From the animal world to the plant: Milkweed trees sent their seeds aloft on the wind, to grow far from home; pinecones flared open at their mother’s feet, a skirt of stubby seedlings scrabbling for space and light. Succulents would grow anew from a broken-off leaf, pushing roots out into the air, then down into the soil: a piece of its own body, transformed into its child.

Her face was still young, but there was something worn and heavy about the way she carried herself, as if she had been stretched past what she should hold.

He folded the newspaper in half, not angrily, but calmly. As if he had read enough news to last a lifetime, as if this were the last newspaper he would ever read again.

A small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.

They would never speak again, but they were linked now, as those who’ve been through something terrible together are forever fused, in ways they don’t always understand.

Librarians, of all people, understood the value of knowing, even if that information could not yet be used.

One older woman—a Choctaw woman, whose granddaughter had been taken—looked at Margaret for a long time with weary eyes, then clicked her teeth. You think this is something new? She shook her head.

She began to learn: there was no new thing under the sun. About the schools where Indigenous children were shorn and stripped, renamed, reeducated, and returned home broken and scarred—or never at all. About children borne across borders in their parents’ arms only to be caged in warehouses, alone and afraid. About foster children pinballed from home to home, their own families sometimes unable to track their path. Things she’d been able to not know, until now. There was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same. A most precious ransom, a cudgel over a parent’s head. It was whatever the opposite of an anchor was: an attempt to uproot some otherness, something hated and feared. Some foreignness seen as an invasive weed, something to be eradicated.

She couldn’t explain why, but she feels this in her bones: certain things must be done in person. Testifying. Attending the dying. Remembering those who were gone.

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny was a powerful reminder about how quickly authoritarianism can rise (as well as what can be done about it), and Václav Havel’s classic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” changed my thinking about the impact a single individual could have in dismantling a long-established system. I hope he’s right.