The Shape of Takotsubo

One afternoon she watched as the terrible storms descended. Unable to climb to the sky with her ladder and pull the clouds back together or seal the leaking shut, after several days her heart answered by opening until it was too feeble to carry her body and she fell to the ground. And now, after being rescued, after entering the hospital for the second time in less than a week, after being carried and swaddled tight in white sheets soaked heavy in the torrential rain, machines bleeped and dripped, chanted their anonymous steady promises throughout the room, and the doctor waded through rancid water to listen once again to the body nestled in her own.

What creature had taken hold to ensnare her heart in what seemed like an instant, inflating her left ventricle with its unexpected breath into the softness of a u instead of the efficient angles of a v, she asked him after he showed her the image.

Takotsubo's Syndrome he told her, his mouth stretching the word like an extended tentacle. Meaning the shape of an octopus trap.

A visitor then—for how long?

It happens sometimes; but don't worry; in most cases it goes away.

She watched them inside her: a billion worms twisting thick from a conical, glowing body, the suction-cupped arms of a violet octopus thrashing, swimming, drumming in wild, terrified protest—to to the rain, the thunder, the interrogation of the clouds mocking her with their windy chorus of whys, whys, whys—as thump, swoooosh, thump, swoooosh, thump, swoooosh slapped the tentacles and she saw the fallen ladder.

In the field under the grass the creatures slunk and hid from the storm. There they remained, nestled together until it was safe.

And lying in her drenched bed she remembered and began scouring for remnants, for a needle, a thread, a stapler, a roll of tape—something, anything—to patch up the sky. She turned from the octopus, because maybe there was a way to do it, pushed the sheets from her body, and began digging into the mattress, ripping it open with her bare hands, clawing the white stuffing away from the coils bit by bit, plundering past the bleeps and drips for the day before the rain. But she found nothing, dug until she made a hole straight through to the floor, was laughed at by the sanitized tiles, and returned bloody-armed and empty-handed as the storms continued, the water levels rose, and she began to float. Eye to eye with the octopus in its unexpected chamber.


--- Published in Tabula Rasa, Vanderbilt University Medical Center's medical humanities journal, 2012

Eulogy

That evening

when the bodies of the vultures are memories torn apart—

one draining in the ditch, the other festering on the asphalt, a row of matted feathers pointing feebly to the stars—I open the door and you tell me

the story of their deaths.

A man in a truck, with tires as high as your Camry, is coming toward you in the opposite lane; as he passes he is accelerating. There is a mad smile on his face. You watch as he starts laughing. And then as he drives even faster. In your review mirror feathered bodies soar—one, two, up, apart—thudding heavy

to the ground.

In the morning, however,

the vultures had danced

a bloody eulogy of iridescently arched necks and urgent beaks scavenging

flesh so mangled, wet, and black, it wasn't until I saw a hoof that I knew the dead one by its name.

And in the morning I watched as they became three stones.

Downy texture and sparkling viscera dissolving into form.

As distant shapes plundered themselves hungry
straight through a third. And sang together in chorus—
with the insects teeming under their claws and the flies swarming about their beaks—
the cornucopia of another day.

Nomenclature

Once you might have named her

the velvety redness of a rose unfolding—

       sun-fiery, undaunted, and open to the sky.

Or touched her

as a crimson petaled jellyfish—

       opening, closing, pulsing her body gently through salty brine.

Or known her

as the deepest well—

       a clandestine viscosity where desires undulate thick

       in a pool to overflowing.

Once you might have likened her

to the stillness of an icy dawn,
to that expansive winter hour before the world
stretches back to life and pink-blue fingers begin

unzipping the shroud of night.

Once you might have recognized her.

      
In those moments still dark

when dreams become snowflakes

echoing promises to snowy ground.

And once
you might have
described her.

As flamencoed hands
along the ribs rushing
lost, abandoned,

to the click of unrelenting castanets.

Or

as laughter, longing, need, ache, loneliness, hunger, love, poverty, and want. 

But in the days of her unraveling,
she becomes a stranger. 

And you don't know what name to speak.

Or what language you will use when you call for her again.

You don't yet realize that the heart unmoored

will grow a new chord, will become a child returning

for the umbilicus again.

Or that given time

the heart will launch herself determined

out to sea for another go.