A New Heart

Sam sat on the edge of a partially buried, long defunct piece of machinery, all black ledges hanging over bent cabins crammed with wires and ribboned throughout with bar grating panels. He held his knees close to himself and stared into the near distance at a massive, rusted metal tube that sat in the middle of a field of dead grass. It was lying on its side, allowing the wind to race through it, creating a powerfully haunting bellow that echoed throughout the despairingly still and lonely world.

Far from the city where he had come from — or at least as far as several days of walking had been able to take him — what Sam found the most intriguing about the wide open world that he was finally experiencing was the way that nature was taking everything back; ground that had been laid with stone or covered with cement so that it would be smooth and featureless had since erupted, fragments of it sprayed everywhere by desperate tree roots. Fences had collapsed from the weight of fruit-bearing vines growing on them en masse, homes were redecorated in carpets of moss and scaly patches of lichen. And in every crevice and crack throughout the spaces that had been so forcefully made grey and hard and metal, flowering plants found their opportunities and added sweeping rows of color throughout the hollowed-out hulls of vehicles and skeletal metal frames of toppled warehouses. Whoever it was that had come long before Sam’s time and had built the sprawling cities… all of their destruction and brutality to such a soft, green world was nothing compared to nature’s tireless tenacity and miraculous ability to heal and reclaim.

On that evening, as he sat staring at the field littered with both the organic and inorganic, he wondered about his own place in all of it. What did he look like, sitting there in the middle of it all, climbing over and through the spaces between nature and broken history? He barely had any concept of his body or what it looked like as it took up space in the world. He had never even known what his own face looked like. He only knew his calloused hands, his legs patterned with thin scars, his battered feet. He only knew that his hair was red because he had seen clumps of it falling to the ground the first time that his head was shaved. There had never been time or opportunity to know himself more than that. He had barely even been able to have thoughts or feelings with his time always taken up by working and yelling and a constant barrage of startling noises.

Sam had only just recently escaped the forced labor he had endured for years. He hadn’t understood the concept of escape before someone else he knew tried it. That person had been punished mercilessly and publicly, but the seed of hope was implanted in Sam nonetheless. And it wasn’t long before he acted on that hope, pushing himself beyond anything he had ever imagined himself capable of, just so that he could see what was beyond the sharp, metal fences, see what existed outside of the patchwork of particle-wood ceiling that had been over his head for his entire life.

What he found out there was that it was lonely. Lonelier than he could have ever imagined. He had thought that because someone else had tried to escape, there must have been people to escape to. He had imagined smiling faces, open arms, conversations in low, even voices. But all he found was that there was no one to meet, no one to know, no one to love.

Sam found joy, though. Joy in sleeping under the stars, in the feeling of breathing air cooled and purified by green leaves that rustled in the night air as he passed. And, he especially had discovered joy in finding a small treasure during his escape. Before he began to climb through loose boards in fences, before he dove into a trench filled with stagnant water and held his breath as long as he could, before crawling on his belly through a field of rocks… before all of the pain and adrenaline, he found something shiny and entirely foreign to him on the ground. It was a bit of metal, but it was soft and curved, not like the sharp edges he was used to. It was shimmery and silver and his eyes felt full looking at it. There was a split down its side, with tiny hinges on the other. He thumbed over the line, and looked at the hinges. He knew enough to know that hinges meant that something could be opened, but the thing felt so small and delicate in his rough, dirty hands that he couldn’t imagine trying to exert any amount of force on it. As soon as he had found it, he already couldn’t stand the idea of losing it. It made a horribly tender spot in his chest sparkle painfully, but in a way that he wanted more and more of.

As he sat on the towering, dead machine, his feet dangling over the edge, he held his treasure out in front of him by the thin little chain that it was attached to, allowing it to slowly rotate and catch the rays of the sun in soft, brilliant flashes. He watched as it turned, the sunset laid out behind it. There was nothing but fields and mounds of moss and miles of rusty pipes and broken concrete spread out in front of him, looking somehow beautiful and inviting in the low orange light of sundown.

The hollow howl of wind through the pipe started once more and Sam felt a strange attachment to the sound as it wailed in time with the slow rotations of his prized bit of metal. The wind was a sweet and lyrical voice, and the sun was warm on his legs as they hung over the metal grate ledge. He felt held, he felt comforted. And he knew that he could love whoever it had been that the little piece of metal belonged to. It was someone gentle, he knew that. Someone who liked beautiful things, someone who cherished little pieces of metal that had no use other than to be cherished. As he pondered the person who the rounded bit of metal belonged to, he felt a tremendous pang hit his heart; him having the thing meant that whoever it belonged to didn’t have it anymore. It was the first thought that he had had that almost made him want to go back. What if he could find them? Give it back to them, or share it with them.

He knew that he couldn’t do that. He would be grabbed up by someone who recognized him, or grabbed up by someone new who would want to force him to use his hands to work and his feet to stand until he fell down in quiet death like so many others around him had.

It hurt him how badly he wanted to know where the delicate little thing had come from. He wanted the person that it belonged to to be sitting next to him, hearing the howling wind, feeling warm sun on their legs, too. He wanted them to also watch the light reflect off of the bit of metal, to notice how the curved bulges at the top seemed to pulse with the light of the dying sun, while the little point at the bottom instead caught the light and gathered it into a shimmering dot, like a small star.

He closed his eyes as the sun lowered and turned red while the sky around it darkened into rich velvet. He closed his hand around the piece of metal, letting the delicate chain trail over his knuckles. He pressed it close to his chest, felt the thumping of his heart beneath his ribs, and wondered if the person who used to have the thing ever did the same.

When Sam opened his eyes, it was completely dark. The sun was gone, and the field spread out before him was nothing more than a black sea, all the details of pipes and slabs of concrete lost to him. It still amazed him how much things changed outside, all throughout the day, every moment a different amount of light, of wind, the feeling on his bare arms going from warm and burning to chill and bumped.

He began to slide forward, feeling around with his feet for the ledge below the one he sat on so that he could start to climb down and look for somewhere beneath the mass of dead metal to sleep safely. But, as he began to climb down, he lost his grip on the metal treasure and it fell out of his hands, making distant and impossibly soft little chiming noises as it hit several ledges on the way down, falling through another slat of metal grate, the chain hissing through the air as it followed behind it.

Sam’s eyes were at once brimming with tears and he gasped so hard that it hurt in the pit of his chest. His heart pounded as he recklessly raced down, desperate to retrieve his lost prize. Once he was on the ground, he immediately got down on his hands and knees and began feeling around carefully, touching every inch of ground that he could, feeling in between the frayed bouquets of copper wire that spilled out of the bottom of the machine’s body. He felt all around the edge of the machine and worked his way out from there, ignoring the rocks and concrete shards that dug into his hands and knees as he crawled around.

When he finally felt it, it wasn’t shaped the same. It had split open, and he cried softly over it, over the delicate and precious thing that he had broken so soon after finding it. He cried himself to sleep, hiccuping and finally breathing normally, his eyebrows knit together and his jaw tense as he slept fitfully, the little thing held close to his chest.

When he woke in the morning, he shook himself out of the deadness left after his blank and emotionless dreams about repetitive motions and aching joints. And then the weight of guilt and horror hit him as he hazily reentered reality. He scrambled to a sitting position, and with the early morning sun spilling in through the metal grating above his head from the towering machine, he winced as he reluctantly opened up the hand that clutched the little thing. His eyes widened as he saw that it wasn’t broken, but simply open, and that there was something inside. It was tiny and he had to squint and hold it just a couple of inches in front of his eyes to see. On one side, there was a faded picture, small holes dotting its decaying surface. On the other side, there was only a bright, polished surface. There, he saw another face, one that moved when he moved. And he looked in trembling wonder at the two faces next to one another. The intimacy of the scene was overwhelming; it filled his chest with weightlessness while making his body feel like a heavy stone all at once.

There was nothingness in his head, nothingness out ahead of him as he walked to nowhere. He didn’t know anything about being free. But he had someone to love.

He held his love close to his chest, never letting them go as he walked, following the musical voice of the wind out into the empty world.