The Locked Heart Society

At the mouth of the tent, a small fire crackled and a figure sat slouched over the prickly remains of its dinner- an undersized and bony fish likely snatched from the slimy trickle that was a stream half encircling the campsite. Legend had it that this particular bend in an otherwise unimpressive body of water, mere perspiration on the brow of this parched and puckered piece of desert, had once seen the end of an entire civilisation. The slouched figure raised its head and cared to elaborate: it sat before a semicircle, rows deep, of other figures similarly decked in raggedy cloth. This was stained and burnt as though they had been wearing it for years before reaching the present moment breathless and sun-beaten, to gaze at the scrawny person in front of them who inhabited it. This waifish individual had an odd sense of being less there than the others, but seemed yet to conduct their attention so masterfully that it did not so much inhabit the moment as command it to sit still and listen.

It would tell them all a story, it said, of the aforementioned civilisation, and the troubles it had with the use and misuse of certain devices. In order to make this story as real to you as it was, actually, real to me, you will allow me to resurrect, temporarily, the remains of one such device (at no risk to your company you may be assured, the device is flawed as I am and as such, can only taunt us with memories of the illusory delights it once permitted). Here the ragged audience exhales a little, and the waif, as though sensing secret disappointment, jerks forward into the firelight to stare wolfishly at the gathering. It would do to remember that they were about to gaze upon a tragedy- one that could be repeated if they were not careful to keep heart and mind protected. To indulge in the deception would be fatal they knew, but at this point cautionary words failed them for there, emerging from folds on the sylphlike form as it lent forward seemingly to play with its fishbones, was the unmistakable gleam of a little heart shaped locket.

They almost missed the sharp movement of little spiky fishbones being tossed onto the fire, which roared up and turned green (there must have been something odd about the fish). They almost certainly missed the pale hand reach into its patchy cloak and, somewhere around the stomach, press, imperceptibly, a button. At once, all the assorted watchers knew was that their world was changing faster than their own eyes could perceive it. Gone was the vaulted tent, the desert horizon superseded by an army of giant-like trees. Rising to their feet with sudden grace and a weightlessness that did not altogether surprise them, they began to step towards the wood cabin that stood in a clearing beneath the tallest tree. There, rags discarded, stood a girl with coils of hair tied in a scarf the colour of the sea. She smiled, beckoned them forward, and though they knew they had stepped into an echo, they could not help but smile back and venture further in.

The girl began to speak, and in a voice soft and deep, layered and full as the waif’s had been thin, told the waiting company about her place, that they could join her in marvelling at the things she had filled it with. Green fire leapt up in the grate and things were plentiful indeed- they lined shelves and stacked up on tables, they were books about gardening and the wilderness, histories of adventurers she probably hadn’t touched (and if one were to open the covers and flick beyond the first few pages, it might be found that they were mostly empty). The tremor of an ancient, crackly record- a tenor serenading someone from a carousel in the rain, emanated seemingly from the walls, while an old brown cat perched on the mantlepiece and winked at the company with a single golden eye. The girl gestured to a small photograph on the wall depicting a seaside scene. Viewed head on, they would understand, colours and shapes twinkled pleasingly out of the frame. Once in the periphery however, the image could be seen to fade. She had come to this realisation herself, she said, that a world of her own construction, curated here for her pleasure and safely contained in a device that would preserve it, could not mimic life to the extent she required it. She had tried to live here, as many of her generation had, when the world outside ceased entirely, so she thought, to be beautiful. They had made their homes in these places, spurred by the thought that they could have anything, because it was the device that made the imagination come to an imitation of life.

A desperate look now entered the girl’s brown eyes, and the watchers sighed for they knew what had come next. The trouble with giving oneself over, body and soul, to a machine made to engineer life, was that it would inevitably come to have a reciprocal effect on body and soul together. Connected as they were to their devices, people were eaten up by their creations, subsumed into them so that they stopped so much being people and got transparent and sickly, and ever more ghostlike as the devices suckled flesh, eroded bone and stole voices from throats as they emerged to cry out in protest. Those who ripped the devices out of their sockets could not be saved, such was the lethal relationship between body and machine. Others realised that if they were to retain humanity, an anchor to the real world would have to be formed. Those who partook in the building of this anchor, it was concluded, would carry a symbol of their locked heart, forever divorced from their bodies and minds encroached upon by the device.

The girl led the way through the clutter to the opposite end of the cabin, where, nestled amongst fresh flowers that had been arranged as though on a funeral bier, the heart shaped locket lay. She reached in among the stems and brushed the fallen pollen from the burnished surface of the locket, lifting it reverently from the bier. She laid a soft finger upon a hidden catch, and the locket opened to reveal a grain of sand. One by one, the company reached into their raggedy clothes and brought out their own golden lockets. At a touch, they too were open when a gust of wind blew into the cabin through the open door.