Murmur

[sadoeuphemist]

At times he could feel a woman, her legs delicately fluttering, in his ventricles.

Of course, it might not have been a woman. He had no way of knowing for sure save for being put under, having a team of expert doctors pry open his chest, crack his ribs, incise a slit into that tender pulp of the heart so that she might be revealed bathing in the blood-red coves of his heartbeat, a deep-sea creature for the first time exposed to surface air and light. Otherwise, the faint flutters he felt in his chest might have very well been a writhing eel, a worm, a shrimp, some parasite; or just another man swimming in measured strokes, with a flutter in his heart as well, made miniature; or a loose filament of cardiac muscle tickling at the inside of his heart, portending the unraveling of all the rest.

But he was certain it was a woman, for in the gray sameness of his days, when he sat alone at breakfasts drinking bitter coffee and looking at the faded wallpaper, he would feel a brief kick in his heart, a playful flutter, as if to remind him she was still there; a caress. The touch of her, her fingertips brushing up against the striated muscle of his heart with every stroke, was so tender that it could be nothing but a woman, and he had come to depend on those moments of her touch as a dear and necessary warmth.

At nights, when he lay awake in the darkness, she would stroke him, soothe him to sleep. She eased his days with the promise that she would be there; and that loneliness was a temporary thing; and that in his heart he was a fruitful, tender person capable of loving and being loved, who only needed the kindness of a human touch to nurture him, a gentle hand to help him bloom.

Except.

At times he would wake up from a nightmare, sweating, his heart pounding as if to beat out of his chest, having glimpsed some awful truth just beneath the surface. In his calmer waking moments he dismissed it as night terrors, irrationality, and tried not to think about it; and mostly succeeded. But the notion would resurface, periodically, like a murky presence just beneath the waters, its pale skin bobbing up at the receding of the tides.

He had killed her. His heart, near full to bursting with desire, had beat indecently, vulgarly, battered her with waves against the walls of his heart until she had strangled on his blood and fallen unconscious and stopped swimming. She had been trapped in him for years, decades, forced through the chambers of his heart without respite or air or sunshine or place to rest. Her body floated listlessly, sightlessly, eyes swollen shut, drowned limbs moving with the currents. It was, and had always been, only his own self-gratifying heart within him, beating, pulling, clenching, stirring up spurts and eddies, puppeting her pale compliant body to brush against him, arousing him with each flutter and caress.