Melissa looked from the gaping wound in her chest to the still-beating heart in her hand, and said, “Fuck.”

“Ouch!” I said, my eyes peeping at her over the top of my comic. “That must’ve hurt more than the thing you did with the jam jar!”

“I’ve done it, Daisy Belle, I said I would and I meant it.” Then she said fuck again.

I sat up in bed and looked at her. She stood in the bedroom doorway with that lump of flesh in her palm. It wobbled in the moonlight, crying spurts of blood out the sides like a cartoon sad face.

Melissa chuckled a bit and slid down the bedroom wall, tearing the bottom edge off a poster.

“That’ll teach him.” She said, the words blurring into one long sigh.

I knelt by her and poked at the dribbling heart. It was warm to the touch and felt like a fat, wet purse.

“Does it hurt?”

“What’s that?”

“Does it hurt?” I repeated, a little louder this time, still quiet enough not to wake mum.

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Melissa looked from the gaping wound in her chest to the still-beating heart in her hand, and said, “Fuck.”

There was a blur and the heart was gone, leaving only a bloody palm. Melissa looked up in surprise, and shrieked, covering her naked body with her hands.

The man in front of her was beautiful. Tall, lean and elegantly dressed in a black suit that nearly disappeared against the darkness that involved them both. The heart in his hand was beating faster, spitting blood and staining the suit, but he didn’t care. His blue eyes were on Melissa, examining her, amused.

With a soft, young voice, he said, “Good evening”.

The man patiently waited as Melissa looked around, finding nothing but pitch-black dark. She looked down at her feet, and they seemed to be stepping in vacuum.

Chuckling humorlessly, she said, “This is a dream.” But it didn’t come out nearly as confident as she’d hoped, neither did it make her feel any less vulnerable.

The man nodded in cheerful agreement. “Yes. But not your dream.”

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Melissa looked from the gaping wound in her chest to the still-beating heart in her hand, and said, “Fuck.”

“Mummy, you promised you wouldn’t swear anymore.”  Penny said.

Melissa looked down at her daughter, and back at the organ which twitched  one last time, before stilling.  “You’re right, baby girl.  I did say that, but this is a special occasion.”  She handed the heart to her little girl, and watched her skip off with the organ clutched in both hands.  There was less blood than she would have thought; almost none, in fact.  She stitched the wound closed while her daughter went about her business.  By the time Penny returned to her side, there was no evidence of anything out of the ordinary.  “Did you hide it?” she asked.

Penny nodded.  “I did, mummy.  It’s…”

“What did I tell you, Penny dear?  You can’t tell anyone where it is, not even me.”

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Melissa looked from the gaping wound in her chest to the still-beating heart in her hand, and said, “Fuck.”

To which the heart replied, pulsing with every syllable, “Hello to you too.”

Melissa screamed and stumbled backwards, dropping the heart like it was burning hot. As she tripped and fell on her bed, the heart bounced on the floor.

“Ow!”

And again.

“Ow!”

And stayed there spurting blood rhythmically.

“Okay, that wasn’t a good start,” it commented in its high-pitched voice. “Look, I — what’s that sound?”

That turned out to be the cat, which jumped from behind the armchair with an ear-splitting shriek and landed over the heart, surfing on it to the other side of the bedroom and leaving a trail of blood on the floorboards.

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Melissa looked from the gaping wound in her chest to the still-beating heart in her hand, and said, “Fuck.”

A small creature wormed through the muscle, teeth chittering as it spun its arrow shaped body through flesh and sinew, bisected tongue flitting against still pulsating strands of broken vein and artery.  Dark stains wafted from its end, latching onto the organ and slowly eating it away, a full dissolution that pushed through the walls of the atrium and ventricles, prompting Melissa to drop it before it could reach the skin on her palm, shrieking.  The heart worm looked up and smiled, coiling and leaping, popping free as corrosion smeared around it.  Melissa caught it between thumb and forefinger, then crushed its tiny head.

“These fucking things,” she muttered, dropping the lifeless chitin module to the ground and grinding it with a heel.  “Just one more time, Jack.  Just one more time and I will spell stuff your ass into another dimension.  And not one full of Fairy Queens and topless Banana Women, either.  Someplace really lame.”  Melissa coughed a stream of blood as she chastised her Terrier, which had three times that week attacked her through arcane reality folding techniques with the intention of murdering her, despite the fact that she’d saved the creature from a lifetime of malodorous cage living and a head full of electrodes that day she visited the Dumb Friends League in Juneau, Alaska.  It irked her to live with such a villain, but how could she kill him?  She didn’t have many friends and his face was so damned sweet.

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“Till death do us part,” Ivana said, to Gregor, from her hospital bed.

“I know. I know. But there is no money left.”

“In sickness and in health,” Ivana said.

Gregor looked away from his now frail wife lying in the bed in front of him. He did love her. Deep down in his heart he didn’t want her to die. But the money in their joint insurance fund had ran out. Gregor was already working double hours at the office to pay the debts that were starting to grow.

“I don’t want to die,” she said. “Sometimes I think that you have lost faith. Have you given up hope in my recovery dear Gregor?”

“No. I pray everyday,” Gregor lied.

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Melissa looked from the gaping wound in her chest to the still beating heart in her hand and said “Fuck. Those bastards lied to me.”

“Shouldn’t you be dead?” asked Skidoon. At least that’s what he’d said his name was. Melissa had told him she was Valkyrie.

He dropped his shotgun off the bed into a pool of blood.

“So should you.” Melissa was glad that they’d paid for the motel room in cash as Mr. and Mrs. Jones. The sheets were ruined. The wall behind her was covered in blood, and the carpet was never going to be the same again.

Skidoon’s heart beat on, not seeming to notice that it wasn’t attached to a circulatory system.

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Melissa looked from the gaping wound in her chest to the still-beating heart in her hand, and said, “Fuck.”

Finally her knees gave out, the muscles supporting them no longer being pumped fresh blood and oxygen, dropping her ungraciously to a kneeling position. She swayed there, head lolling to one side and eyes drooping, just long enough to assuage her curiosity about one thing. Demons of the fifth level of Hell are, in fact, both sexes. Then she flopped face first, her long black hair splayed out around her, into a warm puddle of her own blood.

As darkness ate away her vision, Melissa tried to remember exactly why she’d cut her own heart out, unfortunately it seemed that specific memory had slipped away.

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Melissa looked from the gaping wound in her chest to the still beating heart in her hand, and said, “fuck.”

She laid flat as the World on a plank of wood stripped from an abandoned ark, now hallucinating on the bottom of the sea. The eyes at the bow noticed sticky tentacles reaching out for its remains from the murky horizon. Fish hooks, barb end out, jutted out from each suction cup with poisonous points. Reaching blindly ’til the End. The rotting plank sat atop two upside down, wheel-less grocery carts, stretched from one to the other. Melissa looked up to the Carver staring down at her in his blood splattered apron, she couldn’t believe it had come to this. Most of his teeth were missing, a few transplanted from other species. Curved, thin, and sharp. He’d been chewing on uncooked flesh like gum since the procedure began. The alleyway was his pen. Volunteered incarceration. Millions of microscopic wardens kept careful watch as they gnawed away at the grime. The Carver bent down to his mish-mash of tools: pliers, blowtorch, saw, assortment of pointed and sharpened steel, hammer, rods, plates, pinchers, nails, needles, etc. He poured out an uncounted handful of viscosity enhancers from a dirty orange prescription bottle and dumped the pills into her mouth. Profuse bleeding slowed, blood thickened.

“Make it stop, you smelly bastard. But without decimating it. It needs to stay intact”, Melissa set down her own pumping heart, still connected via rubber tubing extensions, onto her pasty stomach.

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