Lalo had blood on his face and blood on his hands and blood on his RC can.
He sat at the picnic table in Grandma’s backyard with a knife and bucket of bluegills. He was back from fishing the Kankakee with Uncle Val and it was his job to gut and clean the fish. In the shade of the brick house, he sliced into the belly of a fat one.
With his thumb and index finger, Lalo pinched the internal organs and ripped them out quick and dirty and all at the same time. He tossed the insides into a plastic grocery bag and started on the next one. With every bluegill, he got a little faster, a little more efficient, a little bored.
Lalo noticed me watching him. “Check this out,” he said.
He cut into another bluegill, but instead of pulling out all the organs, he delicately picked through the fish with his fingers. The blood on his hands turned the same brown of the grime under his chipped fingernails. He picked around the organs until he found the piece he wanted.
The heart.
With a good grip, he plucked the heart out of the bluegill and laid it on the picnic table. It reminded me of a pencil eraser. It was detached from the body, but it kept beating.
Bump bump bump bump bump …
I didn’t understand why it kept going like that, full of electricity and pumping life to nowhere. Next to the heart was the fish, nothing but a fold of meat with dead eyes.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Lalo said.
He scratched a mosquito bite on his sunburned face and left a streak of fresh blood. He stared at the heart and giggled with his mouth open enough you could see teeth.
“Now watch this,” he said.
Lalo grabbed his RC can. He held it above the heart and lowered it down until the silver lip of the can bottom rested on the twitching tissue. He made a fist with his free hand and positioned it above the can’s mouth hole like he was lining up to hit a nail.
He brought his mallet fist down hard on the can and severed the heart.
He lifted up the can and underneath there were two pieces on the picnic table. They both beat like two separate hearts.
Bump-bump …
Bump-bump …
Bump-bump ...
We watched the tiny hearts beat together. We wondered how long the song would last, and I thought about the hearts beating inside us.
What would happen if Lalo turned the knife on himself?
What if I cut my own heart in two? Would the piece I kept beat soft enough to dull the pumping sound that kept me awake?
Could Grandma and Uncle Val leave us pieces of their hearts so when they died me and Lalo could remember how their bodies sounded when they were alive?
So we could know what they heard when they couldn’t sleep at night?
Bump-bump …
Bump-bump …
Bump-bump …
Lalo finished cleaning the last of the bluegills as the sun started to set over the railroad tracks and Grandma’s house and the backyard and everything. In the last minutes of light, we blasted the knife and bucket with the hose and cleared off the picnic table except for the hearts. We left them to finish their dance in the dark.
I cracked my bedroom window and crawled into bed with a belly full of fish. I spent a long time listening for the sound of the hearts beating below.
All I could hear was the sound of my own.
Ed Komenda is a writer and journalist from Chicago’s South Side. His writing has appeared in Retirement Plan Zine. He lives in Nevada.