12-27-02 11:59pm

The following is the beginning of a story I started writing a couple nights ago, trying to toy with all of these concerns about death I’ve been having, and about anything else that might have been floating around in my mind at the time. I was inspired by a Jeanette Winterson story I had just read called "The Mistletoe Bride," which the author posted on her website as a Christmas present to us all. It is incomplete, right now. I may finish it or I might not. Sorry. No one character represents anything or anyone definite, straightforward, or clear. They both have big chunks of me in them and they both were also inspired by different aspects of certain people that I love and care about, all properly fictionalized. I was trying to make fun of myself/myselves a little. Let me know what you think.

If her body required a new heart, as the doctors seemed to think, she certainly wasn’t going to take it from her lover. At least not this lover. Suicidal, the poor girl had offered. Sweet, peculiar little thing. While it may be romantic to offer your figurative, metaphorical heart, offering the real thing is a wee bit morbid, don’t you think? So she would wait, as everyone else on the list waited, for the motorcycle accident or the twelve-car pile-up that would return her blood to pumping properly. She had a great deal of sex to catch up on and she meant to reclaim it.

She read lesbian sex magazines while she was in the hospital, using them as a cover to peek at the nurses when they would come in (and as a test to see which ones might fly in her flock). Young ones, older ones, ones from different states and countries, accents recognizable and enigmatic, mysterious bone-structures, this one with stockings, this one with sneakers, this one with deliriously large hands, and that one for sure isn’t wearing any underwear—how does someone disinclined to wear underwear become a nurse, anyway? She was half-crawling (half-slithering) out of the bed to find out more interesting facts about the nurse in question when she remembered the girl—right there—who had fallen asleep all over her ankles and that would just be poor form, wouldn’t it? To climb out from under your doting lover to chase the nurse down the hallway in the unlikely hopes that something naughty might transpire.

Oh, the sweet girl. Whose job it was, apparently, to perch on the end of the bed and fret endlessly over her. The woman half-feared that she’d wake up one morning and find her lover’s heart wrapped up nice and tidy (with lace and ribbon) in a cold chest with a can of Guinness and some Haagan Dazs. An organic spinach salad was more like it. With a spot of pesto hummus, if she was lucky. Though she would have appreciated the Guinness. She imagined the note she’d find on that ridiculously tasteful stationary the girl preferred:

Nadia, dearest—

Hope you don’t mind. They were out of the pesto hummus, so I figured you might enjoy the sun-dried tomato instead. Do have a marvelous little lunch. I won’t be able to make it today, I’m afraid, but I thought I’d leave you a little something to remember me by. You’ll have more use for it than I will. Please, please take care of yourself. You know all that alcohol is going to kill you one day and I really want for you to live—you seem to enjoy it so much. . . And please, don’t worry yourself over me. I’m sure death is not that awful, really. It just gets a lot of bad press. Of course I love you, you know. I don’t mean to bore you with redundancy. Oh, and for heaven’s sake, Use The Goddamn Heart! If you throw it out, I’ll be hurt. Don’t worry about me. You’re the best thing, you know. I was this screwed up well before you met me. I just wanted to give you something useful as a token of my consummate appreciation and gratitude. I hope it fits. I hope you like the salad.
Please eat all the greens.

--Wynne

Nadia, for one, had no doubts that she would live. She always had, before. That was a pretty good record, all things considered. Especially given the predictions of the medical establishment. They really were like a flock of apocalypse-oriented astrologers. Always seeing doom in her future but never coming through with it. At this point, some fire and brimstone might be an interesting change of weather. Granted, this heart business had gotten to the point where it was messing with her game. And she couldn’t have that, could she?