For Tammy.

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A long time ago, you gave me your heart. I did not know what to do with it, so I put it in a jar and kept it on my desk, floating in formaldehyde. I reached in on occasion to stroke it, feeling the warm slickness of the muscle smooth under my fingers, playing with the valves, flipping them open and closed. I would explore the aorta, tracing circles around the thin rim of the vein, letting my finger slip inside, savoring the slight suction on my skin. You would come by once in a while and ask to see it, and I would bring it down to you. See the clearness of the preserving fluid? I change it every week. See how the glass has not even a speck of dust clinging to it? I take such good care of you, my dear.

Then I asked for your brain. You gave it to me willingly, your lovely eyes shining with tears of joy as you watched me pry the quivering lump of pearly grey out of your skull. You were so proud that I loved you enough to want another piece of you, and so proud to be able to give it to me. I must confess that I had an ulterior motive; what I couldn’t learn from playing with your heart, I thought I could learn from studying your mind. I laid your brain on the table, unrolled the coils of grey matter and arranged them in pretty patterns. I sliced up your hypothalamus looking for love, pried open your brainstem trying to find sex, peeled away your cerebral cortex and ran my tongue down the crease of your frontal lobe in an attempt to spark your glistening neurons into fizzing electric life.

You begged me, then, for a trade. You wanted my ovaries, my uterus, my Fallopian tubes. You didn’t even want me to cut them out of my body for you to keep, only to let you use the squishy tangle of humanity in my abdomen. I clutched my stomach with one hand and with the other I threw the glass jar that housed your heart. Take it, I said. It smashed against the wall. The dull, red lump of muscle slid to the floor, leaving a trail of green fluid and clear broken glass. You screamed so hard I thought your vocal cords would rupture and split. You told me I was a monster with no organs of my own.

After you left, I stood in front of the mirror and dragged a blue steel scalpel across my chest, making two perfect perpendicular cuts. You were right; when I pulled back my skin to reveal what I thought would be wet red muscle underneath, the mirror showed blue and silver and copper, an intricate filigree of empty wires.

I picked up your heart, held it under the faucet and washed off the dust and broken glass. Then I pushed aside the wires in my chest, shaping a cradle to fit the organ, and eased it into the empty space. It was a stupid thing to do, really. I could not make that heart work without veins, without blood; how could it beat? I realized then that I understood nothing.

But soon I will understand. I will understand everything. I have pieces of you spread out before me. Your withered arms and legs—I am inspecting the tibia and femur, having carefully severed the tendons that hold muscles to dry white bone. I test your twisted spinal cord to see how the vertebrae grind against each other, but the fluid has settled and it will not bend. Your lungs, your liver, your intestines have all come under my now-dull scalpel; they are purple ribbons, lying in pools of congealed blood. Your beautiful blue eyes no longer flash fire at me, for the irises have been cut out, and white jelly oozes out of the hole.

Soon, my darling, I will put you back together and you will work even better than before. I can do it, I know I can. I have all your pieces here on the table…I just have to figure out how they all fit together.