The Hollow Still Rattles

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Abstract

The depth of the waste shocks me as much as the suddenness of your words, “No, I can’t do this anymore.”We had always talked about the romance of our corpses rotting together, compost for flowers, food for the animals, skeletons collapsing into each other.You didn’t even feed my heart to your dog. Then I may still have slept at your feet.Years later the hollow in me still rattles when someone tries to fill it, offering parts of themselves but the transplants never take — the edges are too scarred. The body rejects their affection after a short struggle.Organs that are once removed from a body become incapable of healing without blood pumping through them. Our miraculous creation did not account for this injury, or did not account for a body surviving it, even when the soul does not. A body with too much cut away is incapable of rejuvenating. It can never return to the original state, the violence of evisceration unable to be hidden.Stagnant blood floating in darkness is no longer

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magic.An apology — to anyone who has tried to love me the last three years — you deserve to feel loved like I deserved to feel love, but we were all punished for our wishes all the same.There are more of us out there, walking hollows — we appear whole from the front until we turn sideways, and you see we’re concave, skin pulled in to protect us but that just reveals our secret, creatures out of myth that no one wants to turn into, no one should want to try to save.Alistair J. Kraft 2022

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When someone tries to fill it

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The initial grieving and sharp hollowing pain of the loss — you, once promising forever, the faith that you meant it, days in the kitchen making lemongrass jam, planning a garden we know we won’t manage to save from squirrels, sitting quietly together with our books, you sketching, long legs crossed at the ankle, my fingers scribbling wild thoughts, spinning webs, looking up only to share a soft smile, a feeling of home I’ve never had anywhere else— finally healed enough that I dared to look inward, assess the damage.

There are fundamental organs — heart, lungs, trust, missing from inside of me, and I picture them discarded (brutal, cold, indifferent) on the side of the highway to Colorado, not even resold, or consumed, but just unwanted detritus.

The depth of the waste shocks me as much as the suddenness of your words, “No, I can’t do this anymore.”

We had always talked about the romance of our corpses rotting together, compost for flowers, food for the animals, skeletons collapsing into each other.

You didn’t even feed my heart to your dog. Then I may still have slept at your feet.

Years later the hollow in me still rattles when someone tries to fill it, offering parts of themselves but the transplants never take — the edges are too scarred. The body rejects their affection after a short struggle.

Organs that are once removed from a body become incapable of healing without blood pumping through them. Our miraculous creation did not account for this injury, or did not account for a body surviving it, even when the soul does not. A body with too much cut away is incapable of rejuvenating. It can never return to the original state, the violence of evisceration unable to be hidden.

Stagnant blood floating in darkness is no longer magic.

An apology — to anyone who has tried to love me the last three years — you deserve to feel loved like I deserved to feel love, but we were all punished for our wishes all the same.

There are more of us out there, walking hollows — we appear whole from the front until we turn sideways, and you see we’re concave, skin pulled in to protect us but that just reveals our secret, creatures out of myth that no one wants to turn into, no one should want to try to save.

Alistair J. Kraft 2022 ~~~