Echocardiogram | Olivia Torres
By now, a bitch was used to hospital gowns, spending many a night cloaked inside their pastel-blue arms. The gowns weren’t exceptional huggers, always leaving my ass cold and exposed to the sterile hallway air. By now, a bitch knew to double up and wear two of them, forwards and backward, because the ties–the rough, little strings, protected my honor better than the gown in its entirety. A bitch also knew that a zipper would make more sense.
The cardiac wing was an infinitely more peaceful place than The Ward, a modern ghost town decorated with old magazines and machinery bigger than John Cena. My mother and I shuffled into a dark antechamber where the technician was going to link my heart to their echocardiogram monitor. While I have historically had a fast heart rate, recent excursions to the gym always ended with me kneeling on the ground, two fingers pressed against my carotid as I watched the numbers sprint past 200. I told my mother that my heart was broken despite not really believing that I had one.
“How do we really know?” I had once asked her, clocking the expression on her face. Shock. Recognition. Acceptance.
Her response was a simple ribbon dancing in the air between us. “Because, Liv,” she’d said. “You very clearly have a body, therefore you must have a heart. Right?”
I had proceeded to gaze down at my navel, where I imagined… nothing. Nothing inside the empty cavity beneath my belly button, because how was I supposed to believe that fifteen feet of intestines just hang out inside my stomach when I had never seen them? How could anyone be stuffed with any amount of organs when there was a vibrating, crushing emptiness where our science books said blood and flesh and tissue should be?
Mom, knowingly, had dropped the subject.
The technician, a forty-something, mousy-haired woman, attached the electrodes to my chest with a polite apathy I was intimately familiar with. I sat, unmoving, exchanging her apathy with my own while intermittently making eye contact with my mother.
“Are you doing all right?” the technician asked, eyes directed away from my face.
I nodded. The testing room was dark and comfortable, the outline of the John Cena-big machines looming next to where I perched on the crinkly-papered table. The sound of that paper was a song on the CD soundtrack of the past few years of my life.
“Okay,” the technician said, stirring me out of my thoughts. “You’ll need to take off the gowns so I can reach the lower part of your chest.”
Instead of the crinkle paper, I heard the sound of the Earth splitting itself wide open. Then I heard myself fall into its maw, the screams reverberating all the way up against the sides of my skull.
The technician, I soon realized, didn’t hear shit. Instead, she simply stared, both eyebrows wordlessly sailing to the top of her forehead.
When the Earth also began to scream, I turned to my mom, wondering if the terror would begin to drip out of my widened eyelids. “I… can’t,” I said, quite pathetically.
The technician eyed me further. “Why not?”
I wanted my mom to yank the words out of my throat, to fist them together and pitch them directly against the face of the woman hovering in front of me. But she was not a mind reader, and despite my certainty that this test would reveal nothing but an empty chest cavity, I was not one either.
I didn’t know the words which would save me from this. “I… have trauma,” I mumbled, feeling my gaze blur. Her profile in the dark ambiance was soon obliterated, leaving only its shell behind. “I don’t like to be exposed. It’s in my medical file.”
I then spontaneously combusted, bursting into flames at my own words, though no one else could see. There was only an uncomfortable silence, and I thought that maybe it was because everyone else was listening to the Earth crack open and weep too.
“Well, I need to be able to attach all the electrodes so the reading is accurate.” A thread of frustration entered her voice, causing the flames to flick higher towards the dark ceiling.
For what? I wanted to ask. For a make-believe heart that wasn’t there?
I could tell Mom didn’t know what to say. I could tell because she shrugged when I looked at her. “Is there a way to do that while keeping her gowns on?” Mom suggested.
“If we untie the gown, we can try to keep your breasts partly covered,” the technician replied. “But I still need access to that area.”
The Earth continued to scream. I began to cry.
A fistfight broke out beneath our feet, and I recognized the disturbance right away. The tectonic plates were colliding again, grappling for a proverbial control of territory. Laying my spine against the dense, unforgiving table, I shook and shook and still, the house did not blow down, not even as the ground rumbled. Not even as I became a bonfire.
I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see the technician push the double-gowned robe away from my shoulders. Her gloved fingers brushed against my sternum, and one tectonic plate proceeded to curb-stomp its opponent. Only I could feel its motion, and my breaths grew shallow and rapid.
Something inside of me was surely broken, that we knew, and as the gown tripped over itself and stumbled, more of me was revealed to the unbearably empty air before the technician dabbed a glob of gel on my chest. The transducer, which is supposed to send sound waves to my heart, followed, although I don’t know how my supposed heart could hear anything through the tribulation of the planet wrenching it apart.
My mom scooted a little closer to me as I choked back tears to the best of my ability. The technician didn’t know that frustration also is a sound wave, one I was able to hear very clearly. My crying inconvenienced her, and I understood. Overworked, underpaid… of course I understood. Hell, my crying inconvenienced my own damn self. But really, to not even scan the novel that was my medical file…
“And… there’s your heart,” the technician suddenly said.
My eyes flew open, and I searched the Cena machine’s monitor for the truth. For my… heart. When she moved the screen so I could see, my tunnel vision suddenly fanned out to encompass the fuzzy image of several valves galloping in strange unison. For a moment, the Earth ceased its movement. Then the technician said, “It looks good, but we’ll keep an eye on it for a while to see if there’s any irregular movement,” and I felt a wordless knuckle sandwich pummel through my abdomen.
“Good,” the technician had said. My heart… my heart was good.
My heart, my… h e a r t.
The bonfire dimmed then, snuffing itself out. The Earth stopped its wailing and instead decided to hum a lullaby, yanking new tears to my eyes. The tectonic plates cut their bullshit out and hugged like real women do, and I felt all the world’s breath whoosh into me as I scrutinized the grainy monitor.
I was still bare – far, far too bare – and while this should have diminished me, killed me even, I shakily turned to my mom, a soft emotion swallowing me and the ashes of my bonfire whole.
“I have a heart,” I whispered to her, a fresh torrent of tears soaking my face.
My mom smiled. “So, you’ll finally believe it now?”
I couldn’t keep my gaze off the monitor for too long, not wanting to leave my new friend alone in this cavern of darkness for even a moment. The – my – heart thrummed, its motion and song carrying over the Cena machine’s speakers. I wanted to dive into the video and fall to my knees weeping, asking where it had been all this time and why it had left me in the first place.
I didn’t need to see the technician to feel the ocean of confusion washing from her body across mine, but I didn’t look at her again. Neither did I mind the reverent, almost sacred, lack of sound perforating the womb-like space. While tears still snaked down my face, pooling in the cool hollow of my sternum, I kept my gaze wholly dedicated to the pumping, thrumming, totally alive organ working so hard in front of me.
For me.
“So… is there anything wrong with it?” I asked the technician, still not looking at her. “Is it beating too quickly?”
Did I ruin it? I wanted to add. Did my anxiousness about the world taint its efficacy or scar its surface the way the world had scarred me? Did I truly break it on my own? Does it hate me for being so weak?
A pause, and then the technician’s voice, abruptly warmer and full-bodied like the first blossom of spring. Even the tectonics cease their mumbling, desperate to hear the answer.
“Nope,” she said, a chirp in the womb’s lowlight. The sound was an angel pressing medicine to a mad woman’s lips.
“Looks perfect.”
Perfect. Perfect. PERFECT. I had a heart, and it was perfect, and I hadn’t destroyed it after all. Somewhere in my body, a pearl of icy warmth began to unfurl. Patient, giving… hopeful.
We stayed like this – observing – for a while longer. I knew that the technician and my mother saw its shape, the valves, all of the minuscule little chambers clambering together, but I —
I watched my heart upon the screen and let its dark belly tell me of life.
More about the author:
Olivia Torres (she/her) is a queer, ex-fundamentalist, biracial fangirl who hails from a small town in western Massachusetts where the potholes in the roads are so large they have now developed sentience. She received her bachelor’s in English from and works at Westfield State University as the Marketing Copywriter. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Merrimack Review, Lucky Jefferson, Dandelion Review, Apricity Press, and SWIMM, among others. In her spare time, she enjoys gaming, avoiding vegetables, and playing eye-tag with the moon.