Story Edition: Heartsease

After a poll on my Instagram story, a lot of followers decided that they'd like to see me attempt to refashion one of my poems into a short story. If you voted, you're in luck! I chose the poem 'heartsease' from my poetry book, Poetry Against Artificial Belonging. This is a sensitive poem, about a child in a broken home, learning they can trust inanimate objects over humans - and where this time of reflection can lead them.

Of course, this was a poem, that at the time, I wrote from a difficult perspective. However, a few months down the line from its publication, I've managed to give the story version a positive and empowering spin.

Here's the poem, if you need a refresh:

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heartsease

I’ve my inanimate camaraderie:

lifeless substitutes for a hand for heartsease.

I’ve starlight’s maternal breath that attempts a kiss.

Fails. She only exchanges my freeze with the window’s. 

Tubes, wasted lochs, in the walls tempt this:

imitate us, cold doesn’t bother the ineffectually hollow.

I’ve feather armoury as the chevalier 

that fled a battleground for a billet, my room.

In advance of tomorrow, are the queer

nuclearity prayers I whisper to the moon.

I've had a cryogenic adjustment. 

Revive me at dawn if I make it ‘til then:

if breakfast is there. I’ll eat up abandonment,

any cereal and all love. I’ll play pretend:

with the floorboards’ mahogany groan that laments being out in the open

and the hypnotic seconds of my clock that deal mechanic melatonin 

I’ve all of my

inanimate camaraderie:

lifeless substitutes for a hand for heartsease.

© Mollie Mardel

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Having read the above, I hope you enjoy this fuller interpretation. Without further ado, here is 'Heartsease: Story Edition'...

It’s interesting what can change in a room when you’re not paying attention. Time’s adeptness at stripping away love and wallpaper is a source of great fascination to the figure lost in bed. The way his open, frightened eyes aren’t dancing - tells you he’s just-alive and in deficit. He’s in awe at the shape and atypical face his life has adopted, and the equal capture and comfort of his four bedroom walls. It’s 2012: the year they prophesied the end of the world. When it didn’t explode, humanity finished the job on the other side of the curtains instead - blowing up the sky with chemical fireworks that left smoky traces. They celebrated by throwing down Tequila Rose in homage to the earth that still existed beyond the soothsayers’ chant. In the memory of before, everyone's presence was immaculate.

   His soul fell away in crackles and smoke, and awoke in the familiar darkness of later daylight, deserted in the dying belief that people were listening. It occurred to him in a dream, censored by a nightmare, that people can be as blind to silence as they can be to colours. There was so much scarlet in the house - open wounds that looked like good intentions - that nobody saw that his eyes were set back in red each morning. Midnight was so welcome, in fact he ached for its monochromatic sanctuary. What is a child when solely parented by the moon and a sea of stars?

   Eat, was something that downstairs demanded, but the sky begged, live. That’s how his heart found inanimate camaraderie: dependent friendships with the furniture. Scratches hunted the heels of the wardrobe: all the way up to the blockade behind the door that it sustained alone. Thin lunar lifelines scrambled down from the heavens, loving their earth baby, yet missed his window by an inch, leaving kisses of light trickling down the brick precipice. 

   The duvet became his armour in the so many brave nights he spent conjuring prayers, despite unassigned faith. Amen slipped his lips too early, but it had to, the instant something worse than a monster shifted under the floorboards, brushed its teeth and fell asleep to supposed ‘sinless sweetness’. Hope continued, addressed to the moon: bring back the way it was.

   It had been a hazy duration of being conditioned to eat breakfast, play pretend, and then wait desperately to return home to the moon. It’s interesting what can change in a room when you’re not paying attention: like the pattern - the signs, the measurement - of years. Ten years later, withdrawal has flourished into a different dimension of confidence. When the call comes to talk, he counters from a place of heartsease. No, not this time.

A thousand stars and the moon, nodded in solidarity.

© Mollie Mardel