A Surgeon Removes Frederic Chopin’s Heart for Safekeeping, 1849

Callie Collins
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Here’s the final task. Micha covers his arms in more blood than he’d expected cracking the chest open. The body is newly dead but cooling and scaly, like the quietest whitefish plucked fresh from the river. Micha’s moving a little too quickly. He’s doing this one alone. He’s not much if not precise, even in the face of this other face, this still young face, tinged blue and lurking over his right shoulder. He’s reverent but quick in the cutting, and he lifts the heart out of the cavity and puts it in a pan and just moves out of the way for a minute to inhale and then closes the body right back up. The heart rests in its juice. He doesn’t remember the last time he felt queasy during a procedure. This seems to Micha an odd time—the stakes being so low, the motion so routine. But he carries a little sickness around with him for a couple of days. For weeks, even, he refuses eggs in the mornings, his stomach dropping low at the sight of yolk. His wife peers at him and drums her fingers on the table. His throat tightens.

Callie Collins is the co-director of A Strange Object and the fiction editor of Covered with Fur. Her stories and essays have appeared in places like The Rumpus, The Toast, The Collagist, PANK, and NANO Fiction. She lives in Austin, TX, where she also cohosts Five Things, a bi-monthly reading series.