by Greta Kaluževičiūtė
Empathy is a muscle.
My heart was marshland in winter.
Soft enough to swallow everything that waded through it. Cold enough to keep the shape of what it devoured.
Men with foreign accents wandered in and left without heads.
HEADSHEADSHEADS.
Women and children followed.
The bodies softened, ruptured, contracted into a thin protein film that lacquered the valves.
BODIESBODIESBODIES.
I was inventive that winter.
Empathy is a muscle. February is an exercise.
Snow darkens by afternoon.
By evening it resembles an old bandage.
It gathers at crossings in granular heaps, compacted by tyres into a grey paste that remembers every footprint and refuses to release it, holding exhaust, ash, dog urine, the pink leakage from butcher paper, until the whole street smells faintly sweet, as if something somewhere has been left out too long.
Damp blooms in the concrete seams of apartment blocks.
Light arrives late, dragging itself sideways across balconies strung with stiff laundry.
I spot my heart hanging upside down among shirts mouldering in ice.
Pinned at the aorta.
Dripping slowly.
Hung for prayer among the newly baptised cloth.
It hardens before it has the chance to dry.
Amen.
Somewhere, at some point, a crow howled.
AOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
The sparrow I found stuck to the pavement was already dead.
I did not touch it.
I only looked.
And still, I did not leave it there.
I carried it inside without lifting it.
The way cold migrates through leather into bone.
In the atrophied valves of my heart it began to move again, beak worrying the inner wall, skull splitting to make room for growth.
It builds itself from what I have left.
Siphoning calcium from old tenderness, iron from clotted memory, until the muscle stiffens around it.
It is alive where I keep it.
Empathy is a muscle. February is an exercise. And something in me tears quietly.
Next I found my twin’s rib.
It surfaced where the plough had already passed.
A white curve rose through the compacted grey, as if the street itself were beginning to articulate.
The rib lay cleanly detached.
Light enough to mistake for a stick.
Heavy enough to remember a body.
Somewhere, at some point, a dog hissed.
HSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
I carried the rib home in the pocket of my coat.
With every step it knocked against my hip.
I held it against my chest without removing my clothes.
It yielded without resistance.
Empathy is a muscle. February is an exercise. And something in me tears quietly. And the fibres draw inward into a single line.
The last thing I found was my dog’s fur.
It clung to the underside of a thawing fence, where the wire had held him back from something beyond it.
The fur weighed almost nothing in my palm.
It still held the impression of warmth.
As if heat had memory.
Inside, the sparrow shifted.
The rib rippled along its curve.
I pressed the fur along the forming seam.
I wish to wear my dead dog on my face.
Even bone demands softness.
Somewhere, at some point, a horse screamed.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
Outside, the snow began to loosen.
Dark soil emerged, compacted by winter’s insistence.
Water moved in narrow runnels along the pavement, carrying grit and the husks of small unfinished things.
Empathy is a muscle. February is an exercise. And something in me tears quietly. And the fibres draw inward into a single line. And the heart, once marshland, compresses into ground that no longer gives way.
The severed heads of foreign men compacted into blunt vertebral knobs.
Women and children flattened between them.
The outlines of bodies disappeared as the pressure mounted, until suffering hardened into one solid structure.
My twin’s rib lengthened and split, repeating itself segment by segment down the newly forming spine.
My dog’s fur matted into the seams.
The sparrow’s thin bones threaded through the mass.
Somewhere, at some point, a cut of light splits the soil with a blade finer than frost.
And the bones, having endured their season of fracture, contract along a new axis.
And they do not break.
And they do not soften.
Empathy is a muscle. And every muscle fibre bathes in the first light of March.
Greta Kaluževičiūtė is a Lithuanian writer. Her prose—published under her own name and multiple pseudonyms—has appeared in The Bulb Region, Do Not Submit, Expat Press, Hobart Pulp, Plague Circus Press, 3AM:Magazine, Ritual Dagger, and various obscure corners of the internet. She is also a psychoanalytic researcher and holds a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex, UK. In addition to her writing and research, she is the author of eskimo kisses, an ongoing photography project examining intimacy through uncanny encounters.