The Doctor Says Roots Are Growing Around Her Heart

by Yunya Yang

And that is why she feels the pain. It’s not really a pain, she says. It’s more like a slow burning, like when you cook braised pork feet, you have to keep the stove on low heat, so low that only a flicker of glow remains. We’ll have to cut them out, the doctor says. But I’ve always had them, she says. Always lived with the burn. It’s bad for you. See it for yourself. The x-ray shows her caged heart, nested in the embrace of twining arms. She has never seen it before, never seen the inside of her body like an out-turned pocket. During the surgery, she dreams. The roots rope around her. They whisper in a language she no longer speaks and they sing of a distant, forgotten land and all the while they burn. But the burning is retreating, branches recoiling. Her dreams are rolling back, an ebbing tide. She wakes. Her body is light, like duckweed drifting on dead water. The clean and untangled heart moans within her as she returns to life with a hollow hope. Later, when she is old and lay dying, she feels under her left breast the scab of a slit and yearns for a rope that will once again pull her home to the shore of soothing burns.

Yunya Yang was born and raised in Central China and moved to the US when she was eighteen. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Hobart, Split Lip Magazine, among others. Find her at yunyayang.com and on Twitter @YangYunya.