#Syazwan Sharani

[mybukz]

Fiction: The Home of the Heart by Syazwan Sharani

Image by Peter Lloyd on Unsplash

About three months ago, while I sat in my office chair typing a letter to finance, I felt a severe throbbing pain in my chest. Then my surroundings shrivelled into a blur, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor, unconscious. I woke up in a hospital bed,b barely conscious of my sobbing mum, a few colleagues whom I’d exchanged files more than I did words, and Dr. Kumar telling me that my heart had failed and if I didn’t get a donor by the end of January, it was going to be the end of me. It was a hereditary condition, and my mum broke down in tears as she spoke of my late aunt (before I was born into this world) who fought the same battle. Mum and I tried everything to secure a heart but the list was excruciatingly long, and even if the universe had cramped the stars into stellar constellations, still I would never get a heart by January’s end.

Desperate, mum resorted to a powerful shaman that had healed a malfunctioning kidney of a friend of hers, just few weeks prior. The shaman stood by my hospital bed, threw tiny pieces of buffalo skull on my palm, and told me that I possessed the spirit of a wild animal; that I would survive, and help was already on the way. A week later, two women with dark robes from a remote village in Indonesia turned up at the hospital, and it was revealed to me that a distant, estranged relative who was dying was going to provide me with a heart. I never knew we had Southeast Asian roots in our blood, and when I asked my mum, she was silent. The operation went fine, and Dr. Kumar said he had never seen a donor’s heart match a recipient so well in the span of his career, like mine did, and it was like the heart had really been mine all along.

I was allowed home the next month, and Dr. Kumar, mum, and everyone kept assuring me that I should be feeling fine, but deep down I wasn’t. I felt less and less like myself ever since I got the new heart. I despised the skin I was walking in, my brown curls, and even my thin nails; I hated seeing them every time I looked in the mirror. I felt like they weren’t me. I ate steak more than I ordinarily would, but they tasted weird, marinated and cooked on a stove, before I realised it had been the red meat that I really wanted. That day my mum went out on the lawn to speak with a friend on the phone, and on the counter were raw meat and salmon from the store. When she turned to the neighbour’s fence, I pounced on the counter, tore the meat with my nails, and devoured them manically, like I hadn’t eaten in weeks. They tasted so good. When she came back, I told her Shamby, our old retriever, had eaten them. I felt bad that Shamby had to sleep outside that night.

I dreamt of woodpeckers making wild sounds in the woods and the noise of tambourine playing a very poignant ancient tribal tune that night. I felt like they were somehow trying to call me. Tangled in sweat and fed by the adrenaline in the dream, I took my clothes off and hit the shower. As I massaged my head, I began to realize that my brown curls were shedding under the jet of water, and soon the tub, sink and the bathroom tiles were flooded with hair from my body. I stared at my bald, hairless self in the mirror. I looked closely and saw that not only had all hair gone from my body, uniform brown spots had developed all over my skin, and I now looked like I was wearing the skin of a feline. I’d always had soft features but now my cheekbones and jaw had become sharp and pronounced. I remember trembling in front of my mother’s door, so close to waking her up to rush me to the hospital, but I got so terribly scared that I didn’t. I quietly entered her room and rummaged through the drawer that in my twenty-five years of my life I had never dared to open, but I knew that part of the answer had to be there. In there were antique brooches—some her favourite, some she’d never worn, polaroids dating back when I wasn’t even born, and a few carefully kept files. I took out the green file that looked the most recent. I knew where I had to go now. Lampung, Indonesia. That must be where the two Indonesian women in dark robes were. The ones who had provided me with the heart. Perhaps they knew what was going on with me.

I kissed my mother on the cheek for one last time, got back into my room, panting like I had been chased by a robber, and stuffed whatever item that was five feet away from me into the tiny trolley luggage. I remember packing my brown blanket, a couple of tissue packets, the green file that I had taken, a pair of sweat pants and an oversized shirt that I had repeatedly worn for the last two weeks straight. I looked over at the short dresses and silhouettes hanging in the wardrobe, neither of which I had brought along. Somehow, I knew I was never going to take them out and have them placed on my skin ever again. I was about to book a ticket on the phone, but my trembling fingers wouldn’t allow me to tap on a single screen function. They were growing unnervingly sharp as I poked them on my skin. I called the airline instead and got the first flight to Lampung in the morning.

I was in an oversized black hoodie and donned a pair of wide shades that went above my brows. The brown spots dotting my face were choked with layers of compact that nobody would take notice of them, at least if they didn’t stop to look twice. I could be perceived as nothing out of the ordinary, if I was lucky. I sat at the circular window, next to a gentleman in a business suit, who was too engrossed in his Sudoku to take note of my suspicious spots. I was too on edge to sleep in the four-hour flight and was nervous in my seat, few steps away from biting my bottom lip off.

I remember dozing off the last 10 minutes before landing, before I was jolted awake by the creak of the storage door above my head. I panicked and needed to get out of the plane and storm my way to the village as soon as I could. I accidentally launched my shoulder into the back of the gentleman in the business suit. Even from his back, I could imagine his smug face. As he was about to turn to face me and express his dissatisfaction, all of a sudden, the only thing I saw smeared across his face was shock, as if his face had been wiped by the cloth of the grim reaper’s cloak. “What…what is that?” His fingers pointed at a place slightly above my forehead. Even though he struggled with words, the horror upon his face was enough for me hear what he was trying to say. I turned towards the black TV screen on the seat in front of me, and caught a glimpse of my face that I had never seen nor I thought I would see in my life.

Two tiny antlers sprouted from my temples like some twigs poking up soil, and my eyes were a black, hollow universe unrestricted by boundaries, blacker than it had ever been. I dashed past all the other passengers and aircraft crew, who looked with horror, springing past them like a wild animal. Each nudge I forced on any human arm that was in my way landed them on the floor or slammed hard against the wall of the plane. I never recalled being this strong. I was sure that I took a small leap, but now I found myself across the stairs of the plane, on the tarred runway. As if orchestrated by a supernatural force that was welcoming me home, spirals of dark clouds began sending the sun away, and contained me under a gloomy choreography of a thunderous rain, intertwined by the most chilling wind. I could feel whatever toner and powder I had smeared across my body melting away into the rain puddles. I took my hoodie off and whatever else fabric wrapping my body. There I stood, stark naked in the rain, wearing nothing but the brown spots on my skin and the tiny antlers crowning my head. My heart reverberated, as if it had picked up a call. I looked up, and saw a dark forest growing out of the horizon of the thunder and rain-splattered sky, I ran towards one end of the runway. as if it was where my heart really belonged; and I could feel it pumping stronger and stronger as I stormed through the rain. As I was just a few breaths away from the forest, there they were, the two figures in dark robes whom I figured were the two Indonesian women at the hospital. The ones who had brought me the heart I was carrying now.

“What did you do to me?” lips trembling, I asked them.

Only one of them spoke, while the other remained silent. “We did nothing to you. We only put the thing back where it belongs,” she placed her two tough fingers on my chest, and tapped rhythmically on my heart.

“Welcome back, Namybia. Come, we have to get you home,” she said.

Both women unveiled their robes and I could see the same brown spots dotting their skins, same black eyes and similar antlers on their temples, albeit much longer and tougher-looking than mine. The two of them crept on all fours on the ground. I followed suit. The three of us sprung into the dark dwelling in the woods, together on all fours, like a troupe of hyenas in a hunting rage, under the solemn dark sky, and disappeared into the woods, forever.

*

Syazwan Sharani is a practitioner of story-telling on paper, penning on selected occurrences and encounters trapped in my arena of thoughts. His work is heavily inspired by Neil Gaiman, Lemony Snickett, Laika movies, and words left by a kind stranger on the last page of his journal that he cannot disclose.