A FABLE / Joseph Mirkin

Whether it was a congenital hollow in my abdomen, or some unnaturally heavy element in my blood—the wild excess of some mineral or another—or both of these things together (for whatever is unheard of in medicine has only never been noticed; it was not very long ago at all that the era of modern medicine first began, and there are still a great many who have never come in contact with it, for pride or inconvenience or poverty—or even spite, for I spoke to a woman once whose father, having developed gangrene, intentionally allowed it to kill him; but this is neither here nor there). Nonetheless—at 34 years old I have been diagnosed with an unheard-of condition (by a doctor abroad—and a language barrier made the situation all the more surreal). That is, my heart is shaped like a stalactite. But, he said, it didn’t seem to be causing me any trouble, and he didn’t see how it should, in the future—doctors never do see such things—so that I went away in an optimistic spirit. I began even bragging about it, and analyzing the symbolism of it—that the very source of my life wore such an exhausted appearance—that it was an ancient heart, formed over the (effectively) thousands of years of idle drippings of my brain—that the weight of life was especially heavy to myself; of all people on earth, I alone understood and felt the weight of living so acutely that it stretched my heart toward the dirt. But I boasted of it to one man, who, when I told him, began to weep so profusely that he went to his knees. He held me, when I knelt to comfort him, imagining that he was comforting me rather; and he cried into my shoulder until it was wet through and through. And so I have come to suppose that the bearer of a symbol is not necessarily its recipient.

Joseph Mirkin is a student at Wayne State University.