A Broken Heart Lev Mirov I forget about my broken heart sometimes until something makes it sputter again, valves hanging useless, arteries clogged, pulses erratic oxygen levels variating... sunlight and spacedust keep it mostly beating though shifts in gravity make it jump and my blood simmers leaving orbital rotation. They ask how it happened during physicals opening up my chest to examine the light-machine that keeps my skin breathing. they want to know, everyone wants to know, who broke your heart? How did it break? How did you build a heart out of star-gases and violin crescendos? and how did you keep it inside your chest and make it beat graft it to broken muscles and pump plasma instead of blood? I never tell the doctors or the astrophysicists. They tell me you can't fuse human beings and whole stars, but what the fuck do they know? They say I'll die any day, my heart crumpling like a black hole, but I just laugh-- there was a war to fight. You think I gave a shit about impossibilities? You wouldn't have heard, of course-- nobody has heard who wasn't there and nobody from that satellite moon has returned to earth. Sometimes I think that is why people doubt my account: genocides are silent affairs meant to silence the victims. It goes like every war story: we were losing hour by hour, evaporating like wine in the desert, and I had already lost a hundred battles. You must understand: I had lost everything. My heart couldn't take it. It was easier to swallow a ray of blood-red dawn and store the sun inside my chest than to lose that last time. So I burned-- oh, how I burned ripping up my heart, evaporating my blood, carbonizing my bones, filling my lungs with the dust of space, drinking down the stars, to cauterize their army with a surgeon's knife of morning because I was tired of burying the dead. Now my hands are a cosmos full of weapons. when I blush, the aurora makes my skin flush blue and green and you have never heard of my war. But now you have seen me, and you will not forget. The stolen sun still rises in my chest the guns that shattered my heart are silent at last and it is time to name everyone I burned for.
Lev Mirov lives with his historian wife Emilia and their two cats outside of Washington DC. He recently finished a master’s thesis on folk magic as a spiritual expression in late medieval England at Goddard College and is now licensed to time-travel at will. When not buried in research for his next time-travel adventure or cooking, he can be found fervently scribbling speculative fiction, fantastical poetry, and gluten-free recipes from around the world. You can follow his adventures on twitter at @thelionmachine.
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