Valves

Nikoline Kaiser

Sparks ran across Tara’s fingers, stinging her knuckles, making the skin beneath her nails bleed. It was fine. It was expected. She reached for the wires again, connecting, braiding them together in a now familiar dance. Over and over again. Keep trying. It was not madness to keep trying if you knew it worked, it just had to be perfect. Her lenses had long since stopped working, their magnifying quality gone. She was left with only her failing, human eyesight in the growing darkness of the lab. The sparks of light from the wires were so bright, they hurt to look at. She shook out her fingers, her hands, and started again.
          As a young girl, Tara had gone hunting with her father. She’d had no particular wish to shoot and kill the deer he stalked through the tall woods by their home, but it was time spent with him that she would not otherwise get. She would get up before the crest of dawn, put on the reflective, bright orange hunting vest he had gotten her for her birthday and eat oatmeal in the kitchen while he rustled around to get his gear ready. Her mom had been deep asleep still, and they only turned on the lamp above the kitchen table, so as not to disturb her, leaving her dad to hold a flashlight between his teeth until everything was ready and they could go. Tara had gotten good at navigating the dim light since then, had often forgotten that she could turn on more lamps in the lab or in her room when she read until far into the night. It was Charlotte who would walk into rooms and ask why she was sitting in the dark.
          “It’s always dark when you’re not here,” Tara said, and got an eyeroll and a kiss in exchange for her platitudes.
          She’d cried the first time she had shot and killed a squirrel, its tiny body a mess on the forest floor. Its body had seemed so much bigger through the small lens of the rifle. Her dad had taken her aside and asked if she didn’t want to do this anymore, and she had said yes. Half a year had passed. She’d started to miss him. She had gone back to hunting by his side.
          Tara had learned the art of walking silently over undergrowth, over leaves and branches. She had perfected it on sleek hospital floors, had walked just so to make sure her shoes would not screech against the surface. She had not wanted to disturb patients sleeping, resting, crying. It had not been in her to disturb them; she had passed like a ghost through the halls. That was how she had met Charlotte.
          The pale hair by her wrist caught the heat of another spark, but the fire burned away before it could do more than kiss the skin. It left not a burn, just a red mark. The smell faded after a moment, but it was enough to make her nose wrinkle. She had to stop. She had to breathe. She lowered her hands, feeling the itchy hurt of skin overheated, feeling the shape of the wires in her hands. She let her fingers ghost, only briefly, over the metal plate beneath her. A moment. That was all she had. Then it was time to try again.
          Tara had become adept at hunting, if only to please her father. It was an easy way to get his eyes to glow with appreciation, the clearest path towards his heart. On her journeys into the forest, stalking prey with her father by her side, she found the path to the heart of other creatures laid in the muzzle of her rifle, in the sleek surface of the metal. She moved her fingers over the trigger without sound, memorizing the steel, likening it to the scalpel that would later cut out rot and disease, tissue and sinew. The first time she brought down a deer, her father cut in deep to drain the blood and he opened that hidden cavity to show her the heart.
          It had pulsed still, spasms of panic, though all light had already left the eyes of its owner. Blood trickled onto green leaves and freckled her shoes. She brushed her hand across the still-warm neck and did not know if she wanted to throw up or cry.
          “The heart-valves,” her father said. “It’s not quite like a humans, but close enough. Don’t look so shocked, little bird, I’ve seen you peek in mom’s textbooks. You’re prime to become a little doctor like her. Let me show you.”
          Heart-valves, heart-chambers and arteries and the heart as a whole, sitting full and growing cold in her father’s hands. When she started her first proper tenure at the hospital, she no longer went out hunting with her father.
          Charlotte was a vegetarian. When Tara went home, she ate the meat her father served, but they always had something else for Charlotte, from the moment it became clear she was going to stay a while. Forever, if Tara had anything to say about it. That thought made blood fill her mouth like idle, misplaced laughter. She was shocked it did not drip onto her fingers, onto the metal plate she was trying to fix. She was moving silently even now, with just herself and her patient there to hear any noise she might make. But as always, when hunting, Tara was silent.
          The day she had first met Charlotte, she had gotten off a call with her parents, frustrated and guilty. She had not been home in what felt like an age; it might have been longer, actually. She had gone in through the sleek, revolving doors and found one of the new doctors sitting in the waiting area, eyes drooping with exhaustion.
          “Oh. Hi.”
          Tara had not known what to say. She had only looked at her. Charlotte with her curls and bitten-down nails. Charlotte with the tiny scar under her mouth, Charlotte with a dog so aged he’d stopped barking at squirrels, Charlotte in overalls stained in splotches of paint in all colors. Charlotte who never remembered to put her mugs in the dishwasher, Charlotte in the sunlight, on their patio, in their bedroom, on their wedding day.
          Charlotte bleeding out beneath her hands. Tara had washed the blood off between the stay at the hospital and transporting her to the lab. She had worn gloves when cutting open the chest cavity and reaching, searching. Replacing.
          Now it was only her own blood, soaking beneath her fingernails, boiling beneath her skin. She had asked her father that day, “If we get the heart started again and sew it up, would it come back alive? Could you bring someone back to life?”
          Her teachers had looked at her with disgust, with condescension, with wild wonder when it had worked. A heart has chambers, valves; a heart is a pump, for blood and life. Components like fine machinery, requiring a deft and delicate touch. In the darkness of her childhood home, Tara had learned to see with her hands and fingers, to seek out carefully and take her time. Surgery was the same, her scalpel an extension of herself, her father’s voice in her head, “Keep your aim steady. You are not holding the rifle. It is a part of you. It is not firing; you are.”
          First: to get the heart up and pumping again. Blood circulation, or there’s no air. No life. The valves and chambers could be replaced, but what of the whole heart? Not cold and lifeless, but pumping and warm, like machinery powered on, the warmth of an engine running for as long as the body needed it. Not turned off; not until it was time.
          It had not been Charlotte’s time. Another spark, another spasm as Tara’s fingers were assaulted by the electricity. Stop fighting, she thought. I am trying to help.
          It was not madness to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results; she had gone into the forest morning after morning, chasing the rising sun with her father and the wind before her. She aimed, she breathed in and out. She pulled the trigger, and she missed every single time, until the day she didn’t.
          The sparks caught in her sleeve as she tried again, but it took, it worked, it lit up with the light of this machine is working, and she placed the wires gingerly into place before hitting away the embers that glowed against her skin. That one hurt, worse than the last few burns; it would leave a blister and a scar, and it would hurt far worse in a moment, once she could again manage to look away from those eyes as they opened and gazed up at her. Pump, chamber, valve, a fine-tuned clockwork with blood for oil and carefully set bones for gears. Her heart beat steadily in her chest, carefully placed and manufactured, and Tara sewed her back up again, watching life blink back into Charlotte’s eyes.

Nikoline Kaiser (she/they) is a queer author living in Denmark; they work with the environment and sustainability by day and by night they moonlight as an author. They’ve published several pieces in both English and Danish, and they’ve been longlisted for the Lee Smith Novel Prize. She writes about grief, love, horror, sexuality and one time about a woman turning into a tree. Their first book, the novella The Dreaming of Man, will be published in summer 2025. See full bibliography at https://nikolinekaiser.dk/

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