VALVE by Evan Grillon

After listening to my heart, the doctor said: “You have some leaking.” Seeing the face I was making and what I was doing with my hands, he chose new words: Your heart is murmuring. 

“Doctor,” I said, “does that mean my heart is trying to tell me something?”

He said yes, but of course he couldn’t pick it out; that’s what a murmur was. He crossed his arms thoughtfully, then got up and opened a door to a back room. 

There was study there, with a divan and a desk and lots of books. So I got up from the examination table and lay down on the divan, as one does. 

“Sometimes a heart chooses to mumble,” he said, “falling on the side of irreducibility, knowing how clumsy any attempt at articulation would be.”

Somewhere along the way he’d lost the stethoscope and the lab coat and put on a cardigan. 

I said, “Doctor, does a leaky heart suggest a lifetime of inadequate corrections which lead eventually to more and more tragic moments of weakness?” 

“You have a wide ear,” he said. The doctor was shining a light in my ear and then putting his finger in it. “Widest ear I’ve ever seen. I could fit two fingers in here.” 

To demonstrate, he put another finger in my ear.

Evan Grillon is a writer who lives in Florida. His work has appeared in Wigleaf and Southern Humanities Review, among others.