A Mother Could Go Mad

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The mortician told her—Ty had been sent to the funeral home without his heart. There was nothing to be done about it. So his mother, Miranda, cried throughout the service, her hungry ears hearing her only son’s heart beating in her own pulse. She stopped wearing earrings because of the throbbing.

Three months later, a tiny coffin arrived at the funeral home for her. Her son’s heart, wrapped in green velvet. They didn’t say why. 

The Army had conducted one honor service and that’s all they would do. Miranda couldn’t afford to dig into his grave now that it was closed and grass beginning to grow on it, couldn’t bear to open the coffin and place the heart with her son where it belonged. 

So she kept it on her nightstand next to her alarm clock. It was the first thing she saw every morning. Every morning her fingers touched the shiny wood of the tiny coffin, a motherly caress. 

A mother could go mad in such a fashion.

Miranda moved her son’s heart into the room he’d occupied when he was a boy. She took it out of the tiny coffin, and laid it, still in green velvet, on his bed. 

Every day, she visited the heart. She took her morning coffee there in her boy’s room. She came home from work at lunch and ate her sandwich perched there on the end of the bed. Her dinner she ate at the table, but always she came in to say goodnight and to leave a fresh glass of water. 

And daily the heart swelled. It covered the simple quilt from his grandmother, its weight making the bed creak. It filled the room, and the floorboards groaned. Soon it spilled into the hallway, blocking the stairs. Still, Miranda had her coffee with it, sitting on the bottom stair in a square of morning sunlight. She slept on the couch, her room out of reach.

It wasn’t long before the heart swelled to take up all the room in the house. Miranda had a cup of coffee sitting on the front porch. 

“I can go now,” she said. And closed the door to the house, gently. And walked away. And kept walking until morning. 

She had a cup of coffee in a park in a city on the coast. It was black, bitter, and cold. 

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Epiphany Ferrell lives perilously close to the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail in Southern Illinois. Her stories appear in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021, Best Small Fictions 2021, New Flash Fiction Review, Ghost Parachute, Pulp Literature, and other places. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee and won the 2020 Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize.

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