My crowd huddles closer as I flourish the beating heart in my palm. It’s constructed of red silk stitched with sparkling faux rubies that give the impression of blood. The threads looped around my fingers trigger the miniature bellows that fills the heart with air. With every tug of my pinkie, the heart pulses. Pulses. Pulses.
It took me two months to create this. Several iterations and much trial and error before I finally got it right. I could tell my story without it, but if I’m going to risk my life for art, I might as well do it in style.
“The first time I lost my heart,” I say as I lift my silk organ with great reverence, inflating it with a calm and rhythmic thud, “it was taken gently. A theft so soft and sweet. One of breathless whispers and chaste kisses. I relinquished my heart with a smile. But the second time…”
I tug the threads, harder this time, working the bellows in uneven lurches. My voice dips low again.
“The second time it was stolen by force.” I crush the heart in my palm and press it against my scar. My audience lifts their eyes to mine, pupils widening behind the slits in their masks. “The thief’s identity was one and the same, yet he’d changed in every way. Once beautiful, he was now grotesque, a beast of fang and claw. Four years we’d been apart, and in that time he gave his heart to another, the dark and wicked moon.”
Resentment burns my blood as the last words leave my lips in a liethat tastes like acid. It would be more accurate to say my love gave his heart to the sun, but it’s the moon the people are taught to despise. And not without reason. We all grow up reading the same holy texts that describe the moon goddess’s villainy. We all know what happened five centuries ago, when all nine gods turned their backs on mankind when we grew too wicked. They withheld their ruling planets’ light, plunging us into a time known as One Hundred Days of Darkness. But it was Vanna, Goddess of the Moon, who gave solid form to humanity’s sins, allowing them to materialize as Shades. It is under her night sky that the Shades continue to flourish, safe from the sunlight that forces them to hide during the day.
The only deity who showed mercy was the sun god, Bastien. After One Hundred Days of Darkness ended, he created the first Sinless, King Kaelum. He stripped the king’s soul of sin, gave him immortality, and taught him the Absolution ritual that could turn other humans Sinless thereafter. Then he gave the king a special kind of astrotheurgy—divine celestial magic—that allowed him to harness the power of the sun as protection from the Shades. Bastien’s only lasting punishment was that all Sinless would feast on sinners’ blood.
The holy texts claim that when the Sinless lose their thirst, the Shades will disappear. It will mean we’ve atoned and are blessed by the gods once more. But first, humanity must put an end to sin.
Tonight is evidence as to how well that’s going.
My patrons curse Vanna’s name under their breath at my mention of the moon.
“I never knew love could change a man into a beast,” I say, “but his dedication to the queen of the night was steadfast. All-consuming. Only one thing kept him from merging fully with his beloved, and that was the heart I’d given him.”
With my hand still pressed to my chest, I tuck the silk heart into the top of my chemise and exchange it for a different creation.
My voice takes on a darker edge. “Now love came to me as a devil. Gone were his gentle hands and sweet promises. When he reached deep inside my chest, he did so with razor-sharp talons. He clawed open my flesh, broke through the cage of my ribs, and split my heart in two.”
I heave forward, my palm splaying open to reveal the shriveled clump of red silk within. Crimson ribbons spill over the sides of my hand, strung with more sparkling red stones.
“But cleaving it in two wasn’t enough,” I say, “for a heart severed in half can easily be stitched back together. My love was a thorough beast indeed, piercing that which he’d once claimed so sweetly only to tear it to shreds, piece by piece by piece.”
I turn my palm to the ground, and the heart flutters to my feet in minuscule shards while red threads dangle from between my fingers like delicate tendrils of blood.
As I press my free hand to my scar once more, my viewers discover more scarlet ribbons streaming from where my robe gapes open.
“Love was thorough,” I say, my voice so quiet my audience leans closer. “Love was deadly. And in the wake of his violence, my life was bled dry. It was the end for me. Or it should have been. For what is life without a heart? How does one breathe when there is nothing left to inflate your lungs? No one was going to save me. No one could piece me back together. No one could possibly make whole the heart that had been so terribly rent.
“At least, that’s what love thought. He’d made a mistake in leaving even a shard of my heart intact, when he should have devoured me blood, bones, tissue, and all. For who better to repair that which is broken than a seamstress?”
I shift my focus to my hand and the threads looped over my fingers. This next part takes precision, order.
“There may not have been a heart in my body, but there were threads of life, a needle of hope.” I lift one string, then another, looping them around my fingers, then together, until the pieces of fabric at my feet stir to life. “That was all I needed to stitch and stitch and stitch. Even though pieces of my heart had been irretrievably lost, I made do with what I could forage. A dried flower I’d kept from one lovely spring past. A lace ribbon I’d treasured as a girl. A worn letter I’d read a thousand times over. A blanket that had always kept me warm.”
Sweat beads behind my mask as I continue to carefully weave the threads, praying to gods who don’t listen that my creation won’t gettangled. To my great satisfaction, the pieces come together, and as I loop the final thread, tugging the mass of cloth toward my hand, the heart is whole once more, though it is no longer red silk, but a collage of mismatched prints that had been hidden on the reverse side. My grin grows wide as I flourish the heart upon my palm, pride igniting in my chest. This took even longer to construct than my beating heart. I’m not sure how I managed enough patience to see it through.
I glance away from my craft to take in the impressed eyes of my audience. My pride swells tenfold.
Gods, this feels good. To know I’ve entranced them. This is what I’ve craved, ever since I told that first tale when I was young. To balance on the knife’s edge between beauty and danger is the best feeling in the world. Better than any other accomplishment. Better than verbal praise. Better than sex.
Maybe the priests are right about artists.
They say our greatest sin lies not in our temptation to create but in our inability to resist the devil’s call. Our slothful disregard for the dangers, laws, and consequences. Our lust for that which is forbidden. Our pride in our illicit craft. According to the holy texts, all seven sins are present in art: greed, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth, lust, and pride. Every brushstroke is a lie. Every line of poetry a fabrication. Every act of creation a mockery of the gods who had forsaken us. And we keep doing it again and again.
For that I am guilty.
I could have learned my lesson the first time I was caught for my forbidden art and consequently sentenced to death. After I escaped imprisonment, Ishouldhave turned my back on storytelling for good, but I didn’t. Not even after I took a new name and started my life over at a textile mill. I shouldn’t have stolen scraps of silk, nor should I have sewn daisies on them when my fellow workers were sleeping in their bunks. I most certainly should not have muttered stories while I stitched, for that was what got me caught for my wickedness the second time. After that, I was sold off to Rockefeller—a mercy compared to what normally happens to criminals. An even greater mercy compared to what would have happened if anyone knew of my previous crime.
“Mine is a story of a woman who lost her heart.” I speak slowly this time, serenading my audience with the sway of my spoken tempo. “Mine is a tale of the treachery of love. But when love left me bleeding, I stitched myself back together, turned wounds into seams and sinew into threads.”
I let hope infuse my tone, which is perhaps my greatest lie of all. The truest version of my story isn’t one of hope. It’s one of hatred and pain and a heart that never healed. Of blood pooling on the floor of a dusty jail cell, a needle in my hand. Of the urge not to repair but to break. To wound. And, if I could, to kill.
