February 20, 2018

PodCastle 510: My Heart is a Prayer

25 minutes

* Author : Ryan Row

* Narrator : Tina Connolly

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

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Previously published by Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.

Content warning for the death of a child.

They make my heart out of stone. A slate-colored hunk of granite run through with thin veins of fool’s gold like silver cracks that the father found in the mountains outside of town. He had been gathering lackweed to chew, so that he could make himself numb, and could fall asleep in the meadows, in nests of dry grass like a bird. The afternoon sun burned his skin, and he felt almost as if the light were passing through him. He felt like a window. Like a single pane of a glass.

He couldn’t sleep at home anymore. The old feather bed was too soft. The mother slept turned away from him, and the curve of her neck, in the blue moonlight, looked to him like a hooked knife. The silence there had a body and a mouth, and he could feel, always, its teeth against his neck. Silence was a vampire.

He had broken their clock weeks ago with a fire poker. Back then, the ticking noise had hurt him somehow. Now it was the silence.

When he first saw the stone, he was rising from a dream in which the moon was his heart and the sun was his mind. His teeth ached and were stained black from the lackweed, which tasted almost the same as licorice. The stone, from his low angle, was like a mountain, poking out of the grass. Still thick-headed with lackweed, his mind and heart spinning like divine bodies, he began thinking on what, exactly, made a heart beat.

The mother whispers to my heart for hours. She cradles the stone in a small room at the back of their lab while sunlight strains through a small window, and tallow candles burn, and fits of black smoke spin above her in the amber light like the insubstantial bodies of angels or demons. She tells my heart all of her sins and hopes. Her skin seems brittle and yellow, like fine, aged paper, and I worry that even the soft fingers of the prayer smoke may damage her. The first stage of the ritual, they have decided together, is confession.

“I have never,” she says, stroking a silver vein of pyrite in my heart, “loved anything more.”

Her words braid together with the threads of smoke, and disappear in the light.

Together, they soak my heart in seawater thick with violet flower petals and crushed sage. They boil my heart in calf’s blood and vinegar. They cut it into a perfect sphere and bless it under the full, blue moon, surrounded by an array of mirrors designed to capture the light. The night is wild, and I can hear ancient chanting from across the mountains. The stars sing in silence. The mother makes exact notes on the quality of the light and on the degree of the moon on a length of lamb skin while the father performs the blessing.

The father dances naked with fistfuls of red flowers. He dances around my heart and the mirror labyrinth in the center of a dodecagram drawn exactly in salt and iron dust. He feels wild. He hears, without hearing, the song of the stars. He breathes heavily and sweats into the earth. His lungs feel like the famous hot air balloons of the coastal cities. His blood is expanding inside his body. He eyes the mother. Her skin is whiter and more terrifying than bone.

“You may stop,” she says, making a final series of notations with quick, sharp motions. At last, she looks up and meets his stare. The father has the sensation of looking through a telescope and observing the l...

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