Missive: Heart Scrubbing Day

♥♥♥ Heart Scrubbing Day ♥♥♥

Today’s work is scrubbing hearts.

You wouldn’t know it, but there are quite a few discarded hearts in Antarctica. Just like all the other debris, hearts are sorted and separated from the used batteries, paper towels and plastic. And just like mandatory dish duty, you’ve got to take your turn with the hearts. Today is my day.

They haul them up, the hearts, from cold-storage in that building down by the Power Plant – you know – the one without a number.

It takes a heart some time to thaw and the smell is something awful. A sort of vacant stale red mixed with chemicals and formaldehyde. Sometimes I think they’re better off staying frozen and I have no idea what they do with them once they’re clean. I imagine they have their own special shipping container to be sent back to the States and studied by an emotionally devoid scientist in a nicely starched lab coat.

I take my bucket full of hearts over to the sink. Some are jagged with flailing arteries still attached. Others are more flat and squished with pieces of ice still chunked on. The worst are those that got worked over and resemble ground meat: lumpy and misshapen.

The bright yellow vinyl apron and long green gloves do little to protect me from all the juices. And the tools…the tools are all wrong: leftover toothbrushes and screwdrivers to get out the clots. I do what I can to clean them up and use the water pressure to wash inside and out.

I made a special playlist for this day. Songs like, “Tell it to My Heart” and “Heart Stomper” because how could I not? Quite honestly, I could not survive such a fate without a generous dose of inappropriate humor.

The hearts look like that carnivorous plant from “Little Shop of Horrors.” I keep waiting for one to come to life and start singing, “Feed me Seymour.” I imagine, as I poke the soapy bristle of the toothbrush into the fleshy compartments, what kind of person this heart belonged to and why it was discarded. Were they tall and lanky, the kind of person who loved potatoes and liked to sit in the upper deck of the Galley away from the talkers. Perhaps this one belonged to a bright-eyed and enthusiastic young fool who risked too much and liked to go on late night walks to Hut Point.

I think about the short time we get to spend with our hearts, how easy it is to give them away at times or leave them exposed to the elements. I think about how careless people can be with them and how sometimes, they don’t even acknowledge we have them – distracted by a seemingly perfect breasts or one too many beers.

And even though these hearts are dead, even though their owners are long gone, I scrub carefully. I make sure I place them gingerly in the clean bucket and stack them neatly next to one another, so that maybe, just maybe, even discarded hearts in Antarctica can have a happy ending.