Fall 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 4

The examination room was cool and well ventilated, decorated in shades of blue, gray, and aquamarine, reminding Annie of sky, shell, and ocean. The echocardiograph equipment gleamed bone white, with shiny black buttons. Annie was tired of hospitals and medical testing but fascinated by the idea of a sonograph—especially an echocardiogram—creating pictures from sound, like sea mammals navigating, using an echo to draw the shape of the unseen. Annie closed her eyes and imagined a dolphin doctor in a swishy, white coat employing chatter, pings, and clicks to shape the data. Maybe a pod of technicians playing call and response, like the children's game. "Marco" they yell, and her body yells back, "Polo." Ping, Ping—Marco! The heart replies—Polo!

An ordinary technician in an ordinary lab coat (not a dolphin at all) arrived and gave Annie a green towel and a cropped hospital gown. The tiny, ill-fitting johnny looked like a faded cocktail jacket and barely covered her breasts. She felt simultaneously too big and too small, enormous like a whale and yet tiny like krill. She wanted to tell the technician about the dolphins and echolocation but held back. She'd learned to keep her visions private, especially in hospitals where every quirk is a box to be checked.

"You're playing Marco Polo with my heart," Annie thought, but didn't say.

Lying on her left side, she watched the black and gray of the imaging, a graph of her heartbeat like a seascape of data, beautifully textured. The bone-white wand moved over her chest, and the data grid held the shape of her body's own water. Like maps of deep-ocean exploration, sonar drawing the contours of the ocean floor.

The sonographer remained quiet and focused.

Click, click, ping, ping. The image shifted, and she saw her pulsing heart.

"My heart looks like a small animal," she almost said, but didn't. Of course, she didn't. The animal seemed to shudder in its sleep, like a baby in a burrow.

#

Later that night, Annie dreamed. She walked through a city, sometimes lost, sometimes searching. Her new wooden cane never appeared in dreams, as though her dream self hadn't caught up with waking reality. In the dream she stood in a shopping mall facing a steep flight of stairs. The bleat of a young animal came from above, but the stairs were slick with water, smelling like salt and the funk of low tide. Afraid for the animal, she stepped upward—and slipped, losing her balance.

Annie woke, heart pounding like waves, the blood in her ears sounding like the ocean in a seashell. She put her hands between her breasts and thought of the animal in her chest, small as a fist, vulnerable, and trembling in restless dreams.

She imagined her friend Jenna beside her in the dark and whispered, "I saw my heart, and my heart was a warm animal."

#

Forty years ago, Jenna touched Annie's chest, applying pressure to the points of the lung meridian. In the warmth of Jenna's living room in Somerville, Annie lay on a mat listening to traffic and songbirds and the rustle of the upstairs neighbor. Jenna massaged her thumbs into the meridian points, moving slowly from the chest and down the left arm.

Grounded under Jenna's touch, under the flicker of her eyelids, Annie saw a vision—one of her secret daytime dreams. A stone lay on her chest—heavy and flat like a slab of slate. Using both hands, she lifted it off. But a second slab was underneath, and she lifted that off as well.

On the third slab of stone, she saw a painting of two Egyptian men—flat and stylized like in an ancient temple—pop into life. They sprung up like cartoons, and helped Annie lift the third stone. The three of them peered in the hole, like archaeologists on the verge of discovery, and there it was. Annie's heart. Muscular, curious, smelling like fur and blood with kind bovine eyes. It blinked and Annie thought, "My heart is a cow. Who knew?"

Later, as Annie buttoned her shirt, she said to Jenna, "Don't laugh at me, but I saw my heart, and my heart was a cow."

"Well, that's never happened before."

Jenna smiled and gave Annie a cup of water to sip. She said, "Don't be afraid of your visions."

Annie tried not to be afraid, especially when Jenna was there.

#

Jenna had now been gone for five years. After waking from her dream, Annie went for a walk in the moonlight with her wooden cane. She knew she shouldn't go alone in the dark because she often stumbled, but something drew her to a nearby field where her neighbors were excavating. The full moon flooded light on a tractor, piled earth, and slabs of gray rock. And she heard a voice calling, lowing and urgent. The call seemed to echo in her chest.

She remembered a time when she was younger, her body strong and taut, and she swam naked in the Aegean looking for the echo of her heart. According to mythology, a shapeshifting goddess once swam off the coast of Crete in her bovine form, leaving behind a monstrous child. Sometimes Annie felt like that child, and sometimes she felt she carried it inside of herself.

Annie limped across the wet grass, the cuffs of her pants absorbing the cold wet of the dew and finally gained the shallow ditch where a white cow blinked as she approached. The ground was too rough for Annie to climb down, and possibly too unstable for the cow to climb up, so she crouched in the damp, until they were eye to eye.

The cow shouldn't have surprised Annie, but before now she had always appeared in visions or dreams. Annie often dreamed of her at night, the warm bulk of mammal comfort. Or sometimes muscular and lumbering in the blood red ocean, swimming in dark salinity—fierce, arrogant and kind. But never like this with the solid realism of her cane, a tractor and the moon.

Standing close, the cow's breath smelled like grass, and the night was scented with mammal sweat, dirt and manure. Annie's heart wasn't reliable anymore, not like the days when she swam in the Aegean, and neither was her memory. But the cow came close, and Annie put her hand on the cow's neck to sense her pulse. Annie's heart skipped fast and slow—fast and slow—tachycardia to bradycardia. It's a lopsided dance, but the cow kept a steady beat. She led, and Annie followed, heartbeat to heartbeat, call and response. Marco Polo.