Even after Phoebe returned from the funeral, she couldn’t bring herself to make any more half-hearted attempts at getting something on the canvas. The shades were never bright enough, the lines looked stiff and lifeless. Phoebe had tried different tools, different mediums, different canvas sizes. Nothing worked anymore. She decided to distract herself before bed, carefully unravelling the rough brown paper within the box that she’d had to sign for a few hours earlier. The box had come with a letter explaining the contents of Uncle Eugene’s will, though explaining might have been a strong word.

She expected something… more, when she pulled the wooden heart from its packaging. Phoebe turned it this way and that. There was no winding key indicating that this would make music. There was no paint on it, not even a finish. She could see each ridge in the wood, and she could feel them, too, coarse as it nested in the palm of her hand. Phoebe tapped on it, pulled at it, and tried to twist it. Nothing made the heart anything other than what it was: a hunk of something that was once alive and had since been carved into something else. She went to bed unimpressed.

Phoebe hadn’t even slept for an hour when she stirred awake.

There was light. Golden, moving in ways no artificial light would’ve done. Phoebe followed it, hypnotized, half convinced she was hallucinating. The light was beaming from her long-untouched art room. Phoebe continued inside. The wooden heart stood up on its pointed bottom, gravity be damned. She wasn’t even sure how it had gotten in here. The light was coming from the heart, alive and humming. But so, too, were thick green sprouts, in shades that Phoebe was certain she had never seen before. Something stirred in her that had been still for a long time. Suddenly, she felt as though she could paint the whole world onto one canvas.

Suddenly, she felt as though she could dance and sing for every minute of the rest of her life and it would never express enough. She had no idea why she was given this gift, if she could even trust her own eyes, her own mind, her own everything. There was no one here; there were no witnesses. It was only her and the art around her. And here the heart stood, thriving.

Audrey T. Carroll is the author of What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024) and Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Lost Balloon, CRAFT, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She is a bi/queer/genderqueer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and as a Fiction Editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter/Instagram.

Audrey’s previous pieces: Queer (In Retrospect) (Issue 12) and How to Have It All (Issue 45)