Heave Your Dead to the Ground

Hearts fell first.  Harvey watched as they landed in yards, pelted shingles, dented the roofs of mini vans.  They destroyed gardens, squashed slicing tomatoes, bruised spinach leaves.  They knocked branches from trees and smeared blood on bay and picture and double-hung windows,  left dark streaks on doors, on driveways, on sidewalks, on patios.  They stained Harvey’s freshly-sealed deck and frightened his dog.  They frightened the neighborhood children, they frightened him.  They filled the air with slapping noise and knocked over mailboxes.  They bloodied skylights.  They sat on driveways, shriveled like dead jellyfish, like deflated kickballs, like slabs of sallow meat.  Harvey knew people ate chicken hearts, lamb hearts, cow hearts, ate them grilled and baked and stewed and stir-fried.  He’d heard of beef heart stew, beef heart kabobs, pork sorpotel and bopis, pan-fried chicken hearts, pate with hidden heart, chicken heart stroganoff.

But these were human hearts. 

“What the hell is happening?” Lawrence said, calling from Palo Alto.  He’d been offered a one-year visiting professorship and had taken it.  He and Harvey were trying to make it work. 

“I don’t know.  What are they saying on the news?”

“You haven’t watched?”

Harvey shook his head, then remembered Lawrence wasn’t there.  “I’ve been looking outside.  The hearts are everywhere.”

“What do they look like?”

Harvey speared open his blinds.  His house sat on the main thoroughfare that wended through his subdivision.

“Like fists,” he said.  “Like fists with all the blood gathered in the knuckles.”

“How are you feeling about it?” Lawrence said.

“What kind of question is that?” Harvey said. 

***

Harvey watched professionals in hazmat suits bend over the hearts, scooping them into biohazard coolers while men in tweed carrying shiny, leather-covered bibles screamed about the Rapture.  Newscasters stood on sidewalks, their cameramen more concerned with where their feet fell than with getting a good shot in the right light. 

An email appeared in Harvey’s inbox, inviting him to the home of the president of the HOA. When Harvey knocked, the president looked nonplussed by the hearts dotting his yard like large, lumpy dog turds.  He waved for Harvey to come inside, where he offered Harvey a beer.  The rest of his neighbors were drinking buttery white wine and standing in the kitchen around the island.

“So what do we think this is about?” someone said.

“Am I dreaming?  Are we all dreaming?”

“Well, wake me up.  I hate this.”

The president calmed the screamers down as he refilled glasses of gewürztraminer and whisked away empty St. Pauli Girls.  Even though he was wearing a t-shirt and chinos, he moved like he was wearing a tux and waltzing.  He had long black hair that curled around his ears and shone in the pendant lights descending from the ceiling.  Harvey looked away, but nodded when the president took his empty beer bottle and asked if he wanted another.

“Who here is driving, right?” the president said with a wink.

When he came back, beers slick with condensation, he told everyone he’d already called the city.

“What about our yards?  Our driveways?”

“How much will it cost to get cleaned up?”

“Are the hearts toxic?”

The president raised his hands, palms facing outward. With lidded eyes, as if he was in a trance, he said not to worry.  He would make some more calls.  The word calls was like a lullaby. 

“When I walked outside, I’d almost forgotten about the hearts,” Harvey told Lawrence on the phone that night.

“Sounds like you’re in love.”

“Whatever.  It’s weird shit.”

“Weird shit brings people together.”

“Lawrence.”

“I’m tired.”

“It’s not even ten there.”

“Long day tomorrow.  Meetings.  I’m gonna let you go.”

As Harvey set down his phone, he thought of the moment that afternoon as he picked his way down the street.  He’d glanced back and seen the president standing on his porch, smiling and nodding, as if to say, “Yes, go, yes, you can make it home.  Everything will be alright.”

***

Eyes, looking like desiccated grapes, fell next.  Most burst into iridescent goop, but a few retained their shape, bouncing off the soft surfaces of plastic playhouses, buoyed by creeks, pillowed by piled leaves.  They stared up, wide and unblinking.  Optic nerves fluttered like torn feathers. 

“I swear,” Harvey said, “one of the ones that fell in the front bushes looked like my grandmother’s.  I’d recognize that shade of blue anywhere.”

“Lots of people have the same color eyes,” Lawrence said.

“Okay.  Sure.  Fine.  I know that.”

More body parts fell.  Intestines left brown trails behind.  Livers landed with sickening sex-slaps against front stoops and bedroom windows.  Harvey watched jawbones stick in yards like thrown horseshoes, teeth looking ready to chatter out terrifying hymns.  He watched ribcages come crashing into the street, bones splintering into strewn hay.  Spinal cords clattered against sliding doors, tangled themselves in wicker furniture.  Stomachs trapped themselves in pergolas, bloaty with acid that ripped through paint and primer and wood and metal and sucked the life out of flowers and grass.

Harvey received another email invitation to the president’s house, but when he showed up, he was the only person there.

“Hi,” the president said.  He had a pleasant baritone.  He stepped aside and gestured for Harvey to come in.

“Am I early?  Late?”

The president laughed.  “I thought we could think it out one-on-one.”

“Oh.” 

Beers were already waiting, sweaty Schalfly hefeweizens sitting on the kitchen island.  The president popped them open and handed one to Harvey.  After he drank, he said, “They’re all unreasonable.  Convinced the world is coming to an end.”

“They could be right,” Harvey said.

The president laughed. “I guess they could be. But they have kids or grandkids to worry about.  It warps how they see things.”

“I’d say what’s happening is pretty warped,” Harvey said. 

“Oh, I know.” The president set down his beer and leaned against the marble so his triceps flexed.  He was wearing a snug blue Under Armour t-shirt. 

“What did you think you and I might figure out that the scientists haven’t?”

The president smiled and shrugged.  “What are your theories?”

“I don’t really have any.”

“You haven’t dreamt or thought about it or talked it out with anyone?”  The president drank.  “What do your friends say?”

“My friends?”

“Surely they have opinions.”

Harvey bit his cheek. How to admit to the president that he’d moved here for Lawrence’s graduate program at Wash U, that he hadn’t seen his friends in ages, that the only person to whom he had any connection was now halfway across the country?

He was saved by the hands. Their sudden arrival was hard and loud.  Harvey and the president rushed to the living room window to watch them fall.  The fingers landed in a vast array, some clenched into fists, others splayed like they were about to be buffed at a nail salon.  Some broke, skewing at unnatural angles.  Others pointed to the sky or poked into soft soil.  They curved into letters in American Sign Language.  They caught in the crepe myrtle in the president’s yard and the planetrees and hedges across the street.  The sound of them hitting sedans and tool sheds was like the end of the world.

***

People arrived in droves.  They took pictures.  They set up food trucks.  Men and women with bullhorns preached the gospels while their followers swayed, hands up and eyes closed, their voices shattering the morning quiet while Harvey slept.  He pierced his window blinds, and groaned, seeing clumps of people up and down the street, eyes rolled toward heaven, hands clasped.  He wondered if he could call the police and complain about noise.

Harvey watched them stare at the sky.  He opened his front door so he could hear, and felt a hard anger when he heard one man ask God for more body parts to fall.  They picked through abandoned yards for dried-up pancreas and testicles and tarsal bones left behind by the scientists, shoving them, without fear of contamination or illness, into plastic containers and paper bags, as if collecting icons of departed saints.  He watched them scrape up humerus bones from sidewalks using snow shovels.  They collected blood dripping from trees with vials and buckets and pitchers you might use to serve beer. 

I saw you on the national news, Lawrence texted.  A reporter had caught Harvey in his driveway while he was checking the mail, dodging around a fresh rain of toes.  They reminded him of maggots, and he’d stepped on one.  It had let out an unsatisfying, wet crunch.  The reporter had not asked him much, sticking a microphone in his face and asking for a quick sound byte while his camera operator stared at the sidewalk once he’d gotten Harvey in-frame.  Harvey hemmed and hawed, blinked and squinted into the sun, and couldn’t even remember afterward what he’d said.

A few families moved out, tried to sell their houses unsuccessfully, took out second mortgages so they could rent apartments somewhere else, where roofs weren’t subject to flapping, heavy lungs.  They pulled their kids from their Montessori schools and private Christian academies to save on tuition.  Images of houses, close-ups of yards and trees drizzled with viscera while preachers and gawkers and lab technicians bristled on the sidewalks, appeared online.  In the pictures, yards were weedy.  Bushes were unkempt, tangled with blood vessels.  Harvey watched the neighborhood go to seed, turning into a series of haunted houses, full of whispers and dust and ghosts.

“Have you heard the conspiracy theories?” Lawrence said.

“Conspiracy theories?”

Lawrence told him: people thought it was all an invention, that all the photos and videos were doctored.  That Harvey and his neighbors were attention-seekers living boring lives in the suburbs who hated their jobs as bank managers and primary school teachers and IT specialists and low pay-grade accountants. 

“Jesus.  Of course we’re not making it up.”

“Some say that the government is running experiments and are dumping their refuse from the tippy-top of Earth’s atmosphere,” Lawrence said.

“You don’t believe any of that, do you?”

“Then there’s the theory that the parts aren’t real.  Plastic and corn starch and rubber.”

“Lawrence,” Harvey said.  “You know it’s all real, right?  I’ve seen it up close.” 

“But you’re on the inside,” Lawrence said.

“Ha.” Harvey knew Lawrence was joking.  Or, at least, he thought so.  He felt a spike in his side.  You could never be sure, could you?

“You could come out here,” Lawrence said.

“And do what?”

“It was just a suggestion.”

Harvey said nothing.  Neither did Lawrence.  Though they were both breathing, it was as if they’d hung up.

***

Two emails arrived in a row: a third invitation to the president’s house, a follow-up meeting and barbecue, the language fluffy and enthusiastic, as if the world wasn’t falling down around their driveways and front stoops and raised-bed gardens.  Then a note sent only to Harvey promising that this time it would not be just the two of them.

“I hope,” the note ended, “that you didn’t feel deceived last time.”

Harvey didn’t respond, but he did go.

The president served stuffed olives and hard alcohol.  He smoked ribs and Harvey could smell them as he walked up the driveway.  Inside, everything sparkled and the air was filled with Pledge, PineSol, apples and cinnamon.  Harvey stood around, drinking from the rum and coke he’d been poured, and listened to everyone complain.  Eventually he made his way onto the back patio where the meat had curled into hard, dark slabs.  The president was alone out there.

“I’m glad you came,” he said. 

“Thanks for having us.”

“I feel like it calms them down.”

“The olives are good.”

The president smiled.  “You can thank Trader Joe’s, then.  I just paid for them.”

“An important step.”

The gathering passed into evening.  More people arrived, and most of them got drunk.  They stumbled away after filling their bellies with the ribs, which were tender and spicy.  Paper plates were scattered across the kitchen island.  Harvey started stacking them, pulling plastic forks and shredded napkins into their own heaps.

“No need,” the president said. 

“Just trying to help,” Harvey said.

“Oh, you did,” the president said.  He was rinsing off a pair of tongs.  He turned from the sink.  “Just by being here.”

Harvey felt like he’d swallowed a jawbreaker, a hard ball of steel hanging in his throat.

***

“People here have theories too,” Lawrence said.  He’d called late, nearly eleven.  Harvey’s eyes were heavy.  He could still feel the pulse of rum in his limbs.

“I bet they do.”

“Do you want to hear the wildest?”

“Do I?”

“One woman said to me, ‘Maybe heaven is kicking out its dead.’  How lame is that?”

“We don’t really have any answers.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“You should come out here.  Just for, like, a week.”

“I’m really busy,” Harvey said.

“Doing what?”

That night, Harvey dreamt he stood in heaven on its pillows of cumulus.  He could see the blue-and-brown marbled earth.  God stood next to him, heaving bodies toward the continental US.  Harvey watched them break apart upon entry into the atmosphere, blood and bone and viscera spreading in an atomized cloud.  He woke sweaty.  He wiped his brow and squinted in the dark to make sure he wasn’t oozing blood.

***

Phalanges were little piano tinkles on skylights.  Latissimus dorsi muscles flailed down like fallen stingrays.  Harvey sent the HOA president a picture.  He responded with a landscape of his back yard covered in mammary glands.

The crowds had thinned, whether out of impatience, an overload of grotesquery, or something else, Harvey wasn’t sure.  Scientists still milled about, ready to collect fresh samples, but most of them had packed up, trundling off to labs to study the body parts.  Harvey had no idea what conclusions they might draw.  Reporters had stopped coming around, realizing the story wasn’t developing into anything of new interest aside from the question of the day: what would fall next?

“Things are feeling quieter,” Harvey said to Lawrence.

“You sure you’re not just acclimating?”

“I know my own experience.”

The president called, and Harvey answered, his mouth sticky before he even said hello.  Without any hesitation, the president invited Harvey to go for a beer.

“Somewhere that we won’t have to worry about falling body parts.”

“I could do that,” Harvey said.  

They sat on the patio at what the president called his favorite bar.  Their table, wrought iron, was shaded by an umbrella advertising Michelob Ultra.  The president ordered them a pitcher of his favorite pale ale.  They squeezed orange slices into their pint glasses. 

“I think it’s going to stop soon,” the president said.

“You do?”

“I’ve been keeping track.”  He told Harvey how he’d printed off lists of the various human body systems.  “Did you know we have eleven of them?”  He listed them off.  “We mostly only think about the musculoskeletal, because it’s what we can see the most.”  The president flexed his bicep, which bulged beneath the roll of his sleeve.  He laughed at himself and drank.  They fell into a long silence.

“You like it here?” the president said finally.

“I grew up in the suburbs.  Chicago.”

“So it’s all familiar.”

“I stayed there for school.” Harvey almost started in on his entire story, how he and Lawrence met at Northwestern, Harvey graduating with a degree in English not because he wanted to write but because he loved nothing as much as he loved reading books.  How he’d followed Lawrence, who had been accepted into the Brown School of Public Health and was now doing a stint out in California.  How Harvey loved the job he had at a cozy bookstore, not just selling novels but working the books—he’d minored in accounting, for no reason other than the pride he took in his math skills.  But the president didn’t ask, so Harvey didn’t share.

“This is nice,” the president said.  He waved his hands toward the parking lot and strip mall around them.  “No ears falling upon us.”

“It’s weird how easy it is to talk about it.”

The president drank.  He smiled.  “Things happen that way sometimes.”

The air was tinged with that far-off smell of coming cold.  Harvey thought of wood fires and fallen leaves, even though the only sign of change were the first, briefest streaks of ochre in the trees.  He thought of winter festivals, light shows, walking along lit paths while holding a hot chocolate spiked with Rumplemintz, arm threaded through Lawrence’s pea coat.

“Do you think we’ll ever go back to normal?” he said.

“I don’t care for normal.”  The president refilled his beer, asked Harvey if they should order another pitcher.  When Harvey nodded, the president said, “Normal is boring.  I like things that are different.”

“So this is all okay for you then.”

The president shrugged.  “What is okay?  Okay can become good or bad quick, you know?”

Harvey blinked and looked toward the sky, his gaze so intense the president twisted to look, too, but there was nothing to see.

***

“They’re offering me another year,” Lawrence said.

“Already?”

“Should I take it?”

“How can I be the one to answer that?”

Harvey had taken to pacing the house when they talked on the phone.  He glanced outside.  The house across the street was empty.  Ulnar bones had slashed through the trees in the night.

“I want to know what you think.”

Harvey was thinking about his body, his self.  After they’d finished their second pitcher, the president drove them home, stopping outside Harvey’s house, his F-150 growling as it idled on the curb.  Before Harvey got out, the president touched his hand.  Harvey thought they might kiss, but instead the president said, “Let’s do this again.  It’s nice to get out.”

“Yeah,” Harvey had said.  “It is.”

How, Harvey thought, would anything seem whole again when he’d been subjected to the show of so many disparate parts?  At night, he trembled as he imagined the fallen hearts and hands and eyes.  The lightest whuff of noise jolted him, sent him rushing to a window to check for cheekbones bashing at the glass. 

Lawrence sighed.  “Please,” he said, voice strained like a bowstring.  “Just tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t know what I think.  I think you have to choose.”

“Will you come be with me?”

“What about the house?”

“I have an apartment.  There’s plenty of room.”

“We have a lot here.”

“There’s a lot worth getting away from.”

Harvey sucked in a breath.  “I think it might be ending.”

“How can you know that?”

Harvey’s still-living heart fluttered, capillaries squeezing blood to the surface.  He shut his still-living eyes.  His still-living hands were clenched, his calves tight. 

“Sometimes,” Harvey said, “I think you just know.”

Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Electric Literature, Electric Spec, On Spec, Barrelhouse, Zone 3, Hawai’i Review, Eleven Eleven, and many others. He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and was nominated for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2016 and was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.