melissa ridley elmes

a sunbathing frog my heart’s gravestone

When I woke up this morning I discovered my heart had broken in the night. I must have slept wrong. It happens, as you age: you awaken randomly to a stiff neck, sore back, broken heart, no idea how it happened.

Operating on some instinct I’d been unaware of before that moment, I got out of bed and fetched an empty shoe box from the closet. I picked up the pieces of my heart and placed them in the box, careful not to cut my finger on their sharp edges. A broken heart is surprisingly stabby. It can really do damage once it’s out in the world on its own. You have to handle hearts with care whole or broken, but especially broken.

I carried the box into the backyard. The sun was warm on my face and shoulders as I
made my way to my little garden by the back fence. My bare feet squish-squelched in the cool, wet dirt; it had rained overnight, as though the universe knew I would need to dig into the earth today to bury my heart. I knelt on the muddy ground and used my hands to scrape three holes, all in a row. I buried a piece of my heart in each hole. I sat there a while, hands on my knees, letting the feeling of being newly heartless wash over me. I thought it would hurt more, that I would scream in agony, but I was very still and quiet inside.

When I’d grown accustomed to not feeling or hearing my heartbeat—which took far less time than you might imagine, how quickly we adapt to new conditions of being!—I stood, brushed the mud from my hands and knees as best I could, went back inside. I washed up, made a cup of tea, and stood by the window, looking at those three new mounds. The world seemed curious about them: birds landed nearby and cocked their heads, a squirrel came to sniff, and a little frog hopped over and took up sunbathing on the middle mound. I thought about how much my heart would have loved to know that a sunbathing frog comprised its gravestone.

All day, I found myself wanting to tell my heart such things, my observations and
thoughts and feelings about being newly heartless, and everything it was missing now that it was broken and buried. Loss works that way; you are always wanting to talk to those no longer around. Some people take to talking out loud to their lost hearts anyway, but I didn’t. It felt too one-sided and sad. The silence of the day, with not even a heartbeat for company, was oppressive rather than serene. I kept looking through the window every hour or so at those freshly dug mounds, waiting; for what, I didn’t know. I simply knew something had to come of it all, something had to grow out of those buried fragments of my heart, if only because the earth was rich, and the sun was warm, and a frog lay there, soaking it all in.

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About the author

Melissa Ridley Elmes is a Virginia native currently living in Missouri in an apartment that delightfully approximates a hobbit hole. Her  fiction and poetry have appeared in DarkWinter, Story in 100 Words,  Black Fox,  PoetrySouth, Haven, Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares and various other print and web venues. Her first collection of poems, Arthurian Things, was published by Dark Myth Publications in 2020, and her second poetry collection, Dreamscapes and Dark Corners, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2023. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Elgin, Rhysling, and Dwarf Star awards.