Kill Marguerite and Other Stories by Megan Milks Read Free Book Online

favorite topics were gentrification, environmental racism, urban art, and tomatoes. I love tomatoes. Since the day we met so gloriously amidst the tomato vines at the farm, we had been back to Mama Mia’s twenty times at least, enough for Guillermo and Estelle to know us and give us dessert on the house from time to time, usually when we were arguing, which naturally became more frequent as time wore on.
    He took me back to Mama Mia’s to propose. Not marriage, but a partnership. A committed partnership. Guillermo brought out our salads, and Paul brought up that first date, that moment when we had gazed at each other with forks mid-air and plinked tomato slices into our mouths simultaneously. He claimed to have known right then, right there, that we would make it. We would commit to one another, grow old together. Darling, he said, will you be my life partner?
    I looked down at my salad. He had jumped the gun a little, I thought. I didn’t want to think of such things; I wanted to plink a tomato slice into my mouth and savor its garden flesh. But looking at him looking at me like that, my heart surprised me, thumping like it wanted out, like it wanted to jump right out of my chest and nestle inside his. Our hearts would grow old together. We were in love.
    So I looked up and said, yes, darling, yes, I will. Paul let out a huge breath and reached for my hand. We clutched each other’s hands and smiled, our eyes glistening, then kissed each other lightly over the table. I was glad then that I hadn’t started in on the Male Answer Syndrome baiting, a game I’d picked up from one of our femarchist friends and grown fond of over the course of our relationship. Paul might have reneged, which, by the way, should be pronounced with a soft ‘g’ because it sounds better and more appropriate that way. Paul always rejected my pronunciation-as-use theories of language. I have to get them in when he’s not listening.
    That night we had a long bout of polite sex and then we went to sleep. When I woke up, it was early morning, and my chest was rattling noisily. Something felt wrong inside me. I was numb on one side, and my chest wasswelling visibly, as though my rib cage was expanding. I must be having a heart attack, I thought. Exciting, and highly unusual for a woman my age—but I have always been special. Then I started coughing uncontrollably, so hard I feared I’d hurl up my esophagus. That was when Paul woke up, alarmed, and started whacking me on the back, saying are you all right, darling, are you all right, and, should I call the hospital, darling, I’m calling the hospital. He made for the phone. I batted his arm away.
    By that point, the skin between my breasts had begun itching uncontrollably, and I couldn’t help but scratch. I scratched and scratched, digging deep with my fingernails until, abruptly, I tore through my skin—it wasn’t painful so much as relieving. As I peeled my skin back, groaning, I felt something push at my rib cage from within. I thought, my god, I must have a tumor between my breasts, now a heart attack is one thing but cancer is just not allowed. And that’s when it happened; I don’t know how. My heart burst out of my chest. It popped through its arterial fence, it surged through my lungs and my rib cage, and ejected itself through various nervous tissues and muscle fibers with a final rip through the hole I had made in my skin. There it stopped, my heart, still attached to its arteries and veins, but exposed and sagging between my breasts like some kind of unwieldy necklace. Chestlace? If you will.
    Because Paul has fucking weird dreams, naturally he assumed this was one and promptly went back to sleep. After a moment, so did I. When I woke up, the problem had not remedied itself. My chest bore a small open wound, from whence my heart dangled, snug between my mammary glands. I was more fascinated than alarmed—fascinated because my