Hollie Warren
When my daughter was still inside me, the doctors said: your heart is leaking. So that’s why. I had suspected it for years, my tachycardia, breathlessness, feeling hot when it wasn’t hot at all. No one had listened.
They opened me down the middle to fix what she had revealed.
She is still small enough to touch without asking. Her fingers find the scar while she talks about something else. A bird she saw. A colour she wants her room to be. Her hand moves along the ridge of me like she is reading.
I don’t stop her.
Before she could talk, before she could even point properly, she used to pat the place on my chest where the bone splits. Not my collarbone, not my shoulder. Always there, as if she had been given a map.
Now she traces it slowly, thoughtful.
Sometimes she presses her ear to my chest as if listening for something she once heard from the other side. I wonder if she recognises what she hears. She knew this heart before it was fixed.
Once, while she was colouring at the kitchen table, she asked without looking up, “Did they open you like a coat?”
I asked her where she heard that.
She shrugged and kept colouring.
And I think—this is the part I cannot say to her yet—she knows that she is why I am here. Not because she broke me. Because she arrived, and in arriving, told me I was breaking, and in telling me, saved me.
At night when she is asleep I put my own hand there. The ridge of it—silvered, thick. Proof.
She made me seam-worthy.
She signed her name in the place only she knows how to read.
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Hollie Warren writes literary and speculative fiction. Her work explores myth, memory, and the strange edges of ordinary life. She lives in the UK. “The Seam” is among her recent short stories. You can find and tag her on Instagram at @holliewarrenwriter.