The Two Denvers by Rebecca Starks
Rebecca Starks’s “The Two Denvers” is one of three winners of the CRAFT 2023 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Kathy Fish.
Absolutely brilliant. It is one thing to devise a clever premise and see it through to a satisfying finish, but this story goes well beyond clever, as I very much hoped it would. Told from an audacious, risk-taking, collective point of view, this story examines love and the meaning of existence. The grotesque aspects of this strange tale serve only to heighten its beauty and emotional resonance. The image of the two Denvers’ hearts, connected, will haunt me forever, as will the moment when the aspiring surgeon and the aspiring anesthesiologist finally uncover “the part that would make them most uncomfortable.” —Kathy Fish
The first thing they had to do was name us, as if we were rescues or strays. As if they would need a way to gossip about us, to get our attention. We mostly did not like our new names. Most of us were undeniably old, now, and were given old-fashioned names. Our hair had been shaved off, and we were naked, so some of us were given convict or sex worker names. Bruno. Frank. Gladys. Angel. Some of us liked our names. Two of us were named the same thing: Denver. One after the singer, the other after the mile-high city. We all liked that singer. We thought of him when we drove on country roads. Some of us had been to that city. The air was thin. The traffic was bad. We got headaches from the elevation. It was a place where people were not content to stay at home. We were content, now. We were only a little lightheaded and thirsty. Some of us chose to be here.
One of us was a science teacher. One was a physical therapist. One was a mail carrier. One had died by suicide. One of us thought he was Christ, his side pierced by a spear. One of us thought aliens had abducted her. When our sheets were pulled down off our faces, some of us worried about our weight, our wrinkles. None of us were very tall or heavy. When the tops of our heads were taken off, one of us thought, This is poetry. One of us understood life at last when a tumor was found inside his nasal cavity. One of us was missing a testicle. One of us had black lungs. One, a uterus as hard as a stone. Another, a bullet in his brain.
Some of us thought they would put us back together after they took us apart. Some of us thought they were looking for something they would never find. Sometimes they forgot we were there at all. Some say marry money, they said. Tom, Dick, very nervous Harry, they said. We said nothing. They no longer gagged on the stench of the mud in our intestines. They themselves smelled of garlic and meat and grass and smoke and sweat and blood, of perfume and shampoo, lotion and shaving cream, almond and coconut and vanilla, mint and lavender, sunscreen and coffee, soap and rubbing alcohol. We never got used to this ragout of smells.
Every day we felt lighter, emptier, thirstier. Every day we wondered if this would be the day they would do it: uncover the part of us that would make them the most uncomfortable. That would remind them we were once like them. We thought it when they touched us with thin-gloved hands: We were once like you.
One of the ones who named one of us Denver thought he was in love with the other Denver-namer. He had come back to his station one day and found the left eye dangling by its nerves out of one of our Denver sockets. His Denver looked so much like hers that she had begun to take apart the wrong one. That night, they visited us when no one else was there. They decided that the two of us Denvers were identical twins, one of us a bank teller and the other a truck driver. One had been donated, the other unclaimed. None of us were twins.
When they weighed the two of our Denver hearts, one was two grams lighter. They set the hearts back in the cavities of our Denver chests and used scissors and clamps to stretch the veins and arteries across to the other one’s table to meet in the air. Then they pressed down on one heart and pumped blood back and forth between them. When one of them reached to uncover the part that would make them most uncomfortable, the other took hold of her wrist. Across the steel table, their thumbs began exploring each of their fingers, mapping the lines of their palms. One of them wanted to be a surgeon, the other an anesthesiologist. I can’t tell anymore whose is whose, one of them said. We should wash them, the other said, then put everything back the way it was.
Some of them had nightmares. They dreamed they were like us. They were lighter, emptier, thirstier. They had black lungs and uteruses hard as stones. They dreamed that when they uncovered the part that would make them the most uncomfortable, what they had done to us we would do to them.
Two weeks in, they had to unwrap the black plastic from our hands. We had dreamed we had no hands. That they had borrowed ours. One of us was a painter who had painted disembodied hands that glowed from within. One of us was a defrocked priest who had crossed himself ten thousand times. They guessed one of us was a pianist from the arthritis at the base of her thumbs. None of us were doctors. One of us Denvers had noticed, as one of them was making an incision along the forearm, a tremor in his knife-hand.
Now they, too, began to dream of hands. Of their father’s hands tying their shoelaces. Of their mother’s hands clutching a wrench to open the pipes under the sink. Of lovers’ hands over their mouths. Of their own hands on a steering wheel. Our hands gripping theirs until they could feel our dead hearts beating in their hands.
REBECCA STARKS is the author of the poetry collections Fetch, Muse and Time Is Always Now, a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Epiphany, Slice, and elsewhere. A recipient of Rattle’s Neil Postman Award for Metaphor and of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, she grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and lives in Richmond, Vermont. Find her on Twitter @rebeccawstarks.
Featured image by Alexander Grey, courtesy of Unsplash.
