That night she woke to find another oddity: during sleep her heart had split or twinned itself, and where one muscle pumped before, now beat two. Her blood coursed through her veins twice as fast as before, and over those paths her skin buzzed and stammered, like wire strung tautly between two poles and charged with load. As if she’d run for miles across rolling hills, as if inside her chest two fists beat time all day, beneath the bone she sped at death in the most alive way. The day crawled while her two hearts raced. Above the fire she set a series of clocks to ticking. She watched the flames, sometimes leaning close enough to feel the heat singe her stitches a deeper shade, their fibers scorching until they curled, like dark froth spilling from her mouth. But when her hearts began to flicker more, and faster than she could stand, she turned her eyes to the clocks’ marked faces and drew comfort from the second hands’ neurotic twitch. Every minute witnessed meant another minute lived. Beneath her breastbone her strange second heart pulsed harder. She sensed the muscle, like her tongue, would leap and fly away from her body if her body let it go. She took the silver-handled knife and incised a cross above the cavity where her hearts ballooned together, jostling for room and dominance. The flaps of skin, pale as egg shell, trembled slightly. A head appeared. A bird with obsidian eyes emerged wet with her blood, shook to shed its burden, and leapt toward the rafters above. She watched the bird and felt air seep into the space it left behind, her single heart unrivaled but lonely in its great room. The wound bled slowly, healing fast to a pale silver scar, flaps falling back to close neatly over the bone, which laid itself again like lines of track or scaffolding across her chest. The bird flew to the window’s sill, and ticked its head to look back at the woman. A slight breeze, cool and calm, caressed its dark wings, and it leapt for the steady branch of that arm