Where Is My Heart?

I’d always accepted myself as being broken.

I never thought of myself as anything other than the faulty product of a society that didn’t like how I expressed myself.
But there was at least one person that believed in me, though I never really saw the point in it. My buddy Alex was, to say, a kindred soul. I could’ve sworn he’s been my friend since we were infants, even though we met in third grade. And he hasn’t changed since. We’ve both been unable to really fit in with anyone, so that’s how we bonded.

We met in the corner of a large empty field of our public school’s dedicated recess area. Alex spotted that I was reading a book about ghosts, and that just so happened to be his niche. He sat with me in my secluded corner of the playground and talked with me about spirits and paranormal happenstance for hours. Accumulatively, of course, there wasn’t much time at recess.
We weren’t in the same class at first, when he transferred in from some more expensive town up north. We rarely could spend time with each other after school thanks to our conflicting extracurriculars. But I remember, clear as day, that Alex suddenly had time one day to go with me to my after school photography class. I found out later that he had quit the club he was in to join me, and said he liked photography better anyways. We were essentially besties after that. Like a sun peeking over the horizon, this little redhead lit up my life since the moment he showed up. Of course, he’s not so little anymore, so I can’t say that. He’s actually… Significantly taller than me. Everyone is now.

I miss those days in third grade in a way. I was so optimistic, so happy. It was like there was nothing wrong in the world. But of course, I aged, and time grew crueler on me each day. I had my share of crises and depressions. I just hope that I’ve finally latched onto something stable now.

At least this stubborn ginger has never left my side, unlike many others.

Speak of the devil. I heard a shrill squeal from down the hallway just as the bell rung, the ending toll for the school day. That could only be him. I suppressed a fond chuckle, he must’ve heard of something interesting earlier in the day. And so sounded frantic footsteps down the hall as he rushed to my class, clambering through the door and running into someone, who he quickly apologized to before running directly to my desk. The light in his eyes was apparent with obvious ambition as he exclaimed, “Ghost! I did it! I found a real one!”

My expression quickly fell, “A real… what?”

To both my pleasure and not, my desk rattled as Alex firmly planted his hands on it, mustering up the most dramatic tone he could, "A real paranormal occurrence! Come on, Ghost- We gotta get there before it's gone!"

Oh, it was just another one of these. Things that Alex would hear about during the day and find to be just rumor later on. It often led to energy wasted and a comforting session, but I never minded it. Why would I kill his passion just because mine was already dead?
Before I could even push myself up from my desk, I heard a grating, familiar voice on my ears, eliciting a tenseness in my jaw.

“You guys going somewhere, huh?”

I turned to find a tan girl with dark hair and dusty pink highlights standing in the doorframe. A bubblegum pink bag with cat ears was slung across her shoulder, and one of her hands loosely held the strap. “I’m gonna come with you guys.”

My brows furrowed in frustration. Why, if it wasn’t Kitty Torres. I flung my bag over my back, my voice straining as I corrected, “No, you’re not. Come on, Alex, we’re leaving”

Alex glanced between the both of us nervously, his mouth reluctantly opening to speak, though the words were delayed by a few seconds, “Um, actually, maybe Kitty could come along this time…?”

I looked at Alex incredulously, putting effort into my expression to make sure I was indeed looking at him as if he had two heads.

In nervous response, he put on a slightly strained smile, “Well, if it’s just the two of us that see it, it’ll be less believable to everyone else, right?”

Kitty looked all-too pleased by this for my liking.

Why did he always have to do this? I knew that Alex always ended up as the intermediary for conflicts, but when he knew about why my conflict with Kitty persisted, he should have just shooed her away as I did. Unfortunately, I also had to face the fact that Alex could never help being kind, even to the cruelest people we could ever meet. Both a blessing, and a curse, as I thought of it.

Sighing, I scooped up my backpack and threw it over my shoulder, the metal chains hanging from it clinking against each other loudly, “Whatever, just don’t be a nuisance. Stay out of the way.”

“Okay!” Kitty retorted, with a tone too smug and a smile too suspicious for my taste.

Whatever, let’s just get this over with, so that Alex and I can just get home and play a videogame or something. I proceeded to ignore Kitty’s presence as Alex joyously took my hand to guide me, like a golden retriever proudly showing it’s owner what it had found.

We walked from out of the school, going down the sidewalk we’d usually take to head towards our houses, but then we took a sudden turn before the block mine was on. We ended up twisting and turning around houses, crossing several crosswalks, and sometimes even heading back in the direction where we came for a block before making another sudden turn away. I could swear we could’ve reached downtown at this point. At least we’d be close enough to grab some good ice cream from the parlor.

For a moment, I was convinced that Alex was just trying to shake off Kitty, but both from the focused look on his face, and the way he stopped to let Kitty catch up, I knew he wasn’t. So then, I asked, “Alex?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Of course I do!”

Well that was a surprise, I should’ve guessed.

Alex grinned, “I’m just taking the exact path I did towards it yesterday!”

“You’re so ADHD.”

“I know.” Alex grinned mischievously.

It did take a while, but eventually we came across an oddly empty lot on the bridge neighborhood from downtown. Usually the roads were busy around this part, but it was completely empty, and silent except for the two of us. This was unnerving, particularly for Kitty it seemed. She anxiously glanced around, as if she expected a threat to come right around the corner, and so I waited until her gaze landed on me.

I offered up my best smug-combination-creepy grin, as revenge, before turning towards the empty lot again. I could feel the frustration radiating off of Kitty in her fearful silence.

At least, it wasn’t completely empty. Among the patchy grass and scattered stones, there laid a lone, white, porcelain birdbath; complete with a dainty sculpture of a swan in the middle, perfectly shaped to look like it floated atop the surface of the water in it.

Alex had already let go of my hand to take a closer look. He unlatched his iconic radio receiver, renamed “spirit communication device” from his pants, and held out the antenna towards the porcelain structure.

“Look at this, guys!”

Alex switched on the device. It was hard to tell if anything was going on at all at first, but the device began slowly warbling, like two tones just out of pitch from each other, one frequency raising and falling like a siren in the distance. But as he kept holding it to the birdbath, the pitch kept oscillating faster, and faster, until it made a loud, screeching sound like loudspeakers making audio feedback, and the radio shook in Alex’s hand. Thankfully, he chose that moment to turn it off, quickly sparing our ears from the nightmare.

This filled me with a sense of unease.

“Oops- I forgot that happened too. Ow…” Alex mumbled to himself.

Concerned, my voice subtly trembled, “Alex… Are you sure this thing isn’t like… Radioactive? Like uranium pottery? It could be tearing apart our atoms by now…” Kitty, behind us, seemed to jump at the thought.

Alex immediately gained a look of disappointment, his eyes pleading, “What? No! My radio isn’t a geiger counter! This is really a paranormal occurrence!”

So it wasn’t radioactive, but it still filled me with a sense of dread whenever I looked into the porcelain swan’s eyes. Something just wasn’t right about it. I had half a mind to actually believe Alex for the first time that… He’d actually found something paranormal.

Then, I caught Kitty in the corner of my eye, looking terrified.

“No… No, no, no,” She whimpered, “I-I wanna go home, this isn’t fun anymore. I shouldn’t have gone with you creeps in the first place.”

I almost felt bad for her, but then I steeled myself. When had she ever felt bad for me? Why should I bother to comfort her? 

“Really? Good luck getting home alone,” I began to agitate, “This area seems unnatural, like the path Alex took was the only way in and out. Are you sure you remember it?”

Kitty sputtered defensively, “I- Yes! Of course I do! I-...” She looked around, finding herself confused, like the surroundings had suddenly changed the moment she stopped paying attention to it. “Where did…”

And it seems it… actually did change. A house I could have sworn was blue and had a visible backyard, was now yellow with a dark, wooden, tall fence. I meant it as a bluff, just to creep her out, but…

Alex spoke up, “Ghost, don’t be mean… I can take her back and then we can look into the fountain together. Okay?”

Alex was great at consoling, but my temper often outweighed it was I was annoyed. My eyebrows raised triumphantly, “No. I want to see her commit to this. She came with us, she’s stuck with us, now.”

Kitty looked warily between us fearfully, as if me and Alex arguing was somehow scarier than the whole radio thing. But then she put up her defensive act, “I-I… You know what, fine! I’ll stay as long as we go home, immediately after Alex is done here!”

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

Alex groaned, “You two are hopeless…”

Then I felt a prick of guilt, our arguing was totally ruining what Alex was so proud of finding, “Okay, I’ll stop…”

Alex seemed to feel better with that, as proved by the small grin he’d regained. He turned towards the fountain, “Now, as all science is conducted, we have to put together a hypothesis, and then test it!”

He tapped his finger on his lips thoughtfully, “My hypothesis is… That if we let my radio continue giving feedback, it’ll do… something.”

“Very specific.” I commented snarkily.

Alex defended himself playfully, “Well what else am I supposed to guess? Paranormal stuff tends to be pretty unpredictable, you know!”

“Yes, yes.” I admitted. I stared at the porcelain structure, stepping up close to it to get a better look, eventually resting my hands on the edge of the basin as I looked into my transparent reflection in the water. Reflected back was my face, pale with dark eyes, and dark hair with white frosted tips. “Well, come on, guys. We’re here, we might as well test it out.” I mumbled, contemplatively.

Kitty stepped up beside me reluctantly, squinting her eyes in distaste before also turning her eyes towards the water.

Alex approached on the other side of me and switched on his radio and re-clipped it on his belt loop, letting it begin to ring out. Preemptively we all plugged our ears before the feedback came. The screeching managed to penetrate our makeshift ear defenses, but it was fine compared to earlier.

Now it wasn’t just the radio that seemed to shake, however. Ripples in the water radiated out from the center, as the ground beneath them almost shook us off our balance. I looked up to Alex fearfully, and he met my eye contact, but we knew at this point it was too late to do anything now, so I unplugged my ears to desperately hug him, surely deafening myself. But if I didn’t, I would regret it forever.

Unfortunately, Kitty seemed to follow in my footsteps, tearfully grabbing onto my jacket with all her strength.

That was when the radio broke, along with the porcelain birdbath.

I saw a bright flash of light, emanating from both of the shattered objects, and I shut my eyes as tightly as I could so I wasn’t blinded as well.

This experience was surreal, and painful. If anyone ever tells you that interdimensional travel isn’t painful, they’re lying. It feels like pins and needles in your skin, and like you’re being dissected, and bisected, and any other -sected-s you can think of. It must have been our molecules pulling apart for the trip, because there’s no way a being could move that fast and that far without being pulled apart at the seams. Oh right, I forgot to mention, this whole thing apparently acted as a portal to another world. No wonder the vibes there were so off, right?

Anyways, I was convinced I was finally dead.

Convinced that the birdbath was actually radioactive and whatever Alex did with the receiver detonated it and caused it to become a nuclear bomb and detonate. And all this feeling was the radioactivity pulling apart our atoms and reducing us to useless piles of unrecognizable human remains.

But that was not the case.

Soon after, I felt a sinking sensation in the stomach I swore I didn’t have anymore, and I fell onto a hard surface. 

“Ow-! What the…”

When I opened my eyes, spots danced in them for a while as I looked up at the brand new ceiling above me; wooden, and creaky. Eventually the spots cleared and I was left to look to my sides, where Kitty and Alex laid, sprawled out on the floor just as I was.

I couldn’t hear it, because the ringing persisting in my ears deafened me at the time, but I could see it. A somewhat short guy with a weird look rushed into the room, and upon seeing us, covered his… beak, with his talons…? I saw the beak move, but I only was told what he said by Alex later, because he could actually hear it.

“Oh my god, I thought it’d never work…”