006/100 aka 146/365

BERNINA, THE BIG-HEARTED WOMAN
Word Count: 479

By the time she was eleven, Bernina’s heart was too big for her chest. It came down to this: a surgeon slit her wide open and fashioned a sac out of skin that would stretch and grow along with her. In it her heart beat unrestricted. People would marvel at its quickening pulse, its exuberant pounding that made all the more obvious her loving  nature.

She had been an amazingly easy baby, sleeping right through the night from the first day they brought her home. She never cried unless she was sick and she happily lay in a wet diaper until somebody noticed. It’s not that she was apathetic or listless; she simply didn’t complain.

From that gentle nature she grew into a child who gave her toys to those who had none. If cold, she gave them her coat, her mittens and boots. If hungry, her last chocolate chip cookie. Bernina had a great circle of friends and people who loved her. She grew into a special if not particularly pretty young woman. If her heart was beautiful, her physical beauty had been absorbed into her soul through the pores in her skin.

Bernina was thirty years old and she’d freely given without thought but for the first time in her life, she felt the first rumbles of wanting. It was as if the hole in her chest where her heart had once been had become a vessel of winds that stirred and grumbled and without substance, still managed to group themselves into a voice.

This voice grew louder with each passing year. Now, alone in her bed, Bernina listened and her fingers crept down past the pulsing sac of her heart, over the smooth round hill of her belly, down into the valley from whence the voice had emerged and they danced.

Bernina had never known such pleasure, other than the great spoonfuls of chicken-soup contentment she took back in the giving. Yet in the aftermath, realizing her aloneness even more, she cried.

Her normally rose-petaled glow slipped away. The dew in her eyes crusted. Her friends noticed. Even strangers who’d never been blessed with her spirit knew something was wrong. One of those was Gerard.

“Hi,” he said. His smile was a slice of melon.

Bernina smiled back. She saw herself, telescoped tiny and whole in the black centers of his eyes. He offered her coffee and she let him pay. But a donut was more than she could bring herself to accept. They talked for most of the evening. They talked as he walked her home. She listened. He listened. Then they both talked some more.

In bed, Gerard kissed her like she’d imagined a kiss would be. He was a slow and attentive lover but what woke Bernina to love, opened her up completely, was the soft way he stroked her heart.