Stolen Heart

It was not in Christian’s nature to pray. He didn’t believe in it. He didn’t think it was anything but a whining plea to God, the fussy mewling of children unable to deal with the unswerving harshness of reality. It made him angry when people claimed to have had their prayers answered. When his family spoke of the healing power of prayer, it made him wonder why so many people who had just as many prayers muttered on their behalf still succumbed to cancer, or AIDS, or sepsis or influenza. He thought it seemed awfully arrogant that any one person would truly think their trivial concerns were getting through on God’s hotline. So he refrained from it, mostly. Every now and then, though, a prayer would escape his lips.

The last time that it happened, Christian was in a church, of all places, which was already quite a departure from his normal routine. He was there for a wedding, unsure of why he had been invited and even more unsure of why he was attending. The bride was an acquaintance, a friend of a friend’s, and he barely knew her at all. What’s more, he didn’t much care for the icy girl or the mousy little engineer she was going to marry and certainly subjugate. They weren’t horrible people or anything. He just didn’t care for their casual haughtiness or the way they disdainfully called waiters and waitresses by their first names. He didn’t like that, underneath a faux-liberal exterior of leftist politics, they were really just money-hungry borderline racists. He didn’t like that the groom cheated at Scrabble by playing proper nouns and then throwing a virtual temper tantrum until his opponent just gave him his points. As Christian sat in the church, listening to the excruciating self-penned vows, he realized, in fact, that he didn’t care for the couple very much at all. Given the sparse population of friends and family seated in the chapel, he assumed he was not alone in this verdict. It also probably explained why he had been invited at all.

Although Christian was hesitant to admit it, he knew that he had only come to the wedding in the hopes of meeting a girl. He felt silly about it, and understandably desperate, but it didn’t stop him from searching the small church for any signs of a single young woman. Clutches of older, or attached (or both) ladies dotted the pews. Haggard aunts of the bride seated with their husbands flanked pretty young cousins of the groom who had their heads on the shoulders of disinterested boyfriends. It was not a promising arena. The annoyance of it was twofold. Lonely Christian was not only shut out of potentially dating any of the girls at the ceremony, he was also subject to their fawning displays of lovey-doviness as the preacher read from the “Song of Solomon,” and then launched into a long sermon about the various glories of being in love. As Christian sat, thumbing through a hymnal and wishing he had just stayed at home, he looked up and noticed just how beautiful the stained glass windows of the sanctuary were.

The one closest to him, in fact, was especially gorgeous, although it seemed to be in no way related to church. He stared at the window, antique and ridiculously lovely and practically bursting with mosaic filtered sunlight. There was a woman pictured in the glass, and she was absolutely stunning. She had the look of an art nouveau advert girl with a serenely beautiful face and skin so milky white that it rivaled moonlight. Her hair was dark blonde and soft, and her eyes were nearly glowing with emerald illumination. She looked proud and strong and noble as she arched her back regally, her lovely curves accentuated by a clinging white and gold gown. Around her head, a golden halo fired its rays into the brilliant cloud-dotted azure skyscape behind her, while a lush garden of rich pink and purple flowers sprung up like fireworks around her feet. She was alluring and mystical, a creation of flawless artistry that seemed strangely out of place amidst windows depicting lambs and anchors and tablets of commandments. Christian was suddenly mesmerized, taken aback by her, and he found himself muttering, “God, I wish I could meet a girl like that.” He had said it quietly, but aloud, and the moment the words spilled out, her swung his head frantically, checking to see if he’d been heard to determine whether or not he should be mortified with embarrassment. If anyone nearby had overheard his accidental prayer, they weren’t snickering about it, so he went back to gawking at the woman in the window.

She looked different, somehow, now, as if she had moved. He couldn’t remember her exact position prior, but her eyes seemed lower now, more like they were looking at him. His face flushed and he felt extremely stupid. Infatuation was one thing, but he decided he should really reserve his unrequited love for breathing human beings and not exquisitely rendered works of art. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, and as he scanned her, he felt as if she was, almost imperceptibly, moving. He decided it must be a trick of the light, maybe an illusion created by the motion of real clouds outside. But it was hard to deny that she looked different moment to moment. Her eyes seemed to be following his, and her pale pink lips, emotionless and cool to begin with, seemed to be loosening into a very pretty smile. She was moving. She was moving and she was looking at him. And Christian unconsciously began to inch away from the window, toward the center of the church, staring intently as the woman in the glass as she very obviously stared back at him. He wanted to scream or to yell, but he was certain what he was seeing wasn’t real, so he kept his mounting fear to himself. If anyone else was seeing what he was seeing, they didn’t seem to think it was odd. Not a single person in the church seemed even slightly perturbed that this gorgeous, unreal girl was crawling out of the glass and carefully stepping down from the window’s sill to the green carpet of the sanctuary.

Christian didn’t think his eyes could physically open any wider and he had crowded all the way to the church’s center aisle as the woman from the window, still as luscious and as fabricated as a painting, calmly walked toward him and sat down at his side. His skin was a topographic map of goose bumps and shivers and she gently wrapped her cold, crystalline fingers around his. She smiled, her expression stalled out somewhere between sweet and sinister, and kissed him on his cheek. He felt science fair explosions go off in his stomach and his brain just sparked and reeled from the sheer improbability of what was happening. He assumed he had lost his mind, but as her drawn glass form began to soften into real flesh and blood, as her crystalline fingers became warm digits of skin and bone, he no longer cared. She was incredible. He could just tell. It was as if he’d known her in a dream or in another life or from some long forgotten childhood event. He was melting in her presence, his rationality snapped in half by a lightning bolt of suddenly falling madly and dizzyingly in love. If he had been thinking logically about any of it, he would have found it absurd and wholly unacceptable. As it was, his heart was twittering and every one of his nerve endings seemed to be lit up like a white hot sparkler.

“My name is Simone,” the girl cooed in his ear. Even her breath was sweet, like honey and lilac, and her voiced slithered into his brain and then fizzled into something effervescent and tickling. Christian couldn’t stop smiling. Any attempts at putting the situation into reasonable terms were thwarted by a mad sort of love-sickness that had entirely overpowered him. He felt as if his prayers, his trivial prayers to alleviate loneliness, were somehow being granted. There was a ballooning gratitude in his heart as she nuzzled her perfect head on his shoulder and he ran his fingers through her soft, sienna hair. Spiralbound trills of birdsongs and liquefied melodies slid down the bones in his spine and he shuddered from something he assumed was the genesis of boundless contentment. The world around him had gone fuzzy and indistinct, but that didn’t matter.

And although she’d said no more than four words to him, Christian knew Simone was everything he had ever been looking for. Her green eyes just sparkled with intellect and wit and inquisitiveness. Her voice was a summer-drenched purr of slow burning charm and molasses calm guile. She held herself with the proud rigidity of a queen, with the sparkling detachment of self-awareness and the soft-eyed look of rare and precious compassion. Christian could tell. She unlocked her hand from his and ran her fingernails along the back of his neck. He responded with the eyes-shut muted elation of a scratched pet cat. As she touched him, she spoke again. “You and I, my dear, are so very much alike. I wonder how long ago it was that I was seated here, like you, wallowing in the self-pity of being alone? I was so sad, then, so unhappy with my solitary lot. I would spend my time praying, like you, just praying for some salvation from this isolation. And then he came… he came and he stole my heart.”

Christian opened his eyes, then, with a vague fear suddenly rumbling through him. It was instinctive paranoia, and absolutely correct. Simone’s nails, as she finished her sentence, dug into Christian’s flesh hard. He felt a jolt of pain and flinched forward, trying to free himself of her talon grip. It was only a moment before tiny droplets of blood beaded up from the wound and ran in warm streaks down his collar.

Simone’s smile was wild, now. Her eyes were flaring with opportunity. “Up there, he was… another victim, I suppose, of his solitude. He called out to me while I bemoaned my fate… Oh, it was such a ridiculous prayer. I remember it so well. I remember begging for him, begging for rescue… from this sad situation. From the company of myself. I just begged. And it was like a miracle when it happened… like it was for you, just now. I saw him slowly descend from that beautiful perch, and he was a miracle. I was… I fell in love with him, on the spot. He was everything I’d ever wanted. And he stole my heart.” Simone grabbed Christian’s wrists, stronger than he could have imagined. She licked her pale lips and looked at Christian with a terrifying lust. “He stole it right through my chest.” She moved Christian’s hand toward the neckline of her gown, and with his flailing fingers, she pushed it down just a bit, straight under her left clavicle and showed Christian the shattered glass hole just above her breast. It was a surreal vision, as if a window of her skin had been pierced with a hurled rock. A spider web network of cracks and fissures radiated out from a hollow black void, marring her perfect white skin with a frighteningly incongruous wound. “You felt me do it to you, didn’t you? Did you feel yourself fall? Did you feel yourself surrender to me? You poor lonely soul. You poor, praying fool.”

Christian felt a horrible sense of panic and nausea wash over him. He was scrambling, trying to free himself from her tightening and increasingly painful grip. Her green eyes were narrowing with malevolence. Her figure was somehow more serpentine, suddenly, a living weapon of arching grace. She was still beautiful, but she was also dangerous and terrifying. “Now, sweet boy, I’ll steal your heart, too.” And with that, she lunged at his chest with her mouth, ripping open his shirt while he bleated in fear. Then, with an unrelenting fury, she smashed open the suddenly glassy form of his skin with her bared teeth. The pain that Christian felt was unbearable. Time froze as he focused on the agony. His whole being was stark white with hurt… his nerves jumped like downed wires while Simone rooted in the hollowed cavity of his chest and ripped out a pumping, blood red mosaic of foggy glass. And as she released him from the bond of his own heart, Christian felt an amazing release. He was free of any need for friendship, for companionship, for love. She had torn it asunder, leaving him broken and unbound. Christian stared at the gaping, shattered window hole in his chest. He looked aloof and remarkably unconcerned.

Simone looked at him, smiling with pride, bits of jagged red glass stuck to her lips and cheeks. “You poor lonely soul,” she repeated.

Christian felt nothing, then, for her. The unbridled lust, the desire, the head-over-heels madness of his brief love was extinguished, replaced with a calm void of presence. He felt at peace. He was unjangled, unexcited and pleasantly cold. And he tried to thank her, but she wasn’t really there anymore, if she ever had been at all. He was, he discovered, alone in his pew, still inundated with the long sermon about the power of union. Christian smiled, no longer bothered by the displays of affection and his utter lack of it. Instead, he was content to smirk, inwardly, at the stupidity of it. He didn’t need his heart. Simone had stolen it, and he was no worse for the wear. He persevered through the remainder of the ceremony, congratulated the unpleasant couple and went about on his merry way.

He never even noticed the resemblance that the figure in the window now bore to him.