“She died of a broken heart”, the coroner had said.

The old women sucked their teeth and clucked to each other about young love when they heard the news. Each of her lovers worried quietly that he was the cause, and mulled over his last encounter with her over plastic cups of cheap whiskey, wondering where he had gone wrong. The family was devastated.

Her heart had long been frozen solid. When she was young, she decided it would be safest if she didn’t feel, so she stopped. She stopped feeling and the blood began to run cold through her veins, and her heart simply froze. She rarely spoke to anyone, and when men would hold her she never cried. She just lay there, hands like an ice box and eyes like the middle of the coldest winter. She kept her jaw clenched shut except to kiss the occasional pair of lips with something like disinterest, and sometimes she spoke in an icicle voice, so clear and sharp it hurt. Being cold had become as natural to her as breathing.

She died of a broken heart. She died because on that day a rush of hot, blue blood had swelled from within her frozen heart and had shattered it like hot tea in a cold glass. They found her clutching her chest, cheeks flushed and hands so warm they thought at first that perhaps she had not died. When the coroner cut her open he found her heart in pieces and when he, dumbfounded, picked one up to look closer and turned it over in his gloved hand, it reminded him of the summer he spent by the lake as a child skipping hot stones across the shimmering surface of the deep, black water.