Shriveled Heart
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Supervised Undergraduate Student Research Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects and Creative Work Spring 5-2001 Shriveled Heart Johnathan Carl Driver University of Tennessee-Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj Recommended Citation Driver, Johnathan Carl, "Shriveled Heart" (2001). Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/458 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Supervised Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Work at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Shriveled Heart by John Driver A Short Novel Shriveled Heart 1 Chapter 1 Dreams Desert sands are endless. They are the cresting foam in the ocean, stretching eternally across a sea of wilderness. I have often dreamed of being lost in their wake. I long to be lost as a single grain of sand in the sea, unnoticed and untouched by the world; oblivious to its pain. I have no desire to be known, only to blend; that is what I want from life. I am much like the desert. Nowhere else does the sun shine quite as brightly and with so much blistering heat. My life is illuminated by the flickers of light that bum in every person's eyes; eyes that stare and gaze upon me- one grain of desert sand. Like the desert, my life is filled with unbearably cold and frozen dreams when the sun sinks back to its home beyond the mountains. The night is a lonely place; so lonely that I even miss, and long for, the heat of the day that I despise more than anything else. And so, I am satisfied with nothing and by nothing. Like the sand, I feel the heat and the cold; unlike the sand, I do not blend. However, what I long for most is to be one with the sand, the only consolation for a meaningless life filled with unbearably painful days and frigid, comfortless nights. Someday, oneness with the sand will come, and I will not resist it. So let life continue to trample over me, for each day is one step closer to the inevitable. And I say, the faster it ends, the better. "Wake up, Jeremiah!" The voice seems louder today than usual. Years of repetition have not lessened the volume of my mother's voice in the morning; nor have they lessened how much it annoys me. Maybe it's just my own frustration- the frustration of a twenty-one year old man still living with his parents; or maybe I'm just tired. Shriveled Heart 2 Either way, in a tone that my father would definitely call "disrespectful," I shout, "Leave me alone, I'm not going to synagogue this morning!" Every Sabbath seems the same. It's not that I don't want to go to synagogue; in fact, I have trouble waking up every morning. I am definitely a hard sleeper, but there is something more to the intensity of my nightly hibernation. I have always dreaded my parents' voices in the morning mainly because they are the voices that call me away from my dreams, my favorite places to be. My dreams are not like other twenty-one years oIds' who dream of their work at the marketplace or a future journey to a relative's home. No, instead my dreams resembie the dreams of a child. In all of my dreams, I am twelve years old. I always see myself walking down the street on my way home. While walking, I pass another group of children who are about my age and are playing with some sort of small ball in the street. Every night, the dream is the same: somehow, while playing catch, one of the children overthrows the ball and it speeds towards me, heading straight for the back of my head. It is always the back of my head because my back is turned so that I can't see the ball coming. The children yell for me to watch out and I tum around in just enough time to hold up my right hand and catch the ball; my long, lanky fingers wrapping around it like the two were made to be together. Indeed, a dream like this would not be very thrilling to most twenty-one year old men, but I am no ordinary man. I am a man of average stature and weight (although I put on a few pounds every year at the Passover Celebration.) Furthermore, my facial features are not what you would call striking, but I'm fairly pleasant-looking. I work for the local blacksmith, not as an apprentice or assistant, but simply as a bookkeeper. My days consist of sitting in the back of the shop and writing down the orders and payments of the Shriveled Heart 3 blacksmith's customers. I'm not particularly talented at being organized or figuring up numbers and totals, but my job makes me some money and that's why I do it; in fact, it's the only reason I do it. If I had it my way, I would never wake up from my dreams. I don't necessarily want to die right now; Ijust want to sleep so I can be safely hidden from the eyes of the world. I dread the ominous toil of everyday life. All I do all day is write, and always with my left hand. I am indeed left-handed, not by nature, but by necessity. The fact of the matter is that I was born with a deformed right hand. When I was born, the rest of my body was completely normal, and I am thankful for that. In fact, there were a lot of other things that could have been wrong with me that are much worse than a shriveled hand. I could have been born blind or deaf. I could have been mentally disabled and unable to understand or communicate with the people around me. In fact, there have been many times that I have longed for this very thing: to not know what the people around me are saying and to not realize that everyone is staring. Sometimes I can feel their gaze, almost as if there is one pair of eyes looking at me. It doesn't matter how many of them there are, all I feel is the one pair of eyes- the eyes of humanity gazing upon my shame. I wonder what emotions are captured in these eyes. Indeed, I have come to realize that it is the eyes that reveal to me what people are thinking. Over the years, I've become a talented reader of thoughts, able to see through external words and cloaked expressions. People may try to hide, but the eyes always reveal their hiding place and what it holds. Sometimes when I am writing up an order at the shop, I can feel someone's eyes investigating my hand. Of course, when I look up, they are looking at my eyes or looking away nonchalantly, but I can see in their eyes that they have invaded Shriveled Heart 4 my pain and are glad to leave it to me to bear alone. The way I am shaped is something that all good mothers and fathers pray to God will never happen to their child. Truly, I would not wish this upon anyone else, but my bitterness sometimes desires a companion. Of course, what companion could possibly relate to the way that I feel? Sympathy holds different meanings for me than for most other "normal" people. Certainly I have learned to live with my affliction and those around me have accepted it just as easily. Besides, I try to keep it hidden under my cloak as often as possible. I am not blatantly worried about what people will think; I just hate the way I feel when people see my hand and realize that I realize they are staring. They always make awkward expressions as if to say, "Poor man, how does he cope?" I don't want pity; I've coped quite fine all these years. It is no surprise that my dreams are about children, considering that at the center of my anguish is my childhood. If normal children can be cruel, the little Jewish kids in my neighborhood were quite vicious. I have spent much of my life trying to drown out the whispers around me, which seek to determine the cause of my affliction. Our culture views physical handicaps as signs of demonic possession or perhaps some inconceivable sin that my parents had committed. As far as I know, my parents have done nothing worse than anyone else. As the months and years of my childhood were quickly dissolved into time's vacuum, the rumors took their toll on my heart. Eventually, I learned to just block people out. Getting to know me was about as easy as breaking through a stone walL Once, I let my wall down just enough to let someone peek in; or should I say, he broke right through it. His name was Jephthah and I first met him when we were both about sixteen years Shriveled Heart 5 old. I was not "well-versed" in the art of friendmaking since I could count my friends on my one good hand.