Michael Czyzniejewski
HER HEART WAS A CHIPMUNK

She said her heart was a chipmunk, said it on our first date. I figured she was being poetic, saying something like My heart is a chipmunk to mean she herself was like a chipmunk, perhaps on the inside. Or that she just really liked chipmunks. When we hit it off, got serious, I started to see it (at least in my head): she was skittish. She climbed well. She enjoyed nuts. But then one day we were lounging on her sofa, and she was like, “Hold on,” and then she took off her shirt and I was like, All right, here we go, and I took off my shirt, but she said, “What’re you doing?” and I said, “Just following your lead,” and she said, “Oh, no … but I see why you’d think that.” Then she reached between her bra cups and pressed into her sternum like it was a button, which made her chest open, a little door flipping ajar, and out came a chipmunk, reddish brown and speckled. It leapt from the threshold onto the floor and disappeared. “It likes to run around,” she said. Her little door shut automatically and she put on her shirt. I fumbled into my shirt, keeping watch for the chipmunk, for her heart. I heard it under the couch, on the countertop, rummaging through a cabinet. I couldn’t relax. Meanwhile, she’d flipped on the game show where contestants sketch pictures based on clues given to them by celebrities. The winner then has their image tattooed somewhere on their body, audience’s choice. My cousin had been on season six and now had a tramp stamp of a pistachio with Bob Marley dreads. The chipmunk-hearted woman said she wanted to be a contestant, win a little tattooed door over her actual heart door so everyone could see it when she went to the beach. “Or when I’m with someone special.” With that she took her shirt back off, her bra, too, and put her fingers to her mouth, whistling. The chipmunk, its cheeks stuffed, came running. She poked into her sternum and the door opened and the fat-cheeked chipmunk jumped inside, the door shutting behind it. The woman said, “Now’s when you follow my lead,” so I took off my shirt. She pressed into my sternum, but nothing happened. “Sorry,” I said. Then she kissed the spot she’d poked and said, “Just wait.”

Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of four collections of stories, most recently The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Press and Moon City Review, as well as Interviews Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Pushcart Prizes.

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