The Rental Heart

The Rental Heart

By Kirsty Logan

Once in a while someone will enter your life and make your heart beat faster. He or she will force you, without even trying, to constantly think about them. You will begin to feel butterflies tickling in your stomach, fingertips and knees, and in every other atom of you. You will feel an increased level of surplus energy and creativity. You will be wearing a silly smile all the time, and your eyes will shine.

Once in a while that someone will exit you life again and make your heart stop beating. That is when you feel completely and utterly broken. You may even be able to 'see' your heart lying on the floor in front of you, "shatter[ed] like a shotgun pellet, shards lodging in [your] guts". You will still, without even trying, constantly think about him or she. The butterflies will be replaced with something that feels like endless pain and your energy level will be at its lowest. We all have or will try this at least once in our lives, and Kirsty Logan clearly is not an exception. The short story "The Rental Heart" is a science fiction, which we can easily see because of all the symbols such as rented metallic hearts, heartbeats being attuned to help please the lover, and possibility to live without a heart.

The story is about an incredibly heartbroken main character - or actually the main character never really becomes heartbroken at all, because that is what the story is all about; how these people in this unreal world avoid getting their hearts broken. We are not being told what the main character's name is, but we know that the "he" is an adult. This is because he tells us a story about Jacob, a boyfriend he had ten years ago, when they were teenagers. That means the narrator must be at least 23, since you become a teenager when you turn 13. What we do not know is whether the main character is a female or a male, and it is almost impossible for the reader to conjecture, since the narrator dates several different people - both men and women. I cannot help but wonder - what if a person changes gender every time it changes its heart? Or maybe gender does not exist in this world at all? What I know is that Kirsty Logan writes in an article for The Skinny that she is a lesbian, so it is easy to figure where she gets her inspiration.

In "The Rental Heart" we are invited into a world where heartbreak-pain only exists in one's mind, and cannot be felt anywhere else. You simply just have to change your heart at the local heart rental place whenever you feel heartbroken. First time the narrator rents, is when he meets Jacob. They fall in love, and the more he loves Jacob, the heavier his heart feels and when they break up, he, "...ha[s] to drink every night to wash the shards [from his heart] out." This tells us something about how the pain