A Change of Heart

I-1

PART I - The Metamorphosis

The first time I died, I was thirteen. My mom and I were at the flea market on a sunny afternoon of early July, going through the most disparate clothing and houseware items. I saw a blouse I liked and pulled my mom's purse. "It reeks in here," I said, and my mom approached the lady selling flea at that market. I don't know if my memory is playing tricks on me, but I remember this lady—flapping her hand in the air to fend off two flies—wearing hippie patterned rags, greasy black hair, and a giant mole on the left side of her mouth.

"How much for the—" my mom said to her and snapped her fingers three times, eyes fixed on the blouse I liked.

The lady frowned. "Six worms."

My mom shook her head. I pulled her purse again. "That's too much," she said to the lady.

"I can do four," the lady said back. And from there, the lady and my mom spoke nothing but prices at one another. I rocked my head back and forth, scratching my left arm. It'd been itching all day—I attributed it to some kind of allergic reaction—and there was a slight wind that kept throwing my hair all over my face. So my hand went from left arm to hair over and over; it never occurred to me that I had another hand.

When I realized that not even a second elapsed between readjusting my hair and it invading my face again, I rolled my eyes at the allergic wind and decided to tie my hair. I reached for a scrunchie in my mom's purse—she didn't even notice, so busy she was fighting the lady with lower and lower prices—and I bit back a scream when I saw that the one I'd grabbed was red.

But after I tied my hair, I still felt it in my face, making my nose itch, but when I touched there was nothing. I worried hair might be growing on my face. I'd seen on the news about a young man who had a face full of hair, and the hair just wouldn't stop growing; he looked like a monkey. I didn't want to look like a monkey so I pulled my mom's purse, but she pushed me away without even looking. I felt the hair growing on my face, I imagined them sprouting like flowers on my skin as blond and thick as my hair, when my heart twinged.

It was the sharpest of twinges and I had no time to reach for my chest because I was already dropping face first to the ground. I lost my senses then, but the story has been told and retold. When my mom saw me senseless on the ground, she panicked and shouted; "Alice, Alice," she cried. The lady ran toward my body, got to her knees, and turned me around. Now, apparently when I fell, my chin had planted itself on a peg, so when the lady turned me around, the skin of my chin peeled off like it was an apple.

My mom naturally calmed down after seeing my face skinned, and the lady told her not to worry because she had a medical background and knew what she was doing. But, as her dirty hands hovered over my unconscious body, it seemed to my mom like she didn't really know what to do. "I don't really know what to do," the lady then said, getting back to her feet and grabbing the blouse I liked, "but I can give you this for two. Please, take it."

My mom screamed her lungs out at her in response and ran for help. Eventually someone called an ambulance and they rushed me to the nearest hospital, while they attempted to resuscitate me. I don't remember experiencing anything while I was out. All I can recall is my heart failing, a bright blue light blinding me, and waking up at the hospital.

"A basic heart attack," a trusted doctor said to my mom while looking at me. He then gave us a list of all the tests they'd ran on me along with a slideshow of scans and papers that might as well have been written in Japanese. "Stay safe, stay healthy, and you should be out of trouble," he said to me this time, and I believed him, even though I wondered how he could just shrug off an adolescent kid having a heart attack. But, at the time, I saw doctors as these human versions of God—scary but almighty—so I trusted anything they told me, as absurd as it seemed to my young, undeveloped mind.