I have the heart of a small boy... (the greatest for sale ad ever written). x-post /pettyrevenge

I work for a National Science Center and we're hosting a surplus sale of old supplies and equipment that we're not using. I posted an ad in a local Facebook group selling some of our old biological samples in the Group's surplus sale. The ad reads as follows.

I have the heart of a small boy... $20 Grand Rapids, MI (49504)

In a jar....on my table. LOTS of biological samples including a heart, spiders, tapeworms, and an octopus. Excellent for a young person who wants to grow up to be a vet/biologist, or for scaring the living hell out of your soon to be ex wife. The Geek Group's Nerd Surplus Sale is being hosted at 902 Leonard NW, 49504, doors open at Noon.

And I posted a pic with it. The pic is of the preserved heart floating in a jar.

Of course, this is the internet, and, well....half of the people who come across it will have below average intellect. And I got this comment.

"Valerie C. First or all why do you have this I'm sure its illegal for you to have him an remains in your home"

Well......now this is just too much fun......

So, I replied, with this.....

Valerie, I’m glad you asked. It’s time I told the story.

Many years ago, my parents were quite poor. My dad owned a root vegetable farm growing potatoes, beets, turnips, rutabaga and such. My mom worked at the nursing home in town. We lived outside of Coopersville, a little farming town west of here in the nothing between Grand Rapids and Grand Haven. They had nothing, and their life was not an easy one.

As the leaves fell and they brought in the harvest of ‘74 my mom found out she was pregnant, with twins. If you’ve ever worked around nurses, well, this is like Christmas on a daily basis. They have baby rabies and go nuts over such things. Presents, a shower, it’s a whole thing. And TWINS no less, oh my god. My dad and his best friend build an addition on to the house, and builds a nursery with his own tools and his own hands.

On a beautiful spring morning, Saturday, May-31-1975 Peg (my mother) gives birth to a pair of healthy boys. 10 fingers, 10 toes, and the only way to tell them apart is one never shuts up, and one never makes a sound. They name the loudmouth Christopher (hi there), and the quiet one Peter.

We grew up typical american farm kids. Running in the fields, playing in the mud, poor but happy. My parents made sure we were fed and clothed and we were never want for anything. A simple life in a quiet town in a world before the internet. Summers on our bikes, and winters trudging the snow. We lived the kind of life where our idea of high entertainment was jumping out of the barn loft into the haystacks. Through all of it, we were inseparable. We did everything together.

Through all of it, Peter never really said a word. He wasn’t mute, he COULD talk, he just chose not to, especially around people. I was gregarious, a natural performer and always the center of attention. I’ve been the king of any room I walked into since I was a teenager. Peter, was always there, but always in my shadow. He seldom made a sound, and he spoke so rarely that I could count his vocabulary on my fingers. We called him “My quiet half”.

Still, this was our “normal”, and none of us really thought anything of it. We were 80’s kids, and medicine by today's standards was stone knives and bearskins.

In the late summer of 1991 we were helping with the harvest. To grow up on a farm is to be born into a life of strong muscles and an appreciation for hard work. We were harvesting Turnips, which are very dense and a full hopper weighs over 20 tons. Because of this they lurch and jump and twitch their way across the field. You’ve seen these being pulled behind tractors, they look like an upside down pyramid with a wheel on the side and a little hatch, and have an open top piled high with corn or whatever. We had 5 of them in a line behind an old International Harvester hydrostatic drive tractor.

I was driving the tractor across 60th from the West paddock (where we kept the cows) into the east field where we made the turn to go back to the drop pit to load the big truck that would haul all the turnips off to the broker that we sold them to. Pete was riding the pin and would release the load at the right time, one hopper after another, as we passed over the big grate. We’d done it a hundred times. It’s not the safest way to do it, but it’s what everyone does, because it’s hours faster than doing it “by the book”.

As we came over the ditch next to the corner of 60th and Garfield, the trailer jumped and Pete got knocked off. Five trailers, each in turn, brought their wheels across his abdomen and legs. He was shredded from the waist down. If he ever made a sound, I never heard it over the roar of the tractor. I didn’t even known he’d fallen off until I got to the barn and he wasn’t there.

I jumped out of the tractor and ran down the road, I saw him a quarter mile before I got to him, and that was the hardest run I’ve made in my life. From the waist up he looked totally fine, and below…..he looked like he’d sat on a grenade.

It took half an hour for the ambulance to get all the way out there, but it didn’t matter. There was no way he could survive that. He never cried, or screamed or anything. He simply whispered one word.

“Sorry”

September 26th, 1991 was when half of me died, my brother, my Twin. My quiet half, silenced forever.

In the process of cleaning him off the road, hauling him to the hospital, and all of the circus that goes with that, one of the Dr’s noticed that his heart was unusual. The left Atrium and Ventricle were about 3 times the size of the right. The right half of his heart was perfectly normal. The left had formed so large as to displace his lungs and his vocal cords. It was then that we learned that talking for Pete wasn’t just difficult, it was incredibly painful. We never knew. It was a simple birth defect, and today it would be easily treated, even without surgery. But back then, for simple farm folk, we never thought a thing of it. Think about it, do you know how big your heart is?

Hold your fists together. It’s about that big. Behind your sternum, and just a little to your left.

Pete, through a miracle of mortuary science, had a totally normal funeral with a half-open casket. Most of the people who came had no idea that there wasn't really anything under the closed half, but I had to take a peek after. I lifted the lid and, while I don’t know what the hell I expected to see, I wasn’t prepared for what I found. He was completely dressed, but the pants stopped just under his butt (about 2 inches past where you could see with the top half open). With only the top door open he looked totally normal. But open the lower half, and his pants were rolled up into little bundles and tucked neatly under him, where his legs would have started. Where his legs should have been, were just a series of jars. They had to bury as much of him as they could find, but they couldn’t put him back together, or didn’t take the time. It wasn’t as if he was going to get sewn back together be heal up or something. So most of his organs and such were in jars, sitting where his legs would have been. It wasn’t gross or anything, just simple glass jars with things floating in them.

I don’t know why I did it. But I had the whole place to myself, and I reached in, and picked up the jar holding his heart. I quietly closed the lid, said goodbye to my brother, and took it home with me.

I hid it, on the shelf in my closet, for years.

My mom came across it once, I told her it was from school for a science project and she said “Iew, gross” and went on with her day. Nothing was ever said about it after that, just another in the massive collection of weird things that was my room as a teenager.

As I write this, it’s 2016, and I have years on my back forty-one. Pete’s heart has been with me through my first love, college, and building a wild dream into a global empire. My quiet half. It’s time to let him go and make his own impact on the world.

Pete can live on, far longer than I will really, his giant heart will pass from student to student. Biological samples like this tend to never be actually opened. They are studied through the glass, and spend decades sitting on a shelf. Properly preserved his heart will remain intact for a hundred years after mine is turned back into fertile soil.

And that is the story of how I came to have the heart of a small boy, in a jar, on a table.

Or it could be that it’s a sheep’s heart that I got from a high school years ago with all the rest of those biological samples and we’re simply selling them to make space for new demonstrations and gear. It could be that I just made all of this up because it’s a nice quiet morning and perhaps I just like to mess with people that get all indignant on the internet.

And you believed it.

What….did you just fall off the fucking Turnip truck or something?