The dead woman in the laboratory has lost her heart. Otherwise, she is intact: ribs, muscles, and skin in place. Nothing betrays the emptiness in her chest.

Wrapped like a sandwich, the heart shivers and jumps inside the backpack of a woman who is on her way home. She sits in a battered train, holding the bag close to her chest. At her desk all night, she masters the valves and chambers that add up to a heart, naming the ways it gives up and permits one to die.

In the dictionary the woman no longer opens, dried petals, the remnants of flowers from a man long gone, mark the pages of her favorite words. Somewhere in this room are the streets where the dead once lived, but there are names that need not be spoken. Please, the woman says, though there is no one to hear her request.