Gillian perry

Phoebe, like everyone, has a peeling heart. At age 23, Phoebe would call it a tearing, ripping, yanking heart. She once watched a woman pull a rectangular bandaid off her knee in the locker room at the gym and clutched her chest, inhaling sharply. When she feels the tug of a petal coming loose, she often thinks of the flash of her mother’s front teeth, dragging the flesh from the leaf of an artichoke. It is a part of growing up, this she knows. But still, it hurts.

Phoebe’s parents regretted that her abscission started early, during her eighth birthday.

Phoebe had what she thought was a friend, a friend she shared her orange slices with at school. A friend with sprouted curls that grew wild as she ran, a friend with a tinkling laugh that bubbled from her small lips. Phoebe would practice the sudden collapse in her shoulders, the splay of her fingers against her open mouth, desperate to mimic that tinkle in her own laugh. She would walk in her friend’s footsteps, mirroring her toe-heel lift, her dance on air. Phoebe’s birthday party at the movie theater had just one invited guest. She sat on the edge of the black leather seat, twisting her neck to the door, waiting for the bloom of curls, the sashay saunter, the little bell laugh. When the lights dimmed and the seat next to hers was still empty, her chest began to feel sticky and hot. Phoebe couldn’t catch her breath. She howled and hugged herself, her fingers sinking through her skin. As she was rushed out of the theater, reeking of butter and chlorine, she pulled a pulsing, red knob of heart from her chest.

Her mother said “Oh, my baby, I’m so sorry it’s happening now.”

She is telling this story to her date, Silas, a man with rounded glasses and a whipped cream dollop of black hair. He nods and puts a fist under his chin, thinking of his first petal. Dad had stormed out of his baseball game when he struck out. Age twelve. Now, it was the smell of leather and freshly cut grass that peeled him. And phone calls with Dad, full of silence and hushed chuckles.

“When do you think it’ll stop for you?” she asks him with an edge of desperation. It’s rumored to be worse for women, but he isn’t sure he believes it.

“I think it already has.” He lies. He wants to impress her.

“I think for me, it’ll be something tragic, something that can get most of the petals loose in one go.”

Silas sucks in a breath, his heart hammering.

“So … would you?” Her voice is lacy, delicate, holy. He feels heat in his cheeks and a hardening between his legs.

“I don’t know Phoebe, we’ve only been on like two dates.”

She expects Silas to answer this way; it’s why she chose him. Her friends told her it should be someone who feels like a marshmallow—soft in the middle, easily melted, still warm.

“If you never want to see me again after, I definitely understand. I just want to move forward with my life, you know?”

Phoebe doesn’t tell him that she’s been peeling at work, running out of meetings whenever someone criticizes her reports, whenever a coworker has a passive aggressive comment about her sweaters, her pink leather shoes.

He doesn’t tell her that this is something he and his buddies have discussed at length, joking about the kind of person who would ask a date for this. Would it be sexy? Intimate? Disgusting?

“Okay.” He says, his pulse in his ears.

She brightens, her teeth glinting against the lightbulb dangling above them.

She flashes her credit card to the waiter. She drags him to the movie theater down the block.

He doesn’t remember which movie they buy tickets for. He doesn’t remember the side-eye glances and eyebrow raises as they shuffle into the family bathroom. He doesn’t remember if they are kissing first, or if she takes off her top, or if he undoes her bra. He doesn’t remember why he feels like he needs to be shirtless too. He does remember the sickening smell of butter.

Phoebe’s tears are fat and silent, her face stony and resolved. She places his flat hands to her sticky chest, elastic with peel. His hands sink into her chest cavity until they are wet and dripping, like they are swimming in cake batter. She leans against the cool tile of the wall, and he digs into her, peeling her heart, petal by petal. As her tears turn to sobs, her heart pounds fierce in her chest, newly naked and glistening with heat—finally, hers.

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“Petal Heart” by Gillian Perry and the artwork titled Sudden Fiction by Charlotte Bunny appeared in Issue 44 of Berkeley Fiction Review.

Gillian Perry (she/her) is a writer and teacher from California, and she is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the
University of North Carolina, Greensboro. You can find her writing in Cleaver Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. Her story “Somatics” was nominated for the Best of the Net 2024 Anthology and the 2024 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Charlotte Bunny (she/her) is a 25-year-old fine artist, illustrator, and graphic designer. She’s also a writer in her free time and a civil servant in her not-so-free-time. Her art often revolves around Classics (which was what she studied at undergraduate) and nature (because she fancies herself a Romantic). She has illustrated for Berkeley for 4 years now and is very grateful for it!