The day of Jed’s wedding, Mark wakes up so sad he has to reach into his chest and extract his right lung. It sits heavy and cold in his hand, the alveoli blue like the Pacific Ocean. He sets the lung on his nightstand, blocking his view of his alarm clock. He rubs his eyes and holds his breath, then forces himself to a sitting position. Beneath the subdued sorrow, he can feel anger burning at his center: his heart, afire.

Of course, he was not invited to the wedding. He only knows about it because he saw the save-the-date card tacked onto the fridge at his best friend Monica’s apartment. The names were lacy, hand-written, the date obscured by a magnet of a Picasso painting, something from his blue period. Mark had said nothing about it. Of course his friends would be invited: his friends were Jed’s friends. He wondered how many of them were going, and where the ceremony was, and how long Jed had dated his fiancé. Mark wondered if the fiancé knew about him. He knew nothing about the fiancé.

Another wave of sorrow. Mark glances at his lung: the blue has deepened, like it’s hundreds of feet underwater, sunlight stanched by pressure and distance. He takes another breath and holds it until his left lung, doing an admirable amount of work, starts to tingle. His eyes water and he exhales.

“It’s okay to feel,” his mother told him when he was a little boy and she found him crying uncontrollably after his grandfather died. Mark had hardly known the man, only met him a handful of times, but something swarmed his chest, cold and terrible, and he couldn’t catch his breath through his sobs. His mother set him down on the living room sofa and reached into herself, brow furrowed in concentration as her hand moved around in her torso. “It likes to slither away sometimes,” she said before finally extracting her stomach, which shone like a gargantuan sapphire. She set it on the coffee table. “See? It’s in there somewhere for all of us. We just have to find it.” She asked him where the painful chill was, and when he pointed at the right side of his chest, she said, “Ah. The ribs will be in the way. But we can get past that.” She took his hands in hers. “We can always get past anything.”

Years later, he’s not entirely sure. He hasn’t talked to Jed, who still lives somewhere in St. Louis, choosing not to jet off to one of the coasts when his first book took off, became a best-selling hit that spun into a Netflix series that has now entered its second season. Mark remembers his voice, sees his face on social media—they’re still Facebook friends, mutual follows on Twitter and Instagram, even though they don’t interact at all. But Jed’s sharp smells, his mannerisms, his carriage, those particular insider things that only come into hard relief with enough intimate interaction, have all buzzed and faded into curved, indistinct shapes.

And yet: Mark stares at his icicle blue lung. It doesn’t help, Mark thinks, that he hasn’t dated anyone since. A hookup here and there, but nothing with roots, legs, whatever metaphorical thing that means solidity, recurrence, and distance from what came before.

He forces himself out of his bedroom and into the kitchen, where his cat, Tanko, mewls for breakfast. The cat had been Jed’s idea, the adoption not something done upon a move in together—they never made it that far, which makes Mark feel a swell of sheepishness in his bladder over his sadness—but Mark is glad to have him despite his xylophonic meowing in the morning, chirpy noises that don’t end until Mark has placed the bowl of wet food on the floor next to the refrigerator and Tanko is chowing down, his wet, sloppy gulps a little symphony. As is his habit, Mark leans against the fridge and watches Tanko, waiting to start his own breakfast—a toasted English muffin and a trio of turkey sausage links—until the cat is finished eating and has moved on to licking his chops and running a wetted paw over his snout in his own little post-prandial routine.

Mark wants to go for a run after eating, but this will require both lungs. In the bedroom, he stares at the lung, feeling chill in his fingers as he lowers his hand above it as though he’s standing before a bonfire. He takes a deep breath and picks it up. The lung is slippery like a side of beef. Ignoring the cold in his fingertips, he opens himself up and shoves it back in. The sorrow washes over him in a blue crest, like he’s been hit by a powerful, icy wave on the shore of a sea, but Mark swallows and grits his teeth, rummaging in his closet for his running shoes.

He and Jed had never seen eye to eye on feelings. Jed’s parents had instilled in him the importance of absorbing his emotions; Mark’s mother had taught him to pry out his kneecaps when he felt overwhelmed by fear. She showed him how, when she was angry at something stupid he’d done, she could reach inside herself and take out her heart. This they had in common: though their confusion and happiness and terror concentrated in different places in their bodies, it was their hearts that gave off the vermillion heat of rage.

“It runs in our family,” she said, holding her heart, veiny and throbbing, in her palms. She raised her hands like she was making an oblation. “We keep our anger in the center of things.”

Although this meant that anger was always simmering at the edges, Mark had only felt deep, scorching ire a few times in his life, most recently when Jed, in lieu of absolutely nothing, had admitted to being unfaithful. In part, Mark’s rage was driven by the seeming unnecessity of Jed’s confession: they’d been sitting on Jed’s couch after a quaint home-cooked meal they’d worked in tandem to prepare, a rich feast of spinach noodles and pesto, the latter of which they’d made themselves, grinding together the basil leaves, pine nuts, and garlic. They’d drank an aromatic Riesling and listened to a string quartet on Jed’s old-fashioned record player, a trio of candles burning at the center of the dining room table. They settled in to watch a quiet Netflix drama about a family on the mend from a terrible tragedy, and it was in the midst of the second hour that Jed took a deep breath, the sharpness already sending something jagged and dizzying through Mark’s head, and said, “I have to tell you something.”

It had not taken long for his heart to flare so powerfully he reached in, plucked it out, and flung it on the expensive sofa. Jed at least had the wherewithal not to complain about scorch marks on the microfiber, but he did look down at Mark’s heart, then back at Mark, and say, “I just can’t be with someone for whom love and anger come from the same place.”

“You know that love and the heart aren’t really connected, right? That’s, like, a Hallmark thing,” Mark said. He then pointed to his diaphragm. Jed rolled his eyes.

He’s just finishing his run, plodding to a walk, his legs jiggling, breathing shallow after three and a half miles, hair a tangle of sweat and his tank top shellacked to his chest and back, when the music on his phone cuts off and is replaced by the sound of his ringer: Monica calling. Mark feels a tight tinge of worry in his spleen because Monica never calls.

It takes him a second to cut the Bluetooth connection to his earbuds, but he manages to answer, breathy, before the call goes to voicemail.

“Hey,” Monica says. Her voice is too perky and bubbly. He’s used to her early-thirties version of goth, her deadpan voice even when sharing good news, her dark eyeshadow, her sleeve of thorny roses tattooed up her right arm.

Mark takes a deep breath. “Is everything okay?”

“Of course!” Then: “You sound—are you alright?”

“Just finished running. What’s up?”

“Look at you. Go you. Far?”

Mark wishes she would just say whatever she wants to say. He’s pretty sure that he knows what it’s about, and when she finally changes tone just so, saying, “So, about today,” he feels a touch of relief spread through his veins.

“Today,” he says.

“Yes, today.”

“I know what today is. Saturday.”

“Mark—”

“And Jed’s wedding.” The words feel like mash. His chest goes icy again. Mark leans against the hood of his car, parked in its spot on the street in front of the building; the metal is warm from the morning sun, but not burning. It doesn’t contain the glare of rage.

“Right.” Monica’s voice is clipped now. “You saw.”

“I did.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“How do you feel?”

“About it, or you going?”

After a long silence, Monica says, “Both?”

Mark lifts himself from the car hood and looks down at the metal, where a swampy outline of his ass dots the surface, beaded and blurry at the same time. He heads toward his apartment on the second floor, the iron stairs clattering under his footsteps.

“I’ll be fine,” he says.

“I notice the future tense there. How are you now?”

“Out of breath.”

“How’s your—are your—lungs?”

“Cold.”

“Oh, baby.”

He never locks the door when he goes running; Mark lives in a safe enough neighborhood, all suburban enclaves and little apartment honeycombs where everything looks the same. No one is awake, no one is on the lookout for an easy mark. He opens the door and is greeted by the blast of the air conditioning.

“I’m fine,” he says, though his chest is starting to throb. He’s not sure if it’s the battering of aerobic exercise, the chill of his sorrow, or growing anger that Monica is asking him these things. Or perhaps because she’s right to wonder how he feels: maybe it’s natural, normal to react like this, even after so long. How long, he wonders, is too long?

“So you won’t be mad? If we go?”

“We? There’s a we now?”

“Oh, that.” Monica lets out a raspberry of air. “Just a girlfriend from the restaurant.” She tends bar at Le Chief, an uppity place in the Central West End best known for its Sunday brunch that comes with all-you-can-drink mimosas. She’s invited Mark to come sit on a stool and get wasted many times, but the one occasion on which he obliged he was unpleasantly surprised to see Jed walk in the door with a small cadre of loud men, all of whom proceeded to get rip-roaring wasted and run their server—an admittedly extremely pleasant to look at swarthy boy whom Monica identified as Bo—all over the place. What had at first felt like a throb of sorrow and shame had turned quickly to annoyance and then a low fire in his heart.

“And when you say girlfriend.”

“A friend who is a girl.”

“Just a friend?”

“For now.”

“Don’t do that,” Mark says.

“We’re feeling each other out.”

Mark feels a welter of happiness in his lymph nodes, a gooey tingle at his jaw and armpits. “Phrasing!”

“So, you don’t mind? Really?”

“He’s your friend, too.”

“But you were my friend first.”

“It’s fine.”

“I’ll text you about all of the gaudy, terrible taste that will surely be on display.”

In the shower, Mark wishes he’d asked Monica how often she saw Jed. He’s been a subject of silence amongst his friends—at least in Mark’s presence—since their breakup, all despite Jed’s rise to pseudo-fame in the literary world, a universe that many of his friends dip their feet into; a cluster of them launched a book club several years ago—Mark begged off at the time, claiming he was too busy, a lie whose root he’s still not sure of—and sometimes they talk about their selections when everyone’s together at a bar or house party. Three months ago, they finally chose Jed’s book, and they all praised it, heaping every compliment they could sling out of their slurry, drunk mouths in between sips of white wine while sitting around Monica’s living room two days after the book club met, a spillover that caused Mark to feel cool hurt gather in his lung, sadness wrenching away his breath, both at the references to Jed, to his success, and to Mark’s self-imposed shunting from this thing that his friends so clearly took joy in. He'd had to slip into the bathroom and tug his lung out, leaving it curled in the sink for a few minutes like a dead puppy. It was later that night he saw the save-the-date card. If Monica, or anyone else, noticed that Mark had had to remove himself, they had not, at the time, given any indication. He wonders if Monica caught any streak of blue in her bathroom during her post-party cleanup, but he’d done a pretty thorough job of making sure nothing of himself had been left behind. If anything, Jed had appreciated this: Mark was a cleaner. He didn’t like to leave his messiest parts for others to deal with, wiping away streaks of pain or confusion when they became too much to rest inside his body.

He tries to forget about the wedding, but it looms at the back of his head all day, driving icicles through his chest and up his throat whenever he exhales. Mark watches college football, then switches to some crash-and-slash explosion-filled action film whose plot makes no sense. He opens a beer at exactly two-fifteen, imagining that this is the approximate time at which Jed and his fiancé, now husband, are exchanging vows. The liquid stings his throat, cold and bitter, but he sucks the entire thing down, letting it slosh in his empty stomach: he realizes, as he lets out a loud belch that spooks Tanko, who sleeps curled in the nook of the couch’s far arm, that he hasn’t eaten since before his run. His stomach flops. Hunger still lives there, just as air lives in his lungs, blood in his heart.

A raid of the fridge leaves him with a block of white cheddar cheese and a handful of blackberries, which he pairs with crackers and peanut butter from the pantry. Mark has always prided himself on his adulthood, of not falling into the ridiculous trappings of post-university bachelorhood: no pathetic dearth of real foodstuffs and endless crusty dishes for him. He cooks at least three times a week, eats his leftovers by reheating them on the stovetop or in the oven rather than blasting them in the microwave. He cleans as he cooks, so his burners aren’t crowded with flung, dried-out detritus and the counters free of cakey stains that would require steel wool and powerful bleaches to remove when and if he ever moves out. But today all of that is out the window: he’s going to let himself be slurped up into the sorrows of the dismissed lover, the loner looking out at the world through his couch and television.

He eats, the blackberries tart, the cheese sharp, the crackers crunchy. Crumbs coat his lips. Seeds rivet into his molars and bury themselves against his gums. Mark feels full, his stomach lumped with food. He manages to fall asleep, the plate sliding down next to him where Tanko might usually curl.

Mark wakes to knocking on his door. He’s jostled from sleep and discombobulated because the sun has set: how long has he slept? His phone indicates that it’s nearly nine, but that only helps with an end point, not a start: an untethered spear in time when he nodded off, connected to nothing. He’s groggy, dry-mouthed. It takes him a minute to remember the day, the wedding, the sorrow in his lungs.

The knocking comes a second time, and he calls out a meaningless garble meant to indicate give me a second. He stands, yellow and purple fireworks centering in his vision. Mark has a moment of jolting hope and desire in his intestine that it is Jed on the other side of the door, that he’s a runaway groom, having left his betrothed and gaggle of guests stunned at the site of the ceremony as he’s rushed away to rejoin Mark, to throw himself at Mark’s feet and beg forgiveness, reconciliation, recoupling.

But of course it isn’t Jed. It’s Monica, her tattooed arm slung over the shoulders of a woman he doesn’t know: the “girlfriend” from work. They’re both wearing midnight blue dresses that match the bruising of the sky as darkness descends. Monica has done something to her hair to make it curly instead of the sharp, straight bob she usually wears. The other woman is bright blonde, an unnatural platinum that looks good against her face, which is all angles and cheekbones surrounding a tiny, pointy nose that looks like something that could do some serious stabbing damage. Both wear more makeup than seems normal, especially on Monica’s face, which is usually bare and scrubbed.

“The party’s here!” Monica yells.

“You’re here?” Mark says.

“I couldn’t stand it for another second,” Monica says, stepping inside and dragging the other woman with her. “It was terrible.”

“So much orange,” the woman says, letting Monica pull her past Mark. “Hi. I’m Bree.”

“Hi, Bree.”

“You’re not drinking?” Monica says, looking around the living room. “I’d have sworn you’d be wasted by now.”

“I had a beer earlier,” Mark says. “Did you drive here?”

“Uber, baby!” Monica says. “I’ll make us cocktails.” She deposits Bree on the sofa and teeters into the galley kitchen, where she starts knocking around. Mark feels the tiniest blip of warmth in his gut at Monica’s familiarity with the space; it’s nice to be known like that.

“Hi,” Bree says again. She’s a little slumped, clutching a small black purse in her lap. She looks down at it, moves to open it and then changes her mind, setting it on the table. “Sorry we’ve invaded.”

“It’s fine.”

Monica appears with three glasses pronged in her hands, filled with flat soda from a two-liter she’s managed to conjure from the back of Mark’s fridge. He takes one and drinks: the bitter spark of whiskey snatches at the back of his throat.

“You had some Jack Daniel’s growing cobwebs above the fridge. I pilfered.”

Mark nods. Bree takes her glass and chugs a third of it, then sets it down hard on the table like she’s slamming drinks at a bar.

“So,” Mark says. “It was—”

“So bad!” Bree says. “It was at an art gallery. There were fairy lights. They walked down the aisle to that Elvis song. You know the one.” She hums a few bars, off-key.

“‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’,” Mark says. His face feels flush. “That was Jed’s favorite song.”

“The first dance was Journey.” Bree brays. “It was all so white.”

“She means that literally,” Monica says, sipping from her glass, a pinky finger wrapped around the bottom. She sits next to Bree, close, their shoulders touching. “Not just racially.”

“But also very orange!” Bree says.

“So you mentioned,” Mark says.

“And their names are Jed and Thad. Thad!” Bree looks from Monica to Mark and back. “I mean, really? Thad? You change that shit by the time you’re twenty-five. My parents named me Calinda-Bell, and you don’t see me going by that anymore.” She picks up her glass and drinks another third. “Seriously, it was a trainwreck.” As if Mark has demanded she prove her annoyance, she reaches down the throat of her dress and rummages around for a second. Bree grunts and then produces a greenish-brownish shape, squishy and slick, that she drops on the table: her gallbladder, effervescent with annoyance.

“Phew,” she says, leaning back against the sofa. “Much better.”

“Bree! Gross!” Monica says, leaning forward with a lurch as if to clean up, as if Bree has taken a shit on the table.

“It’s fine, Monica,” Mark says. “Sometimes you have to get it out, you know.”

“This guy,” Bree says, pointing with her glass and then taking a more moderate sip. “This guy gets it. I bet he’d have hated the part where they took out their hearts.”

Mark frowns. “Who did that?”

Monica bites her lip and then says, “Jed and Thad. At the end. They reached inside each other and plucked them out.”

“They had a whole spiel about the source of their love. All the octogenarians loved it. There were a lot of octogenarians.” Bree shivers. “It made me want to barf, personally.” Her gallbladder bubbles with more annoyance, turning a bright jungle green.

“I’m sorry,” Monica says, looking at Mark.

Inside him, several spots are lighting up. Mark feels sorrow in his lungs, because the Jed he remembers would never go for such a gesture with Mark; confusion in his kidney because how, in so short a time, could that Jed cease to exist and this new one come to be; and, of course, anger in his heart that Jed, who was always tsking and clucking when Mark was overcome and had to temporarily remove part of himself, has become, in Mark’s eyes, a ridiculous hypocrite.

Bree finishes her drink and rattles her glass at Monica. “Any chance for a refill?” She waves her free hand at Monica’s drink. “What’s with the baby sips? It’s a party!”

Monica hoists herself from her seat and rolls her eyes. Mark thinks she may tell Bree she’s had enough, but instead she heads toward the kitchen, patting Mark on the shoulder as she goes. Bree leans forward and plucks up her gallbladder, returning it to its proper spot. Mark wants to say something nice about Monica, something to slide her into greater favor with Bree, but he can’t think of something that wouldn’t be too obvious or too stupid, so they sit in silence until Monica returns with full glasses.

They drink another drink. Then another. Bree and Monica play a game that their co-workers at Le Chief call ruining, whereby they throw potshots at Jed to make Mark feel better. Monica says he’s a gossip and a flake. Bree says she tried to read his book and hated the first ten pages and donated her copy—which she’d actually gotten from the library—to the Salvation Army. Monica calls him a serial cheater who’s almost certainly stepped out on Thad (her tongue thwacks on the name, as though it’s a dull curse). Bree, her words sliding all together, shouts, “I’m pretty sure he’s on Tinder, looking for women to bang on the side. What an asshole. And did I mention his terrible taste?”

Mark’s body throbs. His head has gone woozy from the booze, from his sorrows, from the melting heat at his center. His listens to Bree and Monica, letting his memory of Jed’s confession take over so that warmth can do something useful by melting away the hurt in his chest.

Mark wakes with a gummy mouth and a dull throbbing at the back of his skull, not only because he drank too much last night but because, at Monica’s urging, he left his lung on his nightstand. As his mother explained to him when he was young, this was a bad choice: “It’s not about the body part,” she’d said. “That’ll be fine. But our emotions.” She tapped at her chest. “Even the unpleasant ones. We need them, whether we want them. Taking them out is a temporary reprieve, like swallowing Advil.”

Monica moans next to him. She’s wearing one of his t-shirts and a pair of his athletic shorts, her oceanic dress pooled on the floor on her side of the bed. They didn’t mess around or anything; she was clearly besotted with Bree, anyway, leaning against her, laughing at everything she said, pawing at her bare shoulders, but Bree, while Monica went on a pee break after they polished off the whiskey at one-thirty, toppled over on the couch and started snoring.

“Bummer,” Monica slurred when she returned, her face puffy. Mark had heard her retching, but he said nothing about it. “Roomies tonight?”

Mark has always liked the feeling of sleeping next to someone. The first few months when he and Jed were serious, staying over at one another’s places three, four, five nights a week, were the best night’s sleep he ever got. The heat of skin, the rhythm of breath, the rocky pulse of a body’s shudders and turns: all of it sunk something deep and calming inside him, washing out the emotions pulsing in his organs and letting him dream of flight and sex and mountains of gold and silver. He likes curling his hands around a hot back at night, or being pulled into the embrace of a pair of arms, a tumid chest. But he also takes satisfaction in simply feeling the plumb anchor of another person tugging at the top sheet, beveling the mattress’s springs, dipping their head into the fluff of pillows.

So of course he said yes, and Monica immediately tottered into his room, changed and asleep before he’d brushed his teeth and drank a glass of water to balance out the whiskey.

Mark picks up his lung, the tissue cool and cerulean. He can feel the yearning in his chest for its return. His body is hot. Monica moans and flops on her side, her back to him, and mumbles something. Mark reaches inside himself, opening his core to the world, and shoves the lung back in. He feels a mixture of relief and pain, nothing physical, just a fresh flood of sadness to balance the anger. Of course sadness would still be lurking, soaked into his lung: what would one night of drunken bitching about Jed do? Sorrow doesn’t just swirl away down a drain any faster than anger. But this teeter-totter wave will pass eventually, he knows. The lethargy and breathiness of sorrow will crest and flush away like many things do. He’ll forget about Jed one day, he’s sure, truly and totally, even if that day isn’t today. Today: he imagines making eggs and bacon for Bree and Monica, filling the apartment with the smells of grease and salt, adding some butter and cheese to the pan, bloating their bodies with anchoring nourishment to beat back the skull-crush of hangovers and hopelessness. Perhaps he’ll coax them into a happy conversation and will get to witness the blooming of something beautiful between them. The thought gives him a flutter in his gut. And then, when they’re gone and he’s alone, perhaps he’ll go for another run, jam that tired ache into his calves, his ribcage, his thighs, leave his body burning with something other than sorrow, other than rage.