Heart's Stapler

A short story about Cupid’s cousin

My first cousin, Cupid, gets all the attention. He's featured on greeting cards, in Saturday morning cartoons, in poetry, and on tattoos. Cupid's one of the most famous beings on Earth and among the most beloved, too, rivaled only by Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. 

I'm not jealous. After all, Cupid's been slinging love arrows since 700 BC, while I only started mending broken hearts in 1877. But I will say that Cupid's job is a lot easier than mine. Really. Mix a bunch of twenty-somethings at a party together, libidos surging, hearts longing, alcohol coursing through their blood, and something's bound to happen. 

One shot fired, and Cupid's work is over. He doesn't even have to aim. 

But for each way romance can begin, there are a hundred roads to its demise. That's where I come in. I fix broken hearts.

Hearts are tricky to mend. Repairing a broken heart is like trying to grasp a slippery fish underwater. My job is more difficult and time-consuming than Cupid's, but nobody gets a tattoo of me—the skinny girl with freckles, an oval face, and blue eyes hidden behind black-framed glasses, who’s carrying a silver stapler in her sheath. 

I am Heart's Stapler.

For a time, Clippy fixed shattered hearts with paper clips. He had replaced Sticky, who mended hearts with tape, but as you can imagine, sticky tape doesn't last long in the fluid, pulsating environment of the heart. Needle and Thread held my job for centuries, and before her, Glue worked in the position for millennia. 

The dozens of sharp staples I snap into the heart's soft, sensitive tissue hurt. I’m sorry. I don't mean to cause pain, but nobody gets over a lost love without a mountain of suffering. 

I patched Lady Gaga’s heart after she split with her fiancé, kept Jacqueline Kennedy from falling apart during her husband’s multiple affairs, and reversed both Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s dysphoria. I put one hundred twenty-two staples in Prince Charles’ ticker, a record. 

I don't know if Cupid keeps track of his clients, but I do, and I'll tell you why. In the fall of 1968, I stapled back together a heart belonging to Millicent Davies, a thirty-two-year-old woman with one young son living in Minneapolis. Typical story. Soon after their child was born, Millicent discovered that her husband, whom she married when they were both twenty-seven, was having an affair. It doesn’t matter with whom or for how long or even whether it began before or after their baby was born. Millicent’s heart was a vase that crashed to the ground. I fixed it, and if there was anyone who cried and howled during the stapling, which took two years, it was Millicent. 

On December 2, 1971, Millicent cried again non-stop, just like she had before I tended to her. She slept every night on a salty, wet pillow. She ate vanilla ice cream for breakfast and a pint of Rocky Road for dinner. She spent her days at the movie theater watching “Love Story” and her nights playing the same side of a Carpenter’s album, too weak to flip it over. 

What happened to Millicent? 

I found out when I walked by an office supply store after a long, grueling heart operation. I was sipping a banana, raspberry, blueberry, and yogurt smoothie on Madison and Seventy Eighth Street in New York City when a flash of light skipped over my eyes. My first thought was somebody had recognized me and was signaling for help. I spun around, listening for tell-tale sobs, scanning the ground for rainbows refracting off tears. Then I faced the office supply store’s window and saw it under a bright display lamp. My nemesis. The tool, invented in 1971 that now makes my work a thousand times harder and renders no heart permanently fixed: the staple remover. 

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If you liked Heart’s Stapler, I think you’ll also enjoy my story, A Second Chance.