Heart Like A Hole - Sleepytime Supervillain Theatre #44

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"Heart Like a Hole"
Story by Morgan Delaney
Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

He took Chewy onto the dance floor, ignoring the sniggers and insults around him as a dance remix of “Wicked Game” played on the pub’s creaking speakers.
He loved Chewy, a small tan-brown bear he’d had since his sixth birthday, despite it all.
Despite her silly old worn face, her tattered fur, the holes where years of tenderness leaked stuffing (yellow and green like the stuffing in his Nana’s old couch).
“I’ll be okay,” he texted Chewy from the waiting room the next morning after stabbing pains in his chest sent him to the doctor.
But when the doctor told him to piss in a cup, only a hole came out the end of his knob, and the doctor said that was serious.
Those little plastic cups weren’t cheap, and other patients might stumble in the hole, which had spilled out onto the floor after swallowing up the cup.
They let him go home to get his belongings before checking in for more tests.
He wanted to bring Chewy, but he didn’t want her worrying either.
Nor did he know what would happen to her there if he died of the hole inside him.
So he lied and told her it was just one night and that there were some mean teddies already in the ward.
He didn’t think she believed him, but the taxi came and it was too late to apologise or change his mind.
In the hospital, they took his blood and fluid from his spine. They fed him more than the other patients, but he always felt hungry. He hadn’t been to the toilet in days, but still felt no need.
The hole inside him kept growing and swallowing everything up.
The doctors wanted to cut it out before it swallowed him.
It wasn’t like the holes in his teddy bear, they said - he’d talked about Chewy in his sleep. The holes in her fur were on the outside and superficial.
His hole had grown deep inside him and then metastasised into something dangerous.
It wouldn’t be a safe operation.
But he agreed to it for Chewy.
She hated hospitals as much as he did, but if he did this thing, when he returned home, he coul insist she had her operation to be patched up to stop losing her stuffing.
This might end up being good for both of them.
The surgeon cut out as much of the hole as he could. Then the other doctors did something to his metabolism, so he’d grow into the hole the missing hole had left behind. He lay in the hospital ward, dozing in front of insipid television shows for a week, having forgotten that Chewy was waiting and worrying about him.
At home, she sat in the hallway when he opened the door.
Right where she had been when he left, as if she hadn’t moved.
He realised what an idiot he’d been about Chewy.
She wasn’t his best friend.
She was a stuffed toy he should have outgrown years ago.
He put her in a box and left her in the attic.
Except for the rain, he would have put her outside immediately for someone else to take - if they wanted her.
He forgot about Chewy in no time and got on with his life.
The box in the attic didn’t close properly, so Chewy gathered dust year after year.
She shrank with time as mice pulled her stuffing out to make beds for their children.
When she had no more stuffing left inside, a hole leaked out through the bare patches in her fur instead.
Forgotten, unnoticed, it ate away at the box, then the joists of the attic and the ceiling as it spread down through the house.


And that's what happened.

Alright, I hope that helps you.
It's certainly a weight off my mind to have told you.
Possibly too much weight off, I'm...
starting to...
spin...
Oh noooooooooooooooo!