THERE IS A ONE-ARMED GIRL sitting next to me on a bed in a motel room. Across from us, above the TV, hanging at an angle, is a large oval mirror. Through the mirror I watch the girl as she looks out the room’s only window.

She closes her eyes and begins to speak without turning to face me. She starts talking about my heart, of all things. How it was the first thing I was ever given. “You had a heart before you even had a thought,” she says.

I do my best not to stare at the nub on the left side of her body, where her arm should be, but isn’t.

I smile at the back of her head and put my hand on her knee because that’s what we are here to do, I think. And because she doesn’t have an arm on this side of her body, which means she doesn’t have a hand on this side of her body, which means her knee will have to do. She turns and faces me, reaches across her body and peels my hand away. She pats it gently, like it’s an old dog. “You should listen now,” she says. “Your heart was a gift.”

I feel like my chances will improve if I take a more active role in the conversation. So I ask her the only question that I can think to ask. “Who gave it to me, then?"

She sits up straight.

I try to keep my eyes away from the nub. I wonder to myself then how she lost it. And when.

She tells me about the electrical impulse in the early moments of my heart’s growth, how it moved down a conveyor belt of atoms and became my heart’s first beat.

She has bright eyes and white teeth.

“So beautiful,” I respond.

She stands up and grabs the remote for the TV. Flips through a few stations of static and infomercials. Settles on something that resembles local news. A blonde woman with plastic surgery tugging on the corners of her mouth updating us on current freeway congestion. The girl lowers the volume. Sets the remote back down on the desk. Sits down next to me on the bed. “Everything moved incredibly fast after this,” she says. “Your heart developed rapidly.”

“Mine specifically, or—”

She looks at me hard. “You need to focus.”

I nod in agreement. Focus.

“When you were born, when your eyes first saw the fluorescent lights of whatever hospital you were born in…”

“French,” I tell her.

“What?”

“The hospital.”

She shakes her head like she just walked into a spider’s web. I am annoying her, and I know that I am annoying her, but I do not know how to stop. She pushes past the cobwebs. “When your mother first spoke to you, and when your father first held you—your heart took notice. It was listening.”

“I didn’t know my heart could do that,” I tell her. "When did you learn all of this?”

“When I lost my arm.”

“Oh—” I say. “That makes sense,” even though it doesn’t.

She catches me looking at the nub, and then looking away.

“You don’t have to pretend,” she says. “Go ahead—look. I don’t mind.”

“No—” I say. “It’s just—”

“It’s okay.”

But now I can’t look because she caught me looking. So I look at her almond brown eyes instead. I tell her that I’m sorry. “I’ve never really been around someone with just one arm.”

“Do you know what you were doing seven months after you were born?”

“My parents lived in San Diego, I think.”

“Your heart.”

I brush hair away from her face. I catch a glimpse of the motion in the mirror, realize how stupid I look doing it—like some cheesy asshole trying to make a move—but then keep doing it anyway. I hold my palm against her cheek.

She closes her eyes. “Seven months after you were born, your heart started sharing all of its blood with your brain. The world was bigger than you thought it was going to be. It made a deal with you then.”

I lean in and I kiss her on the cheek.

“Your heart said to you, ‘I will keep you alive until I am done keeping you alive, and in exchange you will show me the world through your eyes.’”

I move my mouth from her jawline, to her neck, to her shoulder. I place my hand on her thigh and she lets it stay. The airy fabric from her sundress falls over my wrist, covers my hand as it disappears up her leg.

She makes a sound. “Your heart didn’t stop growing until you were seventeen. This is the healthiest your heart would ever be.”

I touch her left shoulder—pull gently at the strap of her sundress until it slides over the empty space where her arm should be, and falls down her side.

She leans against me, her nub poking me in the ribcage, her head resting in the crook of my neck. She tells me that the muscles in my heart stiffened over time. “At some point in your twenties your heart had a maximum heart rate of two hundred beats per minute; this number declined, and will continue to decline five to ten beats per minute, per decade, for the rest of your life.”

She raises her hand to the stubble on my face, and turns my eyes towards her. She kisses me on the lips for what feels like a long time. Carefully, she pushes her tongue into my mouth. She looks at me like she is trying to figure something out, deciding on something, and then she shoves me with her nub so that I fall back onto the bed.

She climbs on top of me.

She unbuckles my pants.

I almost tell her then, as she maneuvers my belt away, how impressive all of this is—for her to be doing this. But I stop myself. Because that would be cruel, I think, to point out and make obvious the parts of her that are missing.

She straddles me and lifts up her dress so that it’s resting on the curve of her ass. “Has anyone ever told you about the flamingos?”

“Does this still have to do with my heart?”

“Yes,” she says. “All of this—” she moves her underwear to the side — “has to do with your heart.” Slowly, she glides down onto me. “There are more plastic flamingos in the world than there are real ones.”

I gasp—not because of the flamingos, but because of what she’s doing with her hips—but also because of the flamingos. I gasp for them too.

I reach up and I grab one of her tits. “I had no idea you were so perfect.”

She grabs my hand and squeezes it. And then she leans down, her body flush with mine, her ass bobbing slowly in the air to the sound of her breath.

I think to myself, This is all going to end soon. I try and concentrate. I try and distract myself. The flamingos. Think about the flamingos. “What happened to them?”

“We destroyed their habitats,” she grunts. “We killed them. We turned them into plastic idols—memories of a time we can no longer access.”

This is a good distraction. The more we talk about flamingos, the longer I can last. I am sure of it. Keep thinking about the flamingos. Think about their bright, pink feathers and their dwindling numbers.

She’s making strange sounds now, from somewhere deep in her chest.

“But—” I stammer. I lose my train of thought. I stare at her dark hair spilling over her shoulders like a bloated winter creek.  “Why did we do it?”

“Because the plastic ones are easier to love,” she says. “And the koalas, too.”

“We killed the koalas?”

“No, we put them into zoos. Which is kind of the same thing.”

I don’t know why, but I repeat the words back to her. “The same thing,” I say.

I am indoctrinated by the nub.

She asks me if anyone has ever told me about their fingertips.

“The koalas or the flamingos?”

“Flamingos are a bird—”

“I know that,” I interrupt.

“Birds have feathers, not fingers.”

“Of course,” I tell her. “So stupid.”

“They are the only animals with a unique fingerprint, like ours.”

“And we put them in a zoo anyway? Even with their special fingers?”

She brings her face down to mine. “Yes,” she says. “We stuffed them into zoos.”

I feel like I might cry—looking at her now, she’s so beautiful, more beautiful than any two-armed girl I’ve ever met; and her words, they’re so sad, sadder than any two-armed girl’s words. I can only think to ask the same question that I’ve been asking. I ask her why we did it.

“I already told you,” she says. “You’re not listening.”

I try and look at her face, and I mean I really try and look at it—the freckles on her nose and cheeks. Her perfect lips. Her goofy ears and how they stick out from where they hide in her hair. I look at her good arm and I tell her that I am sorry.

She’s moving her hips in smooth, rhythmic motions. She lets out a quick breath, like she just got punched in the stomach, and then digs her face into my neck. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s—Thanks.”

I can feel the sweat from her forehead, sticky on my neck. She kisses my collarbone, her body relaxing on top of me.

I reach up and touch the nub on the left side of her body—the skin pulled tight like the knot of a balloon. I clear my throat. “Can I ask you something? At first she doesn’t answer. I can tell that her eyes are open though; I can feel the clumps in her mascara as she blinks. “How did you lose it?” There is pale light slipping in through the window’s half-drawn curtain. I don’t know where it comes from, but I can hear the blonde newswoman on the TV whispering about wildfires.

“I was young,” she says, finally. “My parents never told me. But if you are quiet, and if you listen, you can still hear them.”

“The flamingos?” I ask. “What about them can you hear?”

She looks up at me and smiles. “Their heart,” she says. She holds her breath, her ear pressed to my chest.