how to mend a broken heart

by Luanne Castle

His mother named him Virgil from a pocket baby name book in hopes he would flourish as the paperback predicted. She couldn’t imagine all the sorrow that would come into his life, starting with her death by choking from a bite of tough steak when Virgil was ten. In his senior year, his girlfriend joined the track team. During their first run, Olive’s throat swelled shut, and she collapsed. By the time an ambulance arrived, she was gone. Virgil sang “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” at the funeral. After that, Virgil suffered one loss after another: uncle, sister, teacher. But he tried to be resilient. Put one foot in front of the other, just keep moving.

The funeral song lodged inside Virgil, a permanent earworm. He apprenticed with a rheumy, old man, learning to tune pianos, then started his own business. At every job, he played “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” with trills and scales and squiggles to check over his handiwork. What he liked best, though, was rebuilding old pianos. He taught himself to replace soundboards, hammers, and strings, finally sanding the cabinets with tender hands. Virgil added a studio at the back of his house, where he could work on one or two pianos at a time. 

In the corner was his own medium grand Steinway, which he worked on in his spare time. His neighbor kidded him that the piano was his life’s work since he never seemed to finish it. Virgil didn’t disagree. His fatal heart attack at forty-two occurred while he mowed his front lawn. At the auction for Virgil’s Steinway, a musician opened the fallboard and shrieked. Where she expected to find smooth keyboard geometry, she discovered a grotesque smile of cadaver ivory inset between the ebony keys. Thanks to the efforts of many dentists, teeny bits of gold, silver, and porcelain sparkled amongst the ivory under the fluorescent light overhead.

Photo of Luanne Castle

BIO: Luanne Castle’s poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, Burningword, Superstition Review, One Art, Roi Fainéant, Dribble Drabble, Flash Boulevard, O:JA&L, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble, Antigonish Review, Longridge, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, and Ginosko. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her hybrid flash memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in 2026.