The Heart Snatcher
She was immensely proud of the pottery she had found near the Navajo Indian reservation.
It went perfect in her new Santa Fe-style house in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and people would visit and ask her about it.
“Stacey, that is amazing. Where did you get that?” they would ask upon seeing it on her shelf in her spacious living room.
And it was perfectly understandable to inquire about.
It was centuries old, nearly perfect with a few nicks and minor cracks but other than that it was perfect.
To make it even more alluring were the petroglyph-like drawings of what appeared to be a mother holding the hand of a child, and in the background were buffalo and deer.
“We’re not supposed to remove these things from Anasazi ruins because it’s against the law but I had to get this because it was perfect,” Stacey would say.
Her younger son, Jeff, was a typical 14-year-old boy who hadn’t grown fond of things like that.
Much less had he learned any appreciation of the Native American cultures in New Mexico. It just wasn’t important.
And then one day Stacey was sitting in her living room looking at the pot when she remembered the Navajo sheepherders who were there with her that day when she found the pot.
“Don’t take those. They belong with the dead. Us Navajo stay away from those things,” they were telling her.
Of course she asked the typical white man question of why.
“Because they’re gone and their lives on this Earth are broken. If you take these home with you your life will break or much worse.”
She paid no heed to the superstitions and the warnings and took it home anyway.
And as she sat there that day looking at the sensual, heartwarming scene of the mother holding the child’s hand she noticed another figure beside the child. It was a light inky type of spot then it became a child shape.
She was horrified and ran to her son’s bedroom to tell him about it.
He wasn’t there.
She searched all over the house, called his friends, and drove around the neighborhood looking for him.
Nothing.
Then she realized that maybe he was the one on the pot. Horrifying as it was it made sense.
That night she dozed off after a tremendous cry and dreamed of an old Indian lady talking to her in her living room.
“You must take it back then I’ll give you your son back. I made that pot for my child long ago after he died. I put his heart in it and I could see him still when I looked in it. Please bring it back or you’ll become twisted and your son will stay lost.”
Stacey woke and realized that she could get Jeff back anytime she wanted.
“We’ll give it a week,” she figured.
The boy was a burden to her and she never loved his father in the first place. Now he was an irritating liability who had turned on her.
“Let him learn a lesson from this,” she laughed.
And at the end of the week she thought about it once more.
Life was so much easier and free now without the ungrateful son of a bitch.
Suddenly she felt a tug in her chest. Feeling her pulse she discovered there was none.
She raced to the pot and looked in it.
Her heart was beating in it then it began to disappear.
As horror raced in suddenly she began to laugh.
“Oh, to hell with them all,” she hissed and left to go to a bar with a friend.
“That pot is worth more than him and all them Indian traditions.”