On Thursday morning, Spencer Mills became acutely aware of his heart beating.
Without warning, he felt it—all warm and watery, pounding with peculiar enthusiasm—against his left breast.
More unsettling than that, he could see it.
Obscured from others in an office cubicle, Spencer watched the pocket of his shirt gently pulsing.
It felt like a panic attack, but those usually only happened right before he was about to do something that threatened severe humiliation.
Was this a precursor to a heart attack?
I’m thirty nine, he thought. Not fifty nine. This is not supposed to be happening.
After glancing over his shoulder to be sure no one was watching, he pressed his hand against his chest and immediately felt the rhythmic pounding travel into his left palm. Like a sinister current, the previously benign lub-dubbing seemed to snake throughout his body, parking in his skull. Spencer’s brain was suddenly a soft tomato throbbing against a fragile skin, one brief crescendo from bursting.
