“No one believes that anymore. Not even my grannie believes that.” Robyn crossed her arms over her chest and flopped back in her chair as if that settled the argument.

Miss Everlee was used to such outbursts from Robyn and the other children by now. It was only two months into the new year and she was already counting down until the harvest, when her appointment would be over. Her sanity was worth more than her salary; she had done the calculation as she stared at the crack in her bedroom ceiling this morning before hauling herself up and out into the darkness to make it to the schoolhouse in time.

Sometimes she wished the students wouldn’t show up. None of them cared about reading or spelling or math beyond how much they could count on two hands. Sometimes she thought she’d made a mistake. Other times she knew she had.

“Really?” Miss Everlee asked in a way the children heard as an innocent question, but any adult listening carefully would have felt the hairs on their neck stand on end. It was not an innocuous question.

“Of course,” Tym replied, receiving a nod from Robyn. “I saw it when we went to the City last year. My da’ dropped us off at the museum and we saw lots of brains in jars.”

A chorus of icks and awes created a din in the room, which subsided more or less on its own, no one paid attention to Miss Everlee’s motions to be quiet.

“And what does that prove?”

“The person at the museum, she was even older than you, said that scientists showed all our thinking is done in the brain.”

“Yeah,” Robyn picked up after Tym took a breath. “We only need our brains. No one needs their heart for thinking.”

“You don’t need a heart?”

“No!” the children chorused.

“You can kill someone through the heart, but it isn’t the most important thing. The brain is.” Robyn nodded at Tym as if this settled the argument.

Miss Everlee wanted to sigh, but didn’t. Instead she moved on with the next lesson and the next until finally the day was done. Then she walked back home, though even weighted down with her bag, she had a slight smile playing on her lips that caused the foxes to scurry from her path for they were more observant than the children.

When she reached her cottage after locking the door behind her, she reached into her bag and withdrew a specimen jar large enough to hold a brain, but this one held what looked like the shadow of a heart. She put it on the shelf above her bed and considered how long it would be before the children noticed that parts of their hearts had gone missing.