Tapeheart

He was born inside a mountain that breathed tape. Magnetic lungs turning, spitting oxide dust into the air. He’d wind the reels around his wrist until the hiss found harmony with blood. Each groove a confession. Each flutter a pulse. Down in the valley they named it nostalgia; he inhaled it like air, exhaled ghosts in Dolby.

The mountain convulsed one night—exhaled a bird wired with diodes, feathers glitching in 8-bit light. It perched on his shoulder, sang in a corrupted MIDI key, whispered: I can take you out, but you’ll have to leave the tape behind.

He laughed—a dry splice of sound. The tape’s the only thing keeping me together, he said. The bird peeled open its chest like an autopsy of melody. Inside, an empty cassette marked Ani. He fed it into the hollow where his ribs met the hum. Pressed play.

Static leaked out—warm, chemical. Smelled like sleep-deprived dawn on the skin of a dead lake. A voice whispered through the noise: I’m still listening, even when the power cuts. Then they flew—only high enough to escape pattern recognition.

They landed in a forest of organ pipes. Pines singing the old cathedral frequencies. The bird unraveled into lace; lace into skin. She stepped from the filament, wearing a blazer and entropy. Her smile said come apart with me. He did. Their mouths soldered. The hiss became breath. The tape unspooled, a fuse lit between two collapsing systems.

They came as the valley lights flickered alive—two ghosts syncing to the same fractured metronome. The air smelled of iron and electricity.

When morning glitched through, he tried to rewind himself. Nothing but her name left magnetized on the reel, looping every thirty-five seconds like a heartbeat he’d forgotten to erase. He pressed it to his ear—still warm, still alive.

He walked home without the mountain, without the machine, only static in his pocket and the taste of a kiss that never happened but keeps playing through every silence.

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