Rebecca Hanauer

In the Absence of Findings

Winner of the 2026 American Literary Review Award in Essays, Judged by Ira Sukrungruang

Premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) are extra beats from the lower chambers of the heart.

They disrupt the regular rhythm—
a flutter,
a pause,
a bird slamming
into a window
and vanishing.
Sometimes causing
a sensation of a skipped
beat in the chest.

Lauren Berlant said: Pain is intimate. It is also structural.

I had just fallen asleep when one of the tires hit a pothole on the road hard enough to rattle the glove compartment. It felt like the bottom of the world falling out. I couldn’t have been asleep for more than a minute, and yet, for a second, I didn’t know where I was.

It’s cliché to say that my heart was racing, but that’s what it was doing. It was racing so fast that I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t think of a time when my heart had beat so fast. I thought of tachycardia. Arrhythmias. Palpitations.

I was born with a slight heart murmur. Innocent, they called it. However, as I was growing up, I had to take one antibiotic pill when I went to the dentist for a cleaning.

The bacteria from your teeth could get into your heart, they told me.

As a child, I worried about an infected heart. What if? What would it feel like? Would my heart beat differently?

Is that what causes a broken heart?

At some point in my life, my heart started skipping. PVCs. More like a pause. Like that liminal space between an in-breath and an exhale. Sometimes, it takes my breath away.

Nothing to worry about.

Unless two happen one after the other. Two in a row, and your heart could stop.

That seems like something to worry about, to me.

I pressed my forefinger and my middle finger into the soft groove of my neck just next to my windpipe. I tried counting, but I got numbers and letters mixed up. Three, four, five, G, H, I—

My husband was driving, and I insisted that he feel my pulse. He tried, awkwardly, to reach his arm around to feel my neck. He shook his head.

Seems fine, he said.

But I feel weird. I knew something was wrong. I could feel it. Not pain, but a kind of darkness— velvet and hollow. The edges of my consciousness zoomed in and out. My mind felt far away. Let out like a kite.

I think I’m going to die, I said. I rubbed my numb hands against my thighs. We were driving home after a short stay in the mountains. On a stretch of highway so remote there was no cell service. No shoulder to pause and ruminate on. I imagined—in my near-death state—a helicopter landing nearby to give me medical assistance.

You’re tired, my husband said.

It’s true, I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept for more than a few minutes. The night before, I tossed and turned, then went to the living room. I didn’t want to wake my husband, so I tried to sleep on the sofa. I read, I played games on my phone, I stared at the ceiling.

That’s when I heard it. That song playing on some bugle in the distance. The same song they had played at my brother’s funeral. Taps, it’s called.

I can’t think of anything more harrowing and sorrowful than the image of a lone soldier in uniform, standing away at a distance, playing Taps on a bugle. How he turned on his heel with skill and precision and marched away, the song still streaming after him.

I sat up and tried to locate where the song was playing from. I leaned my ear against the screen of the open window, but I couldn’t hear anything outside. When I lay back down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling, I heard it again.

This must be some kind of psychosis, I thought.

Hysteria (noun) hys-te-ria: a psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of the psychogenic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions.

I listened to that song play until the sun rose. I made it home and I didn’t die. But my hands continued to feel numb sometimes. My mind kept escaping. And yes, my heart—my heart—kept beating at a frenetic pace. Like a bird in a cage. Like a jackhammer in my chest. It pounded, skipped, and fluttered.

My body was experiencing what my mind could not. My mind was remembering what my body wanted to forget. And somewhere in between, my heart paused.

He’s in a better place.
He’s not suffering anymore.
Time will heal.

When I did sleep, I dreamt of my mother. Her face would glitch and fall like pixels. Sometimes, her form fell apart as she walked towards me. Other times, she was still asleep in the hospital bed they squeezed into my house. I’d sit and watch as she left her body in wavy lines.

Two in a row, and your heart could stop. First my brother, then my mother. I continued to count my heartbeats. Eight, nine, ten, T, U, V—

My doctor sent me to a neurologist for my numb hands. An optimist. An opportunist.

We need an MRI of your neck, he told me. There could be lesions.

Lesion (noun) le-sion: a region in an organ or tissue which has suffered damage through injury or disease, such as a wound, ulcer, abscess, or tumor. It’s a brain tumor, my mother had told me. Twelve to eighteen months.

Nerve tests. Neurological tests. MRIs. The neurologist held his empty hands out to me like a priest or a magician or a man with nothing left to offer. Nothing to worry about—

You, the doctor. You, who smiled as you said it was nothing. You, who saw the tremble in my hands and called it tiredness. You, who have never had a body like mine.

The word hysteria originates from the Greek word “hystera,” meaning “uterus.” Ancient Greek physicians, influenced by Hippocrates, believed that women’s psychological and physical ailments were caused by a wandering womb.

I wonder how many women have heard you’re fine when something inside them was breaking. Medicine can name the parts of us, but still fail to believe. Sometimes, the most dangerous diagnosis is indifference.

Sara Ahmed said: The body becomes the place where history deposits itself.

I lie on the floor—hands on my chest—tears still streaming—little hiccups—the ceiling is smooth—the crown molding is a different shade of white than the wall—salt—bone—calcium— I remember the texture of my brother’s ashes—how I was surprised at the sight of them—they looked like rocks, like stones, like osseous matter—how the box that held him was warm against that January night—how my father laid his fingers atop the back of my hand—you’re too young to deal with all this, he said—

Terror swirls in my mind. Hands to the floor. I find a tiny pill in the fabric of the carpet, and I roll it under my finger.

I had to lie down.
That was the only way
to stop the hysteria.
It’s the only thing I can control.
What my thoughts do,
how my body
decides to react,
is out of my jurisdiction.
I just live here.

It started when I left the house this morning. I said goodbye to my husband, who was working from home in his office. The smallest, tiniest, littlest thought wiggled its way between the hemispheres of my brain. What if?

Just a thought. Maybe a memory. Not quite a memory. Connected to a memory. What is a thought that’s connected to memory?

I let it go and went to the store.

I almost forgot about it. When I walked back into the silent house, I had that hair-standing feeling. The somethings-not-quite-right-feeling.

Hello? I called out. The dog tippy-tapped around my feet. I looked up the stairs at his office door. Open. I listened. Quiet. Maybe he’s on a call, I thought. But his voice reverberates through the house; there’s no way I wouldn’t hear him—What if?—I stalked upstairs with dread pooling in my belly. I honestly expected to see him sitting in his swiveling desk chair—the one that he hardly uses because he prefers the standing desk—and I feared that I wouldn’t.

When I stepped into his office, I was mid-sentence. Already talking to him, but I’d already forgotten what I was saying. He wasn’t there.

The room wasn’t empty—it was absent.

I had already been tucked in bed when we got the call. The call was years ago, but it feels like now. The call that, if you’ve received it yourself, you know what it feels like.

Frozen.

Acrid.

Bottomless.

Like space.

I screamed. Rather, my soul screamed. Every thought I’d ever had ran through my mind again. A collection of What Ifs. It all happened years ago, but sometimes it happens now.

Anne Carson said: You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?

You, the reader. You, who made it this far. You, who may be wondering if this is too much, if I’ve gone too deep. You, who might be counting your own heartbeats now. I’m with you. You’re with me.

I saw myself searching through the house for him. Finding him. Blood spilled. My scream filled the empty spaces until my husband appeared at the doorway.

What’s the matter?

It was years ago, but I remember seeing my brother a few weeks before. He seemed like himself. He smiled the way he always smiled. He hugged me the way he always did, picking me up off the ground. He snored when he fell asleep in the chair—What if?—I thought it was a mistake.

They must be talking about a different person. And then, I thought, maybe he’s just hurt. Maybe he didn’t die. Maybe they’ll call back and say oops! Nevermind.

At least he left a note.

My husband had been downstairs in the basement and came up to find me when I started screaming. This wasn’t the first time, and so I knew what to do. I knew that soon, my hands would go numb, my mind would float into the distance, and the fear of my heart exploding would become so strong that I thought I really would die. My body experiencing what my mind could not.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am, Sylvia Plath said.

His warm hands on my shoulders. His image blurs through my tears. I wouldn’t do that, he says, I’ll never do that. And I hold on to it, like a key in my pocket.

Are you okay? Someone asked me at his funeral. I looked at the table of framed pictures of my brother, then I looked across the room to my mother—at the question mark of a scar on her exposed scalp—and shook my head. No, I said. I looked into their eyes, and then they turned away from me.

The last time I saw my brother, he sat in the living room, swirling a glass of brandy. This is where my memory gets tricky. They say our cells have memory. Does our memory have memory? That every time we recall something, it changes just a little. Can I rely on those last images? It was late. Cold, even for December. They had to go get him. His motorcycle wouldn’t start again. Do you know how dark the back roads of the Texas Hill Country can be at night?

It was so stupid, he said.
So stupid. The deer all ran
across the road like a wave.
So stupid. He swirled the brandy.
His hair was receding
ever so slightly. A sign
of age. Of wisdom.
Of life pulling back.

You can see—it’s clear—that he didn’t want to die, right?

Once, when I was getting my hair cut, the hairdresser told me that her husband had died suddenly. I don’t know if it was the intimacy of haircutting or if we were both just the type to spill our trauma onto strangers. But she told me she wanted to die after he died. That she understood why someone would want to take their life. And I said to her, but it’s not that you wanted to die. It’s that you wanted to stop feeling the way that you felt, and those are two very different things.

She showed me the goosebumps on her arm.

My husband walks back downstairs, and I count his feet as they stamp down each step. I’m still on the floor, hands on my chest. I notice the crown molding is a different shade of white from the ceiling and the wall.

Who thought of choosing three different shades of white?

Maybe they were trying to make the edges disappear. My heart flutters. I count my heartbeat again, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, W, X, Y—

Rebecca Hanauer is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her essay, “Grief, As Usual,” won The Penn Review’s 2025 Prose Prize and appeared in their spring issue. She is currently completing her first novel. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, their son, and a lazy labradoodle. Her first publication was an obituary.