The Progress of Sherlock Holmes

The Heart is not Heart-Shaped

Rayleigh scattering has diffused the shorter green and blue wavelengths in the remaining light of the sun, leaving only red and orange across the London skyline.

Sky. To date I have spent brain power only on considering what descends from it and alters the conditions of human criminal activity, not the sky itself. Peer up at it now: a great empty space. Initial observations suggest that it is largely pointless. Merely absence of a ceiling or upper floor. Functionally, the origin location of weather patterns. Rain, snow, fog, sleet; these things can be evidence, important to note. Otherwise, it is merely the Cartesian coordinate Z (up). How tedious. The cosmos, largely, is boring: there are no motives in space. So far, no murders, no crimes. Dull. Large balls of gas on fire and moving around in aimless circles. Tiny points of light. Bright red glow, pushed out from the edge of the world, slowly dimming. (Dimming light can shift the view of a crime scene; things can be hidden in different varieties of light. Worthy of notice, at least.) Bright point of orange behind the skyline; fingers of red that fade into blue-blackness.

People appear to find this process romantic, the sun moving behind the horizon. Why? (Does John find it romantic? Probably. Thought stings. He does not sit and moon over sunsets with me. Would I want him to?)

(Could I find this process interesting, if John were sitting here next to me, mooning at the setting sun?)

(Possibly.)

(Probably.)

Is it the colour? Do reddish hues bear some particular significance that prompts an emotion or amorous action? Would staring at a wall painted red incite the same reaction? Could I paint the entire flat red as a means of provoking John in an amorous direction?

Pathetic. It would only make him think of someone else.

Phone buzzes. Pull it out, look at the screen. It’s a text from John. Can’t help but look. It’s the latest of fifteen such texts, each more anxious than the next.

Where are you?

Can’t hear tone of voice through a text, but I can sense it anyway. He is still angry with me.

It’s not my fault his date’s hair caught on fire. She was dangling it into the candle on the table, I didn’t drag her head over it. I didn’t even ask her to turn her head away from me like that. Her decision. I just wanted to ask John a simple question or two about liver decomposition, I couldn’t very well get his opinion without the liver in question present, could I?

Another buzz. Check screen. Two messages. Stomach does another little turn.

Sherlock, please answer me. Where are you?

Mrs. Hudson is starting to get worried, it’s not just me.

Red is also the colour of warning; signs, portside lights on ships, traffic signals. Red is the colour of blood, which is, in a way, another kind of warning: stop, you’ve gone too far, broken the skin, broken a body. Hearts look reddish when you first see them inside a body, but once cleaned of blood, they’re predominantly yellowish, like chicken skin. Children draw them and colour them in red, presumably because they have failed to learn this simple fact. Perhaps they have seen only living, beating hearts, seen open-heart surgeries on their relentless tellies (do parents let their children watch open heart surgeries on telly?) and failed to understand that the red around a heart is only the blood. Do parents want their children to imagine only bloodied hearts? Presumably so; live things are (apparently) more pleasing to people than dead things are. (Regardless of its colour, the heart is certainly not heart-shaped, which is an odd failure of the English language, and a bizarre and erroneous anatomy lesson for children. I suppose it’s like Santa Claus: one of the things adults lie to children about by default, with no shame or remorse.)