My apartment has just two rooms-an eat-in kitchen and a living room that doubles as my bedroom-but the place is bright and pleasant. I live on the second floor, above the shop. A jauntily posed mannequin clutches one of the purses, but her face is covered in a fine layer of dust since I haven’t changed the window in years. The window features a few purses, an ostrich handbag, and a suitcase. Inside, there are tables for the bags and a mirror, and a workshop in back, behind a curtain, with shelves for my materials.

It’s just a small place, but it has a nice display window facing the street. For more than 20 years now I’ve kept a shop near the train station. “Take that elevator to the sixth floor.” She pointed past a crowd of people gathered in front of admitting I noticed her nail polish was chipped. I pronounced each word slowly and carefully, hoping to quiet the pounding of my heart. “Could you tell me where to find the cardiac ward?” I said, getting to my real question. She seemed annoyed by my question, and I was sorry I had bothered her. “No one’s seen him this morning,” she said. Y?” I asked the woman behind the information desk. Central Records, Electroshock Clinic, Conference Center, Endoscopy… It was all like a foreign language to me. Y was and where he could be, as I studied the hospital directory.

The public-address system had been repeating this announcement for some time. Please contact the pharmacy immediately.” Kike dug through old medical journals that he found in an NYC thrift store and cut out pictures of bags, hearts, hospitals, and all sorts of other things in order to come up with just the right macabre imagery for a story that is heartfelt in the most literal sense. We’ve paired this story with Spanish artist Kike Besada’s collages. In the story, a comely cabaret singer with the outlandish birth defect of a heart that developed outside her body hires a reclusive bag maker to sew a satchel to protect the misplaced organ. “Sewing for the Heart” is from Yoko’s new collection, Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (Picador February 2013), and it’s as perversely tantalizing as anything she’s written.

Yōko ogawa revenge eleven dark tales