Dan and the Dead Boy

After receiving a donated kidney from a stranger, the narrator struggles with the feeling that part of his body is not really his. Available in the Fiction Desk anthology There Was Once a Place.

Lying in recovery after my first satisfying piss in three years, I ran my fingers over the dressing on my belly and imagined sliding them through the incision to tear out the dead boy’s kidney. I saw it flop off the bed, a bloody half-moon left behind on the sheet, and landing on the floor to be carried off by a cleaner; and my body being mine again. They say it might last ten years. A decade with it, as my blood runs through and becomes his blood.