The Girl & Her Organs

She offered her first organ to a boy with a strip of film tattooed around his wrist.

He had a buzz cut, warm brown skin, and long fingers that cupped his take away coffee like a lover. She had fallen for the way he leaned into her so they could hear each other. The warm of his shoulders near hers. His breath brushed against her face, her mouth, and She knew that she was lost.

There was a warning about this. Women’s organs were highly prized objects and men could make entire careers out of collecting them, even selling them. Every girl was warned of this as they aged. Mothers would tell them fairytales where girls were kidnapped and they had to escape, all while brushing their hair and folding it into neat plaits. Be careful of who you trust, mother would say. They’ll take without worry and leave you bleeding out on the sidewalk.

She was twenty-years-old. She wasn’t some silly teenager, cutting herself open in a school bathroom to hand over an organ to a boy who would change girls the next day. She was better than that.

Yet, at the end of the night, when the boy kissed her cheeks, his lips soft, She folded. She called a cab and as they waited, she cut into the bottom of her ribcage. Her spleen was the easiest. She handed it to him and he blushed pink under the warmth of his skin.

The Boy with the Film Tattoo lived in a different country. Come the next day, he would be on a plane back home, Her spleen packed into his luggage. Some nights, She believed if she concentrated hard enough, she could still feel it being cradled thousands of miles away.

Next were her gallbladder and pancreas. This man had been handsome, movie star handsome. He was so, so tall and had an accent that sounded a hundred years old.

Halloween was their first date. She dressed up, lips red with lipstick. The two curled into each other in a movie theater, knees bumping, hands brushing. Blues and whites played across his face when She looked up at him. In the car ride to her apartment, She realized that she’d give this man whatever organ he wanted. He looked at Her like she was his for the taking, a vicious, predatory look that She took for attraction.

He drank too much. He smoked weed and kissed Her in elevators, hand firm against the back of her neck. They were long and curled around her ankle like a vice. He called at three in the morning, voice dripping like syrup, heavy with whiskey. She would answer, let him in, and he would hold her like she would slip away if he let go.

This was love, She was sure.

She lost her virginity in a haze of alcohol and weed, in and out of consciousness, the tall man heavy between her thighs. She woke up to a thin cut along her back. He was polite, made sure to patch her up. He gave Her pain killers and a Plan B. Kissed her jaw.

The gallbladder he took after She told him She loved him. They sat on her bed, so small. Her toes curled into his thigh, his fingers in the oh-so familiar grip on her ankle. She let him turn her over, slide a knife along her upper back. He picked out the gallbladder all by himself.

“You shouldn’t love me,” he said after, Her organ pink in his palm. “I’m not able to give that back to you.”

The Poet was after.

He read Her poetry from the corner of her bed, legs pressed along hers. She tumbled head over heels with him, his voice a soft peach in her stomach. He would gasp and writhe when She ran her fingers over his skin. He made Her feel useful.

The Poet loved touching Her when the doors were closed. He would press her to walls, drag his hands over Her body as his mouth tasted of vodka and lemonade. He took her tonsils first, his mouth along Her neck. He grazed his teeth over the thin skin, bit down to hide the pain.

That was on Her birthday, when he would take what he could and then leave her, drunk.

She could never learn, no matter how many times she fucked up.

She told The Poet that she liked him and he seemed taken aback.

“I’m not looking for anything that serious.”

She stuck around. Slept with him in the sweaty confines of his childhood bedroom. Let him take a kidney on his bed covered in beige sheets.

Every warning She had received as a child was a silly song, forgotten as she slid her hands along the back of The Poet’s neck. Pulled him in to kiss him like he would leave and never come back.

He took Her adenoids over the summer on a blow up mattress in her friend’s apartment. This time, She would cry about it when he left. Sit on that mattress made of plastic and sob into her hands as she bled down her neck, along her collarbone, onto the blanket.

The warnings had been about him, She was sure.

She still didn’t heed the bedtime stories.

Her mother was left a shell of what she had been as her step father took everything he wanted, then left her to rot. She told herself that she would be different. She would find the one person who was worth it.

It was not The Boy from Queens.

He was the one She met at the top of the subway station steps. Her shorts cut into the fat of her thighs, left red marks. The sun blinded them both and kept them blind for four years.

The first night, he sweet talked. Spoke so nice like syrup on pancakes. A fly to sugar water, trapped. He kissed Her on his bed and she felt nothing.

But, oh, how She wanted to.

The Boy from Queens insisted She stay the night. “It’s too late to leave.”

He stole Her second kidney. She woke up to blood crusted on her stomach.

He kissed his ex-girlfriend and She offered her thymus as proof that she wanted to be with him. He took it into his hands, already bloody from his past, and promised her the riches of everything he had to offer.

She would travel to him, day after day, hours on the train. She would sit in silence, staring ahead as the streets passed. More hollow than She had been before.

This was love. Someone who wanted to be with her, no matter her flaws. The many scars along her body from the men before.

The Poet and The Boy from Queens fought for her organs. She made the mistake of trying to make them friends. There was a get-together: alcohol, video games, and The Poet. He tried to kiss Her, fingers probing along her liver. She pushed him away, laughed in wine drunk.

The Boy from Queens didn’t think it funny.

From then on, The Boy from Queens began to take the organs of other women.

She moved in with him and they got jobs that were parallels of each other. She slept and he went to work. She went to work, he slept with other women.

She didn’t feel at her best. She slept more, cried all the time. She sat in darkness and her body ached, each scabbed-over incision heavier and heavier.

The Boy from Queens told Her he loved her. He bought her gifts, took her on trips. She believed him, even if she couldn’t quite feel it. She wanted to leave, once or twice. She sat in the bath, her cheek on the cold edge of the tub, and told herself that she had to break it off. But She stayed. What if no one else loved her enough? Loved her like him?

She didn’t offer him her organs anymore.

He only took.

On a couch in a sun warmed living room, The Boy from Queens asked Her to marry him. He had no ring, there was no show. He held Her face in his hands and with wide, terrified eyes, he asked her. Everything in Her was telling her to say no.

She said yes.

He took her appendix.

She bled more than she remembered bleeding before.

She found out about the other women. The day The Boy from Queens asked Her to marry him, he had spent the night with a homeless woman, already married. She had asked him for help, he had offered it. He had a drawn out lie to hide his guilt.

She told him to leave. Then begged him back.

He slid a scalpel along her belly, took her small intestine.

They would come and go, fight and make up. They were always on the brink of collapse. The only thing that held them together was her belief that She loved him. She was too afraid to never find it again once he was gone.

She met the women he talked to. They’re copies of her, down to the TV shows they watch. They sneered at her, scoffed. They were covered in scars too. She hid hers, embarrassed.

They were the same and yet they allowed this man to overshadow them.

He yelled at Her, screamed at her, on some street. She cowered, sunk within herself. Her hands pressed and hid her skin, worried that he would hold her down, take another organ. He instead left Her stranded and though she cried, even though something in her chest felt broken, there was the relief that he didn’t take a scalpel to her body.

She left him finally. Left him to the women who so desperately needed him. He tried to talk to Her, keep her around. Stalked Her, found her work. She blocked him, he got a new number, found her again. Every time She saw his name, each scar on her body tingled.

She was single for a year.

She got a new job, one with co-workers who loved her, laughed with her, kept her around. She wore a new lotion that smelled of vanilla and flowers. Her eyes were the bluest they had been in a long time. She smiled more, the heat didn’t hold her down, and for once, a man was not trapped within the confines of her skull.

Till She met The Blonde. He stretched upwards and he curved his shoulders to feel smaller. He smiled at Her. Teased her.

She hated it. He would try to talk to Her and she answered in clipped tones. On the walk home, She would look at a co-worker. “Every time he talks to me, I get creeped out.”

He continued to talk to Her. To go out of his way to interact with her. He waved at her and she pointed at her chest. “Who else would I wave to?” The Blonde asked, his voice sultry, deep.

The first crush after a terrible break up is a scary one. She became the one who would go out of her way to speak to him, to draw his eyes to her. She stayed up all night, wondering if he felt the same. If she should ask him out. Would it work? Or would She only be embarrassed?

She stopped by the exit he stood at. “Would you like to get coffee some time?”

He gave Her his phone number.

And so it began again.

He kissed Her in a park, his hands wrapped around her upper arms. After their second date, he asked Her to be his girlfriend. This is something She has never experienced before and at first, there was only a terror deep in her stomach. “Are you sure?”

He was.

She said yes, but begged him to be honest if he fell out of whatever it was they were getting into. He promised that he would.

She offered him her lungs even if it made it harder to breathe.

He took them and at first, he was appreciative of it.

At work, they passed each other and brushed hands. He would always find a way to find Her. They made out in dark hallways, park benches, hands roaming. He came to her house, drank till they were sloppy, movies playing behind them, forgotten. They fucked to the sound of rain outside on the window. He took Her bladder as she slept.

It was always while She slept.

He began to fade. It happened sudden and fast. He stopped contacting her, refused to make eye contact across the atrium.

She begged him for an explanation. Told him that if he wanted to end things, he had to do it now because she was not dating to date. She dated because time was passing, it was too quick, and she refused to let it waste.

He told Her that he was trying to fix himself. He wouldn’t break up with her, but he told her that he wanted kids. She didn’t, but in a desperate moment, she said she would.

He took her uterus and kept it for himself.

A co-worker ended up dating him in secret. They spoke to Her in terrified murmurs, shaky hands, and she figured it out. She wanted to scream.

He broke up with her. Hooked up with the other co-worker.

She left her job. The ache was back.

There was a hollowness inside of her that She couldn’t fix. Every missing part of her screamed from their phantom spaces.

She gave her large intestine to The Boy in the Band. He doesn’t even need to kiss Her, to promise anything. She just offered it in hopes that he would want her.

He didn’t.

Her brain goes to The Writer, who she adored. She gave it to him and didn’t regret it, even if in the end, they were nothing but passing ships in the night.

Years passed. Migraines came day in and out. She looked out into the trees of her hometown and stared for hours. Her skull was so empty, she found it hard to feel anything.

She uprooted everything and moved overseas.

She could still feel the ache, but at least she could ache with green mountains on the horizon.

She met the last boy on Halloween. He had an accent that reminded Her of the hundred year old accent in sophomore year. His ankles were skinny and his wrist fit in her palm.

Their first date, they spend it walking. Walking and walking, talking, ignoring cold hands. Eventually, She asked if she could hold his. Warm it up. He let her.

She kissed him in a graveyard. The darkness swallowed them, comforted them as She pressed into the warmth of him. Glasses fogged, smudged, he tossed his into the wet grass, and they kissed until a light passed over them, scaring them into normality.

Her dreams are filled with kissing him beside gravestones. They walked through graveyards during the day, eyes bright. They giggled.

He held Her like she was something special. His hand fit well in hers.

For the first time in a very long time, She was able to forget the aching inside her. There was a warmth in her chest where the heart lay as she caught sight of him across a park, walking to her. If She could, she would kiss him till he was breathless, searching for the last breath.

Maybe this is it. Maybe She had finally proven herself right.

She told him that she can’t offer him anything because it’s all that she had left. She had to make sure that he meant what he said, wanted what she wanted, before she made any decision that could kill her.

He had told Her that he understood.

Except, he asked to speak with Her.

She took him to her place, walked him up the steps. His hands were cold and thin.

He couldn’t look at Her when he told her that he wasn’t ready to date. That he should have waited. He was in the wrong, he liked Her a lot, he did, he just couldn’t. He didn’t want to waste her time.

She thought of the time they spent, of the hours whittled down to nothing. None of it had felt wasted, even in this moment as her heart splintered behind her breast plate.

How could it have been wasted if it was everything She had wanted?

She’s embarrassed, but she begged. Begged for some way to change it.

He said they couldn’t.

She imagined herself leaving claw marks on him as he walked out of the apartment, afraid to let him go.

“Don’t go, please,” She whispered.

He doesn’t answer. There was nothing left to say.

She offered her last organ to a man on the first snow of the year.

Outside, on the sidewalk, She offered her heart. Presented Her chest.

As all men, no matter their temperament, he took the offer.

She gave him her kitchen knife, watched the way his breath puffed in the cold. With both hands, he shoved the blade into her chest. Her breastplate fought back, but with force, he broke it in half. He slid the knife through Her skin, thick and fatty. Pulled it open with his bare hands, cold.

His fingers fished inside Her chest. She watched his face, the concentration. Even with her blood on his neck, he was as beautiful as when She first saw him.

He pulled Her heart from her chest. She gasped. He held it in his palm, black with Her blood, and it pumped between his fingers. He stared at it, a greed in his eyes that she was sure he hoped looked like grief.

She dropped to her knees, pressed her hands to the hole in her chest. The blood flooded between Her fingers, soaked into the waistband of her pants, muddled the white snow on the sidewalk. The cold as it melted soaked into the knee of her jeans.

“Get home safe,” She whispered.

He put the heart into his backpack. He nodded to Her. Only a nod and he left.

She fell backwards onto the concrete. Above Her the sky was white with clouds. Snowflakes fell slow and fat around her. They kissed at her nose, her cheeks.

She lay there, palms upward, and she bled out, the snow stained red.

-Allyson Lyon

Allyson Lyon is a 27-year old writer with a BFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. In 2019, her first horror novel draft, ANGELA, was hailed in the same vein as Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, and Carmen Maria Machado, winning Best Senior Thesis. While she grew up in the Pennsylvania she writes about, she is currently in Scotland working on an MA and MFA in creative writing exploring all the hills and cemeteries for inspiration.