I was still here when they scattered pieces of me everywhere. Before the separation between body and soul occurred, my being injected life back into anything it could find. It didn’t differentiate between potential life and lack of it. Whatever it could reach for, it clung to, and it didn’t let go. It snuck between the layers of muscle fibers connecting my limbs; it recoiled as my movements became nothing more than electrical misfires; it hardly reacted as I exploded on impact, reducing mounds of adipose tissue to starbursts of gunk on asphalt. It stuck in earnest to the shoulder joint tethered by tendon and sinew, and spilled out with my stomach contents in the acrid smell of apple pie. It was the nail that hung by a thread of skin, the flesh that lingered on granules of gravel. It was every bit of me that was ever me that continued to be me, even as it was thinly spread across a thirty-foot stretch of highway. So as long as life still flowed through me- any life, any piece of me- so would my soul remain on Earth, still fleshy and beating.
Then, once the blinding white pain gave way to euphoria, and the ambulance sirens started screaming, my remaining consciousness cascaded out of my ear canal and trickled down the length of my spine. It collected in my helmet, a soup of cerebral fluid, tacking hair to the base of my flopping neck. It carried my breath away, wind only restored by the plastic tube that parted my laryngeal folds, working past my crushed windpipe as a gurgle. More globules of blood and saliva spilled down my chin, even the lubrication tinted red. Red. The color of the heart absent from laminated plastic; their sign of approval to remove mine.
I watched, from above, as they rolled me through an operating theater several hours later, the gurney disappearing under a swarm of nurses and consenting signatures. A human compulsion initially prevented me from passing through those doors, but to what degree was I human anymore, having been reduced to shattered femurs and severed nerves? Intangibly, I slipped inside.
Hands gloved in vinyl writhed around my abdominal cavity, and my intestines were on display to the world. I stood above myself in agony at witnessing my demise, anguished as they cracked what remained of my ribs for better access, sick as they saved my squishy insides swimming in blood. It was terror, watching as they snipped and scissored and slit and took and took and took and took until they set their scalpelled sights on my heart. Steady hands. Steady slicing. Steady separation. Steadily gone.
Once I came to again, I was somewhere in a hospital corridor. Though thick was the disorientation that plagued me, I recognized this expansive space as the hall leading up to the ICU, where I was laying just hours earlier. Eerily, everything forewent volume. A world on mute, that’s what I called it, greeted me with its solitude. Not even my own footfalls made a sound anymore.
Though in the distance, a beacon of auditory hope emerged: intermittent beeping, accompanied by a familiarity I recognized. A heartbeat. Mine. Though off, not quite. The steady pattern compelled me to follow. I listened, and it pulled.
The feeling led me to several supine figures lying behind a wall of glass. As if the pane weren’t there, I phased through it towards the form that called me. There was no need for confirmation from a chart at the edge of the bed, or a peek at the festering wound wound tightly under wraps; I knew there was a piece of me in there, buried under the sternum of another, embedded inside a stranger I did not know.
My mind churned with a slurry of thoughts. Even after seeing myself splayed across the operating table, I still couldn’t fathom that it happened to me again: my body, mine no more, reduced to its utility, to its ability to be split and shared. But I didn’t care how many vessels they split me across or how many places they inserted me into: they were still mine. They may be elsewhere now, but these pieces still belonged to me.
Time became a viscous liquid that only further confused me. Every time I blinked, I was greeted with someplace new, and became newly acquainted with the bodies and walls that confined me. Four hospitals and six bodied tugged me in either direction, sometimes after a few hours, sometimes after a few days, with my former organs nestled in their bodies acting as a conductor of sound.
I was a witness to their every critical moment: every episode of night sweats and stirring; every soiled hospital linen; every digit working itself into responsiveness. There I saw myself in vases of flowers tagged with get-well wishes, replaced once they outlived their usefulness, leaving behind shriveled traces of itself on nightstands.
In moments of inactivity, when the celestial bodies would cast a dim light across monitoring screens, I studied them closely by their bedsides. I tried to envision what they were like outside this sterilized environment, how their personalities would color these drab walls, these speckled ceilings and endless tubes. I committed to memory every name and face and emergency contact and medication to remedy whatever condition they had until the information oozed out of my ears, and then reread it again out of boredom. I wondered what commutes they frequented to doctor’s offices, how many family and friends they had to welcome them back after months of thinking they had to say goodbye.
They didn’t ask to be dying. They had lives, too, lives that they could get back to now that they had another chance to live it. I knew that rationally. I knew all that and more. But no matter how much I tried or wanted to, I still couldn’t shake the bitter envy. No matter what soul was in control of that organic machine, all I could see were pieces of me, and a life deferred indefinitely. I was their extension, and unwilling conduit for their lifespans.
How many breaths had he stolen with my lungs? How much waste was she left to filter with my remaining kidney? I wondered how my skin fit so easily over his limbs licked by flames.
How much richer was color when she perceived it with my corneas? How easily would maintained sobriety be vanquished with my liver lengthening his life? How differently was love felt when its medium was my heart?
The clenching in my chest never got better. I stewed in the misery at the sight of familial affection and repeat visitors, and eventual sick notes and discharge papers, and as the hands rounded the circumference of the clock, my bitterness and sorrow only grew. After only a few months, I couldn’t handle the idea of lamenting a life lost for several decades, especially when I was forced to watch them enjoy the time that should’ve been mine.
Eventually, I couldn’t bare the thought of seeing any of my recipients in the eyes. One day, I wandered away from one of my receivers and sat under the canopy of a willow, my ears faintly buzzing with shrieks of glee. It was made by the one with my kidney: a little girl, and she made her parents give chase to she with newfound energy. In energetic bursts, she ducked and dove, her parents purposefully lagging just enough for her to sprint by. Every time they reached for her, she’d scream, and her ponytail snapped in a different direction. From the back, her straw-dry hair reminded me of my sister.
The last time I ever saw my family was in a bereavement room, before I was shared, the sight of my elder sister cradled in our parents’ arms. My mother’s inflamed sclera. The weeping sinuses of my father’s nose. My sister wore a turquoise sweater I had never seen before. She must have bought it after moving away.
A surgeon, the same one who would later repurpose my insides, entered with a stack of papers and a somber pinch of his brow, and as the bearer of bad news, he was deliberate in his choice of words. He explained the concept of brain death, how the collision snapped my neck on impact, that it was best to say goodbye. Then, more delicately, he mentioned my status on the organ donation registry. I wasn’t registered, and even my adamant refusal was noted on file, but since I’d donated one time before, surely I wouldn’t mind, so he sought permission from those who would grant it.
My parents turned to each other. With a brief glimpse into the other’s eyes, nary a tear yet dried, they turned and voiced their approval.
It wasn’t long before my sister’s wailing turned to rage, and my parents quickly ushered the physician out of the room before she could reach him. She was livid at the suggestion, and it gave her strength to stand- until the door was closed, that is, at which point she fell back in her chair, silently crying.
I stood staring and watched her ragged breaths warp the wool around her ribcage. Cerulean rosary beads swung from her clenched fist like a metronome.
My former kidney beckoned me closer. I joined her in the adjoining hard plastic chair, although “hard” was not a sensation I readily recalled anymore. The erratic vibrations of her pounding heart rattled around in my head. She stared holes into the linoleum floors, still hunched over with folded hands.
“You were always more than that to me,” she whispered, wavering with tears. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t make any further adjustments, and simply sat there in silence. If she eventually went to the room where my body was on life support, then I wouldn’t know, because a piece of me pulled me somewhere else not long after.
Despite my sister harboring my other kidney, my circulation cycle never brought me back to her. It only happened the once, perhaps on account of her proximity to me, perhaps as a divine final chance for us to say goodbye. Maybe time lessened the bond of ownership as the calendar lost pages. Maybe twelve years was too far removed to still be recognized as mine.
My sister knew the circumstances of my birth, perhaps more intimately than I did. After all, I was conceived especially for her: a vital gift to prolong the present, and beneath the supple exterior, a broad spectrum of spare parts for the taking. I was never intended to be my own being; I was merely a means to mend things of more value. I was her means of life.
The girl’s father eventually caught her, gathering her up in his arms with a twirl. They clambered back to their picnic site, a blanket and spread of sandwiches delicately laid out by the mother, all in spite of the baby strapped to the front of her chest. The girl spit lettuce everywhere while blabbering between bites, wiggling the toes of her sibling, a baby girl.
I wondered, before my passing intervened, if she was conceived just like me. Who has a child while their current one is dying? Was this for want of another, or for more time with the first? When their eldest grew old enough and sick enough, would they explain why she got a new sister, what having someone so genetically similar could mean? Would they help the younger one understand what “organ donation” meant, even though a child has no concept of coercion? Would she be loved afterwards or as an afterthought, only when more harvesting was needed?
I sat in the shade for what felt like an eternity. The baby cooed and grabbed a handful of grass, blissfully unaware of the opportunists surrounding her, looking towards her as their savior. Here was progeny who would never know the reason for her creation, who would never know a knife or be burdened as her sister’s only solution, who couldn’t be signed away with parental consent. She who would live with the illusion of autonomy, whose being belonged to her and her alone.
Perhaps this was my sole purpose in life, to extend the existence of others, and here was my legacy fulfilled. If this was the fate I were subjected to, if I was truly stuck here for the rest of their lives, then maybe I could find contentment in it one day. If not through acceptance, then perhaps through vicarious innocence, to see a life free of being shared. Maybe that was the life I was set to live. To give. Maybe I was meant to be scattered.
Last updated 05-22-2026.