Organs Of Donation
Entry by: Ilana
15th December 2014
Whether Steph is alive or dead, she isn't sure, but she knows that her organs are screaming out in protest against the treatment she has administered. They're rejecting the poison she allowed to proliferate, the toxic anger that people say can give you cancer. She has been angry for so long. And now, lying here on the Oxford cobblestones beneath the rooftop party she leaped from, she wonders whether it is the lividness, the lividity, some other word she feels must exist but keeps mangling up in her mind's tongue - whether it is this feeling of absolute rage that has brought along the bile and the need to tamp it down with alcohol, pills, people.
For the first time since she remembers anything, which was quite a long time ago since she has memories of herself in her crib with her hands locked around the bars of the cage that wouldn't open unless she screamed so loudly her voice would break down into tears and wisps of mucus, for the first time since those awful youthful days, Steph is aware of her spleen.
Fitting, she thinks, to be aware of the filtering system for my blood, the one that is shaped like a fist, which is also what they say about the womb. Why do they, the nebulous "they", always compare organs to fists? The heart, too, the size of a fist more or less. Is it one's own fist that these organs are proportional to or some ideal fist that holds all the characteristics of fistness, and that is the fist to which the organs are compared? It is all a muddle of a mystery in her mind and Steph is pretty certain she has brained herself as well as butchered her body.
Sirens, an ambulance, the expected drama, and she wishes she had her donor card with her, one of the first outward signs of rebellion she exhibited to her parents. When she was still young, still at a good girl public school with uniforms and bow-ties in her hair which she would inevitably unravel by the end of each day and tie around various other body parts, Steph's classroom received a visit from a mum who was a volunteer emergency respondent in town, and she told the children all about organ donation, ignoring the horrified face of the teacher behind her and the attempts to shut her down with "well, isn't that NICE" and "we really MUST be going to lunch SOON."
When Steph signed up as early as she legally could to have a donor card, her parents were horrified. Our little girl, they said, her organs in some fat old man or some stupid Princess Di character driving drunk or some reckless druggy getting a liver from our pristine little baby? No, no, and no. But Steph didn't pay them no never mind and she went ahead and for some years she carried it around with her everywhere, a badge of pride, a mark of selflessness. Also, more to the point, an assurance that her body would not be the same as it was when it came out of her dreaded mother when it was buried in the family plot. No, there would be pieces of her missing, as many as possible she hoped, so that she could live on in organ if not in spirit, in other bodies that would be buried elsewhere eventually, far, far, far from her family.
And now look at her. Lying there, a suicide, a delusional one at that, believing that from her womb a little girl has sprung off into the night sky even though she, Steph, has never been pregnant once, but wanting to believe that a part of her flesh and blood will live on, and as she's loaded into the ambulance, she knows that her organs have been abused, corrupted by what prudes may call her "lifestyle", not wanting to say things as they are - that she fucked up, that she fucked, that she shot up and swallowed and snorted and smoked and that she loved every minute of it and would possibly not have traded in her time for anything else, except that she does wish she could have told some people some things, but that matters not at all now.
In the ambulance, she tries to tell the frantic figures grouped around her to make sure to find her on the donor registry, to take anything they want and gift it to someone more deserving, but not to give her brain or her heart away. She wouldn't wish those on her worst enemy.
For the first time since she remembers anything, which was quite a long time ago since she has memories of herself in her crib with her hands locked around the bars of the cage that wouldn't open unless she screamed so loudly her voice would break down into tears and wisps of mucus, for the first time since those awful youthful days, Steph is aware of her spleen.
Fitting, she thinks, to be aware of the filtering system for my blood, the one that is shaped like a fist, which is also what they say about the womb. Why do they, the nebulous "they", always compare organs to fists? The heart, too, the size of a fist more or less. Is it one's own fist that these organs are proportional to or some ideal fist that holds all the characteristics of fistness, and that is the fist to which the organs are compared? It is all a muddle of a mystery in her mind and Steph is pretty certain she has brained herself as well as butchered her body.
Sirens, an ambulance, the expected drama, and she wishes she had her donor card with her, one of the first outward signs of rebellion she exhibited to her parents. When she was still young, still at a good girl public school with uniforms and bow-ties in her hair which she would inevitably unravel by the end of each day and tie around various other body parts, Steph's classroom received a visit from a mum who was a volunteer emergency respondent in town, and she told the children all about organ donation, ignoring the horrified face of the teacher behind her and the attempts to shut her down with "well, isn't that NICE" and "we really MUST be going to lunch SOON."
When Steph signed up as early as she legally could to have a donor card, her parents were horrified. Our little girl, they said, her organs in some fat old man or some stupid Princess Di character driving drunk or some reckless druggy getting a liver from our pristine little baby? No, no, and no. But Steph didn't pay them no never mind and she went ahead and for some years she carried it around with her everywhere, a badge of pride, a mark of selflessness. Also, more to the point, an assurance that her body would not be the same as it was when it came out of her dreaded mother when it was buried in the family plot. No, there would be pieces of her missing, as many as possible she hoped, so that she could live on in organ if not in spirit, in other bodies that would be buried elsewhere eventually, far, far, far from her family.
And now look at her. Lying there, a suicide, a delusional one at that, believing that from her womb a little girl has sprung off into the night sky even though she, Steph, has never been pregnant once, but wanting to believe that a part of her flesh and blood will live on, and as she's loaded into the ambulance, she knows that her organs have been abused, corrupted by what prudes may call her "lifestyle", not wanting to say things as they are - that she fucked up, that she fucked, that she shot up and swallowed and snorted and smoked and that she loved every minute of it and would possibly not have traded in her time for anything else, except that she does wish she could have told some people some things, but that matters not at all now.
In the ambulance, she tries to tell the frantic figures grouped around her to make sure to find her on the donor registry, to take anything they want and gift it to someone more deserving, but not to give her brain or her heart away. She wouldn't wish those on her worst enemy.