Donor

by SaraG

His daughter Claudia was crazy: she changed jobs overnight and he
never knew who she was dating. When she was home, she scribbled on her
notepad and left the scraps of paper lying around for him to find.
Whenever his guard was down, he’d be jolted by men suffocating on
their top-hats, amoebas with eyes and tentacles, frog eating
princesses.

They argued a lot.

When Claudia came visiting, she drank his beer and stretched out on
her mother’s cream sofa. Metal studs inched down her ears and
eyebrows, down the nape of her neck, disappearing under her clothing
to find secret places to pinch, to rub.

His daughter suffered from kidney failure; she shouldn’t drink.

Dialysis became more frequent. Claudia could no longer live alone so
she moved back into the house. The cream sofa became her fiefdom,
where she received men with soft voices and sad eyes, women with dyke
haircuts and well-toned shoulders. The visitors brought crocuses,
dandelions, snowdrops.

The doctors pronounced them compatible. He gave her a kidney.

She lived. He still thinks she’s crazy. She drinks his beer and gets
grease stains on the sofa. The amoebas have multiplied into a sea of
little monsters. Once in a while, a kidney makes its way into her
drawings. He swears that he’ll use them for toilet paper, but he never
does. They argue every single day.