Aurora 2026

Krislyn Moreland

stops, and her song ends as I get out and directly onto a gurney. The first time I did this, it was bad. Grief and guilt were the twins I had lived with for three months since Lucy’s death. She needed lung tissue, parts of the intestines, some plasma, and more. I had a minor skull fracture, a concussion, and two broken ribs. The doctors told me and my recovery team to look out for personality changes, that sometimes injuries like this can affect the part of the brain where values live. No one noticed anything aside from me, but it was decided that gnawing guilt wasn’t grounds for a CT scan. Since I understood what was going on, I was looking up what I could have done for her. Intestinal transfers, lung lobe movements, and what the rate of survival was. I spent my weeks in that hospital bed calculating if she could have made it from what I could have given her. She would have. The understanding that my body harbored what could have saved her, when she was two rooms away breathing slower and slower through an oxygen tube, broke me. I could feel my very skin cells reject me at the thought. I was crawling out of my skin day and night. Having dreams of sewing myself into her side, our organs acting as one. I left the post-college house I had rented, moving into a small apartment closer to the cemetery. My days were filled with obsessive googling, my thoughts carving her name into my organs, and my veins rearranging under my skin to spell her name. Then one night, at 3:45, I saw it. My internet searches had gotten increasingly bizarre. Looking up old medical practices and stories of, albeit unethical, but successful rare organ transplants. I had entered a particularly sketchy website for one of these stories, and there, flashing with red letters against a white background, read the ad “Organs for harvest with financial compensation.” The username was anonymous enough to be forgettable, but the idea wasn’t. Because of my injury history and DUI, I couldn’t get approved for the hospital’s donor list. But I couldn’t just let what wasn’t rightfully mine anymore waste away in my tomb of a body. Once the first one came out and I was back home a week later feeling no

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