In retrospect, I shouldn’t have fucked the helicopter pilot. It wasn’t worth it anyway, his dirt brown eyes bugging out of his head as he violently tried to reach release. I put on a big performance, pushing my hair around and twisting my nipples raw. It took him fifteen full minutes of frenetic jutting before he came. I was sore but not because he was big; because he’d taken so long, and we didn’t use lube, and by two minutes in I felt my walls turn raisin, dried and limp, because I was already full of regret over his entry.

Now I stare at his bald spot as he tries to scream something to me over the engines. He is gesturing wildly to his headset, and I realize with a flash of anxiety that I don’t have mine on. I pull them over my ears quickly, and his voice bleaches my ears.

“Stephanie! You have to have your headphones on. The noise damage is wild. I know pilots who can’t even hear out of one ear.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“You set to go?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Lifting off.” He gives me an oozing smile, a bubble of spit hanging at the corner of his mouth and I feel my stomach flip as we rise into the sky. Beside me, the 100-pound medical device tilts forward and I rush to stabilize it, leaving my hand on it’s flat top. I always imagine that one day I’ll be able to feel what’s inside, beating artificially, keeping itself alive for a new body. Just a few hours ago, the heart that I’m transporting had been in a woman’s body. I had watched her fade out of consciousness, the oxygen seeping out of her slowly, the final exhale one of tepid relief: a neutrality that I wish I could feel myself.

I had apologized to the family, their sobs so wet and thick in the sterile room, as they wheeled the woman off to the operating theater. They never realize it happens that quickly. They ask for five more minutes, every time. You have to take her, now? Yes, I always say. Yes, we have to take her. What I want to say is: she’s dead. Five more minutes means nothing, anymore. Death is hardest on the living.

When I think about it, as I often do on these flights between hospitals, my job definitely affects my mental health. My boss asks me every quarter. Are you taking your medicine? Are you sleeping at night? Are you doing okay? Do you need to go back to the psychiatrist?

I’m okay, like totally. I approach grieving families and ask if the hospital can harvest their organs and give them to someone in need. It’s super chill. Sometimes they scream at me. Sometimes they look at me, with such abject despair, that I have to turn away. Once, a man was so angry that I asked about his wife—who was registered, and breathing her own blood at that point—that he shoved me. I fell backwards and landed on my tailbone. I had a bruise for weeks. At night, before getting in the shower, I’d turn around and look in the mirror, pressing the pads of my fingers against the purple flesh, relishing the pain of recovery.

We ended up taking her stomach, her liver, and her pancreas. The husband signed the line with such rage, he tore a hole in the paper.

For whatever reason, I’m never very curious about the person who is dead, but rather—I’m enraptured by the person who is actively dying, waiting for the new life that I am bringing, on a helicopter, flown by a man with a three-inch penis. I flip through the clipboard on my lap, scrolling through the medical jargon and patient notes.

Jack Michael Umberland. 62. Cardiomyopathy. End-stage heart failure. Status One. On mechanical support. Local candidate.

I pull out my phone and immediately go to Google. I type in his name. Not much comes up on the first page. Before he had to go into the hospital, he worked at some big law firm in the capital. Moved to Virginia a few years ago, an early retirement for someone of his stature. He could have had at least ten more years, if he’d wanted them. Maybe something happened. Maybe he was just tired. In the photographs, he is snow-haired and his face is lightly wrinkled, like an overused shirt. He is in a few news articles, shaking hands with big-name politicians, looking like he would lap shit off their shoes if they asked. He reminds me of the helicopter pilot, a sleaziness to the both of them that manifests in the shape of their eyebrows.

I am bored, so I keep digging, going all the way to the seventh page of google before I find something that makes me lean forward in my seat. It’s a decade old Reddit post.

Anyone else ever deal with Michael Umberland’s creepy ass in law school? I know I’m anonymous and no one believes victims anyways but just trying to find some support.

The replies begin with affirmations that pain matters and victims can heal, blah blah blah. But then they start to gain traction. With people who knew Michael Umberland.

I had him as a professor and he would call me into his office and stare at my chest. One day he sat at the end of his desk and cupped my breast. I didn’t know what to do, I froze. Never said anything about it. I dropped out of the class halfway through and failed.

I had him too but for an undergrad pre-law class. Similar experience. He held me after class to ask how old I was, convinced I wasn’t in college. He lifted my skirt to look under and I ran away. Didn’t tell anyone. Finished the class from the back of the room.

Michael was my neighbor when I was seven. He’s on the registry.

On. The. Fucking. Registry. I immediately pull up a new tab and search the sex offender’s registry. There he is. Shaved bald. Orange jumpsuit. Two years. Only two years! For what he did to that child. I flip my phone over so I don’t have to look at his disgusting face. I am hyperventilating and the pilot can hear me on the headset.

“You okay back there, little lady?” He reaches his hand back behind the seat, casting it around as if my thigh is a fish that he can snag. I move out of his reach and his hand hangs pathetically before he lassoes it back to the wheel.

“Yes, fine. Just getting a little motion sick, I think.” I burp and my mouth is filled with acid and the flavor of my lunch: chicken teriyaki.

“Well, can’t help you there, sorry.” The pilot looks annoyed, clearly offended by my lack of physical contact. Fuck him. Fuck, fuck. I need out of this helicopter.

As nonchalantly as possible, I am trying to pry the batteries out of the box because of what’s inside: the heart of a woman who lived a good life, a respectable, beautiful, life and gave birth twice and went to France and taught preschoolers—and what’s going to happen: it’s going to be placed into the body of a fucking pedophile.

“It’s fine.” I mutter, glancing down at my watch, forty-five minutes. I dig at the battery panel until my fingernails bleed. I stare at the device. I think of the woman’s family, how much time they spent with me, how kind they were, how eager they were for her to live on in other people. She would’ve loved this, you know. Her husband had said to me, putting a paternal hand on my shoulder for only the briefest of moments, as if he’d lost himself, before removing it and replacing it on his daughter’s arm. She loved helping people.

We have a bumpy landing. I let the device slide around, crash into the walls a bit. I’m hoping that maybe that will make it shut down. It chirps methodically, happily even, as if it is undeterred by my negligence. We begin to deplane and I wheel the box out into the blazing heat of the summer sun. My thoughts are getting all jumbled. I hear ringing in my ears. I can’t breathe out of my nostrils anymore. He’s on the registry. She loved helping people. What he did I’ll never outlive. She loved children more than anything in the world. He almost killed me, and called it love.

I can’t do it. I stop wheeling the cart. The pilot turns around to look at me, halfway down the tarmac. He calls my name but I don’t hear him. I am opening the device, it is screeching in disapproval, I am reaching into the warm blood and artificial liquid, I am pulling out the heart and holding it, beating, in my hand before dropping it, unceremoniously, onto the ground.

The pilot is running, screaming, the ground crew is frozen in place—from far off, I see people in scrubs streaming out of the hospital towards us. The pilot gets to the organ and bends over as if to pick it up, but becomes so disgusted that he turns around and vomits—blue Powerade and Takis, his traditional in-flight snack, pouring out of him.

The woman’s heart lies there, barely moving, scraped and bleeding onto the asphalt. It finally stills, and the relief that only the dead feel moves through my body. I smile.