Last they heard she’s in a phone booth outside Wendy’s calling interstate. Says she quit her Thorazine. Something about Matthew 5:14 and she needs to spread her light down I-80 out east. Her love-yous go straight to voicemail. $2/day keeps her name in the local classifieds—**MISSING**, page 6—until her folks are behind on water and gas. Then it’s seventeen months radio silence. When the car hits her—moonlit and no headlights and drunk—she’s praying eyes closed to the neon cross on Chicago’s 3rd Ave. I check her toe tag: L.S. Findlay, 5’6″, eyes green. Her license says ♥DONOR. It’s why I called up her folks. It’s how they found her: stitched up empty as a gift to eight lives. Her corneas, each a credit card thick, go out to Texas. Her lungs will breathe in Michigan.
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Max Steiner lives in Berlin. He checked the box for his heart at the Seattle downtown DMV.
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image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 