Free Bodies Are Disgusting by S. Gates

they're trapped between you.
Ori's tongue flicks out, licks a quick swipe over your carotid
artery. "What do you think, dearest one?"
    You hadn't even realised you'd begun to cry,
but then you feel the tears rolling down your cheeks. "Please let
me go." The words come out choked by the lump of fear in your
throat.
    "You're no fun," says Ori. You can feel them
pouting against the vulnerable skin of your neck. "If I let you go,
will you consider what I've said? Have I proven to you that I'm
serious?"
    "Yes! God, yes! Please let me go and I'll
think about it, I promise!" In this moment, you would swear fealty
to Adolf Hitler himself to wake up from this nightmare.
    Ori sighs. "Very well, then."
    Like that, you're slumped in the bathtub. The
water is hot enough that you can practically smell the steam around
you. The shower curtain hangs undisturbed and the only light in the
room is still that of the street lamp outside filtering in the
window. Everything is so painfully mundane that you actually manage
to think, I am never falling asleep in the shower
again.
    The fingers of your right hand still grip
something.
    You don't need to turn on the light to realize
that it's Ori's spleen.
    You have no idea what to do with a fresh
spleen beyond get rid of it . Kneejerk reactions flicker
through your brain and are discarded as quickly as they surface:
try to flush it (it won't go down), throw it in the garbage (what
if the trash collectors see it or someone reports the stench), put
it in a tupperware container and stuff it in the back of the
freezer (what if Simon finds it), just fucking leave it where you
found it (there are so many things wrong with that
plan).
    For the first time in your life, you wish you
were a pet owner. They never held any appeal before, prone to being
dirty, smelly, and needy as they were, but now... It would be
undeniably useful to have a hungry little critter to just feed
Ori's organ to.
    That thought brings all the rest to a halt.
It's not a bad idea, least of all when compared to your other
panicked impulses. The neighborhood is suburban enough that there
are bound to be strays, raccoons, hell, you've even seen a hawk or
two circle around once or twice. Just get some leftovers, chop the
spleen into tiny bits, and leave them out for the
scavengers.
    The spleen is oddly bloodless, but you don't
risk setting it down. You use your other hand to turn off the
water, grab a towel, and clutch it to your chest in case Simon
passes while you're on the way to the kitchen. When he doesn't, you
drop the damp thing over the back of the sofa. You leave squishy
wet footprints in the carpet and slippery ones on the linoleum
tile.
    There's one cutting board in the entire house,
a cheap monstrosity that dates back to the Paleozoic era which is
made of a plastic that you can't take the chance of contaminating,
so you just grab a chipped plate and drop the thing on it. A quick
examination of the fridge reveals something that might have once
been Chinese take-out. It's absolutely rank; probably the stuff
Amanda brought over when you think of it. However long ago that was.
    (Everything is so liquid and surreal in the
wake of your shower. It feels like it was a hundred years ago when
you saw her last.)
    There are a few other things that show signs
of growing an independent ecology, so you grab them as well.
Chopping everything up stinks to high heaven, and by the time
you're done there's unidentifiable slime squished under your
fingernails where the ink from the newsprint you handle at work
usually lives. It does not take long, however, and it leaves you
with a pile of mystery goo, the contents of which you feel vaguely
comfortable no one will question.
    You take the plate with the
leftover-and-spleen slurry to the kitchen's narrow door and pause.
The back yard (what little of it there is) faces a few other houses
and basks in the dim glow of a distant street lamp. While you're
fairly certain no one is awake, you're pretty sure that