Graft
Benjamin Kessler

IN KNEE SURGERY, doctors frequently replace damaged tissue with cadaver parts.
“Very little chance of rejection,” the orthopedist tells me. He runs a hand up the underside of my leg, stopping for a moment at the shallow depression beneath my knee and pressing into the flesh like he is playing a saxophone. “It’s this easy.” He demonstrates with a pen where the incision will be made then makes a snipping motion with his fingers.
That night I celebrate my thirty-ninth birthday. The cake my daughter makes is adorably terrible, and my father-in-law gifts me a coffee mug that has “not yet over the hill, but I’m close!” printed on it in block capitals. When everyone is gone I ask my husband to place it in the Goodwill box. 
Two days later my knee is shaved and I am rolled into the operating theatre, a small, white tiled room that smells like antiseptic. I half-expect to see the leg from the corpse which will supply my new ligament propped up against the wall, but of course there is nothing like that.  
Anesthetic pumps into my arm through a tube. With my remaining consciousness I needle the technicians.
“Is that it, in there?”
“No, that is filled with sterile gauze.”
“Maybe there?”
“In that box there are spools of suturing nylon.”
I weakly gesture to a sealed, opaque bag on top of a rolling cart. “What about—”
Then I am back in the recovery room, waking to my husband and daughter watching basketball on television. He explains to her the benefits of a zone defense. “Watch the big man,” he says. 
I allow my daughter to sit in the front on the way home so that I may spread my leg out across the backseat. I pull up my sweatpants and scan for evidence of something different, someone new. 
“Daddy says you have a dead person inside of you,” my daughter says.
“No, I said mommy has part of a dead person inside of her,” he responds.
They laugh, some shared joke, causing my husband to not notice a speed bump which makes the car violently bounce. He apologizes profusely.
For the first week the only thing I notice is pain. My knee swells and I think that perhaps the other person’s tissue is trying to escape. My husband gently places an ice pack over it and then goes back to struggling with a crossword clue. 
“‘Hitherto unknown.’ Five words, starts with A.”    
“Alien.”
It fits and he makes a satisfied face. I’m glad the ice pack is over my incision. It keeps me from staring. I look at it so frequently that my daughter has noticed. 
“Is that where the dead person is?” She points at the bandages but only for a second, as though she is afraid.  
“What did we say about talking like that?” I admonish her and feel a tick of guilt because the “dead person” inside me is all I can think about. 
The next week everything tastes terrible. My favorites—peanut butter, navel oranges, butterfly shrimp—make me gag. In their place I crave foods I’ve never enjoyed before: kimchi and grapefruit and pink frosted animal crackers. I make my husband fetch them from the store. What’s brought this on, he asks. I tell him I do not know. 
“Pain meds?” he posits. “Playing with your senses?”
“Maybe,” I reply.
By week three I can’t stand my husband anymore. The way he makes the bed, the way he palms my breast during sex, the way he whistles while putting away groceries. I begin to question if I ever liked him to begin with, this man with whom I raise a child.
The swelling has gone down considerably and now I can handle the heavy duvet resting on my bare leg. What I cannot handle are the awful television shows I have set to record. When did I start watching this garbage? And the paint color on the walls? It’s hideous, even though I know I chose it myself.
I lob aggression at my family over trivial things. I scold my daughter too harshly for scraping the tines of her fork against her plate during dinner, and she runs to her room in tears. My husband responds with a sour look and I barely have the patience to shoot one back. 
“She’s worried,” he says, scraping my daughter’s cold dinner into the trash. “She thinks you were switched out for another person during the operation.”
“That’s absurd.”
He shrugs me off and retrieves my crutches from beside the couch so I can use the restroom.    
The next day I return to the hospital for a follow-up appointment. The orthopedist again runs his fingers over my leg, admiring his work. 
“Range of motion is good,” he says. “You’re walking more?”
“Yes, but there is something.”
I tell him about the changes, how everything feels different, like I restarted a version of my life where nothing at all has carried over except my physical body.
“It’s stressful,” he tells me. “You are learning things over again. Give it time.” 
He is about to leave when I find the courage to ask. “Can you tell me anything about the donor?”
He dismisses the question with a wave. “You don’t want to know that. It doesn’t matter.”
“Anything?”
“Woman, late thirties. Car crash. Really, it’s not worth thinking about.” He refills my prescription and then walks me to the lobby where I wait for my husband to pick me up.
The scar is barely visible now. The crease of my knee joint allows it to blend in, like it was always there. I’m nearing forty, perhaps the same age as the woman who’s tissue now lives a second life inside of me. We are newly alive in our shared midlife. 
I hear the familiar sputter of the car and force a smile for my husband. But then, as he gets closer, the smile becomes easier and easier to hold, until I can’t tell if I’m faking at all. 

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Benjamin Kessler’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Pithead Chapel, Entropy, Superstition Review, XRAY Lit Mag, and The McNeese Review, among others. He lives, writes, and raises a hedgehog in Portland, Oregon.

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