Story 11 | His Match
After a decade of silence, a woman's unrequited love texts to ask if she would test to donate a kidney to his wife.
In last week’s recap of stories 1-10, I mentioned writing weekly stories has taken more time than I anticipated. As I do want to work on my novel more, I was looking for a way to deliver quality content, continue developing my writing skills and knock out stories more quickly.
I devised a writing challenge for myself: in only two hours and using no more than 1000 words, I had to write a short story based on one of three previously unseen prompts. The story could not be edited after time expired.
My friend Emma provided these three prompts for the challenge:
🌸 a character receives a text message from someone unexpected asking for help
🌸 a 100+ degree day, ice cream, and a for sale sign
🌸 alphabet soup proposal
When time started, I quickly workshopped each of the prompts to see which immediately yielded the richest premise. The result is below!
His Match
I would venture to say that most women didn’t want to hear from the guy that got away. Particularly not after he happily married to someone you didn’t like (she wasn’t you – and really, he chose her?!), the two of you fell out of touch and haven’t spoken for a decade because not all relationships last, and then he texted out of the blue to ask if you’ll test to see if you could be a match to donate a kidney to his dying wife.
What did you do with that? “New phone, who dis?” I thought about it.
Why get involved again? Things were fine being dead. We naturally hadn’t been keeping up. I didn’t owe him anything. And this wasn’t a casual “hey, I’m town, we should get brunch” ask. It was a kidney. Well, a blood test to start. It was not a leap to say he must have been desperate.
But at one point, we were very close friends. He had been my best friend. And maybe I thought I was in love with him. And when I called to confess my feelings, he cut me off and told me giddily he had met someone, and it was serious. And her name was Toodle. Well, her real name was Tess, which is respectable bordering on elegant, but her Southern family had nicknamed her TOODLE, and she had adopted it as her name-name. Not a nickname. It’s a lot to process. He’s been your best friend for years and you had unrequited feelings and he’s choosing a woman named Toodle, who was a diehard sorority girl and was genuinely so kind and generous and maybe a little dense, but you’re biased.
It was a strange way for a heart to break. To go from envisioning a full life with someone to being so fully disappointed and disoriented by their decisions that the rose-colored glasses were violently ripped from your eyes, and you saw him differently, immediately. Today, we called it getting the ick.
I couldn’t orient to that new vision of him for a long while. He was still a good guy, so earnest and excited for his future with Toodle that I smiled through the wedding (imagine a wedding planned by a woman named Toodle) and held my tongue on my buried feelings. He never knew.
So, how did you respond to that text? From someone who was a good person, whom you once loved, and who was in a desperate life-or-death situation.
I sat on it for a couple hours, but then the answer became obvious. I was also a good person, and as much as I held no responsibility here and yes there was an old wound that was tender if I were being dramatic, testing if I were match was the right thing to do.
I texted back to agree to test. He responded immediately with an effusive thank-you, explaining there was something in her blood that made her impossible to match and her family had suffered from so much cancer that they couldn’t donate, so now he was texting everyone he knew. I was tempted to ask if he had properly considered all Toodle’s sorority sisters because, based on the way they behaved, I was certain there had already been some blood rituals performed. But that felt a little callous.
I wasn’t expecting I would be a match. Surely I would participate in a simple blood test and be ruled out like everyone who preceded me and then he would rightfully shift his focus back to finding a donor and we would return to being a story from the past that didn’t come up.
But our blood types were compatible. And our tissue typing came back with the highest possible score for two non-relatives.
And now I was sitting alone in a medical office holding an envelope with the results from the last weeks’ battery of tests. The results that would finally determine whether we could move forward with the donation, where I would give my former love’s wife my kidney, taking months to recover and exposing myself to potential though unlikely complications later in life.
The mental exercise was excruciating. It was obviously the right thing to do. I was healthy enough to recover from the surgery. And she was not healthy enough to live much longer.
But if I were being honest, I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to have a major surgery I didn’t need. I didn’t want to be a living organ donor. They could have everything when I was dead, easy. And if I were being really honest, I didn’t want to give my kidney to them. Was that horrible of me? I think so.
I opened the envelope. My stomach (or maybe my kidney) lurched as I read the clear declaration: “positive match.”
I was a match in all the ways that counted. I could donate my kidney.
Sitting in a chair, frozen in shock, I realized my decision. As much as I didn’t want to donate, I would. Did that make me an even better human for donating even when I didn’t want to? This wasn’t a morality competition. I needed to stop thinking like that.
But I would do it. I would donate my kidney to Toodle. Maybe in exchange I could ask that she revert her name back to Tess. Never mind, that was thoroughly unkind.
I took a deep breath to steady myself and follow through on my decision before I could chicken out. I dialed his number on my cell to report the good news.
As once before, he cut me off, elation clear in his voice. “You’re never going to believe this: we found a match! A woman in my dad’s office is a match.” He sounded deliriously happy. “They’re lining up the surgery now. Toodle’s going to live! What were you calling about?”
I tucked my results back in the envelope, congratulated him and hung up.
Thank you so much for reading! Your feedback is welcome: rate the story with one click in this poll, or get a discussion going in the comments.
Next Week’s Plot Twist…
We’re off for Thanksgiving next week, but I’m back Dec 5 with my two-part take on a Christmas romance, which I’m VERY excited for you to read. I was aiming for a more substantive plot that was still a blast, and it turned out better than I expected.
Last week’s story:
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