[Updates from The Writer's Desk]

GIVE: An Anthology of Anatomical Entries is now available in both eBook and paperback!

To celebrate, here are some of the first lines of each story! Buy a copy today to find out what happens in all twenty-four creepy organ donation stories.

• Samrat sat on a packed train as it rolled toward the Tirupati station in Andhra Pradesh, South India, considering what to pray for after he was tonsured, or shaved, at the Tirumala Venkateswara Temple.
• Joel easily recognized me as weaker prey and pounced day after day.
• I heard about the explosion on my way to work.
• Referring to her own pregnancy, Lindsay’s mother said she knew she’d have twins.
• Vincent calls Pepper into his office. He is the head of “The Family” and has been for a very long time.
• Golden Voice Virginia Hart was not an organ donor but when she saw the pictures of the crash and her daughter’s hamburger throat, she knew she had to give.
• As usual, I felt uncomfortable. “You’re still repressing conflicting emotions,” my biomedical team leader, Dr. Hennessy, said. I followed him and the nurse down the antiseptic, green and white corridor.
• Natasha plucked one of his chest hairs.
• Mr. Coleman was watching the evening news when the doorbell rang.
• It started innocently enough, as these things most often do, with a blood drive at a local church.
• He paused. His hands were clammy. The pen was impossible to grip.
• Rhys hated his right arm. It was attached to him, connected by bone and nerve, a birthright, but it wasn’t a part of him. It hung heavier than the left, he was sure of that.
• “You know you’re a hero, right?” Maggie said, holding my hand.
• “What if it’s a lie? What if I wake up in a hotel room in a bathtub full of ice?” Chianti whispered in a nervous joke.
• Talia grimaced and tried not to fidget against the hard plastic stirrups that braced her feet apart.
• Steven Plunkett stared at Doctor Leanne Linstrum’s expression from his side of the desk and groaned inside.
• Different species may copulate but cannot breed.
• Barren. That’s the word they used. My whole life’s purpose, gone, just like that. I was surprised, but not inconsolable like some women would have been.
• Dental Assistant Letitia liked her men bald: the muscular and the skinny, the biologist and the forklift driver—any type would do so long as his genetic makeup had predestined him to lose his hair.
• Parker saw them everywhere: red-haired, blue-eyed monsters.
• “In a nutshell, do you think it is better to have one nut or two?” I asked him. He looked at me. Tears streamed down his lax face.
• Nicole sat at the edge of the bed and fiddled with the collar of her fuzzy, purple robe. No cheap cotton gown for her.
• It started with the blood drive. The community blood drive, the one they held as part of the fundraiser and relief effort for all those people affected by the disaster.
• At 1:17 in the afternoon on June 14, 2014, a male American robin (Turdus migratorius) weighing 3.4 ounces and with a slash of yellow across its distinctive red breast, dove for a common earthworm (Lumbricus terrestris) curled in a patch of clover on the administration building lawn at North Snake River Community College in Patchley, Idaho,