Fallow

The dentist’s quote for the surgery was between two and four thousand dollars. “I’m sorry I can’t be more precise,” he said, “but I can’t really know until we get in there.”

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It wasn’t a life-ruining amount. It wasn’t going to sink me. But it was going to be really fucking annoying. My credit cards were maxed out from my oldest sister Mia’s bachelorette party six months earlier, and after rent and utilities, the eight hundred dollars left of my monthly income went to food, happy hours, and the minimum fifty-dollar payment toward my fifty-three thousand dollars in student loans.

The first person I called was Libby.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s up?” I could hear the drone of the call center behind her and felt a near physical relief at not being there.

“How long does it take to make money off OnlyFans?” Two weeks earlier she had seen a TikTok about it and spent her lunch break running numbers on a Subway napkin.

“Starting cold? Probably . . . three, four months?”

“Months?” My mouth gave a throb of protest.

“Yeah. To pick your niche, build your audience, figure out an engagement strategy. Oh, and make the content. Three posts a day? Maybe more?”

I definitely didn’t have the time or energy for that. “That sounds like . . . a lot.”

“It is. I’ve switched my research focus to sugar-daddy sites.” I heard another voice in the background, calling her name. “I have to go,” she said. “You’re so lucky you’re off today. 7-Eleven rolled out a new sexual harassment training with our number. It’s chaos.” The line went dead.

The second thing I tried was calling my mother.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said, and I could tell from her voice that she’d picked up without checking the name on the screen, that she knew I was one of her children but not exactly which one. Lucky for her, she didn’t need to know in order to decline my request.

“You know I wish I could help,” she said. “But Sydney and Evie both still need braces.” I knew Sydney and Evie only in the broadest of terms, as they were both barely ambulatory when I left home for college, but in that moment I felt a tenderness toward them, teeth as our familial cross to bear.

And that was when I remembered something Phoebe had told me at Christmas. I was always next to her at holidays because my mother made us sit by birth order, even though we told her it was weird and sister-wifey. Phoebe was the sister I was closest to growing up, until she left for college and my sister Elise filled the role. It wasn’t until recently, when Phoebe moved to the city, that we’d regained our footing.

I had been tuning Phoebe out, primarily focused on stopping the gravy from breaching the mashed potato wall on my plate, when I heard her say, “So yeah. If you’re ever interested in some fast cash, I can hook you up.”

“What?”

“At the blood bank,” she said, dumping salt onto a piece of Honey Baked Ham. “You can make a lot. Especially during your first month.”

“They pay you for your blood?”

“For the plasma,” she said. “Fun fact: it’s actually one of America’s largest exports. More than soybeans, even.”

“So—”

“There’s only a few other countries that’s legal in. Anyway, like I was saying, I do have one coworker who sucks, but still, it really is a great job.”

All the things Phoebe loved about the blood bank seemed heavily influenced by the fact that she had spent the previous three years on the night shift at a hospital. The blood bank got a lot of natural light, she said, and was very social. Everyone there was conscious, for the most part. And there were no curtains between the beds so people talked to each other. Really talked to each other. She had already made a friend, a regular donor in the midst of a bitter divorce who paid her to chauffeur an Italian greyhound named Brett biweekly between her and her ex-wife. “So I coordinate with Dana for drop-off on Wednesdays and she gives me his bag and leash and collar, and he sits in the front seat with me, and then I just   drop him off. He gets really excited, and I’m like, ‘Brett, buddy, this is a weird situation.’”

Occasionally someone overhydrated and peed their pants during a donation (“More often than you’d think, actually”), but that was no biggie, compared to what went down in the hospital overnight. Sundowning dementia patients swiping at her tits as she adjusted their pillows. Existential loneliness. Ghosts.

Across from us, the twins were buried in the iPad I had never been allowed to have and Evie was mixing gravy and butter into a paste on her plate and eating it.

“You have to come,” Phoebe finished, like the blood bank was a hot new restaurant-bar. “You’re going to love it there.”

*

Outside the dentist’s office, I typed “blood plasma how much make” into Google, which claimed that everyone was doing it (or at least “almost 8 percent of the adult US population”), and you could get up to eight hundred dollars in your first month. I only had to be over eighteen years old and more than 110 pounds.

“Hey, r u at the blood bank?” I texted Phoebe. “Can i come for the plasma thing.”

Phoebe responded less than five minutes later, “yeah come whenever!” then, “good incentives this month due to shortage,” plus a pin of her current location.

I called an Uber, even though I was financially in no position to do so. Despite an exterior that left something to be desired, the blood bank was nice on the inside, more dermatologist than dialysis center on the spectrum of medical establishments. The seats in reception were cushioned and the floors carpeted, a bold move, I felt, given the industry. The woman behind the desk told me that Phoebe was busy and I was handed off to Nurse Alma, a woman with large teeth and an adult barrette. She walked me down a long corridor and into a curtainless room full of the reclining chairs that Phoebe had been raving about. I had to admit she was right. I was already having fun. From start to finish, Alma was gassing me up.

“Amazing,” she said at my lack of tattoos and international travel. “Really prominent veins, honey,” she said as she slipped the needle into the most private part of my arm.

“Such a good bleeder,” she said, watching my blood zip through the tubing of the weird blood-separating machine.

Even the dull ache of the needle wasn’t entirely unpleasant, more like the nagging feeling of something in my teeth, or needing to sneeze. An anticipation of release.

While we both bled, the rail-thin woman on the cot next to mine turned to face me. “This isn’t that bad,” she said.

“No,” I agreed.

“I was really worried I wouldn’t meet the weight requirement,” she said. Because we were lying down, it felt like a sleepover.

“Me too,” I said, daring her to call me on it.

It wasn’t until nearly twenty minutes later that we both started shaking, which Alma assured us was perfectly normal as the cooled blood and the saline mixture reentered us. It aggravated my mouth pain, but I didn’t want to tell her about it in case it interfered with the donation. “You’re doing so great,” she said, draping a thin blue blanket over me. “A real trouper.”

A little over two hours later, I left the blood bank with fifty dollars, a renewed sense of confidence, and a snack it would almost certainly be too painful to eat.

“I’ll be back,” I assured Phoebe, Nurse Alma, and the thin woman. “Good luck, honey,” Alma called to me on my way out the door.

“With what?” I asked, but no one answered.

*

I returned to the blood bank after the required forty-eight-hour recovery period to donate again and get a seventy-five-dollar bonus. This time Phoebe was free, so she stuck me herself. She had the same bedside manner as when I was five and she was seven and she gave me “vaccines” with the lead of a mechanical pencil.

“Aren’t you going to tell me I’m a good bleeder?” I asked. She shrugged and told me she’d seen better. I silently vowed to request Nurse Alma the next time as she glanced down at her phone and frowned, holding it various distances from her face, trying to unlock the message previews.

“These bitches need to stop texting me at work,” she said.

“Who?”

“My roommates.” She put on the same breathy, syrupy voice she used to imitate our mother. “‘Hey, friends, quick q—I was wondering, how often are we changing the Brita filter?’ We are changing it never. You can buy a damn filter and put it in if you care so much. I’m too busy buying hand soap so they don’t just water that shit down.”

I settled back in the chair. At some point, listening to Phoebe complain about other people had become like ASMR for me. “Paul does that too. And it’s literally flu season.”

“You’re still living with that guy?”

“Yup,” I said, my voice sounding more irritated than I’d wanted it to. “Why?”

“Nothing. I told Mom I thought you had a new roommate. I thought you told me that.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Okay. Sorry.” Phoebe glanced back down at her phone, then stuffed it into the pocket of her scrubs. “She was just asking about you.”

“When did you talk to Mom?”

“Last week. She called on my birthday, but she didn’t know it was my birthday.” I, too, had forgotten this.

“Shit, Phoebe, sorry. I—”

“It’s fine—that’s not the point. Anyway, she was in one of her reflective moods and she said this thing about how she worried about you the most. Out of all her adult kids.”

Part of me felt a little thrill at hearing this. The other part felt defensive. Our mother wasn’t the type to ask after people. “If you need me, you know where to find me,” she always said, which was true, except that finding her and getting her attention were two entirely different things.

“Why did she say that? What is she worried about?”

Phoebe laughed.

“What?”

“I mean, you were an intense kid. She’s probably just thinking about that.”

“No I wasn’t. What does that mean?”

“Well, you’ve just always had a hard time making friends. And there was that thing where you were weird with the dog.”

“What are you talking about? Why would you say it like that?”

“Pepper. You were obsessed with Pepper.”

“So were you! So was Mia! That’s the whole point of dogs!”

“Uhhh, yeah . . . but you were weirdly obsessed with her. You would, like, lie on the floor and whisper in her ears and get jealous when other people petted her. And you told everyone you were dating. You told your pediatrician that.”

“Give me one example outside of loving our dog.”

She thought for a minute. “The Oreo incident?” She raised her eyebrows meaningfully. “At school? When you told everyone that we were too poor to have Oreos at home?”

“I was five!”

“More like eight.”

“There’s no way I said ‘too poor.’”

“You did. Mom was so mad.”

“I was a child! And I was right—we never had snacks. You and Mia ate them all.”

“I’m just saying, Mom still thinks of us as how we were as kids, so that’s probably why she said that.”

“You literally had a years-long klepto phase.”

“Yeah for, like, a tinted ChapStick from the Walmart, not manipulating other second graders through fake poverty. Anyway, Mom just said something about how she hopes you ‘find your path.’”

The machine next to me beeped quietly. My blood looked strangely thick running through the tubes, more syrup than water.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I don’t need a path. I have a path. I just need money.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told her.” She busied herself checking on the machine and the bag. “Okay, I’ll come check on you in ten,” she said, and left.

The version of me that Phoebe had described stung a little. I couldn’t decide if it was more of a revision or an exposure. But just as I was riling myself up, starting to spiral, Nurse Alma walked by.

“You’re back!” she said, smiling broadly. She was wearing a barrette with a felt strawberry attached.

“Second donation bonus! Wouldn’t miss it.” I lowered my voice. “Between us? Phoebe could use some work on her technique. It was at least twice as painful. So if you’re here when I come back next week  ”

She laughed. “I’ll see what I can do. You’re going to be a regular, huh?”

“For now.”

“We love our regulars. Did your sister give you the recruitment spiel?”

“No,” I said. “She did not.”

“She might not have seen the email yet. We’re discussing it at the next staff meeting. We’re partnering with this company     They’re looking for people to be part of a study or something. It seemed like a neat opportunity. And it pays. Better than this, I think.”

“Sign me up.”

“Give me a couple minutes—I have to finish a few things and then I’ll bring you the flyer.”

I spent the remaining time squeezing my fingers into a fist, shivering violently as the cold crept through me, distracting myself from the mouth pain by thinking about ways my other sisters had fucked up, ways they were actually the ones we should all be worried about.

Phoebe reappeared forty minutes later and peered down at the bag. “Done.” She unceremoniously yanked the needle from my arm, slapping down a piece of gauze.

“Ow,” I said.

“You’re fine,” she said, and left.

I was in the observation area agonizing over the decision between Chips Ahoy! and mini pretzels, things I could dissolve in my mouth without chewing, when the thin woman from the last time appeared. She didn’t hesitate to select three Nutter Butters and some fruit snacks, as if the laminated take one, please signs posted at six-inch intervals along the table were meant to be read as encouragements instead of restrictions. She packed it all carefully into a purse made of wicker, then started in on a bag of Cheez-Its. I tucked the Chips Ahoy! under my arm and reached for the pretzels. I could at least suck the salt crystals off. At the sound of Alma’s voice behind me, I jumped and dropped the second bag back onto the table.

“Here, hon,” she said, handing me a flyer. “The information’s all here. And go ahead and take two of those. You look a little pale.” She winked. The flyer was printed on expensive paper, the thick kind I had only ever seen used for my rich cousin’s wedding invitation, and it emitted its own strange light. The paper had charisma. Across the top was written, “GENEROUS SALARY WITH BENEFITS,” all caps, and beneath it, “Contact for more information.”

“What’s that?” The thin woman was next to me now, munching and peering over my shoulder. “Is that about aftercare?” She squinted. “‘Generous salary’ . . . I like the sound of that.” She took it from my hand then, so confidently it didn’t even occur to me to protest. We both read silently for a moment, arriving at the Requirements section at the same time: “healthy lifestyle,” “birthing hips,” “discretion.”

We sized each other up, and I felt things between us cool as I came out on top. My hips and thighs have always been the bane of my existence, thick and unbothered by any amount of exercise or diet.

“Hey, can I have this?” the woman asked. “Are you going to use it?”

I yanked it back with the same confidence she had used to take it from me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m using it. You have to ask. You have to ask one of the nurses to give you one. If you meet the requirements.” The woman stalked off in search of an employee—I hoped my sister—and I headed for the double doors.

“Good luck,” Nurse Alma called from behind me as I passed by her through reception, and this time I was grateful.

*

At home, Paul was in his usual spot on the couch. It was freezing inside the apartment.

“Hey,” he said. “Long story short, I accidentally melted a Tupperware lid on one of the burners. I opened all the windows but it still smells kind of chemical, so maybe give it another hour before going in there.”

“Cool,” I said. “Thanks.” I shut the door of my room, took the flyer out of my bag, and climbed under the covers of my unmade twin bed. It took three tries to open the “Quick Apply” QR code with my phone, but finally the digital square appeared and I was redirected.

The website was the online equivalent of expensive paper. It had one of those layouts with only a home page that doesn’t tell you what it’s actually about, just the words “We create opportunity” written across the center. At the bottom—in a clean, elegant font—were hyperlinks to About, Careers, and Contact. When I clicked About, it looped back to the home page: “We create opportunity.” When I clicked Careers, a new window opened. It was a simple application asking for my name, contact information, age, current height and weight, a recent full-body photo, and ten questions:

1. Do you have any chronic health conditions?
2. Do you drink alcohol?
3. Do you take any prescription medications?
4. Do you have any tattoos?
5. Do you cohabitate with cats?
6. Do you currently have a romantic partner and/or close family ties?
7. Do you currently have or plan to have children?
8. Have you ever had an abortion?
9. Have you ever had a caesarean delivery?
10. Have you ever had a miscarriage?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I clicked confidently. I did drink alcohol, but I sensed this was not the answer they were seeking. I paused at number eight. In the years since it happened, I always thought of it with a “The,” like those people you always call by both first and last name. The Abortion. Al Gore. It was something that didn’t need to be disclosed to a potential buyer. Like a house where someone had died in one of the bedrooms. No, no, no, I clicked. Done.

I attached a headshot Mia had taken of me in our backyard a few years back when she insisted on making me a LinkedIn. In the photo, I looked confident and svelte. When I pressed Submit, a message appeared: Thank you for your interest. If you might be a fit, someone from our team will reach out.

__________________________________

From Fallow by Sarah Anderson. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Sarah Anderson. All rights reserved.