Leon had overslept. Bernadette, his sister, came in to see why he was still sleeping.

"Leon," she shook him.

He woke up and grimaced with pain. He had tried to move too quickly. He felt that he might vomit.

"Something is wrong," Bernadette said. She pushed back the top sheet of the bed and saw that it was speckled with orangy bits of dried blood. There was more blood, still wet, on his nightclothes.

"What has happened?"

Leon became frightened, and turned pale. Together they gingerly pushed down the waist of his pyjamas. He had a fresh incision on the right side of his groin. It was swollen and discoloured, and ran from the base of his penis up to his waistline. It was a good five inches long.

"The Removalist has been" whispered Bernadette.

"Quickly! I'm going to vomit."

Bernadette ran to get a bucket for him to throw up in. Later she got a cold damp cloth to stroke his head with.

"I'll call the Doctor."

"No. Call father and tell him what has happened. And call Mr. Borges at the office. Tell him I'm very sick and won't be in for a while."

On the telephone, his father said it was better not to see the Doctor.

"It's better not to know what he took out. It could have been something relatively benign. The location is good. The only thing around there is your appendix. Perhaps it was only a small piece of bowel, or some muscle."

Bernadette resisted. "You should see the doctor anyway, just to be safe."

"I have faith in Father's advice. I will just wait," Leon replied.

For the next five days it rained continually, soaking the earth and pulling up the soil's pungent fragrances. The rain was hard, and many plants were beat down. Bernadette began to fret, but Leon had become fatalistic.

"Forget the plants. You cannot save them; you should concentrate on saving me instead. The Removalist will be back again, and who knows what may happen."

Bernadette slowly smoothed down her skirt. "The world will drown with all this water," she said grimly.

The roof had begun to leak, and Bernadette had moved Leon's bucket from his room. He had thankfully stopped vomiting. Vomiting caused him a great deal of pain, and he was frightened that he would tear open the incision. He was cautious not to laugh or scream. If he read something funny he would let out a long slow wail, smiling, in an effort to keep his laughter inside. He could not afford to cough; sneezing was also hazardous.

It had been a difficult five days. But he had slowly found his appetite.

"Not so much pepper on the food," he demanded.

He preferred liquids; his throat was very sore, and dry food did not go down well.

His father came to visit, and quietly confided that his own brother, Leon's dead uncle, had been visited by the Removalist when they were young boys on the farm out east.

"The Removalist puts a tube down your throat, unless, of course, he is working in your mouth. The tube is slightly too large, you see, and the after-effects are very painful. My brother, because he was so small, had trouble swallowing. He was in a great deal of pain. I actually prayed to God, to thank the Lord for taking my brother and sparing me. That's what it was like back then. It was a selfish time. But the Removalist's work is always of the highest quality. He is very precise."

"What did your brother have taken?" Leon asked.

"The Removalist took his pancreas. My parents took him to the doctor, but everyone knew he didn't have long to live. We tried to make him as comfortable as we could, but he died before the Removalist came back. Still, the Removalist finished the job. He waited until my brother had been taken away by the authorities. We saw, when we went to the funeral. My brother was layed out in the coffin, wearing the small suit which he and I shared, and around his right eyelid was the telltale stitching. The Removalist had sewn a clitoris into the fold in the corner of his eye, like a tear."

His father's story had not comforted Leon. He had been anxious about the Removalist's return, but now he began to have strange dreams about the addition to his body that he would be given. He thought of Reba, at the office, who had been given a second hand on her left wrist, sewn together with the original so that they held one another, the fingers entwined. It was a man's hand, a street boxer's, with bruised and swollen knuckles. Sometimes it held her own hand too tight, squeezing it, or digging its thick nails into her palm. She had talked, at first, of having it removed. But the doctors eventually told her that this was impossible; all they could do was remove both. She eventually learned to live with her new appendage, and Leon believed that she had even come to appreciate it on occasion.

But the Removalist had also been known to play cruel jokes on some of his patients. There was the tale of the corrupt mayor, who received a flaccid penis in place of his tongue, and his son, the aspiring politican, who had been given a length of bowel as an inner lining for the throat. Such stories weren't fit for the papers, but they circulated widely nonetheless. People were of the opinion that the two men had gotten what they deserved.

In the night, Leon dreamed that his soul had been taken from his body. His identity had floundered uselessly among the mud and grass. In the dream he had tried to speak to Bernadette, who was working in the garden. He cried for help.

"Leon, is that you? Where are you?" She stopped working and looked around. Leon tried to speak again, but he realized that his voice was growing smaller. Soon it was gone. He gradually lost all notion of his senses, and found that he had become nothing more than a collection of thoughts. They gradually drifted and lost each other among the heavy drops of rain. Leon woke in a terror, screaming out his name, and Bernadette had rushed in, once more, to see what was wrong.

Leon waited. When the rain had stopped he went for short walks, being careful not to strain himself. The ground had taken on so much water that Leon's hesitant steps created small foot-shaped puddles behind him. The plants, too, had faired badly in the rain. Many had been trampled down by the constant weather, their leaves drowned in the muddy water around them. Few survived, but Bernadette salvaged what she could.

Leon considered going back to work. He was able, but Bernadette was urging him not to.

"You should just stay at home until the Removalist comes back. There's no point in going back to work if you may have to leave again in a few days."

Leon knew that Bernadette was right. But he also suspected that she was afraid, for herself, if the Removalist should come while he was away at work. He knew that such a thing was impossible, but his sister's fear worked its way into the damp air of the house. Opening the windows seemed to have no effect; he could still smell the fear. He decided to stay home.

On the morning of the sixth day, Leon overslept. He woke up close to noon, and slowly made his way out of bed. He felt particularly sluggish, and his sore throat had become worse. When he saw the clock on his wall he couldn't believe his eyes.

"Noon? Dear God, why didn't she wake me?"

"Bernadette!" he shouted out into the hallway. No one answered. He made his way, too heavily, down the passage and into her bedroom. He cried out when he saw her bed. The sheets had been pulled back, and the bed itself was soaked with fresh blood. It had only just begun to dry into the tiny creases at the edges of the large uneven stain.

Leon became frantic. "Bernadette, where are you? Are you okay? Answer me!" he screamed. He ran downstairs, his incision throbbing with pain, and began to search through the rooms of the house.

"Has he come for you, by mistake?" he cried, breathless and doubled over. After searching the house he sat on the stairs in a frightened sweat, unsure of what to do. Looking down, he saw that his nightclothes were soiled with patches of mud. He looked at the palms of his hands, and found that they too were muddy and stained. He gasped, and looked at them closely. They were suddenly too large; they appeared thick and tight, and didn't seem to be his. He rushed up the stairs and into the bathroom, and screamed when he met his reflection. Moaning, he sank to the floor, and began to touch the foreign skin which now covered his body.

He found a solid track of thick stiches which travelled from the top of his head down to the base of each ankle. He had been given Bernadette's skin, overtop of his own, and a grotesque parody of her image now greeted him in the mirror. Leon cried tears which sat heavily in the deep and unnaturally sunken folds of his eyes.

Phil McCluskey