“You’re asking for a list?”

“Yah. Say you’re in a bar fight, and you’re going to lose an organ or two. Which ones?” We were, of course, sitting in a bar: me, Moose and Colin.

“Easy-peasy,” said Moose. “I –”

“And you can’t say your reproductive organs.” Colin waved off Moose’s objections. “Too easy.”

“Shit. Those are the only ones I really use.” Moose rose unsteadily and lurched towards the men’s room.

“Just organs, or do glands count, too? ‘cause I think you can lose your thyroid or pituitary glands.”

“Whatever. If you got ‘em, which ones can’t you loose. Lose.” Colin had been drinking two shots to my one. He must’ve been hammered.

“OK. Let’s start with the ones you CAN lose: spleen, gallbladder, appendix. People have those removed all the time, and they do just fine.”

“Can’t see how you’d lose your appendix in a bar fight. Nor gallbladder neither. Spleen, sure. A bad impact and they gotta cut it out. Happens in contact sports all the time.”

“Yeah, but ‘bar fight’ is pretty nebulous. The guy could have a knife, a broken bottle, even an icepick. You get punctured in the right place, and it’s good-bye, gallbladder.”

“OK. Knives but no guns. Which organs DON’T you want to lose?”

“Well, none you need to survive: brain, heart, lungs…pancreas. Both kidneys.”

Colin was counting off with his fingers – but on the hand where he’d lost his pinky. He switched to his other hand. “That’s five. What else?”

“Skin!” came a voice from below. “Biggest organ you losers’ve got! Not me, though.”

We both looked over the table. Moose hadn’t made it to the men’s room. He was lying on the floor. He’d also used another organ: his bladder. There were two empty chairs at our table; Colin and I put our feet up on the seats to keep them out of the spreading puddle of urine.

“I don’t see how you could lose all your skin in a bar fight,” Colin said.

“No one even scalps anybody anymore,” I said.

“To the lost art of scalping!” We clinked glasses and downed our shots. Then I refilled our glasses from the bottle, because, why not?

“If we include glands, you can lose your tonsils and adenoids. I had mine taken out when I was a kid.”

Colin shook his head. “If someone can reach inside and down your throat to remove your tonsils in a bar fight, they belong on ‘America’s Got Talent,’ not….” He didn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence.

“He’d need a lil’ baby arm to fit in your mouth ‘n’ reach down your throat,” Moose said from the floor.

I didn’t even want to think about some killer baby reaching inside my mouth.

“Moving on,” I said. “You want to keep fighting, you need your eyes. And your ears.” At the moment, ears were on my mind, since I couldn’t seem to hear out of my left one. “You can live without your nose, but I got mine broke once in a fight and it hurt so bad I couldn’t even see. Can’t fight blind. Sense of taste, I suppose I could do without.”

“Nothing tastes right anymore,” Colin said. “Not even this scotch.”

I was pretty sure we were drinking bourbon, but I didn’t bother to point that out.

That reminded me. “Stomach! That’s an organ. Don’t want to lose that.”

“To eat with?” Colin asked. I heard sirens approaching. Cops.

“To drink with!” We lifted our glasses to toast again. My glass kind of stuck to the table. I realized that the blood from Colin’s severed pinky had spread across the tabletop. Or maybe it was blood from the stump of my left ear.

“Guess it’s time,” Colin said. Now the police were at the door, screaming at us to raise our hands and get on the floor. As if I’d get on the floor, wet with the blood of the guys we’d killed! And Moose’s piss. I noticed that Moose hadn’t said anything for a while – he was probably dead of his wounds, too.

“Go out with a bang?” I asked.

“Only way to go,” said Colin.

We didn’t even manage to get our guns out before the cops shot us down.

Tony Conaway has been a published writer for over twenty years. He has co-written or ghostwritten business books published by large publishing houses, including McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, and Prentice Hall. He co-authored "kiss, Bow or Shake Hands," which achieved printing of of 350,000 copies, including global translations. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen anthologies and numerous publications, including Blue Lake Review, Close to the Knuckle, Danse Macabre, Rind Literary Magazine, the Rusty Nail, and Typehouse Literary Magazine. Some of his odder credits include co-writing the script for a planetarium show and selling jokes to Jay Leno for The Tonight Show. Tony passed away in 2021.