If a nineteen-year-old could conjure the concept at the turn of the 19th century, then I in my ripe old age, with the help of all the high-tech bells and whistles that hallmark this era, can carry this to sublime fruition. Why, I can take it one better! I will begin at the beginning. Mine will start out small; hence, manageable. Mine will not only live, but grow. Mine, I will be able to teach. Train, if you would rather call it that.
My patchwork cherub, in pieces: skeleton, organs, muscle, connective tissue, a pliant, fresh skin in which to wrap my dear, little masterpiece.
Voltage channeled with artistic, microscopic precision, isolated heat and frigid cold applied as needed, monitors attached to track the slightest brain activity, regulators to ensure a wavelength’s lilting flow; heartbeat inducing and acid generating implants sewn into place. . .
Whatever is needed to make my doll tick, I have done it.
Switches on, surges course. . . The lights, even these days, flicker momentarily as power is diverted. . .
I hope the neighbors don’t notice; but then, all decent folk should be fast asleep at this hour.
Tha-unk, tha-unk, tha-unk. . .
There! From the depths of its small, heaving chest, arise the palpitations of twin lungs, laboring hard to expand, fill their stiffened recesses. A small drumbeat sounds from deeper still, a melodious, if muffled clockwork that signals to my ears, what the monitors in minute detail delineate.
My progeny, ignited, curls its tiny fingers, flexes its bubble toes, smacks its lips as were it tasting of its very own sweetness. A few more minutes pass, and I witness the slow lifting of flower petal eyelids. No doubt, it wants to have a better look. The babe wants to behold its loving and life-giving god. Papa.
I myself long to gaze upon my pallid child, and approach the bed from offsides, like the sun at dawn rising slowly, gently, to peek over the horizon’s edge, to witness as the milk of life flows anew through its form, fills its veins, plumps its belly, tinges its skin with the soft hues of one newly reanimated. Pearlescent oyster grays give way to the blush of a blossoming rose, nigh on the verge of unfolding. . .
I hover like the noonday sun over my glowing child, afire with pride, but then watch as something else washes over my progeny. An edge hardens the lines of its winsome mouth. The scientist in me is transfixed as I next observe as something dark and primitive emerges, which causes its dimpled fingers to furl into a wee fist, round and hard as a river rock. I watch as the glimmer in its dew-kissed orbs transforms into a knife-edged glitter, focused not only on the blood-drained features of my crestfallen countenance, but pushing past it, as if in search of the visceral – my skull, my brain, the throbbing pulsation sounding a warning bell from within, calling me to a different attention:
All is not as it should be.
I begin to understand, I am no more a sun than I am the harvest moon, and this infant on the table is no more my angel as it is my hand-crafted monstrosity.
Its pupils narrow to obsidian slits.
The baby opens its mouth to cry, as any newborn would. A pointed tongue emerges, slaps left, then right, upon marzipan cheeks.
My progeny bares two rows of ivory tines and hisses at me.
Acid spittle stings my brow.
The babe rises, lift itself up off the table like a freshly hatched viper. In its all-consuming hunger, it leaps at me, buries its tiny teeth deep into my forearm. It means to make a meal of me, or at least my appendage. The bite locks – I can feel the shift of its jaw – and when I thrash my arm about to shake it off, the baby flaps through the air, arms and legs flailing crazily, no more a precious doll but a limp-limbed, evil puppet, face planted into the fat and muscle of my bleeding arm.
Fantasies of picnics, of school lessons, of fairy tales I wanted to read by the light of the sun, spooky stories I wanted to tell in the dark, are dashed in the blink of an eye. I know what I must do, and though I am loathe to do it, I must give this, now, my all.
With my free remaining hand, I crush the infantile troglodyte’s skull.
One, two, three blows. Preternatural strength, instinct driven, overtakes me, though several more strikes are required until the cranium finally pops, and my project explodes all over us both, and the teeth finally release their hold.
Under cloak of darkness, long before the tattletale lightening of the pre-dawn skies, I work frantically to undo what I have done. The machinery is dismantled, torn apart; I destroy the bed, trash the linens. Before the clock strikes the next hour, I will have bulldozed the shed and set fire to what is left. The promethean nursery is no more.
I next set out to do what I do believe I ought, but my ingenious malintent, which I cannot help, mandates nothing less than as melodramatic a disposal as I can manage.
That nineteen-year-old did, after all, come up with this, too.
I box the remains, still a-twitching, and resolve to deliver them to the cliffs, and from there into the unrelenting saltwater maw of the all-consuming ocean.
I stand at the very edge of the precipice, poised to cast the dismembered parts as far out into the air as I can, to let them fall into the churning waves, which will pulverize what is left of my poppet against the colossal mortar that is the rock-lined shore.
But in this moment, the beastling’s teeth, its mandibles, resume their chatter.
Exhausted to my core, I lose my composure, and with it, my grip. The incessant gnashing is too much for even me. Before I can gather back up the pieces, perhaps to wrap, to burn, and then bury them as I probably should have done in the first place, they jump from my hands, land benignly in the tide pools below.
Let us pray, the barefooted bathers at yon beach tomorrow do not prove as tempting a dish as was I.
††††††
butterflybroth 