Behavioral Science
She cried out Look! I am forming! Only, having no mouth yet, no one
heard. She was naturally
excited, since she had grown a single finger - the right hand's last joint lying right next to it
so that when skin appeared, they could copulate, join.
Next, she worked very hard on the knee, but knees are complicated, and once she got half a patella
(should she have started with the femur?) she said Phew, and decided to leave it at that for now.
She practiced her alphabet. Having no bones or marrow, a person must have something to hold on to.
Her mother found her hiding in the dark of the closet. She lifted a sheet and there she was.
"My goodness!" she said, astonished. "Look what's happened!"
She had accidentally grown a shoe.
"Put that away and concentrate," admonished the mother. Meekly, she did as she was told.
Vowels first. A.E.I.O.U.Z.W.
The shoulder joint had fallen apart. Perhaps she should play around with the muscle? She tried a
tricep. It turned out quite nicely, but was the wrong size - no bigger than a hairpin. She tried again.
A dog's tooth. Disgusted, she gave up. B.F.N.G.K. She invented a word and forgot it.
She listened to everything they told her, but had trouble grasping concepts. She watched as her class
was taught how to make an artery.
She shrieked at a nightmare. In the dream, she looked nothing like herself, and a man was trying to put
a ladle down her throat. She turned it in on herself and served him a custard parfait. It took less
time than if he had done it on his own. He put his hand up her skirt, but since she looked nothing like
herself, she did not yell. She only screamed when he stuck his tongue in her ear.
Her mother dismisses the dream as fiction, but she cannot grow anything the whole of that day. She
tries to make an elbow, but only comes up with water.
Jill Alphonso lives and frolics in Seattle. Her short stories are decidedly too long and she hopes to have her own magazine one day.