I'm trying something. Abstract, impressionist short stories and sonic sketches. Written, recorded and published within a morning. No AI involved.
This is the second.
**
I didn’t know how much it would hurt, how much it would bleed, until I made the cut. I didn’t know the pain would be so terrifying and so exquisite at the same time. But I did know that the wound closing up so quickly—like a turn-of-the-century art film where an invisible hand zips a 15-year-old boy’s forearm closed at one frame per second—wasn’t right at all. So I did it again.
Father was in his office, as he was every Saturday morning. I’d rushed there after running the experiment once across each limb. I hadn’t made time to fantasize about what Father would say or imagine those words in his academic intonation, his Cambridge diction.
“Dorian, in many ways, you are, and may forever be, immortal.”
I became lost in the painting behind him, the one of my mother as she was in the last year of her life, the year I was born. I was so absorbed that I missed every word that came after “immortal.” Knowing how much Father hated to repeat himself, I apologized before making my request. But he made no fuss. He just began again.
“Your mother had twice miscarried. It seemed certain that a third attempt would result in the same conclusion without some intervention. Serendipitously, your Uncle Arthur had just had a breakthrough in his study of transdifferentiation in mammalia. He’d completely stopped the cellular deterioration of a mouse using mutated cells from jellyfish. He’d shared his discovery at dinner, and your mother became obsessed. What if it could be used to help her carry her conception to term? So, we tried. And from those experiments you came. It was inevitable that, despite doing my best to shield you, you’d injure yourself in some way, and I’m relieved we’ve found that my suspicions as to your ability to regenerate have been confirmed. How did you hurt yourself, anyway?”
I’d caught my arm in the roller of the library ladder while re-shelving some of the poetry, I said. Lies grow best when rooted in the soil of truth. I’d been in the library, reading Plath, reading “Cut.” I wondered when Father had bought this pristine first edition, and whether he had ever read the contents in this form or any other. I wondered if I would experience a “celebration” by taking the letter opener to my forearm. I did. And I knew I would do it again, even before I knew I’d recover.
