By the time I reached the Anatomy Library all the bones had been checked out. At every table, students bent over yawning boxes, assembling feet and arms, scribbling in notebooks, muttering Latin names. Half the chairs were occupied by slouching skeletons, and skulls littered the floor like driftwood.
Since I also needed to cram for the following day’s exam, I asked the librarian to search one last time for bone-boxes in the storeroom.
“I’ve told you there aren’t any more,” she said, frowning at me from beneath a tangle of dark hair, like a vexed animal caught in a bush. How many students had already pestered her for bones this evening?
“Are there partial skeletons? Mismatched sets? Irregulars?”
The librarian measured me with her stare, as if estimating the size of box my bones would fill. She was young enough to be a student herself, yet shadows drooped beneath her eyes, like the painted tears of a clown. “Irregulars,” she repeated. “You’re sure?”
“I’ll take anything.”
A bitten-off smile quirked her lips. Then she turned away from the desk, murmuring, “Very well. I’ll see what I can find.”
I blinked with relief at her departing back. Only as she slipped noiselessly into the storeroom did I notice the beige gloves on her hands. Fastidious, I thought.
While awaiting the specimen, I scrutinized the vertebrae that were exposed like beads along the bent necks of students who labored over skeletons at nearby tables. Five lumbar vertebrae, seven cervical, a dozen thoracic: I rehearsed the names.
Presently the librarian returned with a box the size of an orange crate, wooden, dingy with age. The metal clasps that held it shut were tarnished green. No wonder she wore the gloves.
“You’re in luck,” she said, shoving it over the counter.
I hesitated, my hands poised above the crate as if I were testing it for heat.
“Well, do you want it, or don’t you?” she said.
Afraid she might return it to the archives, I lifted the box, which seemed lighter than its bulk would have promised, as if the wood had dried with age. Perhaps instead of bones inside there would be heaps of dust.
“Must be an old model,” I observed amiably.
Her plump lips curled.
I found a clear space on the floor beside a spindly man whose elbows and knees protruded through rents in his clothing like the humps of a sea serpent above the waters. The clasps, cold against my fingers, yielded with a metallic shriek, drawing the bleary glances of my fellow students. I shrugged apologetically, and the glazed eyes returned to work.
Inside the crate I found a stack of hinged trays, as in a fishing-tackle box, each tray gleaming with putty-colored bones. I began on the foot, joining tarsal to metatarsal. It was soon evident that there were too many bones. Each one seemed a bit odd in shape, with an extra flange where none should be, or a misplaced knob, and they were too light, as light as hollow reeds. Fitted together, they formed a seven-toed foot, slightly larger than that of an adult male, with phalanges all of the same length and ankle-bones bearing the sockets for . . . what? Flippers? Wings?
This drove me back to my anatomy text. Yet no consulting of diagrams would make sense of this foot. A scrape with a coin assured me these were real bones, not plastic or plaster. But from what creature? Feeling queasy, as if in my ignorance I had created this monstrosity, I looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Everywhere living skulls tilted over dead ones, ignoring me. Only the librarian seemed to be watching me sidelong, through her tangled hair. I hastily returned the foot bones to their various compartments.
Next I worked at the hand, which boasted six rather than seven digits. Two of them were clearly thumbs, opposite in orientation, and each of the remaining fingers was double-jointed, so that both sides of these vanished hands could have served as palms.
After examining fibula, femur, sternum, and clavicle, each bone familiar yet slightly awry from the norm, I gingerly unpacked the plates of the skull. Their scattered state was unsettling enough, since in ordinary skeletal kits they would have come pre-assembled into a braincase. Their gathered state was even more unsettling. They would go together in only one arrangement, yet it appeared so outrageous to me that I reassembled the skull three times, always with the same result. There was only one jaw, to be sure, though an exceedingly broad one, and the usual pair of holes for ears. The skull itself, however, was clearly double, as if two heads had been squeezed together, like cherries grown double on a single stem. Each hemisphere of the brain enjoyed its own cranium. The opening for the nose was in its accustomed place, as were two of the eyes. But in the center of the vast forehead, like the drain in a bare expanse of bathtub, was the cavity for a third eye.
I closed the anatomy text. Hunched over to shield this freak from the gaze of other students, I stared long at that triangle of eyes, and at the twinned craniums that splayed out behind like a fusion of moons. No, I decided, such a creature was not possible. It must be a counterfeit, like the Piltdown Man or the Cardiff Giant. But I would not fall for the trick. I dismantled the skull, stuffed the bones into their trays, clasped the box shut and returned it to the check-out desk.
“This may seem funny to you,” I hissed at the librarian, who was rooting in her bush of hair with the point of a pencil, “but I have an exam to pass.”
“Funny?” she whispered.
“This hoax.” I slapped the box, raising a puff of dust.
“Not so loud, please.”
“It’s a fabrication.”
“Is it?” She rested her gloved hands atop the crate.
“Nobody who knows a scrap of anatomy would fall for it.”
“Really?” she said, peeling the glove away from one wrist. I wanted to hurry away before she could uncover that hand. Yet I was caught by the slide of cloth, the sight of pink skin emerging. “I found it hard to believe myself, at first,” she said, spreading the naked hand before me, palm up. I was relieved to count only five digits. But the fleshy heel was inflamed, as if the bud of a new thumb were sprouting there. A scar, only a scar, I thought. Nothing more. Whereupon she turned the hand over and displayed another palm. The fingers curled upward and then curled in the reverse direction, forming a cage of fingers on the counter.
I flinched, and turned my gaze aside, unwilling to look her in the eye, fearful of what those snarled bangs might hide. Skeletons were shattering in my mind, names of bones were fluttering away like blown leaves.
“How many of you are there?” I whispered.
“I’m the first, so far as I know. Unless you count our friend here.” She clacked her nails on the bone-box.
I guessed the distances to inhabited planets. “Where do you come from?”
“Boise.”
“Boise . . . Idaho?”
“Actually, I grew up in a logging camp out in the sticks, but Boise’s the nearest place anybody’s ever heard of.”
“You mean you’re . . .”
“Human? Of course!” She loosed a quiet laugh. Students glanced up momentarily from their skeletons with glassy eyes. The librarian lowered her voice, until it burbled like whale song. “At least I started out that way,” she whispered.
“But what about your hands? Your face?”
“Until a few months ago they were just ordinary hands.” She wriggled fingers back into the glove and touched one cheek. “My face wasn’t swollen. My shoes fit.”
“Then what happened?”
“I assembled these bones.” Again she tapped the crate. From inside came a muffled clatter, like the sound of gravel sliding.
“You’re becoming one of them?”
Her upturned lips and downturned eyes gave me contradictory messages. The clown-sad eyes seemed too far apart, and her forehead, obscured behind a thicket of hair, seemed impossibly broad.
“Aren’t you frightened?” I said.
“Not anymore,” she answered. “Not since my head began to open.”
I winced, recalling the vast skull, pale as porcelain, and the triangle of eyes. I touched the bone-box gingerly. “What are you turning into?”
“I don’t know yet. But I begin to get glimmerings, begin to see myself flying.”
“Flying?”
“Or maybe swimming. I can’t be sure. My vision’s still blurry.”
I tried to imagine her ankles affixed with wings, her head swollen like a double moon, her third eye blinking. “And what sort of creature will you be when you’re . . . changed?”
“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
“We?”
“You’ve put the bones together, haven’t you?”
I stared at my palms, and then turned my hands over to examine the twitching skin where the knuckles should be.