(By the tub was a basket of old bones. She’d had it explained to her and the sight was not disturbing. She made sure only to glance into it, though the minister seemed uninterested in her reactions. The bones were of all sizes and kinds and came—she was sure of it—from various animals, and from people too. (There was no human skull that would have cast that beyond any doubt.) She saw the jawbone of a horse or donkey, the snapped-off ribs of something cat-sized, perhaps. Nub-like vertebrae. Little rags of flesh still adorned a few. That surprised her and she wanted to ask if it didn’t affect the process.

The minister fussed over the big container where the viscous fluid slopped with his steps. Not for the first time she detected in his motions an enjoyment of the whole process; that annoyed her.

‘This is what this is for,’ he said as if she didn’t know.

She thought, How is it that I’m here?

The minister upended the bucket of bones into the bath. That did surprise her, and she jumped back, because he did so without any apparent thought and certainly without warning, and the swilling stuff spattered. It landed on his arm—she moved too quickly for any to hit her—and she was anxious at the sight of its glistening opalescent blobs, of what they might do, but the minister wiped it all off without any concern and kept staring into the tub. She stepped forward again to look herself.

The bones did not lie all at the base. Some were already suspended a few centimetres up. She watched more began to lift gently, tugged insistently, against their own density. They drifted through the thick liquid.

Around each bone, slowly, the solution began to coagulate and grow more opaque, like cooling candlewax. It thickened into threads, coagulated in lines and cocoons, cauling the bones, connecting one to the other in cords spun out of nothing, tendons that spasmed and yanked the bones in whatever directions.

Some big leg-bone was at the centre of the shifting mass. A variety of smaller bones slipped and slid in imperfect radial symmetry around it, and those tiny ribs spread into what she thought would be feelers. The vertebrae knotted into tails or tentacles. New limbs. The bathwater-stuff built itself a chaotic new body on these collected bones, threadlike capillaries opening invisible through which thinner bloodlike liquid might rush. Clots of stuff shielded by the bones would become organs. Perhaps eyes.

The next night, when all this was done, whatever this would be would self-birth out of the urgent slop, stand, or as close to that as it could, step or crawl, a random animal on uneven limbs. It would cry out if it had a voice.)