Free The Assembler of Parts: A Novel by Raoul Wientzen

tights, and a hat. Instead, she slid me into the sack and zipped me up. Only my face showed.
    Ned took me to see the fish in the office’s little aquarium. Then his eye caught sight of the bench in Waiting Room Two, and he brought me there to study it with him. It was old and long and gleaming against the far wall. The few patients in that room sat with their mothers on regular chairs, leaving the bench unoccupied. His hand slid down three feet of its fifteen-foot length. He rapped his knuckles on it four times, cocking his head to read the sound’s report. He let the tip of his index finger cross the grain of the wood. He pressed it with his nail, and his breath caught in his throat. He looked down at me with a face full of wonder and said sacramentally, “Red pine.” He dropped to his knees and placed me gently on the floor under the bench, where a second later he joined me. We both looked up to the bench’s underside. “Not a screw, not a nail,” he said appreciatively. He looked my way and said, “Dovetail fit, from mortises and tenons.” His hand caressed a joint. “And here, dowels, perfectly shaved, perfectly spaced.” He unzipped my sack and extracted an arm. He held me up over his chest, supporting my head in his palm, took my hand and let me feel the handiwork. The wood was slick, even the joints cut so tight, if you closed your eyes to the design, it felt like a single block of wood. The board showed the same, tight, wavy grain as the top side of the seat. The ridges tickled my fingertips. “Not one single screw,” he said when we had finally stood.
    The mothers in the room watched us as we walked out. “This is a real good place,” Ned said to their quizzical looks.
    Nana was miffed when Ned returned to his seat next to her. She looked quickly around the room and saw it was too late to return my arms to the sack’s secrecy. Ned said, “We checked out an old wood bench on the other side. It’s a beauty.” Nana stared at him. We were called after a few minutes of silent waiting.
    The nurse slid the rest of me out of the casing, removed my shirt and diaper and put me on a scale. I had gained almost four pounds. She wrapped a tape around my head and wrote a number in my chart. She slid a ruler under me and stretched out my legs and wrote again.
    “Growing like a weed, Mrs. Jackson. You’re doing a real good job.” Then she looked at me. “We’ve got something special for you today, baby girl.” She winked at my mother and said softly, “Shots.” She wrapped me in a pink blanket, handed me to Mother, and brought us to the examining room where for fifteen minutes I studied the cartoon forms of animals painted on the walls. In real life, only monkeys and porpoises smile. On Dr. Burke’s wall, the lips of every species—aardvark to zebra—curved up into big expressions of glee. On the way home, both my thighs aching from that nurse’s promise of something special, I saw those smiling rabbits and puppies and fawns and mice. For the remainder of my life, I would be wary of happy animals.
    Burke wore a backwards baseball cap and a pin-striped Yankees shirt. He greeted Mother with a “Kate,” Nana with a “Mrs.,” and Ned with a “Hmm” when he heard him blurt out, even before their handshake had concluded, “You ought to look into switching her two big toes to her hands. Seems like the thing to do. To me, anyway. Shouldn’t be that hard.”
    Nana groaned and Mother frowned. Burke said, again, “Hmm.” He tugged the visor of his cap and added, “Well, that’s not such a bad thought.” In those few seconds when everyone in the room arranged themselves around the exam table to watch Burke’s investigation of my growing body, I caught his eyes darting repetitively from my feet to my hands. Finally, the lids narrowed and he nodded a little. “I’ll mention it to Dr. Garraway and see what he thinks.”
    He asked about my development and tilted his head in disbelief when Mother told him