God or the Company, IT ordered, PRODUCE THE OTHERS THAT MIGHT POPULATE THE 7 AND FIGHT THE 3. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 …

Or this is just something I thought of now.

Charlie, through his gloom, wrestling with the proteins and the vocal cords and the sinew and the blood and the epidermis, to within those 10 create more magic, even with the magical garden dead. For the 7. Against the 3. Although he did not then really grasp who the 3 were, or how they might collude with the fox. The fox was the 1 or the 0. He became confused, like in all fairy tales retold and updated so what had been certain and sacrosanct sank into disavowal, disavowel, disembowelment.

How do you know you’re in hell, if God and Company are still conversing with you? Or is that how you know?

This continued for years.

My father transformed my face into that of a bat. My father slit my throat and inserted surgical mice. My father rearranged my organs so they spelled out the true name of the Company inside. 10, 7, 3, 0.

But chance or fortune or fate favorited Charlie in the end. For there came a day at the vats when his father fell, temporary consumed by fumes or poison or to the lacerating regard of a self-made creature whose dagger-quality to the eyes was in fact a propulsive sliver, lodging in my father’s neurological epicenters. It is still hard to tell why he fell even so, why he toppled like a cut tree, there in the laboratory. It seemed impossible. This toppling. Like the cutting of a tree in the yard of the house of my youth that no one, not even I, can remember. The tree you could not fit your arms around when you hugged it, the tree was so huge. Such a monster could never fall.

Nor did I understand why all looked to the boy-king Charlie to heal him.

And so the father died and the son cried while inside his mind he laughed so hard he cried. He laughed and laughed so hard his organs regained their natural places and blood seeped from his ears and his nose. But that was just because he was so unnatural now.

As my first act—I mean the son’s act—taking his place, the son forbade his removal from the vats, to preserve him, that some part of him might live on in the creatures I would create, and the ones I would save. For it was then that I set up the magical garden again, in plain view. And in this new magical garden there were many pools of healthy water and some that were muddy and stands of tall grasses and an artificial sun. But mostly there I hid and saved the parts and bits that mewled and would have been snuffed, and upon that pile, that throne, sat my duckling.