Yaya didn’t know how, but she tried. The coil around her neck was not as tight as it felt; she took a deep breath, gut puffing up so that for a second she couldn’t see the muscle snaking between her legs.

Doc’s cautious fingers crept down the tub’s sides toward Yaya’s waist and the red mess. Yaya tensed—this touch was too familiar and yet still strange.

Thin red limbs coiled around Doc’s forearm, but she made to pet the muscle. It gave wet, smacking sounds, as if readying to bite her. Tongue-like flesh, soft and sensitive, sank beneath her fingertips.

Lightning forked through Yaya’s nerves, her flesh raw where it formed the muscled stalk. Judging by the source, she couldn’t be too surprised. She’d read once that she had nine thousand nerves in her clitoris. If it had gained sentience, how upset would it be with her?

Warm muscle shuddered through her. Scared.

“It keeps repeating the same thing,” Yaya said. “Scared, over and over.”

Doc looked from the muscle to Yaya and back. “You hear a voice?”

“Bugs Bunny should’ve taken a very left turn at Albuquerque.” Yaya giggled to herself, and she didn’t realize how much she needed to laugh after everything she’d been through the past few hours. Or was it days? Maybe it had

been her whole life, one long ordeal leading to this night. She would need a lot of jokes for that.

“Is this part of you or something inside you?” Doc asked. “Is there a name?”

How did she know to ask these questions? She seemed to handle finding a vagina monster in her bathroom just fine. Maybe Yaya would’ve handled it better too if it had grown from someone else.

Doc looked at her fingers, now tinged with pinkish fluid. “Magenta,” she said.

“Magenta, hush now. We won’t hurt you. No one’s going to hurt anybody.

Right, Yaya?”

“It’s lashing at you,” Yaya said.

Doc petted the muscle. “Maybe it knows me from Friday.”

“It doesn’t have eyes.”

Doc shushed through her teeth at both Yaya and the stalk. “Up until five hundred million years ago, nothing born on this world had eyes. Life got on just fine without them. Magenta will, too.” One flesh whip slashed inches from her nose, too close to her left eye.

“It’ll blind you, too,” Yaya said.

“The voice sounds like an it?” Doc asked.

“I didn’t ask my vagina its pronouns, if that’s what you’re getting at.” Yaya swallowed every frustrated thought at the unreality, nonsense, wrongness.

Everyone’s parts were different. Hers took that philosophy to the extreme. “It’s

—she’s me. All me.”

“The two brains myth,” Doc said.

“Barely got one to go around.” Yaya tried clenching her abdominal muscles to draw the monster back inside, back where it couldn’t hurt anyone, but it ignored her.

So did Doc. She went on stroking Magenta’s stubborn muscle, and her voice took on a peaceful lilt. “Back before we knew better, we thought some dinosaurs had two brains. Their skulls were too small to hold all the functions they needed for such big bodies, or so paleontologists speculated. Some of those dinosaurs had a cavity in their pelvic bones, perfect for a small, secondary brain.