Something Like Human

Katerina stumbled through the laboratory, confused and terrified by the guttural chimes of agony that pulsated around her. The laboratory walls were painted with a mural of unnatural combinations, portrayed triumphantly in contrast with the tortured captives that died in their cages.

Pale infant heads dragged in circles by living bird bodies flapped their wings as they expired. Beside them, a sobbing, toothless, hairless man with orangutan arms and the paralyzed body of a horse. Flies hovered and landed on a deceased dog-headed teen that hardly resembled the lively canine deity Anubis that was painted above its cage.

A woman-esque abomination, sown at the torso to a lion’s lower half, collapsed into a pool of blood and vomit.

Towering over a single empty cage was a frighteningly large depiction of a brilliant-green Medusa, snakes coiling in every direction from its head, staring maniacally not at but through Katerina, with a face that so closely resembled her own.

“Come, angel. Fear not the errors of a first trial. Your insides were not changed,” said the Doctor, beckoning in her direction.

Katerina now remembered the plane ride, the mansion, the lineup and inspection. She recalled looking out her bedroom window at the snowstorm gathering in the mountains, feeling like a coal-haired diamond trapped between the teeth of a wanderer’s mirage. Her last memory was that of a plastic gloved hand sticking her neck with a syringed needle.

Nauseous, she reached up to feel her scalp, and let out a throat-ripping scream.