When the magnet on the morgue freezer began to tremble, I finally learned what was buried in my father's frontal bone.
On the back of her mother's diagnosis for terminal stomach cancer, Li Ran found a bloodstained refrigerator magnet. That night, the kitchen fridge exploded. Blood-vessel-like threads crawled out of a dark green ladybug magnet and pierced her father's eyeball. He roared and smashed the fridge with an iron hammer. Reflected in the hammerhead was the hideous surgical scar at his temple, where something that did not belong to a human was pulsing like a fetus.
At midnight, the metal door to the morgue's side corridor opened by itself. Deep in the cold storage, inside a cryogenic pod entangled in the roots of a giant locust tree, her mother's shadow, submerged in formalin, moved her lips: "Go..." Her father raised a surgical hammer smeared with brain matter and pinned Li Ran to the operating table. His roar was swallowed by the thunder of space tearing apart: "You have to inherit it! Inherit the 'thing' your mother never gave birth to!"
Li Ran's left abdomen split open. An ice-blue beam shot through his skull and froze the embryo emerging from the top of his father's head. In the tumor exposed at his severed wrist, a dark red head screamed with his mother's breath. The cube marked "Mother" at the heart of the cold storage went berserk in a violet glow. As the refrigerator magnet embedded in his palm pulsed in resonance with the morgue pod's hatch, he saw the truth:
The hole in his father's forehead was a coordinate leading to "three zhang and seven chi beneath the locust tree."
The trembling of the refrigerator magnet was the heartbeat of his dismembered mother's consciousness, deep in the cold storage.
And the molten silver core buried deep in his severed wrist was the perfect womb it had prepared for him.
