The One With Nine Toes

The back room smelled of wet gravel and fish food, and the filters hummed in a hundred different keys. Maya's aunt had gone up front to count the register, which meant Maya was alone with the tanks and the green dim light that came up through the water from below.

The shipping box sat on the steel table, half unpacked. Inside, in a bag of cloudy water, was the animal nobody wanted.

It was pale pink, the color of the inside of a seashell, with feathery red fronds sticking out behind its head like a crown that had been put on sideways. It had a wide flat mouth that turned up at the corners. It looked like it was smiling at her, which Maya knew was just the shape of its face, but still.

The shipping label said DAMAGED. DO NOT SELL.

Maya tipped the bag toward the light. One front foot was wrong. Instead of four little toes spread out like a star, there was a smooth pink stump, rounded over, with a single stubby toe just beginning at the end of it. The skin there was newer than the rest. Glassier. Like the surface of milk.

She poured the axolotl gently into a clean tub. It sank, paddled once with its tail, and settled on the bottom, fronds drifting.

"Sorry about your foot," she said.

The water was cold against her wrist. She watched the stump. It did not look like a wound. Wounds she knew. She had scraped both knees raw on the basketball court in September and they had gone red, then scabbed, then left two shiny patches that would not tan. That was what skin did when it closed over a hurt. It made a lid. It sealed the thing off.

This was not a lid. There was a toe coming out of it.

Maya leaned closer until her breath fogged the side of the tub. The single toe had a tiny dark dot at its tip. A claw. A claw was starting.

She thought about her scabs again. Nothing had ever started out of them. Skin grew back as skin. Nobody's knee had ever decided to grow a new kneecap, a new strip of bone, a fresh cap of cartilage, the whole machine rebuilt from the bottom up. You got the patch and you kept the patch forever.

But the stump was not making a patch. The stump was building a foot. Somewhere a filter changed its pitch. The axolotl turned its head and one black bead of an eye seemed to find her.

If it could rebuild a foot, with bones and a joint and a claw all in the right places, then somewhere inside that little pink leg was a set of instructions for exactly where everything went. Not a scab kit. A blueprint. And the blueprint had not been thrown away after the animal was built. It was still in there. Still readable. The leg knew it was supposed to have four toes, knew this one in front of her was only the first, knew the order to put the others in.

Maya pressed her finger lightly to the outside of the tub, level with the foot.

Her body had blueprints too. It had to. She had grown from something the size of a comma into a person who could hit a free throw. The instructions had been used. She just thought they got used up. Spent. Folded away when the building was done.

The axolotl was telling her they were not folded away. They were sitting right there, the whole time, waiting in case a foot ever went missing.

She got up so fast the stool scraped, and she went to the shelf where her aunt kept the laminated care cards, and she read the axolotl one twice, fast, her finger under the words. Adults too, it said. Not just babies. Throughout life. Limbs. And then a line she read three times because it did not seem like it could be allowed: parts of the heart. Sections of the brain.

The brain.

Maya put the card down. She came back to the tub and crouched until her eyes were level with the water.

A scab over the brain would just be a scar. A blank place where something used to be. But this animal did not do scabs. This animal looked at a missing piece, read the instructions for that exact piece, and built it back with the parts in the right order so it worked again. A piece of mind, regrown. The thoughts that lived there, presumably, coming back online in the new tissue like lights along a street.

She did not understand how that could feel. She tried to and could not, and the not-being-able-to was the most enormous part. There was a whole way of being alive in the world that she had no word for, happening in a tub on a steel table, in cloudy shipping water, in a pet store, while her aunt counted nickels twenty feet away.

"You're not damaged," Maya said out loud. "You're in the middle of something."

The one new toe was the proof. It was not the end of an injury. It was the second step of a four-step plan, and the plan was running right now, tonight, under the pink skin, slow as a clock hand.

She thought about how many people had read that same label, DO NOT SELL, and seen a broken thing instead of a thing rebuilding itself in real time, instead of the most ordinary impossible thing in the room.

Her aunt's voice came from the front. "Maya? You alive back there?"

"Yeah," Maya called. Her voice came out strange. "Can I keep the broken one?"

"The axolotl? It's missing a foot, kiddo."

"For now," Maya said.

She heard her aunt laugh and go back to the coins. Maya stayed on the floor with her chin on the cold edge of the tub. She watched the single new toe and the smooth glassy stump behind it, and she waited, the way you wait at a starting line, for the next one to begin.

Under the pink skin, in the cloudy water, the foot kept building itself, and the dark dot at the toe's tip grew one degree darker, becoming a claw.