You think it’s a mole at first.

        A little bump on your back, off-center, left of your spine and just above the narrowest part of your waist. You notice it when you’re unhooking your bra, fingertips skating over your smooth, warm skin and pausing on the tiny anomaly.

        It’s not tender, or itchy. It doesn’t feel swollen, exactly. It’s firm without being hard, and it shifts a little when you poke at it. It’s not a bug bite, or a pimple. Maybe a cyst? Are there lymph nodes there, in the middle of your back? Maybe it’s always been there, and you just never noticed.

 

        After a week, you dust off your hand mirror and contort yourself in front of the bathroom sink until you can see its reflection. It looks like... nothing much, really. The skin there is the same shade of brown as the rest of your back, a little lighter than your face and hands.

        You rub some moisturizer onto it.

        The second week, you try not to dwell on it. You keep touching it, though. When you’re sitting at your desk, working, when you’re washing dishes in the quiet of your apartment, when you’re tending to the vines growing all over your balcony; you can’t help it. Your hand reaches for the middle of your back so you can roll the strange, small lump between your fingertip and the hardness of your rib.

        It doesn’t hurt; it never hurts. But you think it’s getting bigger. At first, it fits easily under the pad of one fingertip—but by the start of the third week, you realize you need two fingers to span it.

        You make an appointment with your doctor. He can’t see you right away, and that’s fine. It’s not an emergency. You’ve heard that you should wait a month if you find a lump. Maybe it’s hormonal, and it will fade along with whatever stage of your reproductive cycle you are currently in.

 

        By the time the appointment comes around, the lump is the size of a walnut. You sit on an examination table with your back to a nurse as she prods at you. You can’t feel the bump, exactly, but you can tell from the way the nurse’s gloved hand presses on your back that it is resisting the impetus to move.

        “Hmm.” She sounds thoughtful. “How long has this been here?”

        You tell her, and the nurse scolds you for not coming in right away. Then she leaves to fetch an imaging specialist. The technician calls for his supervisor after he aims his miniature ultrasound
machine at whatever it is. The supervisor calls a colleague. The colleague asks you when you had your last period. Before long there is a small conference of very serious people in scrubs and white coats standing behind you.

“Well?” you ask. “What is it?”

“A miracle,” someone breathes.

        Later, after you’re allowed to dress yourself, they bring you to an office. The man sitting across from you is heavyset and balding. He’s wearing a wide tie like the kind your father wore to weddings, and his name is embroidered above the pocket of his white coat: Doctor G. John Bowness. There’s a row of small trees in pots on his windowsill; you can see their silhouettes through the vertical blinds. You wonder if he brought those in from home, or if they belong to the clinic.

        “...it’s not completely unprecedented,” he’s saying. “There are reports of this happening, but nothing confirmed by medical science. You must feel like a very special lady!”

        You don’t feel special. You feel a little cold, and you wish you had eaten breakfast before you came in here. It’s been hours.

        “Certainly, I imagine at your age, and as a single woman, you probably thought you would never have a child of your own.”

        “That’s... true,” you say. You want to say that was on purpose. Instead, you ask, “What are my
options?”

        “Well, I don’t think you need to be hospitalized, yet.” The doctor sounds thoughtful. “You could
get a consult for another department, but your circumstances are so rare that I don’t think there really is a specialty for this. It would probably be a good idea to see a nutritionist, though...”

        You interrupt. “What are my options for removing it?”

Doctor Bowness looks concerned. “Is it bothering you? Does it hurt?”

        “No.” You can’t feel it at all. You can feel the textured linen of your shirt shifting over your skin when you move, but not the strange bump growing inside your flesh. And that makes sense, because it’s not really part of you, is it?

        “Why don’t we watch and wait, then, for now? You should take some time to think about what you want to do. This must be very unexpected.”

 

        You know what you want to do, but you take his suggestion and go home. You have work to do; there’s a major update set to release next week and the closed beta has yielded some concerning results. You’re anticipating long hours tonight.

        You throw together some dinner and bring it to your office. Your desk is uncluttered, and you set the bowl of rice and sauteed veggies down with a quiet thunk. You sit in your comfortable, familiar chair.

        Then you stand, pull the chair further from your desk, and sit back down, perched on the far forward edge of the seat.

        When your next appointment comes, it’s been almost six weeks since you first detected the small bump. It’s larger than your fist now, rounded but not round. It’s oblong, ovoid. Egg-shaped. When you place your palm over it, you think you can feel it throbbing rhythmically, but that might just be your own pulse. You’re glad that it sits below the line of your bra; you can dress relatively normally, though you do choose one of your looser shirts. You consider putting it on backwards and leaving the buttons open.

        There are different tests than last time; vitals checked, images taken. The phlebotomist they bring in to take your blood glances at the array of brightly capped tubes in her basket and asks if you have any other children. You don’t.

“I have two,” she volunteers, smiling softly. “14 and 17.”

        You’re not sure what to say. “Those are good ages,” you try, and wince as her small needle penetrates the pale crescent of flesh in your elbow.

       

        She sighs. “They grow up fast, though.”

        “I’ve heard that,” you offer.

        She chats about her family while she fills the vials with your blood.

        Eventually, you see Doctor Bowness again. He’s thrilled. “Well, Sandra, it seems like—”

        "Sandy,” you correct.

        “What?” He looks up from the papers on his desk.

        “My name’s just Sandy. It’s not short for anything.”

        “Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry. Sandy, it seems like your... let’s call it a bud. Your bud is very healthy!”

​

        You focus on the terminology. “A bud... like a flower?”

        Dr. Bowness hums. “More like a hydra... or a jellyfish.”
       

        You still want it gone, regardless of what kind of invertebrate it resembles, and you tell him as
much.

        “I’m not entirely sure how we would go about that,” he admits. “As I told you, I’ve never seen this in a human before. We don’t really know how the bud might be integrated into your body, or what risks there would be to either of you in trying to remove it. I would need to do some more research, confer with my colleagues...”

        “Okay,” you say. “How long will that take?”

        One of his little trees is flowering; tubular red blossoms you can see through the blinds.

        “A few weeks, I imagine?”

        “Better get started, then,” you suggest.

        They send you home with a prescription for folic acid. You don’t get it filled.

        It takes a few more weeks, and a few more appointments, but eventually you get the date for your surgery. Exploratory surgery, they caution you. They’re just going to take a look and see if the bud can be detached from your renal artery without damaging anything vital.

        You talk to your boss about taking a brief leave of absence. Nothing serious, you assure him. Just one of those women’s health issues, a superficial growth that needs to be removed. No, not breast cancer. Your boss reminds you that there is a major launch that week, so you ask Dr. Bowness to postpone the procedure by a few days. He seems relieved.

        The bud continues to grow. It might be grapefruit-sized now, and you can’t really move it at all; it feels like it’s clinging to your rib. Curiosity drives you to probe at it with your fingers, searching for any hint of what is developing inside, but it’s featureless. As uniformly firm as an unripe fruit.

 

        Your vines are flowering, and you water them daily. You switch your usual desk chair out for a padded stool. Your team gets a nice email from corporate when the launch goes well.

 

        You make it all the way to the hallway outside the OR before the surgery is postponed.

 

        They’ve dressed you in a medical gown that hangs open in the back, but there’s a blanket covering you to the waist, at least. You’re lying on your belly on a gurney when Doctor Bowness tells you that the ethics committee are the ones who called for the cancellation. There’s too much uncertainty, too much risk. Too much knowledge to be lost, he tells you. He isn’t unkind about it.

 

        “Postponed for how long?” you ask. You aren’t wearing your glasses, and you need to crane your head to the side to make out Dr. Bowness’s blurry shape.

        “Well, probably not more than six months.”

        There’s nothing to do but go home. You cancel the rest of your medical leave in the employee benefit portal, water your vines, and settle in for a quiet evening.

        The next day you learn that HR is throwing you a baby shower.

        END