In this edition, Ahmad Dixon walks us through his Halloween influenced dream of fatherhood and success.

I hate money and respect from my elders, so I’ve always been more of a humanities person than a STEM person. Unfortunately, due to California State University General Education requirements, I’ve had to take a handful of science classes here and there if I want to graduate. This eventually lead me to a class called “BIOL. 436. Human Reanimation.” Truth be told, I mostly signed up for the course because I thought it was an art class; however, it was radically different than anything I could have predicted.

The class was being held on the first floor of the Physics building and the first thing I noticed when I got there was the faint presence of electricity in the air which made my arm hair stand up. The last time something like that had happened to me was when I was struck by lightning after someone had left their Tesla Coil on indoors; so as you might imagine I have been pretty cautious from that point on. After scanning the room, nothing abnormal seemed to  stick out to me, so I took my seat next to a woman playing Clash of Clans on her iPhone. The hair on her head was also starting to stand up.

The professor for the class was a grad student named Frank. Frank was a rather tall, thin man, with sunken in eyes and white hair that seemed extremely premature for someone his age. He was an all round good teacher. His quizzes were easy, he’d keep consistent office hours, and he was understanding if you needed to miss class for whatever reason. The only negative thing I can think of was that in the middle of lecture he would sometimes start crying and saying how this class was an abomination and that we were playing God. Once when he was explaining how to reattach nerve endings in decaying tissue, he suddenly stopped talking and screamed something incomprehensible, and then jumped out the window. I was glad to get out of class early that day; the farmers market had a french toast stand that I was meaning to try. I always wondered why Frank chose his line of work, though I never asked because I didn’t feel like hearing an hour long, existential speech about mortality and morality.

A week after that episode of defenestration, Frank told us to go gather corpses for our final project. I was going to object to a request as heinous as that but then I realized that the syllabus did say that at some point I would have to do some heavy duty grave robbing and if I had a problem with it I should have said something at the beginning of the semester rather than at the end.

So the rest of the class and I got to work finding human remains. This project was pretty tricky because I had to find one of every human organ, muscle, and tooth. The first place I searched was my local cemetery. I got a usable pair of arms but after getting covered in dirt and having three or four splinters thrust into me by the shovel I was using I realized the bodies there were a bit too decomposed for my needs. Plus a grieving widow threw a vase at my head while I was trying to harvest her husband. Some people can be so rude and overprotective of their belongings. I did find a fellow who was buried alive though. He was so grateful he told me I could have one of his kidneys and a chunk of his liver for my assignment.

Next I hit up Alvarado Hospital for more fresh produce. The funny thing about San Diego hospitals, and hospitals in general, is that as long as you wear a lab coat and stare down at a clipboard, no one will question why you’re wandering the halls restricted to staff and patients. I  dropped into the morgue and started putting some stuff in my cooler. At one point a security guard asked what I was doing and I just said, “official hospital business.” That explanation was good enough for him, leaving me free to claw out a pair of pale blue eyes with an ice cream scoop.

That trip to the morgue was pretty productive but I lacked one more item, a human heart. After scouring the city for an afternoon I decided I was just going to ask the shady butcher shop down the street from my house if they had one. After waiting ten minutes my number was called and the man behind the counter said he sold the last human heart to a woman playing Clash of Clans. I asked if he had anything similar and he dropped a chimpanzee heart into into my arms. I think the deli was closed by the health inspector a little while after I got there.           

I spent about four hours stitching together a meat puppet Sunday night. The small intestine proved to be unruly but I eventually got it to fit in the abdomen. The next monday the class had to present their hard work. Frank came out to look over the crimes against nature we had all created and had a look on his face that said he regretted all of his life decisions up to that point. He turned to look at me and muttered, “Welp, let’s see if you followed instructions.” He plugged in a little machine in the corner, put it on the chest of my homemade cadaver and flipped a little switch that sent an inconceivable amount of electricity through it. It was at that moment my meat puppet became a person, and that person became my daughter. I never thought I’d become a parent so early in life, or that my child would be the product of lab I had to take in college, but gosh darn am I proud of my pumpkin. She may not be the prettiest girl in kindergarten but she’s got character. The other kids bully her about her green skin and the fact I accidentally sewed her left ear a bit lower than her right but she’s a tough little zombie so not much gets to her. So that’s the story of how I passed BIOL. 436 and how I became the world’s greatest Dad to Mary, the undead little girl. I’m signing her up for ballet next week — hopefully those stitches survive all that bending! The Chimp heart is good for endurance though.