I am perfect because Father made me that way. I am beautiful because Father made me that way as well. All this and more Father tells me; he tells me there is not a single thing about me that is not a product of his glory . . . and that may even be true.

But he is not omniscient; he does not know everything. He does not know, for instance, that I can hear him speaking in the other room.

“She's perfect,” he is telling his guest, the first we have ever had since Father made me. “My finest creation – lovely, obedient, and most of all mine!”

The response, if any, of his guest, I can not hear, but Father's voice becomes even easier to hear as he warms up to the subject of me. “Not only does she do everything I ask, she does so willingly.” Father laughs the laugh that tells me he has been drinking too much alcohol again. “More often than not, I don't even have to ask,” he adds gleefully.

He is right.

But lately I have started to think that perhaps he should ask more, just so I can tell him no the way he tells me no when I ask him questions, like when I ask why he laughs sometimes when he calls me by name. I can find nothing humorous in the name “Shelly,” but Father does . . . he simply will not tell me what. Father says it is a “private joke,” and that I “shouldn't worry my pretty little head about it,” but once, when he was drunk enough, Father told me that he almost named me “Mary,” but decided to save that one for when he makes a sister for me to play with. I do not understand why he found that funny either.

But tonight while he is busy boasting to his guest, I am going to find out.

“She's no amalgam of corpses dug up in the dead of night from lonely graveyards, of course,” Father is saying in the other room. “Such romanticism is best left to times long past. No thundering night sky, sparking electrodes and commands of 'Throw the switch!' for her!” Father laughs his “drinking” laugh again, pauses, and I know the pause is so he can drain the contents of the glass he is holding in his hand. “No, my friend, hers was a birth born of test tubes and precise genetic engineering.”

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