We found a blue cell. It was pale and sickly, shaped like a crescent, and at first, we dismissed the figure. We threw it away. We left it in a garbage can to ferment for many months. It cried and beat the plastic walls, trying to find its way out. We thought we heard a voice and went to the garbage can. The cell hid beneath a piece of paper. Is this something alive, we asked and the cell squirmed. We collected it on our fingernails. It was supposed to be different, we all said. Should we kill it? Someone said no. We thought about the cell and how blue it really was. It trembled in our hands. It should come out of a uterus, someone else said. We constructed a uterus out of metal and rubber. The cell sat inside the chamber, slithering over the walls and alternating between deep blue and a pale azure. It left a streak of gray behind it. The womb became a charcoal color. The cell is killing an inanimate object, we whispered. The cell sparked. It charged at the faux cervix. There was a petri dish. A tiny strip of glass. This body harbored the first stages of vinegar life. Our pickled baby, we whispered and brought the cell to our lips. It was a large cell for its age. It was overly mature and its membranes were thicker than they should have been. The blue cell dove for the trash bin and we pulled it out with a pair of angled tweezers. This is your home now, we said and the cell flinched as we rubbed it against our cheeks. We all had sharp facial bones and the rubbing hurt the cell. It suffered a slice down the middle. It shrieked. It looked at us questioningly. Nothing came out of the cell. It was all blue mass and no liquid. You are hydrogen, we said, pointing at a brown bottle by the double sink. You are some alcohol. We showed the cell another bottle. The cap had gotten lost and the ethyl smell was strong. The cell paled again. We wiped it with water. You are some sugar grains, we said. There was a pot the cell had been caramelized in. The pot had a deep brown bottom. Some of the grains had burned. The blue cell had been the only granule still retaining its original foam color. Sadly, your siblings died, we said and the cell drooped. We put it in a vial but the cell struck against the sides until the glass cracked. We made a new womb out of cotton threads and some plastic wires. The cell sat on the fabric. It sizzled. It made loud spitting sounds. We took turns touching its concave. The cell pushed away from us. It moved towards the bottom of the womb. It stuck part of its body out of the exit. The plastic stuck the cell and it fell back, wounded. We lifted the cell and placed it in a sterile plate. The cell rolled around in circles. You are new life, we whispered. You have to get used to it. We put iodine on it. The blue cell turned bright purple. It sobbed. Our heads throbbed. It threw itself into the sink and collected the droplets running down the sides. Please be careful, we begged. The cell landed in the drain. It stuck itself to the sides. We pulled it out. The purple washed off. The cell was bright blue again. It rested near our thumbs. It stretched its body out and wrapped around our fingers until our circulation was lost. We didn’t mind the blue color touching our fingernails. It made the blue cell happy. It slept on our bloodless nails.

2
You dreamed about the blue cell. It was there, nestled in your nose. Then it slid towards your mouth. The blue cell had a mouth. It had a tongue. It was not a blue cell. It was a blue body. The blue cell laid across your face. It smothered your throat. Hair filled your esophagus. You yanked out hair balls. They were all blue and dripping. They looked like the blue cell. They were lovely little shining things. The blue cell dropped out of the ceiling. The blue cell sat on your throat again. It was the blue cell this and the blue cell that. The blue cell groaned. I love you, the blue cell said. You are the nicest. You tried to ignore the blue cell. It sat in its petri dish and smiled. It climbed into a rocking chair and bit the handles. Blue cell this and blue cell that, the blue cell chanted. It pulled a mammary out of the air and suckled. You smelled peroxide. You smelled orange juice. Or was it blue juice. The blue cell would not take anything that wasn’t blue. It didn’t want dairy products lacking a blue vein. The blue cell created a blue figure that sat on a blue dish that wanted to make itself a place at a blue table located in the blue room of a blue house. Or there was no blue cell. There was no blue cell and you and everyone else was dreaming this spontaneous life force. It was a beautiful dream. But when you woke up, the petri dish was broken and there were no little mucus smears anywhere in it. Goodbye, blue cell. The hypothetical blue cell rejoiced in its atmospheric conditions and wondered why it could not be born. And the test tube baby was still fed daily and no one forgot the creature. And it was happy. And the blue cell was happy. And you were happy and loving some man or woman and everyone else was happy, too. Or frustrated because the chemicals wouldn’t combine like they were supposed to. And you and everyone else drank too much wine at night and went into the laboratory in the day with a hangover. Or you, in your klutziness, spilled wine all over the dish and added several droplets of peroxide and waited for the foam to subside. And there, at the bottom of the dish, was the holy grail of life force, the lovely blue cell, waiting to be lifted and smeared over a bagel. You saw the blue cell and wondered what it might taste like. Would it taste strongly of sour oranges or would it be sweeter, like a baking apple? You couldn’t be certain. Once, you drank amniotic fluid after giving birth to a test tube baby and the saline solution made you sick for over a month. You vomited after every meal and lost all the weight around your neck and shoulders. You were a small skeleton dressed in a lab coat. You were the mother goose and when the blue cell saw you for the first time, it screamed and latched onto your breast bone. There were no nipples sticking out for the creature to nurse from. It tried to drink from your pores but the blue cell was just a cell no matter how hard it tried to become another body. And the test tube baby screamed again. It slapped its tail against the neighboring container and rupture the tank. The blue cell whimpered. It wanted a milk source but the blue cell usurped all the nutrients in the lab. You could not tell the blue cell no, despite the test tube baby’s loud whimpering.

3
You feared for the blue cell. You worried about your own sanity but you feared for the blue cell. It was always with someone. It seemed hungrier than usual. It was temperamental. At first, you thought that that meant nothing. It was just a blue cell. It meant nothing else. Yes, life had been created from scratch in the middle of a shallow glass dish but that was all. But the blue cell was something else entirely. It seemed like it was an entire body instead of just a cell. It was grotesquely large for what it was. No cell was supposed to be that big. And when the blue cell encountered anything that wasn’t blue, it panicked and pretended to lie down dead. It was a stressful creature. It made everyone worry. You walked on egg shells to make certain that the blue cell wasn’t going to panic suddenly. You coddled the blue cell, giving it food dyed blue or food that was naturally blue or at least a bluish-purple color. The blue cell could tolerate different shades of blue but the blue couldn’t be too red or too green or too purple or too black. The blue cell had to be able to look at the blue thing and know that it was blue. You thought it was almost like the blue cell’s version of peering into a mirror and recognizing its reflection. Would the blue cell even know what a mirror was? You couldn’t be certain. And you couldn’t talk about the blue cell anywhere outside of the lab. What if the blue cell was stolen away by a competitor and used for some sort of bio-hazard weapon? No one knew what the blue cell was really meant for. All that had been established was that the cell was just a blue cell. It wasn’t even clearly an animal or a plant cell. It had elements of both, a synthesizers that could turn sun-warmed fluids into a nutrient wish dish. At times the blue cell seemed more like a fibroblast but it never seemed to stretch enough to be some sort of connective tissue. Instead, the blue cell just sat on its own, sighing and reaching out towards anyone who would come near enough. You rarely liked when the blue cell touched you. It had a strange static charge feeling to its walls and the sensation made you itch until you had scratched off layers of skin. That was another thing you had noticed about the blue cell. It seemed to enjoy the sight of wounds. It got close to paper cuts and sometimes dipped into knee scrapes. No one pushed the blue cell away or bothered to clean their injuries after the blue cell had moved into them. The blue cell was a powerful thing. Sometimes you hated the blue cell and wanted to pour rubbing alcohol all over it just to see what would happen. Would the blue cell scream? Or would it wade around the petri dish, barely noticing that any fluid was on it at all? You thought it would burn. You were certain it would. The blue cell never went near chemicals. It seemed to know that such bottles were toxic and so whenever someone removed a cleaning agent, the blue cell went into hiding. You found it stuck in the freezer once, nearly frostbitten after only a minute resting upon the ice cubes. You wrapped it in a paper towel so it could get warm but one of the women went and placed the blue cell down the front of her shirt. Body warmth, she snapped at you and you let her pace with it.