I remember it like it was yesterday. The year was 2012, and I was 9 years old. It was sweltering July, just on the cusp of crawling into summer's cocoon and emerging as humid August, soon to bring September's cool afternoons. I was sitting on the floor of my dad's workshop, a nut or bolt cold under my grubby knee. I was fiddling with some clump of wires or another, my dad was hunched over his strange creation. Whenever my dad went off to work, whenever my mother came in to clean and I followed, she would always carefully clean around it, shooting terrified glances in its direction. She had only touched it once to my knowledge, and her hand had recoiled as though she had touched something dead and rotting.

Now my dad was working frantically over it. He covered it one of my mother's old tablecloths, dirty white lace. I could barely see the thing under it. My dad swore under his breath. He had grabbed the wrong size hammer from the garage and ran out to rectify his mistake. I had gotten up from the floor, wiping the dirt off of the bottom of my thighs. I walked slowly towards it, my dark blue Converse the only sound in the room. The breeze blew through the uncurtained window, stirring the air which had stopped to watch me. The curtain covered the thing well, but a hand drooped off the table like the wilted leaf on a flower.

The hand was covered in soft rubber that felt like skin, and it was a light peachy color. The long, thin fingers curled inwards, just like a rotting flower. I touched the hand, felt the hard finger joints underneath the soft rubber. I felt each and every one of her fingers - I knew it was a she because the chest was a raised slope. My shaking fingers slowly peeled back the soiled lace cloth. A humanoid face was sleeping. I thought my tension should have released, like a taut string loosened, but instead, I just felt like there was something wrong. Her face had paper-thin lips curved into a peaceful smile, and her eyes were closed. She could have been sleeping, I thought. But then I noticed the cranium. I stepped back in horror. The back of her head was clear plastic, and it let me see beneath the veil of fake skin. She really was a network of nuts and bolts, metal and metal nerves. Her blood was motor oil, her brain was a computer, and her heart was not of stone, or of gold. It was of metal. I had peeked behind the curtain and decided I hadn't liked it. I looked back up her peaceful face, dreaming metal dreams with her metal brain in her deactivated sleep. I stared at the face, tears welling up in my eyes, sadness taking up all of the space in me. It would never feel anything. It would never laugh, or cry, or hear tender whispers in its ear. It would never appreciate or know how hard my father worked on her. It would never know or appreciate the man from which she came.

I know now that her name was Audrey. She was with him when it happened. I was 13, 4 years after I first beheld her face. It was a boring afternoon, the kind you had to take a nap on because you had been watching TV for too long and you had a headache. I had turned off the lights in my bedroom and opened my windows, opening them to tempt a breeze from the world outside and let some light in. My mother opened the door, wearing high-waisted houndstooth pants, her hair in a ponytail.

"Alex, have you seen your father?" She looked around my room, as though expecting him to peer out from under my bed.

"I think he's in his workshop," I mutter from my bed, pointing out the window. She rolls her eyes.

"Oh, please don't tell me he's with her," She groaned, making a soft fist and clenching it to her pink lips.

"I think so," I shrugged my shoulders and turned away from her. I was only 13, too young to care about my mother and her strange fancies and even stranger hatred of Audrey. That was what he had named the thing he had made.

"It's really something, honey," My mother had said in her fake happy voice. Just like the voice she used when I told her I wanted to join the baseball team. The voice whenever she talked to Susanne, the lady who lived across the road.

"What, don't you like her?" Dad had cocked his head at her, his brows furrowed in concern. He was always so genuine, so genuinely concerned about the fact that his darling wife didn't like his darling creation. He had married her young and had doted on her every step of the way. He tiptoed into her dark bedroom with lavender-scented washcloths and glasses of water with aspirin when she had one of her migraines, one of the things I inherited from her, along with my big hazel eyes and the mouth that tightened when it didn't like something. The face I made when my best friend Lance wore the same sweatshirt as me in 3rd grade. When Dad made his orange roast chicken for dinner.

"It's not that I don't like her," She continued on in her honeyed voice, fake and sweet like a Twinkie, "it's just that I don't know what she is," She raised her eyebrows, prompting an answer.

"I call her Audrey," Dad beamed with pride, "she's a robot. She's gonna be the future," He patted her on the shoulder with pride, congratulating her for the sheer fact of existing.

"What does she do?" Her fake smile had finally faltered and she'd moved closer to it, scrutinizing its face, the uncanny valley my father's beloved creation had fallen into.

"She can talk... Answer questions. She can carry on a conversation," I had hopped up and sat on his worktable, bored by my mother's inability to mask her disgust and my father's shame at not pleasing my mother.

"I can carry on a conversation," She repeated. Her voice was meant to be high and airy, but it was rich with robotics. The joints that moved her face to speak settled like a sheen over her voice, making it sound like a regular person on a bad recording, played while a monstrous mechanism was flexing its joints.

Later that night, I had heard my mother complaining to my father about Audrey. She had gotten her way with him for 20 years.

"I don't like having it around the house," Was one angle Mom tried.

"It won't be around the house, Barb," Dad said reassuringly.

"That's not the point, Frank," Mom countered, "I don't like that thing. We have a son to worry about. How much does that thing weigh? I don't want it falling on him. Or electrocuting him. Or even me!" She sounded like the epitome of motherly panic.

"Hey, I'll leave her in the workshop and lock the doors. We'll be fine," And so love soothed the savage mother.

But back to the afternoon it happened. After Mom had left my room in search of Dad, I felt my phone ring. Lance was calling.

"What?" I answered the phone.

"Hey, I'm bored," Lance moaned into the phone.

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"I don't know. Recite me a sonnet," I could feel his thick pink lips curl up into the smirk they liked best.

"Karen, you whore! This is what happens when you don't cook the chicken!" Lance cried on the other end.

"I'm sorry?" I mutter in confusion.

"What? Oh, sorry. Karen is being a whore," Lance said matter-of-factly, as though I should know whoever the hell Karen was and her reasons for being a whore.

"What? Where are you?" I roll my eyes. Lance would tell me he was in New Zealand and it wouldn't surprise me.

"Oh, sorry. I'm at Target. The cashier was flirting with me last week," I roll my eyes.

"How old is she and why the hell would she be into a skinny, mean 13-year old bitch?" I snicker, trying to deflate Lance's ego. I sip some water.

"He was 16 and was quite well endowed." I choke on my water and cough loudly. But my coughs and Lance yelling at me was background noise. My mother had slammed the sliding back door, sobbing wildly and yelling my father's name.

"What the hell is that?" Lance asked, but I dropped the phone and ran to her. Her curled ponytail was wet, and her tight houndstooth cigarette pants were smeared with blood. She reached for me and pressed her head to my stomach, beads of rain caught in her brown hair that was splashed with honey blonde highlights.

"Alex," She cried, sobs like the pulsing earth shaking her body.

"Mom, what happened?"

"Frank!" She wailed, "Oh, Frank!" She cried. I pried her arms off of me and ran out into the pelting rain. My white t-shirt was soaked as I ran into Dad's workshop.

All of the horror movies in the world couldn't have prepared me for the sight I saw. All of the fake blood, all the video games, all of the news reports and books and movies and TV shows couldn't have done it.

My father. The man who taught me how to ride a bike, how to comb my hair, the man who loved my mother and made me. The man who made my half-sister, Audrey. Audrey's mother was Dad's brain. Now his strange creation was covered in the blood of her father. He was sprawled on the dirty floor, his kind face covered with wine-red blood, his beard clotted with it. Never in all of my darkest dreams and macabre fantasies could have fathomed that one man could hold so much blood.

I don't like to dwell on that afternoon. After her period of grief, spent bleaching her hair, wearing less and less clothing, and drinking bottle after bottle after bottle of white wine, my mother seized control of her life. She paid a man to put in thick rust-colored carpet and add a small loft. She then dragged me along to browse antique store after antique store until we found every piece of her exact fantasies. There was a cerulean suede sofa, a modest flat-screen TV, and enough pop art to give Andy Warhol whiplash.