She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets—rare exception granted for immaculate conceptions. The mixing pits were sledged and the cutting tables, where ribs were extracted from pigs and goats, were sawed in half. Although the monks were devout and obedient to the thunder of Rome, the wool of their robes was soaked not only by the salt of sweat but also by that of tears. The monks rolled down their heavy sleeves, hid their slaughter knives in the burlap of their scrips, and wiped the hoes clean. They closed the factory down, chained the doors with Vatican-crested locks, and marched off in holy formation. Three lines, their faces staring down in humility, closing their eyes when walking over puddles, avoiding their unshaven reflections.

The march was to proceed until the monks forgot the location of the factory—an impossible task for a tribe that had been trained to memorize not only scripture but also the subtle curvature of every cathedral archway they encountered. And so they walked south to the Argentine land of fire and back north to the glacial cliffs of Alaska, cataloging birds and wingspans. The monks lifted the penguins' flippers and stretched measuring tape, silently reciting the data, trying to displace the coordinates of the abandoned factory. After scribbling the figures onto their scrolled parchment, they rejoined their marching formation and counted off in their assigned order, skipping the fifty-third number, an unaccounted monk who had been lost miles before in the desert's basin.

And though she was born inside the factory, she was not a daughter of monks. She had been created without Vatican sanction by a man whose hands were ravaged by paper cuts. His name was Antonio, and like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat. The fur and organs were scraped from the cutting board into the trash bin and the warm meat was placed in the refrigerated display case with a skewer and flag that read "feline 3.15/lb."

Antonio was only a boy, still wearing his grammar school uniform, when he saw his Figgaro split open and naked. At the counter, without crying, he pulled six bills from his pockets and ordered three pounds of feline.

Antonio received Figgaro wrapped in the white of butcher paper, and while there was sadness and the urge to change from his grammar school uniform to one of mourning, he resisted, instead walking to the stationery shop, buying the Sunday edition and a roll of hand-pressed construction paper.

Locked in his room for three days, he folded and tore away at the paper. On the second day and after thirty-three paper cuts, all minor except for one that cut deep into the meat of his hands, there were thirteen perfect origami organs and ropes of wound capillaries and veins made from tissue paper.

When he unwrapped Figgaro from the butcher paper, there was still warmth in the cat's body, despite the gutting and the hours of refrigeration. The paper heart went in first, followed by the main veins and then the smaller capillaries. Antonio connected liver and lungs, the stomach and newsprint digestive tract, patching the belly with college-ruled sheets, and before the last layer of crumpled paper could be flattened Figgaro was playing with his tail.

It was through this experience with the marvels of paper and his pet cat that Antonio discovered his calling. After five years of medical school and lab experiments with series of radial pleats and reversed folds, Antonio became the first origami surgeon. Medical journals tried to discredit the merits of paper: they said the velocity of the circulating blood would punch holes through the compressed wood pulp, supporting their claims with hand-drawn charts of exploding hearts. But Antonio's hearts never leaked or burst, and as a tribute to his doubters, he shaped the cardiovascular walls using the index pages of the journals. His only failure was a liver that broke down into cellulose fibers, after which microscopic chunks of paper were found in the blood stream of a San Isidro woman. But she drank so much Irish whisky it was a wonder she had even lived past menopause.

But it was not his detractors that ended his career as an origami surgeon. Antonio's medical art was made obsolete by the innovations of Swedes. Bioengineering replaced paper and forced Antonio's scarred knuckles and hands into retirement. He bought a folding table and moved from streetcorner to streetcorner, laying out his paper hearts and kidneys and yards of capillaries. Falling from the prestige and sterility of a surgeon to the dust and anonymity of a street vendor, Antonio found no one wanted paper organs anymore. So he unfolded the hearts into turtles and the kidneys into swans, and he tied the braided capillaries around the necks of the tiny paper animals like leashes. And soon a crowd like the one that gathered around the wicker basket of corn and tequesquite bread began to encircle Antonio's table.

The crowd shouted the names of animals and Antonio folded on cue; they loved the creatures he created. Even men who carried sickles and whose hands and souls were worn and splintered, men who were callous not only to the feel of silk but also to the beauty of landscapes because all they ever saw was terrain and toil—even they, after sliding their sickles into their belt loops, pulled at the tails of paper swans and watched the flapping wings.

And impatient lawyers and city clerks, who had never in their lives felt the grip of a hoe or sickle, but had tasted the silver of salad forks and steak knives, waited behind women and grandchildren to witness Antonio's foldings. These men, who admired the precision of paper beaks and the excellent architecture of the Pegasus's wings, had forgotten that they themselves had once laid on Antonio's operating table and that their own hearts had been replaced by paper.

It was in these times that Antonio's fame approached that of other great craftsmen: Senillo the rope weaver and the late Señor Casique, whose ladders had long ago stopped being used for climbing and now adorned the inside of the Guadalajara cathedral. Yet despite the respect and celebrity that origami animals brought, Antonio suddenly abandoned what had become a coveted vending post, leaving behind the folding table and two neat rows of animals. He retired his sideshow of paper animals and went in search of a nobler purpose, looking for the factory.

When it was obvious that Antonio would not return to his post, his origami was appraised by the clergy, and those who felt a debt in their conscience offered the folded paper as penance. The swans and unicorns began appearing along with the Eucharist on altar shelves.

Even later, when Antonio defied papal authority and trespassed on what was classified Vatican property, the church held that his origami creations were commissioned by the hand of God and fit within the guidelines of sacred art described in the strictures of Vatican II. And though Antonio's excommunication papers were filed, the figurines were allowed to remain on the altars.

Antonio followed church rumors that had passed from cardinals to priests and then down to rectory altar boys. He visited every one of the cities they mentioned, asking for the whereabouts of the factory.

Those who did not ignore him simply shrugged or pointed to a skyline of smokestacks. Had it not been for a disgruntled monk who spoke defiantly against a life of constant walking and bird-watching, Antonio would never have come upon the doors of the factory. The monk handed Antonio a scrap of parchment. Written on it were caliper measurements and detailed illustrations of feathers, ordinary details found in any field guide, but the underside of the paper revealed the never-before-disclosed coordinates of the factory. At the bottom of the page, in the same handwriting, the monk signed in careful cursive, using not his Christian name but his assigned position in line: fifty-three. Antonio followed the scribbled directions. He stole a wheelbarrow from the corrals of the old butcher and filled it with cardboard, towers of books, placemats, napkins, and every other sheet he could find, not caring if the finishes were matte or glossy. He oiled the bearings of the lone wheel and then left, pulling a plastic poncho over his own head and a tarp over the mound of papers.

On a Tuesday, when the windy world was soaked and covered in gray clouds, Antonio found the factory. It took his wrinkled arms and liver-spotted hands four hours to saw through the reinforced platina of the Vatican-crested locks. Once inside, Antonio repaired the broken cutting tables, converting them into workbenches and then spilling paper and cardboard onto them.

Antonio split the spines of books, spilling leaves of Austen and Cervantes, sheets from Leviticus and Judges, all mixing with the pages of The Book of Incandescent Light. Then Antonio unrolled the wrapping paper and construction paper and began to cut at the cardboard and then fold.

She was the first to be created: cardboard legs, cellophane appendix, and paper breasts. Created not from the rib of a man but from paper scraps. There was no all-powerful god who could part the rivers of Pison and Gihon, but instead a twice-retired old man with cuts across his fingers.

Antonio was passed out on the floor, flakes of paper stuck to the sweat of his face and arms, unable to hear the sound of expanding paper as she rose. His hands were bloody, pooling the ink of his body on the floor, staining his pants. She stepped over her creator, spreading his blood across the polished floor, and then walked out of the factory and into the storm. The print of her arms smeared; her soaked feet tattered as they scraped against wet pavement and turned her toes to pulp.

- "The People of Paper"