Three Generations
by Kylin Larsson

Feathers. Turquoise, iridescent, floppy feathers. One morning you wake up and there they are, a curve of whispery eyes shimmering out of the furry envelope fastened to your stomach. Funny, you didn’t have a marsupial’s pouch when you went to sleep last night.

You walk over to the full-length mirror half draped in your mother’s vanilla scented shawl. You check behind you to see if you’ve grown a tail, but nope, it’s just the slightly furry pocket attached to your once flat belly. A slightly furry pocket with peacock feathers blooming from it like a cascading wave. Rustling shivers flutter hungry inside your body, and you can’t decide if you want to scrape out this thing with your fingernails, or cradle it in the palms of your hands. You split the difference and scramble your nails on the mirror image of the reflected swollen, furry mass protruding a wave of feathers, while resting your right hand on the real thing.

“No one in my family has a pouch,” you argue with your image. You stare at your reflection in the mirror and find that one hand is absently stroking the feathers. The soft, wispy strands dividing from the middle tickle the inside of your wrist, and your pulse trips.

The plumage and pouch combo could be from a recessed gene, a lost evolutionary trait. You decide it’s more likely you’re really adopted. You always knew you were different from everyone else in your family -- now you know just how different. You search your mother’s picture tucked into the mirror’s white wood frame, but you see no sign of avian ancestors. She is wearing the shawl you have draped on the mirror, and looks back at you with your own cobalt eyes. You consider praying to her for answers, but she’s left you without any since she died three years ago.

You stand back from the mirror with hands on your hips, noticing with quiet pride how calm you feel over this development in your life. This new weight in your middle has altered your sense of balance, and you are conscious of your feet shifting to gain your bearings.

“I must be dreaming,” you reason. You look back at your bed covered in heirloom quilts, expecting to see your self there. The bed is rumpled, but empty of you. You try to recall last night’s dreams, but all you see when you close your eyes and press your sweaty forehead against the cool glass is a light blue shell of curved sky speckled with dreaming vanilla clouds.

Besides, something is rustling around in there, something with peacock feathers. As far as you can tell, dreams do not rustle. You pull one feather lightly, skimming it between your middle and ring fingers, and feel a slight poke inside of your womb. That poke could be a beak, you think, or it could be the quilled end of the feather.

“What have I got to lose?” you ask your reflection.

She doesn’t respond, she just stares back with your mother’s eyes, the color of a summer evening’s sky. You gather the iridescent bouquet with both hands, feeling their hollow bulk between the circle of your index fingers, webbing, and thumbs. A stray feather attempts to bend out of your way, but you catch it with the crook of your pinky and tuck it with the others.

You give a mighty pull and feel your middle tear out with wet hot sloop. You cry out with a piercing grunt, and when your eyes open, you find in your hands a small pink child echoing you. She has peacock feathers for hair, which you smooth down with your right hand as you cradle her in your left arm. Soft violet down caps her skull and permits the feather hair to curve behind her, down her back. Her tiny feet tuck into the feathers shimmering around her warmth.

She blinks sleepy, shining cobalt eyes at you as you gaze at her in wonder. You doubt how warm those feathers keep her, and reach for your mother’s shawl with your right hand as you cradle the child against your curves. Vanilla scent wafts from the shawl over you both, and you feel your shoulders relax as you watch her snuggle into her grandmother’s shawl.

You hold your daughter close, and stroke the soft down of your cheek across her downy feathers. She smells like sugar cookies and lilacs, warm and clean. You look down at your middle expecting to see the bloody gash of your torn pouch, but instead find fresh pink skin spanning taut across your belly. The pouch is on the floor, out of the way. The soft fur that covered it has fallen off and the skin curls up, alone and bare, like a cast aside scroll that’s delivered its message.

You go back to your bed, snuggling into the feather pillows with your miracle.

Kylin Larsson is a senior at The Evergreen State College. His work has previously been published in the literary journal On Uneven Ground, and will be published in the literary journal Slightly West (date forthcoming).