Believe Me
You might find this hard to believe, but as a kid I could talk to animals. They would seek me out and then ask me to speak on their behalf. It turns out animals have a ton of grievances. The squirrels were always going on about the parks department and their constant tree removal. They didn’t give a crap about the newest invasive beetle; they just wanted their apartments back. And my neighbors’ dog would beg me to tell them to please get rid of the cat already, for the love of Christ. (Their snooty cat, on the other hand, never said a single word to me.) The birds were the worst, though. I remember sitting in math class once, trying to focus on binomials, when an entire flock of starlings landed on the window ledge, all jockeying for eye-contact with me. They had a few choice words for some local birders who were disturbing their favorite roost. Starlings can be pretty harsh. I remember one of them preening its iridescent feathers and then saying, what makes you think you’re so special? You people are all the same.
You might find this hard to believe, but in my twenties, pearls started to erupt in my mouth. At first, I thought my teeth were falling out. While talking to new friends out at dinner one night, I felt something fall from my mouth and land in my lap. I looked down. A small, hard, white thing had fallen into my napkin. Mortified, I wrapped it up and stashed it in my purse and silently promised myself to start flossing again. But when I opened the napkin at home, instead of a molar, there sat a small pearl, round and shining like a tiny full moon. I investigated my mouth and found these pearls everywhere, under my tongue, in the folds where my cheeks met my gum, and in the tender spots where my wisdom teeth had been removed. I spent hours on Google that night, looking for a cause, but every search combination came back with that meme of a guy looking quizzically into the camera. It always took a couple of months from when I first felt a tiny bump to when the pearl was big enough to pluck from its soft, pink bed. I would harvest the ripe ones at night, right before I went to sleep, and store them in a pill box on my nightstand. By the end of grad school, I had enough for a necklace. The jeweler wouldn’t stop asking me where they were from. They’re perfect, just look at this luster, she said, staring at them through her loupe. She pressed me again, holding one up to a light with rubber-tipped tweezers. I don’t know, I shrugged, they were a gift.
You might find this hard to believe (or maybe at this point you won’t), but when my twins were born my daughter came out covered in translucent fish scales. My son followed, swathed from head to toe in soft brown feathers—downy as a newly hatched chick. Nobody seemed to be alarmed by this, not my OB, not the pediatrician or the nurses. They bathed my daughter in an aquarium and then scraped the scales off ever so gently, each one glittering like a shooting star as it popped into the air. My son they just wrapped in a pink and blue blanket and told me to bring him back if he didn’t molt in a week. My mother instructed me to eat the down off of him, said it was good for my milk supply. You have to be kidding me, I said to her, and then to the entire room I said, you all have to be kidding me. The nurses laughed, and someone in the back said, oh sweetheart, just you wait.
Alana Reynolds (@letterb) is a writer and poet living in Beacon, NY. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Bleak and Corny, and her fiction has appeared in the Raleigh Review, as a finalist in their 2021 Flash Fiction Prize.