Before the casting, the molding and the safe, she was exactly what they guessed: three-foot-six and fragile. While her cells turned and knotted ribbons slowly into us, she dreamt, and the dreaming was so old it had no shape but only sounded like her soft heart jerking, rustling skyward. While she dreamt, hyenas cried in packs, and the crying was so light it flew up to the treetops. She was scared when she fell and broke her arm, a clean break, on the fossil record. She floated on a stream until it laid her body down.

 

She was born again in a primate research lab. Her mother screamed all through her birth and screamed while the white coats took the infant to her own room, and the screams were so heavy they fell in heaps like blankets on the floor. They gave her to a wire mother and she drank, and dozed into a wire-dream with fresh paint smell.

 

And she woke up as a pet on someone’s shoulder, who she thought of as her mother, who did not let her tear apart cushions, but only drink, and eat, and dream, and hers was the only skin she touched. She knew her cries for hunger, rest, and danger, and the one for music only moved inside her ribcage.

 

Once she was born and spent her life trying to dance her hands into questions. She never got the movements right. She clawed her skin and plastic toys and dreamt in finger signs and knew that someone with a clipboard loved her. She never asked why.

 

She spent so many births and sleeps so close to cutting god from stone, if she could only reach her hands across the soft branches of phylogeny and touch. . . Stone-still and fragmentary, people pass her by. She dreams, and through the museum glass she traces walking figures: everything she could’ve been by genetic accident.