On my first Earth day, the townspeople waxed lyrical about my dark eyes, midnight-sky canvases underpainted with fields of glimmering stars. Wild animals gravitating to the backyard garden in response to my wordless wails, leafy plants sprouting like beanstalks in the damp dirt that cradled us.

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On my 13th birthday, I began accessorizing with barbed wire in place of a Peter Pan collar, the borrowed walls of a prison fence. Its thorny spikes puncturing my veins, letting my blood flow free without razing my thin skin or my delicate clothing, my well-worn fabric of space-time.

On my 30th birthday, I began accessorizing with feathered birds in place of a Lost-at-Sea Sailor collar, the dangled charms of an invisible necklace. My taloned friends humming tunes inside my head, needle-dropping earworms without musing a true sound, not one false treble note.

Other curious creatures made nests with found objects in my hair, laid their fragile eggs in the bed of curls. I waited years for them to hatch but whatever was trapped inside never even rattled against the bars of their locked ribcages. Only when I’d forgotten the promise of new life ever existed did those precarious eggs begin to rock, like weather buoys on moonlit ocean waves.

In time, I was reborn from broken shells. And I flew: at home, at last, among the waiting clouds.

Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella Goodbye to the Ocean won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over eighty different publications. She loves to dance and is almost always anxious. Find more at https://susanllin.com.

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Twitter: @SusanLLin

Instagram: @susanlinosaur