The delicate beast within my breast.

Something is alive in me. The fluttering in my heart is not its own beat, it’s the desperate wings of a baby bird, soft and yellow like a duckling, trapped in my atria. It pecks at my heart constantly, its clawing and thrashing a maddening irritation. All the time, I’m wishing it would rest. All the time, I’m searching for how to give it ease, how to give myself ease from it.

Washing dishes, seeing friends, driving — I live my life impatiently, wasting time that should be spent liberating this nascent creature from the prison of my bone and muscle. I want to free us both from this torment.

I imagine clawing back at it. Digging my nails through my flesh until my fingertips find purchase to rip my chest open. Need I tear myself asunder to let it fly?

I scrounge around for what might get it out of me painlessly, some magic potion or perfect key that can unlock whatever has caged it. I try babbling to friends, scribbling on scraps of paper, raging into the digital void. Nothing works. All the while it grows more desperate, as do I.

At times it seems to pry through my heart and be clawing its away up my throat. Then it’s a grotesque version of itself, half-formed and featherless, made of translucent, raw skin through which I can see its pulsing veins. It grips my windpipe and stretches its scrawny neck. The tiny beak opens wide, as though some mother might empty food down its gullet, and flings emerald shards upward. They erupt through my own mouth, slicing my flesh on their way, and stab into the world. I spit blood through my teeth and strain to push this delicate beast back down.

I’m weakening, all my striving for or against this creature ceases abruptly. A speedy oblivion is encompassing me with a soft darkness. It’s all over with a relief. I surrender everything, my body relaxes and lets go its grip on my mind, my eyelids slide downward.

As my head droops toward my chest, I see through the sliver of my closing eyes that the brown of my breasts is rippling, melting… a perfect white dove, its wings outstretched to the span of my shoulders, emerges through my liquid skin.

I feel a shocked awe as the soft dark closes in… I fall back into it, see the raven soaring against the sun…or is that glint its white wing…my eyelids are meeting…I’m falling away…away from myself, away from the world…