Adaptation by Erika Eckart

You pass down suffering, no matter what you do — your DNA was bruised at the edges, mutated threadbare from one too many missed meals, too many impressions where a hand used to be on your upper arm, too many hours left unconsoled. Your genes take these secret messages about the past to the future, even when you burned the evidence, even when your girl’s childhood is nothing like yours, there is no dumpster food from when the gas station caught on fire and everything had to be thrown out, all of it perfectly good, scurried into the apartment basement. Your daughter never relished a mesquite-flavored ding dong, such a relief for food to come at truly no cost, no wariness about whose mouth you are taking it from, no guilt about what someone will have to do to get more. Even when her childhood is full fruit bowls and “order whatever you want,” your body scratched messages about scarcity and danger, baked into their bones the need to conserve, to flinch, to hide until it is quiet. Your girl puts back the more expensive yogurt at the store though no one told her to, though you always have stilled your face when the bill comes, hidden your habit of putting things back. She has inherited this adaptation like the bird that spends most of its time in the sky, even though all its ground predators are long extinct. Still, it sleeps while airborne, half its brain resting at a time, in order to almost never land, to a stay above where they can even be perceived, to become almost one of the stars and in that way to avoid the trouble their very cells tell them is waiting for them if they dare to touch land.