Your father was an elk, but you were born without horns. One night, a man who shared your nose came into your room while your parents, below you, tucked into warm milk and rum. He offered to tie sticks to your head with duct tape and a hot glue gun. “There are bones inside of you,” he told you. “How do you know who you are if you cannot see them?”

* * *

A woman lost her daughter in the deep woods. She cried up and down the trunk of every tree until her arms collapsed and she could not lift herself anymore. Kind folks said her daughter was a butterfly now, as all girls are who walk starless roads. Kinder folk brought her the skull of a rabbit. The transformation of girls makes for strange objects, and what was taken away from a mother must be given back.

* * *

When the horns do break the skin at the top of your head your mother wept and died. Your father refused to bury her in the ground with the worms. He placed her body on the bed where you were not conceived and where you were not born. The skin sloughed off her face like runny jelly, followed by the muscle and the fat that once perked her cheekbones. Her skull was as round and smooth as a bright, white ball.

* * *

The daughter was found before she became dust and bones in that dark wood, but not by her mother. A curious doe sniffed at her palm and lead her to the other side of the woods. Not intentionally. It was walking that way and the girl followed. When she emerged into the sunlight a group of flesh-sellers put a blue ribbon around her neck and passed her off as an orphan to a lonely couple, though her mother was still alive, though her mother now dressed the skull of a rabbit in a child’s hat and painted its front two teeth pink.

* * *

When your father died on an island—hunting trip, he told you, but you know he went to tie a cord around his neck—you carried his bones back on a boat made of wood and red paint. The fish followed you for some time, but they swam off when you hit rock. You buried what was left of your parents together in their backyard. The house you sold, because it stunk. Where they rest, no grass grew, no flower spread, no ant marched. You could take their story and make it your own, as all stories end up buried in the earth one day, but not yet. Not yet. You still do not know where you come from. You do not know if that matters.

* * *

She cut the ribbon off of her neck on her twelfth birthday, before it threatened to strangle her. The two who purchased her, though they would not approve of it being spoken of in that way, wrapped her in silk threads they’d cultivated in their abdomens. It was warm in those threads, like a cocoon, and above her they crisscrossed threads back and forth so when she looked up at the dark sky, it seemed as if they had hung the stars just for her. “Little rabbit,” they told her, “we will love you forever.”

* * *

The man returned to you when the bones on your head brushed the ceiling of your little car. “You can’t hide them forever,” he said to you after you offered him a cup of warm milk and rum. You thought you could. In fact, you had become something of a hat connoisseur. He shook his head and said you looked ridiculous. No one was fooled. “Relax,” he told you. So you did, because you did not know what else to do. The moment the muscles in your arms and legs went lax the bones in your head broke through your skull, cracked it in half like it was an eggshell, and from the remains stepped a different you, all fur and snout and bones as sharp as knives. “Is this real?” you asked the man in a voice that was your voice, but not, but was. “You tell me,” he said, but you had no answer.

* * *

Years went by before the two of you met. She came to you in a dress of spider silk, and you had taken to wearing ribbons of gold and silver on your antlers. She told you she never found her mother, the one who had lost her long ago, but she remembered her every time she had to file down her two front teeth when they grew too long. “Did you look for her?” you asked, and she only half-smiled. You gave her a cup of milk, though she said she preferred water, but she drank it anyway. “I think,” she said after a bit, “we have strange bodies. How long will you spend searching for where they came from?” You did not have an answer for that, because you did not know. She carefully removed the ribbons from your antlers and tied your palms together with them. “What would we make?” you ask her, and she smiles and smiles and shrugs. “Something new,” she said, and that was as good an answer as any.