inheritance of scales

By Swati Premkumar, '28

"A Surgeon's Hand: The bullets pass right through you" By Leanne Fan, Westview High School 26'

but what did i really inherit?

if they split open my veins, they would find

my mother’s nose, my

grandmother’s anger.

sandalwood incense &

hymns &

crimson kumkum.

i see red-hot matriliny, watch it

crystallize

into rakshasi scales

every month, ten-thousand

knives

on my body. four days

later, the scales would crumble onto

each other, fall like

snakeskin.

girlskin.

girlblood.

girldirt—

spiraling down the bathtub drain.

i don’t know

where they go. but before then

i pluck the raw scales & watch

red ink spill

from the scars. i’m in my own cage,

the far end of the couch.

away from temples &

god-slicked sunrays &

my family. i’ll see them

when i’m girl again.

i inherited this from my mother, cells recycled

into red scandal while

father & son

clutch gods between their

endless breaths and veins.

maybe in two decades

i will hold

a girl between my arms,

press my palms into the

swell of her pink skin &

feel her womb underneath,

waiting to unspool into rakshasi scales.

because in eleven years,

she’ll grow them too.

kumkum — a cosmetic red powder used by Hindu women, symbolizing divine protection

rakshasi — a female demon in Hindu mythology, culturally feared and deemed unholy