Magenta hummed. Yowzah, drunk girl.

Yowzah. That guy Bryant’s word at Sunnyside Fertility, which meant Magenta had heard him on Saturday even while tucked up inside Yaya.

Everything passed between them. Now Magenta seemed to be spilling out. If trying to escape, good riddance. She could take Sibs with her, if that was her source, and leave Yaya in peace.

Her abdominal muscles twitched with a bone-snapping crunch. Warm memories surfaced from childhood summers of Mountain Dew and snack food, back when she was a little girl who thought it was fun to see how many Fritos or pretzels she could stuff in her mouth at once. This crunch was the same, brittle and crumbling.

Except this sounded between her legs’ jaws. “What the hell’s going on down there?”

Magenta’s voice slid into Yaya’s ears, a sluggish boa constrictor engorged on an unfortunate goat. Peanut. Butter.

“Soon,” Yaya said. “What’s crunching inside me?”

Us.

Yaya snapped her underwear down to her knees and leaned her shoulders against the bathroom wall. Cool plaster nipped her skin. How long had that window hung open?

The cleft between her legs had climbed an inch higher since last night, almost past her dark pubic hair. By evening, would her bellybutton be cloven in two? Would she have a bellybutton at all?

“I want to know what’s happening,” she said. “It’s my damn body, too.”

Red coils prodded her vulva and then parted the curtained folds of skin. She expected Magenta to slide out, or at least the toothy flower bud she’d come to think of as Magenta. The parasite had shown herself to be much larger in bed with Doc last night.

White bone poked the edge of Yaya’s vulva. Not Magenta; too cold and hard. When she emerged, Yaya felt both her cleft opening and the stalk’s emergence, their nerves a shared network. This was a foreign object, maybe a stray bit of tampon that had caught up inside last month. It happened sometimes.

The object pressed forward ever so slightly. Yaya cupped her hand between her legs, readying to catch it.

A crumpled ball of tiny bones dribbled into her palm. Most had been snapped apart, and a sticky crimson residue held the pieces in a clump. The

original shape wasn’t clear, but out stuck a narrow point that reminded Yaya of a beak.

A bird skull.

Her flinching hand dropped the bone ball, and it gave a soppy slap when it hit the bathroom tiles. Congealed bones spread in a puddle of Magenta’s slime.

Their posture reminded Yaya of dinosaur fossils set in the earth, and she thought idly of Doc’s two brains lecture before a whining shriek spit through her clenched teeth. She lunged for the sink, blasted hot water, and scrubbed her hands red and raw.

And still the dead bird lay on the floor.

“Magenta?” Yaya asked. “When did you do it?”

Don’t know, Magenta said. I’ve never existed before. Can’t expect me to have my whole life figured out.