“Sky Bound” (2024)
Albert John Belmont
Oil on Canvas
I’d spent my life not knowing where I came from. Oh, I had parents who’d loved me, raised me. And part of me felt rotten for wanting to know about the people who’d given me life, because adoptive parents had let me live.
But not knowing was a sucking void in my mind. Who did I look like? Did I have a genetic predisposition to diabetes? Cancer? Insanity? Who was I? Maybe everyone asks that at twenty-three, but I couldn’t shake the question.
Of course, the problems only began with the DNA test kit.
Eight weeks later, I got an email saying that there was a problem with my sample, and that the company was sending me a new kit. I spat, sealed, and sent again.
Then the call from customer service. “Hello, Ms. Vaughn. We’ve run the tests several times now, and we keep getting the same result. If you log on to your account, I’ll walk you through the results, which are . . . puzzling.”
I sat at my computer, staring numbly at a map of the world. A map that was supposed to show, oh, 2% Sub-Saharan African, 25% Norwegian, 49% generic Slav, and 5% Mongolian from Genghis Khan. Another screen that should’ve shown 1-2% matches with possible fifth cousins.
They were blank.
I heard fragments of the manager’s words. Something about there not even being Neanderthal variants. Just … nothing. As if I had no connection to the human race at all.
It’s not possible. I have to come from somewhere.
“There are twenty-three chromosomal pairs, including two X chromosomes. But even your mitochondrial DNA is coming up with no matches.” He sounded rattled. “For error-checking, we’d like to get samples from your parents—“
“I don’t know who they are.” I’d said that so many times before. “Closed adoption.”
Numbers buzzed past me, the probabilities of their tests failing being spectacularly close to zero. The chances of my not being related to any of the eight billion people on Earth? Even smaller.
That void inside of me yawned wider. All I could think was that I was nobody. Nothing. A cipher.
When I told my adoptive mother about it, she replied, “Evelyn, you’re not nothing. You’re one in eight billion. What’re the odds of that?”
But I couldn’t believe her.
Endless tests. Full sequencing of my DNA, espaliered on a screen like a tree.
The result? Someone had manufactured me. Took genetic material from hundreds of people and spliced it together like beads on a string. But some of the base pairs didn’t appear in any known human genome. The mitochondrial DNA? The same thing.
No government labs claimed me. No corporate supervillains, either.
“I wanted to know,” I managed a laugh for the lead researcher. “Except there’s no one for me but a test tube.”
“Maybe think of yourself as a letter in a bottle?” he countered.
“If I’m a letter, what’s the message?”
“Maybe that’s for you to decide.”
Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in over seventy journals. She enjoys writing and reading science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and embroiders and plays video games and TTRPGs in her spare time. For more about her work, see deborahldavitt.com. Facebook: deborah.davitt.3, Instagram: ddavitt1974, Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social