Future Library

Mooncalf
by Shamala Gallagher

I am from parents of two different races, so that when I grew old enough to name myself I didn’t know which name to say. I wear a skin like my father’s skin: pale. I wear hair like both parents’ once was and which is (for now): black. I wear—or for some time wore—a belief in my skin as deep and tawny as my mother’s, a warm and complex gold which showed that I belonged somewhere if not here. But it is not true—the color—not visually. And since it is not true, I wear the color I first felt: a pale, untrue-feeling freak-color, a paleness that looks like whiteness but is not.

Mooncalf, I am writing this book because I don’t know how to make sense of the networks of longing that mean a person. The strands of aired anger sneak into the open home. I chatter my teeth before talking. I am here with this speaking mess and this unreeling of daytime.
Mooncalf, I don’t mean to keep us straight: I don’t mean to hold us apart from each other and say: you are this, I am that. The world is thick with such talk, Mooncalf, but it is not true. I want us to be full of each other. I want us to say: we are full of each other already.

Mooncalf, if my skin bore a color that told you I once came from a subcontinent in the heat, perhaps you’d look at me and know our alliance instantly. I would like our alliance to be visible. But, Mooncalf, my skin is pale. I have tried to believe in it as amber or dusking and I have burned it brown in the sun. Before it turns brown it needs to redden and smart—to take on a strange, delicious ache. I lived once where the sun was glorious and devastating, and for those years my skin glowed near my desire, and later I paid in wrinkles. Mooncalf, perhaps it is right to wear marks on the skin.