Yolk – Colette Estelle
February 11, 2026
The impossibility lay just at my feet. Prone and twitching, wings sprawled and crucified. The baby bird–featherless, gummy and gray–squirming on the subway floor. It was nearly camouflaged by the mottled black and red linoleum. Its soft edges melted into the fractaled pattern, smeared translucent upon the shining, sticky surface. I could have missed it. Could have avoided this confrontation and gone on just as I had been going, blind to the truths I did not want to see. But for some horrible reason, I saw it. Microscopically, all of its details jumped out at me with grotesque clarity. Its bulbous head was twisted on its thin neck. Its eyes were sealed together and pulsing like two mouths fighting not to speak. Its own mouth, closed and neon yellow. The pin ends of feathers had just begun to push through its pimpled skin, and beneath, a lace of thrumming purple veins threaded over anemic lumps of pumping organs and tensing muscles. All of it, raw and naked.
It was unbruised or scuffed, free from treads to suggest that it was dragged in on the back of someone’s shoe. Displayed before me with the meticulous care of a classroom dissection. Its glossed, waxy skin appeared embalmed, and I thought I began to smell the sweet must of formaldehyde filling the cramped space. But no, it was myself. My scent had broken free of my deodorant and mixed to make some chemical animal on the damp of my shirt fold. Inside, I cringed with disgust, though I dared not let my face show it.
The subway was packed full of bodies. It swelled heavy with their heat and charged hard around the curves of the track. Passengers stomped and shifted their feet to try and balance themselves through the turbulence. I watched as their shoes came down just nearly upon the bird—the spear of a heel almost piercing its translucent wing, a cement-dusted work boot hammering beside its bloated head. I could not look away. My eyes twitched with each near miss. My mouth went dry. I squirmed beneath my denim shorts, suddenly aware they were too tight and chafing. Bile rose in my throat, and I swallowed it back down.
How long had I been staring in that spot – eyes half blurred, neck craned down – before I had seen it? What had I been doing before? That life seemed so far from me now. A blur of repeated motions, meaningless tasks, actions fueled by that twisting desperation to bear no witness and leave no mark. I had developed the instinct to not react. I passed through life, motionless, without complaint or question. I did not question it. I glazed over overlapping tragedies on the news with hardly a grit in my teeth. I skipped past those who lay collapsed at my feet, who screamed out into crowds or towards the sky, who shook and twitched with their eyes wide at the sight of something I chose not to see. I did not see. I slipped in the putrid slimes that coated the streets and did not look back to find what it might be.
But suddenly, I felt all of myself. All of myself, living. Breathing. Seeing, all of myself, there on the subway with the impossible before me. That black hole. The anticipation of some destruction unknown to me. The groaning, urging of the thing. I knew as soon as I saw it that I was entering something I could not pull myself from. Already, I was lost. I did not want to know it.
But it was that time of the season, I told myself. The first heatwaves of summer. The city held a heavy, humid breath, broken only to spit sticky storms upon the streets. The water rose and washed up everything that lay hidden. Rivers of rot flowed through our neighborhoods and down to the pits of the subway stations, leaving all of the filth behind, piled and aching like a sore ripped open. The heat sent us burrowing down below the cool earth to the air-conditioned trains.
I had been there, sweating on the stink sauna of the platform, delayed by another disturbance. Were it a struck pedestrian or police activity or other regular maintenance, it didn’t matter. It all congealed into the same festering congestion. The more disturbed we were, the more patient we had to be. If not, we risked submerging fully into the chaos that rose slowly around our ankles. Instead, we stood together and stayed apart and held it in. We kept our necks craned down, eyes half-blurred. We did not acknowledge the heat. Did not join our gaze with our neighbors for fear of–
For fear.
I had fought onto the train with restrained violence and slithered into a tight spot between bodies. I was suspended by the compression of the crowd, almost floating off of my feet. Still, I wrapped my hand backward and clawed it around the pole. I wanted to be more like that cold, clean metal than the hot, sticky, infinite flesh surrounding me. I, always minding myself. With my cramped hand, I pulled myself away, desperate to be apart, not a part of. I let my head drop. And then, the bird.
The back of my throat burned. I watched as it slapped the ground with its useless wings to press against it and lift its crazed, bobbling head. With a surge of power, the hatchling faced me. Its beak dropped open to reveal the alarm of its sonic orange throat. Then the brakes slammed hard, and from the baby bird came the scream of grinding metal. Feet fell beside its body and braced. I stared down its throat and pretended I did not see it. I pretended not to see.
The crowd lurched forward as a single liquid mass. The swell of bodies engulfed me, and I gripped hard with my backward hand, fighting to stay apart. The body bubbled back to its stagnation as the speaker turned on and mumbled an excuse broken apart by the static.
Passengers we apologize—disturbance———
A collective breath was held. Tension gathered and quivered at the surface. In the silence, only the bird, sounding off its irritating song. I tried to make reason. To find the message in the omen, the pattern, the source, an answer. I could tell my mind was clearing. As excuses slipped away, behind them some obscurity was finding form, a horrible truth drifting into my vision. I did not want clarity. I did not want to see.
But it was that time of the season, I told myself. It was the heat that sent the hatchlings jumping too early from their nests. They lay splat and steaming all over the concrete. If you weren’t careful, you might slip on their slick black carcasses, spreading their pinkish tar across the streets. And I had heard about pigeons and their haphazard nests. My nerves began to settle. Surely, because of the heat, one must have snuck on. So convinced was I by my consolation that I fully expected to find the nest above me, ripe with mother and children writhing beneath her breast. I felt myself dropping back inside myself as my already glazing eyes drifted confidently upwards. But the rails overhead were vacant. Not a stick, not a twig, not a mother.
Only hands. Swollen and red, gripping tight to the yellow poles. Hands, scraping at the ceiling like rodents digging themselves from a corpse. Hands, flat-palmed, using the reptilian tack of their skin as a hold against the walls they pressed against. They stretched and stuck from the thick gooey mass of bodies pressing in on all sides of me. I did not want to see it. The bile burned an inch higher to my throat. That something within me trying to escape. I held it in, but on the back of my tongue I could already taste it.
I tightened my grip on the pole, now warm and slick from the sweat of my palm. The windows fogged. On the black brick behind them, I searched for some new disturbance to free me from this confrontation. And I did see a face staring back at me. Its eyes were wide with terror. Transparent as a ghost, smeared across the tunnel walls. But I soon recognized the disturbance as myself. Myself, escaped. Myself, outside. No, inside. The broken breath of my neighbor slimed on my neck. I gagged. Choked down that something. That something, myself. Myself, that animal, fighting to rejoin the collective gunk. Myself, that chaos I tried to organize, separate into (myself), that thin line between me and everything. I swallowed. Every piece of my body contracted, held on, held in. But in all the heat I began to lose track of my end. There was a splitting sound. A gasp. My breath, released. Had I already been lost? I was lost.
Empty of breath, my head began to spin. I dared to lift my eyes to see where my hand should be. But I was tangled in the endless webbing of fingers and arms, weaving in and out of one another. I wanted myself, apart. Instinctively, I released, pulled back my hand and held it close to me. I felt something sticking, something ripping, the stretching of threads clinging between my skin and the great gunk around me. I held it out and saw, like the bird, all those pink-purple freckled and pulsing parts that became me. I held it above the bird and I saw it become.
Now there was no anchor. I breathed in and choked on the mucus of it all. My skin was shining and raw and translucent as the bird, (myself), the thing I called myself trapped within that fragile membrane that was so easily pierced. Now broken open, infected, now facing that screaming impossible. And I knew it was never meant to be this way. The bird, the train, the bodies crowded and tamed (always taming) the constant swelling of fear and rage and discomfort (always discomfort) with all of the knowing of all we cannot know. I thought the impossible would be unavoidable to miss, would be so shocking and loud and unarguably powerful. But then, looking, I knew the horrible truth that the impossible is quietly around us, always. And I did not want to be the sole witness. I did not want to know it.
So lost was I down that sour throat that I didn’t notice the subway heaving on again. It lurched powerfully forward and I was thrown into the bodies surrounding me. I fought, drowning. I tried to catch myself on the shoulders but they melted beneath my grip, their edges seeping into mine. I fell, and was falling, falling, everything too soft and slick, dissolving beneath me, falling, impossible to grip but holding me, still, and keeping me sinking, falling, like quicksand, infinite mud, thick tar, falling, and falling. The train stopped again and the doors slid open. I was nearly torn apart by the current of the lives coming and going around me. My foot rose and fell as I finally caught myself. Rose and fell and smashed against the baby bird.
The pink gray goo is melting into the floor already. One impossible layered on top of countless others. The perfect baby bird, now blended and smeared into the yolk of it all.
I am trying to hold it in but the pressure is too great. My edges are splitting. I know that there is nothing left to do. But I cannot allow myself. I cannot see it. I cannot know it. I refuse to be a part of it, I refuse. I squirm and press and fight myself from myself until I crack. I break through the back of my skull and leak myself from by disturbed body. With such relief, I stand behind and see.
I see:
Gently, the toe of one shoe kick off the heel of the other.
The sock pulled off with it.
A bare foot, pressed on the floor.
And then the other.
I see:
The body, barefoot at the edge of the puddle.
Arms, wrapping waist, pulling shirt over head.
Winged scapulae, rolling and spreading under the skin of the back
Hands, wrenching at shorts, rolling fabric down legs.
Legs, kicking shorts down and off feet.
I see myself, completely naked on the subway.
My face is turned away from me. My skin is goose bumped. My back arches forward as I fold, my spine curling and revealing its spiked vertebrae as I lower on all fours. Here, I hover for over the carrion. All of me, raw and naked. And perfect. I watch as I lay down, sink my belly into the yolk. My arms splay out wide. My cheek presses against the floor; my eyes are shut. I look away.
The doors open, and I watch as dozens of shoes step over my body. I see my skin give in like a soft clay. Myself, apart, suspended, floating above that thick gunk. I wade out the doors. Invisible now, I leave my body behind. I turn to see that pink mass, alone and squirming on the subway floor. The doors slide closed and the train pulls away. An announcement cracks through the speaker and echoes across the tunnel. I leave my body with the impossible and pretend I do not know either of them.