I wake up on a Tuesday cloaked in light. The light isn’t simply radiating off me. It is spitting and sparking. It feels like a second skin. My husband begins to stir next to me. I can tell he is annoyed, his lips pursing at the rude intrusion of light flashing on the other side of his eyelids. He rolls over toward me, eyes still closed, and starts to slowly rub my arm. It’s a clumsy, routine gesture. He’s still half asleep.
“Checking in,” he mumbles. “One to ten.”
I glare through all this textured light at his sleep-puffed cheeks. I hate his morning check-ins. They annoy me beyond belief. But my doctor had insisted on them when I had postpartum depression a few years ago. And now that the depression has returned, we’ve been asked to start up these morning check-ins once again.
My husband’s hand starts to tighten around my bicep, urging me to give him a number.
“I’m at like a six,” I say, opening my hands and then closing them into fists over and over again, watching streaks of light wink from my fingertips.
When my husband finally opens his eyes, he has to squint to see me inside this
rushing sea of brightness.
“Well, this is new,” he says, his words still slow and sleepy but his eyes full of panic.
“Do you think it’s a side effect? Something from one of the new meds?”
“Maybe it just means you’re better?” he asks, his voice faltering on the last word.
I sit still and close my eyes. I think I can almost hear the light pulsing. I focus inward and conduct an inventory of my emotional state. Maybe I do feel better? Maybe all the different SSRIs I’ve tried over the past few months have finally, miraculously kicked in? I can feel the light without seeing it. It’s like a layer of weightless, silky fur. I keep my eyes closed tight and will myself to consider that maybe this is a sign. That I am better. But then I feel the familiar sinking in my stomach, the slow-motion panic at the base of my throat.
The depression is a gritty-slick coating that constantly throbs against my thoughts and my insides.
“I’m still sad. Definitely a solid six.”
I open my eyes and look at the top of my husband’s head instead of his eyes when I say this. Because I feel like a failure.
“Mom?”
I hear the froggy voice of my son at the foot of our bed. He’s looking at me with curiosity, not fear, the light that’s bouncing off me turning the frizzed ends of his hair golden. He climbs up onto our bed and settles between us like any other morning.
My husband sits up and stares. His eyes start to water from the glint of me. He needs sunglasses.
I burrow against my son’s warm body. When the hot flashes and mood swings started a few months ago, I told myself it was impossible. I was way too young for perimenopause. My son is only five. But the hot flashes continued to get hotter. The mood swings swingier. And the depression set in like a low, thick fog, covering everything.
I was terrified. My husband was terrified. Both of us transported back to the long months after our son was born, my postpartum depression turning everything upside down. I don’t clearly remember my son as a newborn. Looking at photographs from that time is like peering into a foreign landscape. Now, only five years later, I’ve been ambushed again. My doctor shrugged a little when I told him what was going on. He told me that with my “geriatric” pregnancy at almost forty years old followed by the severity of my postpartum depression, an early onset of perimenopause made absolute sense. And so paranoia has filled my days once again. Irritability and low energy and a knife-sharp craving for isolation.
“It’s a midlife crisis,” my husband says with as much confidence as he can muster.
“That’s exactly what this is.”
My sadness baffles him. He wants it to be about something specific. He wants to name it. But it is just sadness, a creature all its own that shows up on your doorstep on a random Tuesday. Bedraggled with heavy bags that have been hastily packed. Not especially happy or unhappy to see you. Just tired and slightly bored and determined to do its job.
The light sluices over my husband’s shoulders. He is enrobed in it. And I’m simply sad. This sudden light hasn’t changed any of that.
Later that morning the tips of my fingers on my right hand turn into talons as I’m reaching into the cabinet for a mug. I drop the mug and it shatters. But I don’t care. There’s a thrill rushing through me, and I don’t know how to explain it. A tinge of euphoria seeps from the bottom of my feet all the way up to the tips of my ears. The light thrums and fills the entire room.
I fumble with my phone using my non-taloned hand and begin to compose a text to my boss at the medical laboratory where I’m a research scientist. For a split second, I consider still showing up to work today. Some part of me craves eyes on me. But icy nerves tingle up and down my neck when I think of my co-workers—smart, successful, composed women—seeing all this sudden, ridiculous light. I feel a pulsing warmth radiating across my ribcage and lift my shirt to see a thick coat of matted, musky fur covering my belly. You’ll never believe this, I text. Then I delete it. Start over. Unexpectedly tied up. Promise to fill you in soon. Delete. I’m sick. I leave it at that.
When my husband comes home from picking up our son from school a few hours later, he finds me standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror, scanning the inventory of my changed body. Large, bony wings have sprouted from between my shoulder blades and rest against the low knuckles of my spine. Shimmering, rust-colored scales hug the curve of my ass. My hands are claws. My eyes are red orbs. My teeth sparkle with sharp edges. The light dances across it all. Each new body part is tinged with a bit of pleasure, pushing up against the edges of my sadness and embracing it chummily.
“It’s time to call the doctor,” my husband says, squinting through my light to eye the snarled snakiness of my hair.
“Yes,” I say, watching a cluster of small mouths blossom just above my clavicle, the tiny lips gleaming and pouting. “It is.”
Even though I’m feeling quite good, I know we need answers. As a medical research scientist at one of the top clinics in the world, I’ve been trained to pursue answers with steady urgency.
The look in my husband’s eyes should make me scared, but it doesn’t. The sadness that’s been filling me like a swamp is still there, but it fits alongside everything else I’m feeling right now, like a gear set tight and snug alongside all the others.
“I don’t think any of this is a side effect of the drugs,” I say, waggling my newly forked tongue in the light.
When I hear our son outside the bathroom door, I pull on a robe and let him in. He scans the new parts of me that are not covered by the robe, and he does not retreat from any of it.
“Mama,” he says. “Is the light wild?”
The doctor is quiet for a good long while after I have lowered the exam gown and pointed out all the changes to my body, the light drowning both of us. He doesn’t come in close to inspect me. He stays huddled on the other side of the cramped room. My wolf-long, pointed ears twitch in the air. He looks afraid, I realize. And also mildly fascinated.
“You’ve kept up with your meds?” he asks. “No adjustment to your doses?” The shine of something like panic glosses his eyeballs.
“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”
“And the hot flashes?”
I raise my arms dramatically and wave them through the sparking light. “It’s like a constant furnace. But I don’t mind. It actually feels good.” The hot flashes now feel like a dragon laughing.
“One to ten,” he says, the steady, almost bored drawl returning to his voice. “How would you rank the depression?”
“Who cares?” I say in exasperation. “It doesn’t need to be ranked. It’s just there and that’s fine, right?”
The doctor stands up straight and pulls at the stethoscope around his neck. Finally, he will examine me. He will push and prod and measure and assess. But then he looks defeated, his shoulders slumped.
“Sometimes,” he says, looking up at the ceiling tiles. Then he stops. “Sometimes what?”
“Well,” he says. “Sometimes these things.” He gestures at the shadows dancing behind me on the drab exam room wall. “They simply aren’t medical in nature.”
“What is this then?” I ask, lightly flapping the fins at my hips. “Magic?”
He doesn’t laugh. He fumbles in the depths of a cabinet and then hands me a pamphlet: “Both Mother and Monster: Accepting the Menopausal Goddess Within.”
Driving home, sadness and certainty and excitement spiral together like a beautiful shell in my chest.
I hand the pamphlet to my husband as soon as I enter the front door. As if it’s a tourist brochure of what’s to come.
“I’m a perimenopausal goddess,” I say.
“That’s the diagnosis?” he asks.
“It just is what it is.”
I don’t wait for a reaction. I head upstairs and begin bedtime with my son.
“Let’s tell stories tonight,” I say, and begin, “I’m the goddess of the moon and the stars.” With my talons I very carefully comb back his bath-damp hair.
“You’re the goddess of salt and pepper shakers,” he says.
“I’m the goddess of the trees and the lakes.”
“Cookies and cream.”
We both laugh. My light is too stimulating, making it hard for him to wind down.
I have blurry flashbacks from time to time of my postpartum period. The memories are detached and distant. A crying baby. A stack of diapers on the nightstand. My bleary-eyed husband warming bottle after bottle in the kitchen. The feeling of just wanting to sink into the center of the Earth and never return. Now I hold on to the time I spend with my son with a steel grip. I guard it viciously, ready to lash out at anything that might try to set itself between us.
“I’m the goddess of childbirth and Netflix,” I say.
“Candy and toothbrushes.”
“Maple seedlings and gas pump nozzles.”
My son waves his hands through my light and laughs and laughs.
It’s official. I am a sudden goddess. I will come up with my own mythology.
That night I receive a series of texts from my boss that have been composed in a carefully aloof manner. She says she doesn’t want to pry. She’s simply checking in and doesn’t need details. But I know she’s panicking, my cutting-edge research already a congested backlog in her mind, ruining the efficient, flawless vibe of our laboratory. She’s thinking about all the extra time off I had to tack on to my maternity leave when I had postpartum depression. She’s nervous that I could be on the brink of another black hole.
You thinking maybe a day or two? she texts. And I don’t text back. This is a vacation, I decide. The comforting whistle of air sweeping in and out of my velvet horse nostrils lulls me right to sleep.
My husband holds the pamphlet close to his face in bed the next morning, my light creating a horrible glare on the glossy paper. He hasn’t asked me to rate my sadness yet. A first in several weeks. I bask in the not-asking.
“You know,” my husband says. Then he doesn’t say anything more.
“What is it?” I run my tongue along a new set of fangs that cut through while I was sleeping.
“I’ve been thinking about a mythology class I took in college,” he says, and I picture what he must have been like then, anxious and goofy and serious.
“Goddesses can be fierce. They, like, give birth to things and then immediately eat them.”
“So?” I say.
“So,” he says. “I guess I’m just a little confused about why you want that to be your story.”
“Look at me.”
He blinks rapidly, trying to peer directly into the light.
“This is real.” I drag my serpent tail along his upper thigh. “This isn’t a story.”
“But,” he says, inching away from my tail. I can tell he’s trying hard to tread lightly. “In the pamphlet. It doesn’t say anything about treatments for cases that have reached your level of . . .” My tail begins to coil tightly around his thigh.
After a nervous grunt, he swallows and pushes on. “Shouldn’t there be hormones or something, like on the TV commercials?” He wags the pamphlet in front of my face. “This doesn’t say anything about a cure.”
I’m furious. A cure for what? I flex my wings, and my torso rises off the mattress.
I relish the way my husband’s eyes widen.
But then our son stumbles into the room and burrows between us, his warmth radiating right alongside my light.
“I had a nightmare last night while I was sleeping,” he states solemnly.
I look at our son swallowed up in the blankets and scan him for bruises and talon marks. Because what if I am the nightmare? And now I ache for a pill or a patch. Anything.
My husband knows what I’m thinking. He presses close and reaches an arm across our son to bravely rub the calloused ridges along my shoulder blades.
“Screw a cure,” he whispers into my furry ear.
Once I feel bold enough to show myself in public, the magic trails me, wild light illuminating the checkout aisle at the grocery store and the pickup line at school. But I am somehow gloriously ignored by others. Yes, I have horns sprouting from my forehead. And gill slits up and down my neck. Sharp teeth and red eyes. The light provides a kind of neutrality, washing me from a monster back into a mother in a flash—just another harried woman who is running a little late. There are more of me out here, magical sightings just waiting to happen. There must be. The thought alone is a feral solace.
A few days into my little sabbatical from work, I become used to the chorus of texts from my boss. They provide a regular rhythm to my day. I scan the pamphlet and email it to let that do the explaining, but the tempo of her texts increases.
She’s so glad I’m taking some time for myself, that everything worked out with HR for this last-minute personal leave. She’s so glad that I’m brave. That I’m strong. That I’m smart. You do you, she texts. That’s a priority for each one of us here. But I’ll let her know soon—won’t you?—when exactly I plan to return to the lab.
I do miss my work and know I can’t stay away for long. When my depression first set in after giving birth, even on my darkest days, I would still get a rush of happiness each time I made progress with a sample in the lab. My data fights cancer and heart disease and diabetes. My tests provide diagnoses and prognoses and treatment plans for the most complicated medical cases out there. My passion for my work brought me to the surface a bit. After a long, good day at work, I was able to swim closer to my son.
But I’m also surrounded by women at work who don’t openly talk about things like depression or the uncertain landscape of rapidly changing hormones. We present our revolutionary research at conferences across the globe, wearing power suits and celebrating over dry martini after dry martini at the hotel bar afterward. Cheers to work work work! We are chummy and warm and sloshed together on those late nights, but never confessional. Never a witchy coven of sharing secrets and advice about our changing bodies. Each one of us is an expert at not talking about the most complicated and important parts of our lives.
I eye the lumps of clay scattered across my son’s craft table.
“Let’s make monsters!” I say.
He is immediately game. We begin rolling out heads and squishing fat tails into torsos.
“This one’s a quanti-loop,” my son says, naming the squashed thing in his hand so easily.
“Mine’s a dark-eater,” I say, pressing a third head onto an already drooping neck.
What if I could give birth in weird ways, to weird things, just like some of the goddesses my husband studied long ago? I could become an Eve of thousands of strange beasts. I could name each of them in the bright, stark delivery rooms.
The consonants and vowels rolling loosely on my tongue and then flattening into music. With only my name on the birth certificates. Millions of beast babies, all mine alone.
I’m beyond nervous on the day that I decide to return to work, my hooves shaking as I shove them into absurd heels that morning. What will my coworkers think of the extra set of cloven arms and the steaming breath? Will the blinding light be too much? When I arrive, I notice too-tight fists clutched around delicate glass beakers. I see goggles sliding off sweaty brows.
“Look at you!” my boss says fake-cheerfully as she hands me a thick set of reports to complete.
In exchange, I hand her a Xerox of the pamphlet I’ve already scanned and emailed. The original is at home on our bedside table, the creases worn from my husband’s devoted studiousness. My boss holds the pamphlet far away from the rest of her body—her index finger and thumb suddenly forming a sharp pincer.
“Have you read it?” I ask.
When she doesn’t say anything, I realize that I have offered up a horrible dare. My boss glances sideways at the pamphlet as if it might bite her before opening it and scanning some of the contents. “You are not in this alone,” she reads, trying to bravely regurgitate the canned spiel that my husband has read dozens of times now. She continues: “While menopause is a universal sisterhood of monstrous metamorphosis, some of your physical changes just happen to be a bit more pronounced than other women of a particular age.” She stops reading to clear her throat, then starts again. “Welcome to your second puberty. This is a guide to embracing your new, bad-ass goddess self.” My boss stops reading and looks at the empty space next to me instead of at my body. “Pretty straightforward, huh?” she says.
Her eyes narrow when she is certain no one else is within hearing range.
“I know HR has been nothing but supportive. I know there’s absolutely nothing to worry about here,” she says. She can’t take her eyes off the green bulging veins webbing across the surface of my forehead. “But what if this gets in the way of things a little tiny bit?” She offers a tight, practiced smile.
“Oh,” I say, my five hearts simultaneously starting to beat harder and faster. “There’s nothing to worry about.” I smile with all my fangs and look around the room to offer the same reassurance to my other co-workers, but they have slipped into the back offices, test tubes abandoned in their racks, the churning of centrifuges now ghostly.
“But what if,” my boss says, setting the pamphlet on a counter and sliding it far away from her. “What if this becomes a distraction?”
“What exactly do you mean by this?” I hiss through dry, cracked lips that I coated in a waxy film of Maybelline Ruby for Me in the car on the way here.
No way will I tell her I’ve been obsessing for days over how my glare will bounce off all the shiny lab equipment. That I’ve considered ordering tinted lab goggles for everyone. But now I couldn’t care less. The muscled tentacles that ring my hips like a grotesque, tendon-y skirt undulate in the space between us.
“You’re right,” my boss says, doing an awkward little march in place. She’s trapped between me and the pamphlet on the counter behind her. “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Nothing to go over. Welcome back!” Her tight smile squeezes tiny tears into the corners of her eyes.
This is the same cautious, false cheer I received when I returned from maternity leave and realized we wouldn’t discuss the fiery pit I was still emerging from. At the time I thought that silence was a gift.
I lean in close to my boss. She freezes. I can barely track her breaths. She has to close her eyes because of the light. I lean closer. I want to sniff it out—her own awkward, monstrous awakening. I want to sniff it out in my other coworkers, too, once they emerge from their silent huddles in the back offices. All the tempestuous hormones and emotions and urges invisibly flashing across their own bodies like a rippling second skin. I try to imagine all of us piled into the warm, stale nest of my bed each morning, these other women urging me for a number from one to ten on those blank, gray mornings. But it’s only my frightened, befuddled husband I can see in that role.
“Things are kind of complicated for me at the moment,” I say, slowly backing off.
“Of course,” my boss says, her voice a phony stage whisper of reassurance. But then she grabs my taloned claw just as I’m about to turn away from her, and she pulls me into a tight, miraculous hug. She pushes her face into the stiff, scaled armor of my shoulder before pulling away to look into my red reptilian eyes. And there it is, I swear: a glint of envy in her squint. She’s not looking at me like I’m a specimen she could peer at through one of our microscopes. She’s looking at me like I’m simply me. A me who happens to currently be hatching into something beyond myself. We won’t talk about it, but she sees it.
The three of us go for a Sunday drive—one of those weird things we actually do—after a long week of school and work and the buzz of humanity pressing in like usual.
“Maybe I’m the goddess of crayons,” I say.
“The goddess of pant zippers,” my husband says.
“The goddess of water damage and loose teeth,” I say.
“The goddess of dynamite and upper lip fuzz,” my husband says. “Those are good ones,” I say.
“You are the goddess of everything,” my son says from the back seat with all the certainty in the world. “All the things you guys just said, plus a million things more.”
My gills flap a little bit as my throat tightens. Is my third eye tearing up?
Yes, it is.
My son’s voice is everything to me. I wish I could place it in a jar. I would screw the lid tight and never open it. I would place the jar on a high shelf and look at it often, now and years from now. Proof. The brightest light in all the universe.
__________________________________
From the Michigan Quarterly Review, 65.2, Spring 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Sarah Gerkensmeyer.
