Fresh bones failed to sing for me, despite having six generations of necromancers in my family. I could only hear the song after the bones had transformed, over millions of years, into fossils.

Mom helped me discover this when I was 9. At every family gathering, the cousins would be given chicken bones, white and glistening. They’d focus until a single bone multiplied, forming additional skeleton pieces. A cross-hatching of flesh, then skin, enveloped it all. Quills erupted before softening into silky feathers. Finally, a beak clucked a new breath, alive again.

I ended up shuffled to a corner alongside Cousin James, who was a few years older but didn’t mind hanging out with me. For us, the chicken bone remained a bone.

James liked to make snarky comments about all the chickens pecking in the backyard: “If we made nuggets out of them, do you wonder if the flavor might be a little on the dead side?”

Then James accidentally sent a chicken back in time two weeks, and we learned he had temporal powers. He left town to study. He didn’t come to our gatherings anymore.

It was just me. Powerless.

The first reunion without James, Mom found me sobbing in the bathroom, so the next day, she brought me to the local riverbank, where mud-dark water pounded the beach, leaving brown-cream foam and broken shells. I wrinkled my nose at the debris and the fishy smell, but Mom took it all in with deep breaths. “It’s beautiful here,” she said. “Not your typical beach.”

She gazed at me. “I used to come here a lot before you were born, to escape the family. To think about who I wanted to be. What my future was.”

I mumbled, “I don’t want to be different.”

She brushed my hair from my face. “You don’t have to be like everyone else. Your life is your own. You’ll find your path.”

A wave brushed against our toes, bringing seaweed and something hard. A rock, I thought, but something whispered inside it. Faint tones of eons past. I picked it up.

Mom must’ve seen something in my face. “Go on,” she whispered.

I focused on the song, closing my eyes, feeling the fossil rise from my hand. The song in my head multiplied, growing larger and larger, until…

“Look!” Mom cried.

When I opened my eyes, a sharp-beaked dolphin from ages past was flopping on the beach. Which was a problem. It was one thing to bring back chickens. What do you do with an extinct dolphin?

Mom telephoned Cousin James, who came in a flash and sent the dolphin back a few million years.

He gave me a grin afterward. “Pretty cool what you can do!”

I grinned back.

For months after, I practiced my newly discovered skills. Rock-hard trilobites skittered like beetles in my hands. Ancient amber turned into soft blobs that melted into our carpet and wouldn’t come out no matter how many times Mom sprayed it with “Stain-Out.” Anything that had once lived but had been transformed into fossil, I could bring alive again.

Mom hugged me with each transformation, her face lit up with pride. Look at what you can do.

At the next family gathering, Mom gave me fossil gastropods. In my hands, the spiral shells transformed from gray rock to white shell, and slimy snail antennae peeked out. I presented my creation with a chin held high. I wasn’t powerless.

A few relatives applauded, but my cousin Kirk watched with unblinking eyes. He cornered me in a hallway, pulling out a necklace of sharp teeth.

“They’re wolf teeth,” he snarled. “I can resurrect them, and they’ll eat your pathetic snails. Leave the necromancy to the real experts.”

I ran out into the yard and hid behind a shed, my snails sliming around my hands. Chickens clucked and scratched the earth as I tried to control my breaths and halt my tears. I let the snails fall sadly from my hands. The chickens pecked at them until nothing was left except a slime streak on the ground.

I told Mom about it afterward.

She snorted. “He wants to bring back wolves? Imagine if you had a T-Rex tooth. Those wolves wouldn’t stand a chance.” She hugged me, and I felt reassured in her arms.

But we never got a T-Rex tooth. I waited a few years, through birthdays and Christmas. I imagined going to museums and bringing bones to life there, but then I realized the chaos it would create: tweed-suited museum patrons screaming through hallways as velociraptors and triceratops thundered behind them.

Our river only washed up marine fossils, and I didn’t want to bring back another flopping dolphin that James would have to send through time.

The truth was, my power was useless.

By my teenage years, my cousins were raising pets from the dead and learning the rules for resurrecting humans. I sat alone with my trilobite fossils, feeling the bumpy texture of the gray rock beneath my fingers.

Mom tried to reassure me. “You’re the first with this power. It’ll take time, but you’ll figure out the best way to use it. Maybe we could go back to the river?”

“No, it’s fine,” I lied. “I’m fine.”

Mom gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me. “I’m always here if you want to talk. I know it’s hard to be different.”

No, you don’t, I thought. If only I could be in a normal family. No necromancers. No magic. No Mom bragging to relatives about my powers.

I didn’t transform the trilobites that day. Instead, I shoved them into my pocket and found a dark corner. I couldn’t look at Mom’s face anymore and see that glow of her pride.

By my early 20s, I stopped attending family gatherings. I no longer transformed amber or gastropods. I decided to leave home.

Mom was gentle. “It’s okay to leave the fossils behind. Your life is your own. Any path you want to travel will be wonderful.”

I nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

She tried to hug, but I turned to avoid it. As the door swung shut, I heard her call, “I’ll be here if you need me.”

I stumbled through jobs in grocery stores and late-night receptionist gigs. I found what I thought was love, made mistakes, and discovered that my life had become the kind of story that makes people cringe: alone and staring at a faint line on the stick you’d just peed on. A life that leaves you wondering, How’d it go so wrong?

I knew I wanted to call Mom. I needed to call her, I needed her hugs. I wanted to walk alongside the river with her and breathe in fishy air with a smile, but I kept stopping every time I picked up the phone. I didn’t want to go back to that family, where they would whisper even more about my failures.

I didn’t call her. Instead, our local hospital called me. Heart attack, the doctor said. It was sudden, no pain.

My words dried up. Tears poured out. I hugged my belly as Mom’s last words to me played in my mind: I’ll be here.

It took everything I had to call my cousins, begging them to help, but they said no. There were laws about which humans they could resurrect, laws I was never taught. I pleaded until they cut off contact.

I called Cousin James. “I need a favor.”

His voice turned slow and somber. “I know what you’re going to ask. I can’t send you back in time. There are laws.”

More damned laws. “Can you send her body back.”

He paused, his mind working things out. “How far back?”

“About 15 million years?”

James sighed. “I can’t guarantee she’ll become a fossil.”

“I know a beach where conditions are just right. Send her there.”

I walked our local river beach alone, my bare toes curling like snail shells in the sand. Waves alternated between whispers and drums, delivering shells and driftwood. I heard the songs of fossils: ancient whales and dolphins, fish and stingrays, but never the right tune. Mom’s song was the sound of her breath in my ear as she hugged me, a croon of encouragement overpowering my doubts, a rhythm of smiles and love as familiar as my own heartbeat. I listened to each bone, hoping the song would be the one, then moved on to the next.

The days grew shorter, and my steps became unsteady, my ankles swelling, my belly growing. The future would come faster than the tidal bore that swept along the river, and I'd walk its sodden banks alone.

Until I found a fossil on the shores, wet with river mud and warm, that stopped my breath. The bone, black with spongy texture, sang to me: I’m here. I let the familiar voice grow louder in my mind.

The bone rose in the air. Muscles webbed out over a newly formed skeleton. Skin wove like delicate lace. Hair flowed, eyes opened, and her words burst out: “My darling, I’m here.”

She stood in the river’s foam as though I’d never let the door slam between us, her face welcoming, her arms outstretched.

My mind raced through the words I wanted to say: I’m sorry, I love you, teach me, help me. Walk beside me on the riverbank. Walk with your granddaughter.

Her granddaughter. I grabbed Mom’s hands, pressing them to the swell of my stomach. She looked at me with wonder and joy in her eyes.

“Mom,” I said, “I have something to tell you.”

© 2026 Carol Scheina