When the radio comes on it startles me after the quiet of the frozen lake. It wakes the twins and we get out again, to look at the lake one more time, its frozen elegies held in the subsurface layer: bits of tinsel, leaves, ruptured currents broken into fragments of pearlescent quartz–

There wasn’t a forecast of thunder, like Olympic-hopeful Katherine Diaz, 22, dying in El Salvador on a Friday; no one expected it. We were just going out to look at the lake’s less obvious manifestation, to see if the snowbirds had flown in yet, to crack the ice with our boots like glass. Maybe we’d see a wood frog undergoing chemical and metabolic changes–I didn’t think I’d be the one.

*boosh*

Just a little lighting in the distance, nothing to worry about.

*bwoom*

“Mommy. Milk now.”

In winter, some animal species gravitate toward warmer microhabitats. The twins pull me down onto the cold sidewalk. A fantastic cascade occurs, physiological changes. When they drink from me, our body becomes one, bigger, and it generates heat–a geometrical relationship illustrated by Bergmann’s Rule.

A few species change colors in winter, the weasel, snowshoe hare. When the lightning struck it was the same time as the rain, but the rain wasn’t clear like normal, it was indigo with flashes of green. Toni had been speculating about the runoff from the AMGEN factory. The lead in Flint’s water, she said, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

*kaboom*

Perhaps because of the oxytocin from nursing, I didn’t feel a thing when the lightning and toxic rain synthesized into a malevolent force, penetrating my body through my cesarean scar, infiltrating my milk, reversing its capacities. When you nurse, it’s a perfect circuit of comfort and fulfillment, a drugged state, erotically charged with a hyped maternal love inaccessible except within the matrix of the exchange.

Through the medium of milk, organisms scan the environment for bacterial threats and assemble antibodies delivered into the blood stream of nursing offspring. Latescence. Immunofluorescence. Big words but it’s the same biological process in pigs and rats, and who knows what I am now, after all these… morphological changes