Xenopus Rose-Tinted

Xenopus: Rose-Tinted explores the ethics of biomedical research via genetically modified frog sperm, Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor and the aurora borealis. It appears in Bio-Punk: Stories from the Far Side of Research, ed. Ra Page, Comma Press. You can read an excerpt below.

Reviews

“I love the subtlety of this story, how we slowly come to realise who the narrator is and the tale he has to tell about where he came from.” Kirsty Walters, Thresholds
“[A]n allusive and poetic read.” Aiden O’Reilly, The Short Review
“…intellectually satisfying and beautifully crafted.” Kim Lacey, Guru Magazine

Excerpt from Xenopus Rose-Tinted

I was conceived in vitro, in a bright, shining lab, but don’t assume that just because the process was clinical it was without affection. My father, the scientist who made and raised me, who I think of as my ancestral father, is one of Sophie’s people. Reflective and wistful by nature, his pensive demeanour often brought to my mind the frail but beautiful stand-up-white-bird that waded by the shores of the lake where my ancestors lived. As well as being a scientist, my father was a storyteller, as I am a storyteller. My earliest memory, not long after I was born, is of drifting in a tepid, amniotic-like bath with my brothers and sisters, as my father loomed above us, concentration engraved into his eyebrows, whispering, I have to get this story out. I have to get this story out. There was a hallucinatory rhythm to his words and I floated into my first ancestral dream, to a world where Sophie and my father’s people had barely begun their tainted evolutionary journey, and I could submerge myself in the shallows of the lake as dragonflies with transparent wings and shimmering bodies flitted above the surface.

When I awoke, ascending the silted layers of my dream one by one into consciousness, I discovered that my father had cut me in half.