Wishbone Theory

Wishbone Theory by Abby Zhang (@abbyz.320)

Spoiler alert: even the gods favor one side and one of us always gets the smaller half.

Even the past cleaves unevenly,

what remains isn’t always what we chose to keep.

A girl returns

to the orchard of her childhood

where pear trees have gone to rot,

the soil thick with wasps and memory.

Somewhere beneath the loam,

she buried a sparrow

that died with its eyes open.

She was six.

She named it Love or something vacant.

She did not mean to kill it.

I read once that migratory birds

remember the wind more than the route—

that direction is inherited

in the hollow of their bones.

I wonder if grief does the same.

In a dream,

you reached through the smoke of my ribs

and pulled out a wishbone,

still dripping with soul.

Snapped it in half

before I could wash the salt from my palms.

Held the larger piece like a relic

as if fate were something we learned early

in the backyard, in cupped hands.

The wishbone does not break clean.

It splinters. It remembers.

It leaves barbs beneath the skin

like fish hooks or old confessions.

I learned to fold myself

like a letter written in a language

only mothers and goddesses can read—

a script of retreat:

Hold. Hush. Hide.

I wanted to be small enough

to tuck into your back pocket

and be forgotten in the laundry,

the way empires forget

the names of lost daughters.

They say the child who holds both ends

gets to keep the wish.

But a wish is only a wish until it is true.

I remember the snap.

How even holding everything

can still feel like nothing—

I was always the smaller half.

Even when the bone split in my favor.

17 year old Abby Zhang lives in Montreal with her family. She writes everything from postcards to poetry to creative nonfiction. She writes poetry like she is running out of time and letters like she’s got nothing but it. She believes in dramatic exits and glitter pens and all things that rhyme.