Shiloh Warthen

Improbable Blue

Do you know what a punnett square is?

Four boxes, three combinations, two results:

the most simple form of genetic mapping

They teach you them in the seventh grade

They’re pretty simple really:

When both parents carry a heterozygous

dominant

genome

The child has a seventy five percent chance of presenting with the same dominant gene

And a twenty five percent chance

of exhibiting the recessive

Simple science and simple math; that’s why they teach it to middle schoolers

I’m a study in Punnett squares myself

Both my parents have brown eyes;

That's the dominant gene, seventy five percent.

I have blue eyes. Twenty five percent.

So does my little brother.

Statistical anomalies we are, the two of us.

We used to joke that we were adopted,

dropped off with our ocean colored eyes on the doorstep of our brown eyed family

Delivered like packages in the mail rather than children from a mother.

It was a joke but even then I think I always knew;

In a sea of brown, I was going to be blue.