My genetic test results arrived this afternoon, a thick manila envelope sticking out of the mailbox. Turns out I’m mostly Irish, a little bit Scandinavian. Slightly increased risk of heart disease and dementia. And they found an entire movie encoded into my DNA. The Wizard of Oz, all 102 minutes of the digitally remastered version, twisted inside a double helix. I’m just a carrier. Side effects unknown. It’s a shame about the colorblindness, though. The brick road is blue, the city red, the shoes green. Guess that explains why I’m always looking for rainbows.
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Callie B. Dean is a writer, researcher, and musician living in Shreveport, LA. Her essays and poetry have appeared at Coffee + Crumbs, Unbroken, HOOT Review, jmww, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She is looking forward to launching her first picture book, Marvelous Mistakes: Accidents That Made History (Beaming Books), in 2026.