I was born normal enough, except that I was four days late, which isn’t so much, and slightly jaundiced, which isn’t unusual, and had a raccoon for an arm, which is admittedly strange.

It wasn’t my whole arm—I was human to the elbow. And it wasn’t a whole raccoon—there were no back legs. At the joint where my left humerus was meant to meet radius and ulna, the vertebrae of the raccoon’s spinal column began instead. The obstetrician was understandably a bit put out.

The raccoon was a surprise, you see. My mother was young and healthy, so there was no reason for a third trimester ultrasound. The last peek they got was at 22 weeks: an anatomically typical fetus on its way to becoming a presumably normal baby. Raccoons, as it happens, only take 9 weeks to gestate. If they’d looked after week 30 . . . but, of course, they didn’t.

It wasn’t so bad, at first. There was the shock. Yes, there would be, I suppose. And the shame—bringing that home to the suburban cul-de-sac with its sterile lawns and well-manicured golf course where the woods used to be and list of HOA-approved pets, which certainly did not include raccoons. But newborns are a lot of work. Swaddle them, nurse them, rock them to sleep. Not much time for heavy thinking. Feeding the baby boy? Sure, give the baby raccoon a little formula too. Fine. The neighbors even held back their complaints in sympathy—for the first few months.

You see the problem, though. A human takes sixteen to twenty-five years to reach physical maturity, depending on what you’re counting. A raccoon takes . . . a year, maybe?

I don’t remember my brother well. My parents get upset when I call him that. Or bring him up at all, really. But I’ve seen pictures from the album they keep in the attic. And I have fragments.

A woman at the park yelling at me after my brother bit her daughter. Me crying that I wasn’t the one who did it. My brother snarling. My mother coming to save us.

Rolling around in the snow one bright morning, the flakes frosting his fur. His two little hands working alongside my one as I tried to teach him how to make snowballs. Laughing.

The smell of the canned tuna my parents fed him. Sour, like his breath.

I was four when they decided to amputate; I remember waking up in the hospital, after. Fluorescent lights and the sharp smell of antiseptic. It’s my clearest early memory. I was so confused, rubbing the stump of my elbow. “Where’s brother?” Rubbing it over and over. Crying.

My parents told me he’d gone to live with other raccoons, where he’d be happy—that just like I’d be getting a prosthetic arm, the doctors had given him little back legs so he could finally run and be free. I didn’t realize until I was twelve. I felt so stupid.

You can understand their decision. My spine is still bent from the extra weight. My brother never once bit me, but he’d go after other children; we didn’t have many friends. I’d put his tiny hands in my mouth, like a normal kid might suck their thumb. The doctors thought it was stunting my development.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? My parents, the doctors . . . they only saw me. A young boy with an unprecedented disability. People still think that way, when I tell them. They’re usually sympathetic. Kind. But they only see me—one broken human. Never him. Never the other.

I don’t really feel disabled. Prosthetics have come a long way—I’ve got great function in my left hand. I really only take it off before bed. Then I sleep with a little stuffed raccoon tucked under my arm. And sometimes, when I’m having a really bad day, I eat tuna straight from the can and it makes me feel better.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to look past it all. But more and more these days, I find myself wondering. If maybe what happened to me wasn’t an isolated incident. If other animals might need to find somewhere new to be born, with so many of the old places gone. If something is changing humans, telling us we can’t cut ourselves off from everyone else any longer. That maybe the non-human doesn’t deserve to die while the human lives. And I rub my arm and peer inside strollers as they pass on the street, and I wonder if I was only the first.

And there, just now, across the park and against the setting sun, I see the hazy form of a child, running through a field of wildflowers. And it may be the long shadow of evening, or it may be the squint of my eyes against the final blazing light of day, but just for a moment, I see the spread of out-flung hands and swear they could be wings.