Lycanthropia

In case you hadn’t already figured it out, I am a shape shifter, a person of no definite mass or form, one of only a handful like me, destined, almost certainly, to extinction. I don’t mind it. Now is the hour of rigid things, of scientific structure and technological accuracy. Fascism always brings with it a fetish for precision; it has no room for those who are a hand one day, a wrist another, a tuft of fur clinging to the edge of the carpet, or a mote of dust irritating the corner of one’s eye. That which is my greatest strength has become, in this day of microscopic attention to detail, my most serious liability.

This afternoon I am water, and she says she is my elfin librarian. I have no reason to doubt it — she is certainly tiny enough for the job, all her skeleton constructed of the leftover bones from the making of hummingbirds, her hands the castaway lost mates of girls’ kid gloves, her feet sculpted by the dwarf whose charge it was to immortalize a sleeping — and presumed dead — Snow White. One foot is filled with the Encyclopedia of Miles; the other contains the Book of Sorrows. Some days the span of my thumb to little finger is longer than her whole arm; others I drown in the spillover from her blue eyes. Yes, her eyes are the color of a dawn lake when the fog still laces the trees and one is never certain whether what he sees is reality or the remainder of dreams. Her hair is a symphony composed of sunlight, mahogany whispers and dark earth; it smells of new-mown grass and feels like the fur of a wild creature. Fey? Gamine? Pixie? She is all these things. An elfin librarian? She has beguiled my heart and eyes. She covers my mouth with hers and breathes into it an incantation that catalogs the taste of honey and salt, lemon grass and bitter herb. So I am hers, the whole slithering, elusive, unreliable, shape-shifting mass of me. Because I require hard symbols of fidelity, she ties a platinum cord around her ankle and states emphatically, “I am yours.” Though I am suspicious of the words, I trust the cord. It has a value I can process, and I do, and I measure the strength or weakness of our bond by the presence or absence of the cord.

We lay together in the narrow bed until I seep down below the mattress and drift on a blue boat into the Land of Nod; she remains very still until I am gone, and then she slips her feet into wee moccasins, touches the tip of her tongue to the shade of my lips, and sets out on her nocturnal wanderings.

One night, in the shape of curiosity, I tied a strand of spider web to her platinum bond and then followed her on her journey at a distance the length of an afternoon shadow. She stopped first at a service station, where she traced the edges of the night with neon and giggled the metric span of a crescent wrench into the ear of a greasy, grinning mechanic. Next she hunkered over a burger in an all-night diner, coaxing stories out of a raccoon-eyed stripper. She paused at the corner of a busy street to cast a spell on a traffic light and throw off the timing of drag racers howling past in their deadly technological chariots. She kissed a dragonfly, whispered a wish into the hearing aid of the wind, and told a ladybug, “Fly away home.” She stroked the fur of an orange tomcat. She stretched, tried to touch the moon and stars, laughed when she couldn’t do it and said, “That’s a neat trick.” She took a stick and wrote “I LOVE YOU” in the mud wedged into a slow-draining curb. She slipped a bottle of Thunderbird into the waiting arms of a sweet wino sleeping in a culvert under the highway. She whistled a Shirley Temple tune in the morning’s smallest hours and did a little dance. She stood near a frozen stream and waited for the sun to rise over the shoulder of a snow-covered hill; she laughed gleefully when it did, though she had seen, perhaps, a thousand sunrises and knew they would come as surely as day follows night. It was as if she knew the name of that sunrise and the name of all sunrises and each of them was unique to her and each was important to her being. When the sun had fully ascended she dashed home and shed her wee shoes and climbed into bed and pretended she had been there all night when I pretended to rise and yawn and greet the day and her in it. Later, in the shower, she found a strand of cobweb clinging to her anklet. She came into the room where I practiced making the shape of humidity and said, “Silly boy.”

One night she looked carefully, carefully, carefully into my eyes and uttered, almost desperately, “Be careful with my precious things.” She curled near me like a true elfin librarian and fell into genuine sleep. I shifted into the shape of the Sandman’s sand and perched carefully at the corner of her eyes until she admitted me into her dreams. She lay in a garden of clover, nested in the sighs of a million sheep and no wolves. She dreamed of dreaming in her dream, and dreamed of dreaming in her dream’s dream, and so on, until her sleep resembled a hall of mirrors and she was drowsing into infinity. This, I learned, is how she gains her rest. I tiptoed out of her sleep and into the bed and formed the shape of a great gentle bear. I tucked her into the heart of my warmest, safest fur and guarded her slumbers until dawn. When she squinted awake, I formed the shape of a mouth and whispered, “I love you, my little elf.” She muttered through half-twilight, “I can sleep with you, Mr. Bear.” Our words meant the same thing.

In the morning she gave me a moonflower, a the end leaf from a book entitled “What the Ice Queen Wants for Christmas”, and a bottle of perfume. “I want nothing,” I protested.

“But I am your elfin librarian,” she insisted. “You must read the things I bring you.”

I turned the bottle over and over in my hand, sniffing its contents and watching the sunlight glisten on its multifaceted form, wondering whether I could shift into the shape of cut glass.

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