Free Changeling by Michael Marano

CHANGELING
    I felt myself blacken as if charred, felt my skin drink fireless smoke as I was stained with the echo of solidity. I remembered and relived another moment, one of freezing cold in the midst of a bright warm summer, a moment of my taking the fair color of frost amid green meadows and barrows as I was made pale as lime-bleached skin scant days before I’d first heard the sound of a man’s eyes turning to wood.
    And with that long-ago press of smooth wood against the soft cups of his sight, I had been freed.
    I am not now free, any more than is the boy whose shade I reflect through his demonization, through the reverse-exorcism canticles that tend the seed of spite deep within him. The seed sprouts. I feel it. It earth-breathes despair the boy cannot grasp, but that the boy knows with the same intimacy that he knows his dreams. The boy does not feel the germ quiver to life . . . to
my
life . . . and the lives of my distant, more bodiless kin who sleep in his imagining.
    I now know no meadows, no earthwork mounds heaped over chambers of rusting swords. This is a place and a time in which eyes are not turned to wood, but are turned to things like shining dark stones. There is no sound to accompany this changing of eyes to stone, for unlike the crack of rowan bursting thin socket-walls of skull,
this
change of eyes involves no alchemy of pain—it is merely the reflection of moving light that is pulled out of the air and forced to dance in a box with a face of curved glass. The glass face of the box gives the eyes of those who stare into it the same dead sheen I have seen in the eyes of blind grandmothers who crossed themselves feeling my nearness.
    Invisible, I looked into stone-smooth eyes. I breathed without lungs a darkness like deep winter midnight behind the box that flickered the blue light of moving images no less alive than am I. Invisible, I swallowed the black of dead spectra while fear of persons and things dark-skinned worm-twitched in the minds of the boy’s parents and envenomed the boy’s mind and his image of himself. I felt myself stamped with fears I did not welcome, fears that would further color me and force upon me untouchable shape. I am clay molded by hands without nails, skin or nerves. I could be beautiful. I have been beautiful before, heralded by the crash of a snow-coloured stag from out the brush and by the songs of birch to oak. But here, now, there is no desire or need for me to be beautiful.
    I felt kinship with the image moving within the glass face of the box. The image was flax-pulled from the ether by wire and metal that flowed with tamed and thunder-less lightning . . . just as I had been pulled from the air and given unfinished shape by this house of stifled, silenced anger. I am changed by this house, as a blown horn changes the air within it.
    Later, as I was soured by the dreams of the child who slept above me, I wept a deaf nothingness from empty sockets of dust, knowing what I’d be made to feel and become.
    The boy sweats poison, resting above me in a nest of blankets he twists about himself. His parents would welcome the hatchling of a cuckoo. They would embrace a twisted, stunted changeling, such as I had once been, running from the scalding of a font atop the backs of pews that were splintered by my hoofs. They desire a monster in lieu of their son, for such a monster would free them from knowing the child they have.
    Longing for a monster, they craft one—and I am echo-crafted as well. Just as a smith would beat impurities from iron he shapes, so do they remove things they do not wish the boy to have, such qualities as they doubt exist in themselves, that they snuff to convince themselves of their worth.
    With morning, comes a new crafting.
    “What is this?” asks the mother. Like the air above a bellows, the room shimmers in my eyeless sight as she speaks. She kicks with a soft slippered foot a portrait of dust-grey strokes and red glowing eyes. It’s a