Free Changeling by Michael Marano Page A

scrawl. A collision of bracken-angry lines. A portrait of me. The paper leaf-glides across a floor so smooth and clean as to seem rubbed with beeswax; it skids past where the boy lay on his belly next to a wall and comes to rest in my hovel that is the underneath of his bed.
    The boy says nothing. I hear in his mind the belief that he speaks the word, “
Nothing
.” The belief churns the haze of the room. He draws a dragon on another piece of paper with a nub of green wax. There is no dust, here in my hovel. The picture of me, of the impressions of me that he has caught in moonlight, flutters from a slight draft that rides the smooth floor.
    The boy’s mother leaves. I hear her say what she does not speak. Her wish to truly say it makes the bellows-haze of the room flurry like wasps.
    “
You’re shit.
”
    The boy presses harder with his stick of wax as his mother’s thought grips the back of his neck.
    There is pressure as I take the red eyes the boy has drawn, as I become a glamour just a bit more visible than I had been.
    The boy feeds me poison in the night.
    But only what poison he spits up.
    The father sits before the box that sorcel-traps moving images. The boy is nervous as he sits beside the father, and wishes to be welcome, and to not be afraid. While fear murks with desire, I am summoned to stand behind the boy, pulled as if by a rope crafted of the twitching legs of wasps. The boy is aware of me, as some are aware of the coming of storms in their bones. I know this limbo. It is a home to me. It is the color of the boundary suspended between the earth and sky, where Beltane offerings killed by rope or fire are most treasured—where flesh burns best and where seed that would give me a woman’s form of root-matter falls best. Time shifts, as if by a farewell, or by the start of a cloaked exile. The boy conjures, out of the need to be acknowledged, and by the fear that he
will
be acknowledged. The motes of my being respond to the boy’s silent chant before this glowing altar.
    Words of power and invocation filth the air, but they are not spoken by any who have breath or throat. The words are dream-syllables that accommodate the father’s dread and desire. Though I know not what the words mean, they have the bile-flavour of
weregild
, of deep shadow forests forbidden to travelers and the desperate springtime lifting of flesh with a stone knife to ensure a bounty of crops. The words are pulled from the ether. The father takes the trance of their power, as if they are spoken by a hierophant before a bloody stone table. The bodiless voice carried from the box with the face of glass has the feel of greasy metal cooling.
    . . . youths . . . disturbances . . . wildings . . .
    The words of power seize the mind of the father and wave-daub the mind of the boy. The un-present priest speaking the words is made of shifting light trapped within the box. He is a spell that itself casts a spell. He is less real than is the shifting light of heat and marsh-breath that births will-o’-wisps, though he is much more powerful in his capacity to bewitch and lead astray.
    . . . shooting . . . unrest . . . drug-related . . .
    The phrases connecting the thrawn-words are nothing. They are like the chants that bridge the uttered Names of gods that are at once loved and dreaded; the bridging words serve only to pace out the invocations. The gorge of fear nourishes both father and son. The gorge of fear shores the walls, and makes this home a fortress of the imagination. It masques the walls in the guise of a haven safe from fell beings—beings who, in the minds of those who live here, carry only the
shape
of humanity. I had been once such a fell being of human shape in this very spot, which had been a wood-rimmed clearing scant years before the sundering of trees and the fever-swift building of houses. I had once been made a giant of a man, glimpsed. I had been the gleam of a hook where there had been a hand. I had