Free Changeling by Michael Marano Page B

been both the snapping of a twig and the imagined boot that snapped the twig. Fear and desire had danced in this spot before the coming of houses, though in a way much different from how they do now.
    . . . violence . . . urban . . . projects . . .
    I am made more visible to the boy’s storm-seeking nerves. I drizzle the blood in his spine cold. Were he to stand, his knees would be limp for reasons he could not guess. The father is made more uncomfortable by the boy’s discomfort. He looks to his child, freshly in awe of the god- words of fear he has unknowingly worshipped. He hates the boy’s lack of deformity. Hates the lack of wickedness in the boy that would exonerate him from the apostasy of despising his own issue. The father looks to the box’s glass face, to the will-o’-wisp priest whose image gives way to images of shadow-people running on city streets. The father’s own face would be reflected on the glass if he strained to see it, in the same way he would see the lack of monstrosity in his child if he chose to see it.
    “
Not my kid
,” he thinks for the pleasure of thinking it and the pleasure of controlling his reality by fiat. His discomfort abates, as if pressed under a poultice. And with that thought of the father’s, the muscles of the boy’s back clench as if a blade were drawn at his hind. It is the same tension I was aware of in a girl who long ago turned and searched for me beneath a great outcrop of rock without knowing why, but who knew that she would find me there swaddled in tresses of my own hair. The boy knows he is thought of by his father, and is in an ecstasy of hope for a kind word and of fear of punishment for an unspoken offense.
    The father lets his hand drop to the back of the pillowed bench on which they sit, and does not know that the boy expects at once a pat upon the head or a pulling of his hair—both have been bestowed to the boy with equal suddenness. The father does not know why, but is pleased by the confusion he senses in the boy; hope and dread flavour the air in a way that allows me to taste my own ether-misted physicality.
    The father himself becomes a hierophant, using words of power like those that have touched his mind. He gestures to the box, to the image of a city goblin led in shackles.
    “You ever become a little white nigger like that, I’ll kill you.”
    The father pats the boy’s head, and the boy waits to feel fingers close and pull.
    I darken. My red eyes take sclera of white.
    In his ecstasy of acceptance and fear, the boy would see my shape if he turned his head.
    The pictures tell a story in bright colors of god-like warriors and chieftains. The boy fixes upon one image that fascinates and terrifies him. He presses the image upon the paper with his gaze, and I am pinned beneath the boy in my hovel under his bed; his attentions and fears hold me fast, as would a needle driven through the back of a beetle. The boy has endured more this day. Conscripted by his mother to help make food, she reviled him for dropping eggs like those I would have once spoiled with an infusion of my essence to announce my coming with the retch- smell of sulphur. Still stinging from her reproach, in the night he now stares at the image of a monster, a beast-man, abominating it to feel superior to it while at the same time feeling kinship with it for being abominated.
    The boy enters a new trance staring at the image, a new state of half-vision brought upon by half-wakefulness.
    But later in darkness, the boy lies fully awake above me while he tries to sleep.
    In darkness, in the deep night, he has made me densely formed enough with his trance for me to draw raspy breath that he barely hears. The branch-twig fingers of the claws he has given me can lightly click upon the floor.
    I am the living
wyrd
he needs to despise. His eyes dry in the darkness, for he is too afraid to blink. He fears to whistle up the flameless light he thinks may dispel me, believing I will seize