Shapeshifter [Story #9]

I’ve walked this earth in many different forms, but today I am a little girl. Not a precocious one, either. I’m the kind that wraps her arms around her mother’s leg and buries her face in the folds of fabric. The world is large now, threatening. My understanding of the people, parks, skyscrapers, buses around me blurs and I blink at them a few times to try to recapture what I once knew.

Useless. My naïve brain fixes on the mission of the day: walk to the place where I will pay for my crime.

Just get there. Forget empathizing with the grubby birds in the bushes or the man in the stocking cap with an outstretched hand. They are beyond my scope today; I pass by them and feel their colors whirl away from my peripheral vision and out into the dark space I leave in my wake. I could turn around, recall the colors, try to see and understand the birds and the man, but I don’t. I keep moving down the sidewalk.

My head is tucked, not against any kind of wind, but against probing eyes. I fear that others will see the innocent glow I put on this morning, wonder what I’m doing alone in the hard streets of New York City. Their greedy fingers might try to rob or molest me…or worse, force me to transform into the beast that committed last week’s crime.

It would be over then. Useless to show up at the courthouse with forked tongue and raised hackles. Useless to plead my case with bulging, vein-thick eyes and a mouth dripping blood. There’s no empathy for monsters.

I drop my chin lower, into the collar of a newly pressed shirt. Thinking about beastie makes me swell and crackle; it takes all my effort to keep the seams from ripping apart, bursting into the streets. I swallow and focus on my stride—dainty footsteps, timid. The little girl strengthens, secures her place in my body once again. Right before she’s taken over completely, I pause in the middle of the sidewalk.

My upper lip curls into a crazed grin; the forked tongue slithers in and out. Within a heartbeat, the beast retreats. The little girl walks on.

Kate Bitters is a freelance writer, marketer, and author of Elmer Left and Ten Thousand Lines. She is writing a story a week in 2015-2016 on the Bitter Blog. Subscribe to follow her journey.