I Stole You

by Kristen Ringman

  For a minute, I thought you were someone else. A human I stole many years ago, in a time when this place was torn from civil war. When bodies lined the dirt roads, their blood caked to their faces and arms. Sad lines of buttons shining in the sunlight on their chests that will never rise again. The costs of disagreement, of thinking differently, of politics. It matters little that I kill some of you.

  It matters little because you kill yourselves so much better.

  War is starting again.

  None of you know it, of course. You silly humans, running down your dark streets toward a deeper darkness than you’ve ever seen. I save each human I take, because I stop you from seeing that—I stop war for you and leave you with kinder memories of your brief lives.

  My body is covered in black feathers. It’s a body like yours, but I can shift into a much smaller form and fly off across the fields of corn with the crows. They don’t always notice how different I am until I shift and enlarge, and immediately upon seeing my human-like form covered with feathers and my giant beak, they fly off. A murder of crows, sometimes over a hundred of them. I like to watch them fly in such large numbers. They fill up the sky.

  So many of you people would like to have wings. You’ve told me as you were dying, and sometimes I’ve carried you in my arms and tried to fly in my large form. I failed every time. But I occasionally jumped so high, you felt as if you were flying for a moment. That made me very happy.

  My victim from long ago—the one with the red hair the exact shade of yours, the tall, thick body—was a challenge because I am tall, too, but I am not strong. I don’t use force to suppress my victims. I use my face, my feathers against their skin, my feathers all around them. Confusing is the best way to dismantle a human. I steal your ability to think logical thoughts. I steal your ability to escape.

  The other human was my first.

  I was a young crow fae then. A weightless bird with her head in the clouds. I thought it would be romantic, but really, I just pecked out his eyes. They tasted sweet and warm, and the man’s screams didn’t bring anyone rushing to check on him because it was a time of war, because there was already a background of screams and gunshots and rain. I love to kill in the rain. The water washes the blood away. It washes my own body afterwards, like a cleansing. I feel clean again and ready to fly for a long time before my next kill.

  My first human’s energy lasted me for fifty years. I flew all over the world without stopping. I flew round and round. I like to think that I’ve seen everywhere there is to see. Every one of your countries with their vastly different cultures, their cruelty, their inability to live harmoniously with other groups of themselves nor with animals. Your passions, your mind-less egos. You’re like birds with your chests puffed out. You’re as weak and fragile as me, but you think you’re not. That’s your downfall.

  My first human thought he could cross a field of men shooting at each other. He was strong and fast, but it wasn’t enough. Gunfire continued long after he fell to the ground riddled with holes. I flew to him and dragged him away from the field so that I could feed under cover of the trees.

  Like I said, I first pecked out his eyes. Two jewel candies slid down my throat. Then the bullets. One by one, I gathered them up in my beak and spit them out into the dirt. I licked his skin. I licked all the blood mixed with rain until he stopped bleeding, until the rain stopped, too. I pecked one hole after another into his soft flesh. I gulped each piece of his skin down. With my beak, I absolved him of more judgments. No more struggles. That human was finally free when he was turned into bones scattered over moss.

  The woods around us are quiet except for the sound of the drops falling down, pooling in small rivers alongside the empty street. You’re running and your face disarms me because it seems to be the same face as my first human from years ago. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe you can come back in another body. Not at all. But maybe—maybe you have …

  I rush into you, a swarm of giant feathers tickling you until you breathe them in and they suffocate you. I drag you into the trees.

  Once again the trees act as a refuge for me, a safe place to do as I please out of sight. When I kill you from the holes I make in your skin, you even taste like my first. The same sweetness is in your blood, too. I lick until I have eaten all of your flesh. I leave your bones lying clean and washed upon the fragments of your clothes.

  I peck your skull fondly, because of how wonderful you tasted for the sweat that made you taste saltier yet richer at the same time, and for the blue of your eyes, allowing me to imagine I was eating the sky itself, even though the sky above us was gray. I imagined the blue, clear sky inside your eyes and I ate it in two gulps. I was connected to everything the sky touched. Everything on Earth.

  It was only for a moment, but the moment lasted and lasted in my head. I played it over and over while I flew across the Atlantic Ocean, south over Africa, and east over Asia and across the Pacific, and over the Panama Canal and the islands beyond. I flew while your energy, the memory of your killing, sustained me for another fifty years.

  Don’t ask me where humans went after your death or where they ended up.

  I refuse to tell you the end.

  You’ll never know it, but your children might and their children most certainly will know. Your end isn’t pretty like the way that I ate you: bent down low, my wings sticking out behind me causing me to appear like a harmless duck leaning over you and pecking. Endlessly pecking chunk after chunk, licking the dripping red in between, licking the sweat from your skin. I ate until I couldn’t eat anymore. I cleaned and laid out your bones like a fortune teller divining the future of your kind.

  I was wrong. Ever so wrong.

  Humans, you’ve surprised me.

  You’ve burned weakly and irritably in the dark until the Moon rose in the sky, and you turned the moonlight into gold for a while.

  But nothing gold can stay, can it? You were rigged from the start. You lived and you died. Young. Wild. Selfish.

  * * *

  THE ART LOVER

  I stole you from the café.

  It took years. I first noticed you in the fall. You wore Doc Marten shoes and stripes on your clothes, usually black and white or black and red. Your hair color changed from week to week. I liked your style. You didn’t follow any trends; you started them, though you never noticed it. You never saw your surroundings in that way. You saw beyond the patterns of current cultural fashions or panaches. You were an artist. A painter. And within weeks of meeting you, I couldn’t stop going back: to the café, to the table where you sat.

  “Hi, how are you?” I said because that was how people spoke to each other, quickly, as if they didn’t really want to hear a response or even greet each other in the first place.

  “Hi,” you mumbled and buried your face in your work.

  It was a sketch of the barista. Then a pastel drawing of the small circular table in the window with two women leaning close together over it, their faces almost touching, their hands entwined. One was black and the other was Asian. You watched them kiss and smiled a secret sort of smile, as if you were gay, too, or wanted to be, or maybe you just thought their gestures were beautiful on their own.

  I liked your lack of judgment. I liked your shyness. I liked the way you held your pencil and the pastels. You lifted each instrument up to your mouth in between strokes as if you were deep in thought, never just drawing something blindly.

  “I love your work,” I said.

  You didn’t respond.

  “Your pictures are awesome,” I said, slightly louder and more in line with young people’s way of thinking.

  I look about sixteen. I usually can convince people I am twenty-one when I have to, so I have the freedom to shift between age groups, between teens and adults, and play with everyone. I love to tease people into revealing their worst fears and then if I like them, I only give them the easiest ways to die, but if I hate them I wait until I can orchestrate the most terrifyi
ng way to die for a specific person and that’s how I steal them. That’s how they die, exactly like their worst fears.

  I liked you from the start, but I was hungry. I never balked at the thought of taking you, even though I liked you and I felt like I could watch you draw for years. You were showing me a window to another way to see reality, and one rarely gets that now—with anyone, in any animal group. You can never really get close enough to another creature, not all the way into their minds. Except through creatures who are able to produce art. Those kinds, humans and whales, for example, can show you the most beautiful and the most ugly things. Things you’d never imagine on your own and couldn’t render yourself.

  I once followed a blue whale for centuries, just listening to his song. It broke my heart.

  I liked you, but the closer I got, the less I wanted you to die, which was frustrating because I was hungry. But I tried. I tried to stop eating for you—to spend time with you.

  “Hey!” I finally said and waved in your face.

  You looked up surprised, and that’s when I realized—you hadn’t heard me. You were deaf.

  “Oh,” I signed, “I didn’t know you were deaf,” in American Sign Language, because I learn every new language humans create as it happens.

  In my most natural form, I am formless. I am air. But I can shift into anything alive.

  I spent over a hundred years as a banyan tree in order to learn about connecting branches back down with roots, about how the end can come back and meet the beginning.

  I spent nearly a century as an elephant, to learn about loyalty, love, and strength of spirit. Did you know that elephants love the deepest out of all the animals?

  I spent two hundred years as a dolphin to learn about joy. Not the kind humans show, which is learned from their elders and confines within their social behavioral norms, but the joy of a heart free of everything, so at one with their body that they can move it masterfully, soaring through the sea in a way closer to birds than sea mammals. Dolphins know joy best of all the animals.

  Did you know that you humans share so many of your emotions with animals?

  But the one thing you don’t share with anyone else is regret. Guilt. No other creatures, fae included, feel this emotion. This is your biggest weakness, yet at the same time, it has helped you produce your art so well. Your art is your greatest achievement. The beauty of your inner fantasies. The terror of your nightmares. We fae only make your dreams and nightmares come true because you’ve already created these things in your minds. Isn’t that brilliant of you? How you’ve contained yourselves by your stories. How you live them out again and again, always in some small way due to regret.

  “How do you know sign?” you asked in an ASL that followed more closely with the English language, so I knew you had surrounded yourself with mostly hearing people and that you used English more than ASL, though you needed the signing to help you understand what people said.

  You also felt regret.

  From the way you moved your hands, I read that you regretted not being able to sign better and not having fluent signers around you. You lived between hearing and deaf cultures, and I think that was why your art was different. It said things other pieces of art didn’t say because you were more familiar with these cracks in the world, the spaces between things—not just hearing and deaf cultures, but that familiarity gave you a deeper understanding of how it is for all things in between.

  Your art spoke to me because I am also in between. I shift between forms all the time. I’ve only been human for fifteen thousand years now, and sometimes, for a week or two, I shift into other animals like a fox or a dog. I sneak through the woods, smelling the richness of dirt, the remains of deer or field mice, learning their stories, keeping track of what’s going on with other creatures beyond humans.

  I keep shifting back to this form: a girl of sixteen who can fake twenty-one, a girl with long blond hair I like to keep tied back to make me look more subdued, a girl with a short, unthreatening frame to make me look weak, a girl with brown eyes to make me look kind. I’ve worn all kinds of clothes, but right now, I like to wear flowered short dresses, thick woolen leggings, dark boots, and cardigan sweaters in soft colors like burnt orange and light blue. I am the girl you see in the café and think what a sweet looking girl that is! and you usually don’t approach her. You usually just say hi and carry on, but you return to the café again and again, hoping to see her smile at you.

  I give my smile away freely but that’s all I give away.

  I watch your people, and in every gesture they make, every movement of their eyes, every word they say, I don’t read their minds—I read their souls. I take the ones who are closer to demon than human, because I know they bring your race down and I don’t want to see your end. I want you to go on forever, just so I can collect your art and live off of that nectar. It makes me less lonely.

  I only eat artists. Writers, too. It gives me more sustenance than the consumption of other animals because of the beauty and color of their brains. You must understand this—if you eat what you love, you feel stronger and happier. I also feel less alone.

  “It was just something I picked up over time,” I signed, not wanting to lie to you.

  “Oh, you sign really well.”

  “Thank you. I was trying to tell you I love your work,” I pointed to the sketch in your hands.

  “Oh, really? I’m just getting back into it. I need so much more practice.”

  “You should come by my apartment sometime. I collect art and I think you might get some inspiration from the paintings I have there.”

  “Which artists do you have? Maybe I know them.”

  “Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Gauguin, Alice Neel, Picasso, Michelangelo …”

  “What?!” You eyed my thrift-store outfit, my youth, and immediately saw the ridiculousness of my answer. “You can’t possibly have originals of those artists. You must mean prints or something, right?”

  “No,” I knew I had to lie. “My family has collected art from the masters for generations. They’re very rich. But I don’t live that way now. I moved out of my parents’s house a few years ago and took my favorite pieces of art. They weren’t happy, but they let me do it.”

  “Wow, then umm, okay. Yeah. I would totally go to your apartment and check those things out. I’d love to—thank you for wanting to show me.”

  That was how I’ve gotten every artist I’ve ever taken.

  I tried to kill Van Gogh, but he beat me to it. I was devastated. I fell in love with him. Vincent had such a troubled spirit and so much regret. I made love to him so many times I can still feel him inside me now. Anyway, Vincent was one of my favorites. I still taste the shadow of him on my tongue. It tastes bright yellow and turquoise. Vivid orange and muted red. His colors were music for me.

  Every few weeks, I lay down on my futon bed surrounded by his art and get lost in the ecstasy of the colors. I become air just so I can enter each of the paintings and feel how they were layered, how each color touched the others. In those moments, I am color. I am paint. I’m the dream of a mad artist breaking free.

  I led you up the curved staircase to my fifth-floor apartment in Dover. I like to live up high where I can see as much of the town around me as possible. Whenever I can, I sit in my window each night, I watch people move between the buildings, learning so many things just from that.

  You gasped when you entered my apartment, because I lived alone in a three-bedroom and every inch of every wall was covered with art. My bedroom had all my Van Goghs together, and a few of Kahlos as well. The paintings had never been recorded in history because I took them from the artists themselves, from their private collections, their studios.

  “Your family was really able to collect all these?” you signed with no sign of your shock abating as you rushed through the apartment to quickly assess everything before you examined the paintings more closely one by one.

  Most artists take hours before they can speak to me aga
in from the time that they enter my apartment. All of them ask repeatedly if it is real. If what they are seeing is really what they are seeing. Your disbelief is cute. I love this part of my kills. I love it—

  Yet as you made your tour, sometimes sitting down to sketch or just sitting because the talent of a particular artist had floored you, I wanted to kill you less and less.

  Instead, I wanted to learn how you had come to love art. What your parents did. What you drew first when you were a child. I wanted to know the things I couldn’t decipher in your gestures and eyes. The minute details I normally don’t care about at all.

  I did give Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Kahlo many years before I was ready to take them, because I loved them, but they had also made some of the greatest works of art before I knew them personally. You hadn’t done anything yet.

  After you finished examining every piece of art I owned, it was close to midnight. Neither one of us was hungry or sleepy. The art fed you as well as it fed me.

  The following day I went to your apartment to see everything you had ever painted and kept. Your unmistakable talent was there, but most of the pieces were nothing special. You needed more time. But could I give that to you? Could I hold back long enough? I still wasn’t sure.

  “I burn some of them in the backyard,” you signed with your head down, as if ashamed, “when I’m feeling like I need to just release them. Does that sound crazy?”

  Compared to some of the things I saw Vincent or Frida do? No way. “Of course not,” I signed. “So many artists do much crazier things.”