I Stole You

by Kristen Ringman

  “Oh! Like Van Gogh cutting of his ear?”

  “Well—”

  “What do you mean? He did do it, right?” Your blue eyes narrowed. You were testing me, but it wasn’t really a test anyone could pass because no person who was alive in the world at that time knew the truth.

  Except me.

  “He didn’t exactly do that himself. It was an accident. He was definitely crazy. But he didn’t do that.”

  “How do you know?”

  I wanted to sign, Because I was there, but I couldn’t. So I lied, “I read in a secret letter that my family kept hidden that he and Gauguin had an awful fight and Gauguin was an expert fencer and accidentally cut off Van Gogh’s ear and that ended their intense relationship. He left and Van Gogh protected his friend—or lover, according to some people—by saying he did it himself.”

  “No way. Wow. That’s so much more interesting. Why couldn’t your family share the letter with the world?”

  It was so convincing. The lies I could tell with the body I chose. Everyone—male or female, rich or poor—always believes small, petite blonds. I was always trusted. “They were sworn to secrecy by Van Gogh’s family. They didn’t want people thinking that he was gay.”

  “But—do you think he was?”

  Images flash through my mind: intense, beautiful ones of Van Gogh and Gauguin, of their bodies and the night sky above them. I shuddered. “Maybe,” I signed.

  “That would be so beautiful to me. I’m bisexual. I keep falling for anyone, it seems, but I’m just not great at keeping people around because I always put my art first.”

  I knew that we would be lovers. I knew I would get to see your whole body unclothed, natural. I loved that moment most. The edge of that particular precipice. Almost.

  Later that night you peeled off my clothes first. I wore a simple blue hooded sweatshirt over one of my short floral pattern dresses to appear casual. I thought we might start something that night, but I didn’t imagine it to be as perfect as you orchestrated it.

  You put classical music on. “I was able to hear until my late teens,” you explained so that I understood why you knew the best kind of music to play in the background.

  We lay on your bed naked for a long time, just kissing and touching each other. When we made love, it was slow. You were taller than me and heavier. You worried about hurting me when you lay on top so we rolled back and forth. I did things that gave you orgasms that left you shaking for a long time, things I came up with only after over a thousand years of practice.

  I stayed with you and woke to coffee and muffins you had picked up at the café where we met. You sketched while we ate. I knew my art and our conversations had lit a fire in you that you hadn’t had in years. It was a good time to leave you to work alone for a while.

  “I’ve got to go back home for a few days,” I signed.

  “Oh, where is home?”

  “Minnesota,” I fingerspelled. “I’ll be back.”

  I didn’t go to Minnesota, but I went to Rhode Island.

  The School of Design in Providence to be exact. The artists at RISD had a lot of talent, too, and like I said, I was hungry. I couldn’t take you yet. The sex had made me ravenous though.

  I shifted between a deer and a fox, and ran as fast as I could across the states. I couldn’t stay in human form to take a train or a bus. I would have looked crazy like my beloved Van Gogh. Eating plants and small animals in the woods sustained me a little longer.

  When I reached Providence, I shifted back into my human form and entered the student studios by moonlight. A boy was painting in broad sweeping strokes with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. I could tell he was drunk by the way he was swaying on his feet.

  I stepped up behind him. “That looks just like a Jackson Pollock.”

  He turned. I smiled at first, which made his initial surprise dissolve into a kind grin in return. “Hi,” he said, “I haven’t seen you here before.”

  “I’m a new student,” I said and opened my mouth.

  I opened it farther than a human mouth could go. His eyes widened as my teeth grew long and pointed, and my lips stretched out thin around jaws that became the size of my entire human face. My hands turned into claws, but he—like most of my victims—never noticed them at all.

  The whiskey bottle smashed on the floor as I grabbed his upper arms with my claws and tore into his neck.

  His blood tasted of paint splatters on a white canvas. Black, purple, red, and brown. I let it splatter on the floor as I ate, knowing that by the time anyone found him, I would be a fox slinking through the woods to the north, heading back home to you.

  The boy’s work was a bit more abstract than I usually liked, but the size and scope of his vision filled me up. I left his bones with scattered chunks of fat and skin. The police would be shocked. Animal control would be notified and searching the city before dawn. Searching for a rabid dog perhaps. What else in Rhode Island could do such a thing?

  I turned back as I slipped out the door, admiring my own art, my abstract work with only organic materials. The boy’s skull peeked out at me from under tufts of his hair. I smiled as I made my way down the halls, pausing in the bathroom to wash my face and hands.

  I left through the side door of the building. I ran my fingers over the red bricks as I walked down the street just far enough before shifting into a fox under a large elm tree and darting away.

  When I returned to Dover, I took a long hot shower and donned another floral dress. I walked to your apartment. You were in the middle of painting something bold. I saw that my Alice Neel pieces had spoken to you. You were using photos of people, but you knew they weren’t the best way to paint a particular subject. Of course, I agreed to model for you.

  We made love first, so when I sat down to model, my skin was glistening with sweat. You painted that, too. You made me shine like an angel, naked with hair as yellow as a cornfield, skin blushing with pink, all the shadows and lines in deep Prussian blue.

  I loved the way you saw me.

  We advertised for models together, and you began doing portraits. We met in the café and I became your assistant while you set up your easel on a small table and painted friends, lovers, and families. The café offered up their walls to you, and you sold everything. That had never happened to you before. Paintings shown in restaurants hardly ever sold, but yours were so captivating that people couldn’t see them more than a few times without wanting to buy one and bring it home.

  Then you had a show at a gallery in Boston, like I suggested, and everything sold there, too. You were becoming a small sensation.

  You excited me so much, I had to “go home to Minnesota” every week. Sometimes I left for weeks at a time so that I wasn’t killing too many people in one city. I traveled to Canada, all over New York City when you were showing there, and as far as Washington, D.C. I considered turning to air and flying somewhere, but I cannot become air for very long. I need a body to stay alive.

  All my life I’ve never known how I was born, but my first memory is air: a warm, humid breeze. Somehow I entered the largest body I’ve ever taken—a dinosaur with a neck so long I could eat the tops of the trees. Their leaves were so thick and juicy, but I had to eat an enormous amount just to keep my body alive and able to move across the valleys and mountains, able to strike down other dinosaurs when they attacked.

  Eventually I became trees themselves and was able to rest for many years. I could live as a tree for centuries, only eating the air and absorbing nutrients from the Earth itself through my roots. I do this periodically to rest.

  I wanted you to live for so much longer. You were barely in your thirties. You could have gone on to be one of the greatest artists of your generation. Do you know how many humans have that potential? More than you could ever imagine. Regret does you all in. Regret destroys you faster than a T. rex can tear through a triceratops.

  I only know what I have seen, and I’ve seen too much. I am the oldest fae in the worl
d.

  I held you close while you sobbed. The response to your newest show, all of which was positive, had overwhelmed you. I ran my fingers along your spine. I kissed the back of your neck under your hairline.

  Then I opened my mouth.

  I didn’t spread my lips so wide as I did for the boy at RISD. I didn’t grow such long teeth. No. When I kill someone I love, I do it like a song.

  I bit the back of your neck with razor sharp teeth, small ones; teeth grown to the exact length needed to create a delicate yet rushing flow of blood down your back.

  “Owww,” you moaned. I knew you were feeling lightheaded. The fact that you hadn’t eaten all day helped. Your body was going numb and cold at the same time. You shivered against me, so I sucked harder to speed it up.

  I cried, too.

  Your sobs became my own and my tears mixed with your blood, turning it pink because my tears weren’t as transparent as human tears. I hardly ever cry, but when I do, I am careful not to do it in front of anyone because my tears fall like shiny white pearls, thick with memory and feeling.

  When I finished, I held all the pieces of you in my arms and slept until morning, still wishing I could put you back together again.

  * * *

  LOVE WITHIN TANGLED BRANCHES

  I stole you from the base of the old birch tree, half-lying down alongside the trail.

  The moths almost didn’t let me do it. They don’t always agree with us. In Iceland, we’re all connected—the trees, the birds, the flowers, the rivers, the stones—we communicate through touch and wind. But sometimes we don’t agree. There was a flurry of wings as I reached for you. You were so enraptured with the tree that you hadn’t noticed me. You didn’t care that I slipped my arms around your small waist and dragged you deeper into the bushes.

  When you realized that your beloved tree was no longer above you, and instead you were facing me: an elf with a face of green leaves, hair falling down in shades of white, pink, brown, and gray, you froze in shock but you didn’t run.

  I was a birch elf, like the one inside your tree, but my tree was hidden away farther up the mountain. I love her, but I can’t stop leaving her. When I stay in my tree, I don’t get the kind of attention the larger birch along the path gets and I’m jealous. I’m a small tree, so small that I can’t move very far from my roots. But I can make it to the path.

  I needed more sustenance. I needed you.

  You didn’t run when you saw what I was. You embraced me. You took my lips against your own and began to sign things to me with your hands. I didn’t know how to respond, though I understood you. All elves understand humans because we read your minds while you speak or, in your case, sign. We read the vibration of your voices, the touch of your feet against the ground, the movements of your hands and arms, the tilts of your head.

  I touched you with the branches in my hair, careful not to scratch you, but you pulled me in so close, some of my branches snapped against your chest and arms. You held me roughly and I knew—you were happy to be deaf. Perhaps your deafness had opened you to the trees and the wind more than other people you knew—but at the same time you weren’t content in your own skin. You were as jealous of me as I was of the larger birch tree. You wanted my peeling bark, my stiff hair, my green leaf eyes.

  We don’t make elves from humans. That’s not the way of my kind.

  But you were different. Could we do it? I wanted to find out.

  The other elves fought against us. They pulled you back down toward the open arms of the other birch.

  You didn’t understand. You just wanted to be one of us. A birch tree elf in Iceland. Though the time was summer and you had never seen an Icelandic winter. You didn’t know about the snow and the wind. That the way my sisters and brothers were pulling you then was nothing compared to the way our winds could rip you apart in the darkness of a winter day.

  “Why do they pull me from you?” You asked me one day while we lay at the base of my tree with the small town and the lake spread out below us down the hill and snow-covered mountains edging the sky to the north.

  “You’re not supposed to be one of us.”

  “I should have been born a tree. I just want to stay here on this hill forever, watching this sky and this land.”

  “I want you to stay, too,” I mimed in a mix of your sign language and my own thoughts pushed out toward you that you were starting to understand. This gave me hope. Maybe if you could learn to read my thoughts, you could become an elf like me.

  Winter came and you had to get woolen clothes and a parka in order to walk up to my tree. I tried meeting you on the path, but the other elves were working with the wind so they blew me down, threatening to rip my tree out of its roots or send a tremulous crack down the center of it. They wanted to destroy the love we found within tangled branches.

  One day I thought we were both going to die.

  The snow was deep and cold, even for me. The wind blew so hard I had to grab hold of the branches of that first birch tree you found, the only one who gave us any sympathy, who lost you with grace and dignity. Without her, I would have surely blown down the path, down the ice river, and smashed into the road.

  I saw you walking up toward me. I reached out my hand. You reached out your hand. There was a moment when we both looked up and saw the northern lights in full glory: spread across the sky in neon greens and fuchsias. I see them every autumn, winter, and spring. Sometimes I lie against my tree, close my eyes, and feel the lights warming me despite the snow. But this time seeing those lights was different. You were so dazzled by them that I felt like I was seeing them for the first time. I remembered being so tiny, barely a sprig of a tree, and looking up at a sky on fire. You reminded me of myself, and I held onto that great lovely birth tree with new respect. I wasn’t jealous of her anymore, because I had you. She had you first, but she didn’t get to keep you. She wasn’t right now reaching for your hand and touching your fingers. Yours were in thick mittens, but I still felt the energy of you inside them, warm and glowing like the lights above us.

  And just like that, you were gone.

  The other elves—or just the wind itself—blew you down the path the other way.

  The birch tree, which looked like a giant waving hand, and I had a second where I could have stayed—I could have nestled myself into that hand and been made safe.

  But love makes travellers and risk-takers of us all, elf and human alike. I slipped out of that great old birch tree with a warm breath of goodbye, and I let the wind take me. I followed the speck of your black hair down the hill, letting myself roll through the snow, smashing against a tree here and there. I felt my body breaking a little more with each new stretch of distance between my tree and myself. I knew I would not last long. I urged the wind to carry me faster so I could get a final glimpse of you, my love.

  Everything happened so quickly that before I knew it, I was smashed against a cluster of shrubbery by the frozen lake. I looked around frantically, but I couldn’t see you. I felt cold all over the bark of my skin, way down into my bones. I lay back against the rocky shore, thinking suddenly about the tree I abandoned for love. The rest of me. The roots I had dug down deep so that the wind wouldn’t take me this way, the branches I had grown, stronger than they look, some of them nearly unbreakable.

  I didn’t know there were other things out there besides the wind and storms that could damage me. As I slipped off into nothing, I thought of your hands moving, telling me stories with their slim fingers. I wondered if you were still out there, signing with those hands, walking through the snow, alive.

  * * *

  SHINING ORANGE

  I stole you because you were dying so far from your family—in the place where you spent your life on the streets saving dogs no one else noticed.

  People passed them by as if they weren’t there at all. Tiny puppies that could fit in your palms. Dogs with one leg missing or two. Dogs covered in mange with skin full of scales. Dogs with maggot-wound
holes in their necks as large as mangoes. Dogs that were dying faster than the humans who also lived on those orange streets. Dogs that lay in the dirt shining orange like the sun, waiting for no one besides you and the handful of humans you inspired.

  You didn’t take assistance very well. You were stubborn. I liked that about you. You had to be that way because the people around you believed the dogs were not part of them. People threw rocks. They screamed. Their cows or goats died and always, they blamed the dogs, and eventually, they blamed you because they saw you were with the dogs.

  South India is not for the faint of heart.

  I love my country. I love its colors and gods. I am Uluka, the goddess Lakshmi’s vahana, her mount. I carry her throughout the night, though sometimes she lets me fly on my own. I like to wander above the streets where you spent your last years riding your small moped with buckets of leftover food attached to the front. I watched you give and give to the dogs in all the villages surrounding the community built by Westerners along the Bay of Bengal.

  You didn’t just protect the dogs. You also protected my kind. I am an owl. Not an ordinary animal, of course, but they are still my kind. They are a part of me. The little boys of the villages often threw rocks at the smallest owls perched in the banyan trees along the roadsides at night, sometimes killing them. I’ve watched so many of their soft bodies fall to the dust, dying beside the dogs. Whenever you saw those boys, you screamed at them in Tamil to get away, to stop, and they laughed at you but they ran away.