Still Life With Shape-Shifter

by Sharon Shinn

  “That’s why she went out with him?”

  “Well, I don’t know if that’s why, but everybody in town knew that car. It had a horn that made this funny sound—ah-ooooo-ga—and every time he’d drive by the house, even if he wasn’t picking her up to go somewhere, he’d blow the horn.”

  “Show-off,” Brody says.

  “I always thought it was kind of sweet,” I say. My first foray into the conversation in ten minutes. “It meant he was thinking about me.”

  “Did she date lots of football players?” Brody asks.

  “Two,” she says. “But Ian only lasted for about three weeks.”

  “What did he do wrong?”

  “He wasn’t Kurt,” I say. “I ditched him when Kurt asked me out.”

  “That’s kind of mean,” Brody says.

  “He was the captain of the football team. I was a shallow girl.”

  He regards me through narrowed eyes, clearly not believing me. Well, he knows I bore heavy responsibilities at home; maybe he thinks those cares and duties weighed me down in all aspects of my life. But they were exactly what made me want to be heedless and superficial whenever I had a chance. The world had seemed so heavy to me when I was seventeen. Sometimes, I rebelled.

  The world seems even heavier now. And I have no idea how to make it seem lighter for even an hour.

  “So how long did you stay with Kurt? And why did you break up with him?”

  I lie. “I can’t remember.”

  “He almost hit me,” Ann says.

  Brody’s eyes grow comically wide. “Hit you? With his fist?”

  “With his car,” I say shortly.

  “He didn’t see me,” Ann says in exculpation.

  “He was driving too fast. He always drove too fast.”

  And she was almost impossible to see. Little white husky, scampering out from the bushes on the edge of the lawn, running headlong into the path of the car. It was night, and Kurt had no reason to expect a dog on our property. Give him credit for slamming on the brakes when I screamed—I was always on the lookout for that tumbling, frisking creature, and I’d seen her the instant she poked her nose out. But oh my God, the terror in my heart when I saw how close his bumper came to her face.

  Jeez, you nearly gave me a heart attack, he’d said when Ann scrambled whimpering to the porch. I thought I was gonna hit a kid or something. But it’s only a dog.

  I broke up with him the next day. It would have been that night except I was unable to speak.

  “Yeah, and then he had that accident a couple of months later,” Ann says.

  “Well, I think it’s always a good idea to break up with bad drivers,” says Brody. “I used to go out with a woman who couldn’t spend five minutes in the car without using every cussword you ever heard. This guy’s an asshole, that guy’s a shithead, didn’t you see the fucking light turn green? She tailgated people on the highway, flipped people off if they cut in front of her. Very tense to be a passenger in her car.”

  Ann and I look at each other and burst out laughing.

  “What? What’s so funny?” he says.

  “Melanie’s sort of an irate driver.”

  “But I never tailgate,” I add. “I just yell.”

  “Wow,” he says. “You’re full of surprises.”

  Ann gives him a sunny smile. “Aren’t we all.”

  The waitress returns to refill water glasses and coffee cups, and Brody decides to have another piece of pie.

  “How is it you don’t weigh three hundred pounds?” I ask him. “Every time I see you, you’re downing food like you’re afraid you’ll never get another meal.”

  He laughs. “I’ve always had a lot of energy, bounced around the room a lot—burned through calories so fast I couldn’t gain weight if I tried. It’s starting to catch up with me, though, and once I started freelancing, my whole lifestyle slowed down. Sitting down and writing is about as sedentary as it gets.”

  “So tell us about your book,” Ann invites. “What’s it about?”

  There’s a charged silence for a moment. Brody looks at me; I shrug, nod, and look away. He settles his elbows on the table and leans forward to address Ann.

  “I want to write about shape-shifters. People who can transform into animals. I think they’re living all around us, most people just don’t know it.”

  She puts an expression of fascination on her face. “And have you actually met any people who can do this? Change shapes?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Three of them.”

  That wrenches my attention back to him. “You never said that before! I asked you, the very first day we met, and you just sort of”—I move my head in an indeterminate fashion—“didn’t answer.”

  “I didn’t know you very well then. I didn’t know if it was safe to tell you anything.”

  Now Ann’s rapt expression is more genuine. “You’ve seen them? Truly? You’ve watched them transform?”

  He nods slowly. “Spookiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  She flutters her hands in the air. “So? Tell us, tell us! What was it like? What kinds of animals were they?”

  “One was a guy who was maybe thirty or thirty-five years old. Skinny, quiet. A little odd. Not somebody you’d be afraid of, exactly, but you’d think there was something weird about him. He turned into a wolf right before my eyes. His body started growing hair, his face roughed up—five minutes, it was all over. If I hadn’t been looking for this very phenomenon, if I hadn’t been hunting for shape-shifters, I’m not sure I’d have believed I was really seeing it. But he let me touch him. I could feel his fur. It wasn’t a trick or an optical illusion. It was real.”

  “Wow,” Ann says. She glances at me.

  But I’m not ready to let down all the barriers just yet. I’m not ready to give him Ann. “You said you saw a couple of different ones?”

  “Yeah. There was a girl, maybe ten years old. She could become a bird. She just—shrank down and started growing these black feathers, so fast you couldn’t follow the motion. Flapped her wings and took to the air, then came down and landed on my wrist. It was astonishing.”

  “What about the last one?” Ann asks.

  “That one I saw from a distance. I might have thought that one was some kind of illusion, except I’d already witnessed the first two. This was a guy turning into a deer. He was running at the time, so it was almost like a cartoon show—you know, the figure gets all blurry as it moves across the screen, and then it’s something else entirely. Still pretty amazing to watch.”

  “So where did you see these incredible things happen?” I ask. My voice is cool enough that you could suspect me of mockery if you didn’t have reason to believe I had firsthand knowledge of these incredible things.

  He smiles at me. “Someplace in the Midwest. I was only admitted onto the property because I swore not to divulge any details.”

  My eyebrows arch in polite surprise. “Oh—so when you write your book, it’s going to be full of ‘anonymous sources’ and ‘undisclosed locations.’ You realize that people are going to think you’re making it all up.”

  “They thought I was making it up when I had live footage of an actual transformation, so, yeah, I realize that.”

  “Then why bother? Why even try to tell the story?”

  He cants his head and considers for a moment, as if struggling to articulate the reason. “When I started doing the research,” he says at last, “it was just because I was curious. I was fascinated. I wanted to find out as much as I could. But once I met a few shape-shifters, when I saw how difficult their lives could be—most of them just existing on the edge of civilization, without access to medical care or social services—I thought maybe the book could do some good. Raise awareness, raise empathy, maybe even raise money.” He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  “I don’t think empathy is what you’ll get if you write about shape-shifters,” I say, my voice a little dry. “I think you’ll get hysteria. Lynch mobs. Tal
k of werewolves and full moons and crazy folks wailing, ‘Oh, my God, what if one bites me?’ And cops and public health officials showing up at people’s doors to crate up the abominations and haul them off for testing. That’s what you’ll get.”

  “You might,” Ann says ruefully. “Especially if you draw maps to the houses of all the shape-shifters you’ve interviewed, and say, ‘Here’s where you can find this little girl who can change into a crow.’”

  He glances at me briefly, but answers her. “I was never planning to do that. I’m not a complete idiot. I do realize there are risks that come with this kind of exposure, and I was never going to put my sources in danger. But I did think the whole lot of them could benefit if we started the public dialogue. ‘Did you know that these beautiful, amazing creatures live among us—and some of them could use your help?’ That’s all.”

  There’s silence for a moment as everyone waits for someone else to speak. As the two of them wait for me to speak. Ann, who’s sitting next to me in our booth, pokes me in the ribs. “So?” she says. “Do you have anything to tell Brody?”

  I fold my hands before me on the table and take on my most solemn expression. “I do,” I say in a low voice. “I’m a shape-shifter. I’m a Doberman pinscher in my other form.”

  Ann bursts out laughing, and Brody shows me a crooked smile. The waitress brings Brody’s fresh piece of pie and smiles, but you can tell she’s wondering what’s so funny.

  * * *

  William is waiting for us when we get home from Slices, and Brody doesn’t linger long enough to do more than nod in his direction. “I’ll call you,” he says to me, and takes off.

  Ann grabs my hands and starts a ring-around-the-rosie-style dance in my front yard. “Mel and Brody sitting in a tree,” she chants. “K-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love—”

  I yank free and stride for the door. “You’re so childish.”

  She hurries after me, and William falls in step behind us. “I like him. I think you should go out with him.”

  He already thinks we’re dating. Or he did. “We’ll see. William, how long have you been waiting out here? I thought Ann showed you where I hide the key.”

  “I was fine,” he says.

  We all go inside, but neither of them can settle; it’s clear they’re eager to go off someplace together. I make them eat one last meal before they leave even though Ann says she’s too full of pie to cram down another bite. But I can’t bear to think of her foraging in the wilderness for the next week—or two—devouring whatever raw meat or abandoned leftovers she can find. I have to feed her now while I can.

  “We’ll be back in a few days,” she says vaguely, as they head toward the door. It’s closing in on four o’clock, so they’ll have a few hours of daylight to travel wherever it is they’re going. “Don’t worry.”

  “I always worry,” I say, and kiss her on the cheek. William endures a kiss from me, too, then they’re gone.

  I stand in the middle of the empty house and wish it were already time for them to come home.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Brody calls Monday night as I’m curled up on the couch, eating the last of the chocolate gelato and watching TV shows I don’t care about for whatever distraction value they can provide.

  “Just checking in,” he says. “Seeing how you’re doing.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You sound a little down.”

  “Yeah. Ann and William left yesterday, and I don’t know when they’ll be back, so—” I assume he can imagine my shrug.

  “So you’re lonely.”

  “A little, I guess.”

  “Well, if you’re up for a drive into the big city, Wicked is playing at the Fox Theater. I could get us tickets.”

  I don’t go into St. Louis that often. It’s not a particularly big downtown area, so it’s not like I’m a rural girl afraid of urban menace, and the drive usually takes less than an hour, so it’s not like the effort is too immense. It’s just that I don’t seem to feel the need for much more than I have right at my fingertips.

  “Debbie saw it a couple of years ago when she was in New York, and she loved it. Sounds like fun.”

  There’s a beat. “Is that a yes?”

  I find myself giggling. “Yeah. It’s a yes.”

  “Cool! I’ll buy tickets. What night? Wait, I’m looking at an ad in the paper right now . . . Looks like it’s sold out Friday and Saturday, but there are seats still available for Thursday night or Sunday afternoon.”

  “I’d prefer Thursday night, I think.”

  “Me, too. Want to come to my place or meet at the theater?”

  “Your place? The scummy little apartment that you pay someone to clean?”

  “Wow. Is that how I described it to you at some point?”

  “First day we met. Inspired me with raging curiosity to see it.”

  “Yeah, that’s sarcasm, isn’t it?”

  “Kind of. Tell you what. I know how to find the Fox, so let’s just meet there. What time?”

  “Do you want dinner first? There are a couple places around Grand Avenue we could try.”

  “Sure.”

  “Then meet me at six. Oh, and Melanie?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is actually a date. In case you were wondering.”

  I bite my lip, but the laugh comes anyway. “Glad you cleared that up for me.”

  “I always like to be on the same page. Saves trouble.”

  “Oh,” I say, “I think you kind of like trouble. See you in a couple of days.”

  * * *

  But he finds reasons to call Tuesday and Wednesday. Once to let me know he has the tickets in hand. Once to see if I’d prefer to eat Italian cuisine or American bar food. I mean, those are the excuses he gives. I know he’s just calling because he wants to hear my voice.

  I know because that’s why I’m glad when I answer the phone to find him on the other end.

  Our Thursday night outing is a complete success. Even the things that go wrong seem so hilarious that they contribute to the rightness of the evening. The strap on one of my black-leather heels breaks as I’m getting out of the Cherokee, so I’m forced to put on the beat-up old white walking shoes I always leave in the back. They clash horribly with the semislinky red dress I thought would be appropriate for the gaudy opulence that’s the Fox, but Brody says he admires a girl who makes bold sartorial choices. At the restaurant, he casually slips his credit card into the leather portfolio to pay our bill, but the waitress brings it back almost immediately. I can tell he’s mortified as she starts to say, I’m sorry, sir, and he appears to be mentally reviewing his banking balance to figure out which checks might have bounced.

  What she actually says is, “I’m sorry, sir, you gave me your driver’s license instead of your credit card. Unless you wanted me to bill the DMV?”

  We’re still laughing when we arrive at the theater and find our places behind the world’s tallest couple, but at intermission we slip to some unoccupied seats farther back in our section and we can finally see the whole stage. The musical is magical, or maybe it’s the mood. At any rate, I’m humming as we exit with the crowd, and I didn’t know a note from the play before I went in.

  “Time for a drink before you drive back?” Brody asks.

  I glance at my watch. Already past eleven, and it’ll be midnight or better before I’m in bed. “Better not. Workday tomorrow.”

  “Best part of being a freelancer,” he says. “I can set my own schedule.”

  “Sure. Harp on that. Make me resent you even more.”

  I’m parked in a small lot a couple of blocks from the theater, and we walk slowly so we don’t get to my car too soon.

  “So what are you doing this weekend? Can we make plans?”

  I spread my hands. “I think all I need to do is pay a few bills and scrub the bathroom.”

  “So how about dinner tomorrow night?” He smiles down at me. “And maybe dinner Saturday night, too?”

&
nbsp; “You might find I don’t wear that well when you’re around me so often.”

  “Yeah, maybe. You might find the same thing about me.”

  “So? You want to risk it?”

  “Better to find it out now. Before we’ve wasted any more time on each other.”

  I’m choking back more laughter. By now we’ve courted death crossing the parking lot as all the other theatergoers are backing out of spaces and edging past us toward the exit. We pause at my car, and I slip my hand in my purse, hunting for my keys.

  “Well, that’s a romantic way to put it,” I say.

  “Doberman pinschers aren’t known for their love of romance.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not the Doberman type. You’re more of—” I pull the keys out and pause, studying his face for a moment by the incomplete illumination of the streetlights. “I don’t know my dog breeds that well. Something playful and energetic. Particularly exhausting as a puppy.”

  “Border collie, maybe,” he says with a grin. “Always busy. Always getting into trouble. But friendly and reliable.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “So? Friday and Saturday night?”

  “Yes to Friday. We’ll see about Saturday.”

  “Sounds fair,” he says. Without any fanfare, he leans over and presses his lips to mine. I bend into the kiss just enough to let him know I like it, but I don’t linger too long. It’s not the right setting for melting embraces. “What time?”

  “Anytime after six. I’ll be home.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  * * *

  Brody hasn’t specified that he wants to go out for dinner, and I figure it’s time I showed a little generosity of my own to repay his kindness and patience. So I take off work early and stop to buy ingredients for a meal, complete with wine. I’m not a particularly inventive cook, but I have a few specialties that always turn out well enough to serve, and Brody doesn’t seem especially picky, anyway. I’m halfway through meal prep before I realize I’m humming again—either a melody from Wicked or some tune that I’ve made up on the spot. It surprises me to further realize that I’m actually happy.

  When’s the last time that happened when Ann was out of sight?