by A N Britton
I enrolled in Verruckt in the 6th grade. While Alyssa was in my class, I never spoke to her beyond asking for the assignment until 8th. In the early days, the word “prodigy” accompanied my name too often, and I got lax about practicing and sloppy with my technique. Well, our orchestra instructor in 8th had told me to be more like Alyssa. That led me to ask her why she was such a freak about music. My snarky insult garnered an honest response. It marked the start of our friendship, and I’ve never forgotten it, “Music is the only thing I have that is mine. My parents don’t own it, can’t control it. I love music that fills me with awe. Music that is dark, and weird, and complex. Music gets me. And my music, how I play or what I write -that is uniquely me. Music gives me the freedom I need to deal with all the other bullshit.” I hadn’t expected that from the tiny brunette with huge green eyes who always moved away from people. Alyssa turned on her heel and left the room. Her words stayed with me all night. I asked her the next day to pair with me in the Holiday program, she agreed, and our friendship grew over frayed bow strings and achy fingers.
She pulled me through a lot without ever being aware of the problems. I admired and trusted her. Alyssa approached life with a fierceness few possess. She spoke truthfully and didn’t worry how her words landed. Unlike me. She told me when she thought I was wrong or my music was beautiful with the same frankness. We didn’t spend our time together doing stereotypical teen stuff. We never got manis-pedis. She hated shopping, fast food and most movies. Actually, she hated every teen gathering place where she might have been expected to act like she gave a shit about anything she didn’t give a shit about. Our mutual group of friends was small, us, my Manolo, and a group of fellow music nerds we competed with. We talked one common language, music, and everything got worked out through it. We played, we wrote, and sometimes- when our fingers and brains rebelled from exhaustion, we ordered sushi or Thai and listened to more music. On very rare occasions, we vegged out to horrible unreality TV shows to recharge our batteries.
Now, don’t get it twisted, Alyssa wasn’t some frump who had nothing but music going for her. She was scarily brilliant and gorgeous. I retained info by design, but she KNEW shit. She put more than a few teachers in their place who’d assumed she didn’t understand the material because she looked bored and scribbled melodies during class. By our junior year, Alyssa earned a reputation for savagery by cutting folks with her razor tongue in response to perceived (and provable) stupidity on their part. If she squeezed the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes, and sighed, watch out! As to the superficial bit, she masqueraded as a Plain Jane in that teenage movie way. You know- where most people don’t realize the hottest girl is the nondescript chick in glasses with a penchant for shapeless clothing. Yeah, she rocked that look intentionally. She stood 5’3”, all tawny skin and hair caught between chestnut and auburn. The natural gold highlights in her hair matched the gold flecks in her piercing green eyes. She had a runner’s athleticism and a petite, curvy frame, but every day she came to school armored in overalls, boy’s shirts, messy buns, and vintage glasses. Alyssa didn’t want or need attention and avoided it. Everything took a backseat to her goals. She had a tryst now and then, on the low, but she deflected romantic interests, attachments - anyone who might derail her. I admired her sense of purpose.
She never asked me why I loved music, it only mattered that I did. Still, my reasons were and are the opposite of hers. The control I can exert through music, isn’t what music is. My music represents organized chaos, it is about release, not control. The music I compose, it has always been a release of the chaos in my mind. Alyssa used music to bring order through complexity into her life. She used it to give herself a measure of control. I used music to give up control, to let go of everything it meant to be Thumbra and embrace all the craziness that is human. I felt a kinship with the girl, both of us using our gifts to escape our realities.
Anyway, on that day we prepared for our final school performance. Alyssa intended to become a concert pianist or composer, but either way – she wanted out of our little enclave. She planned to attend the Bard College Conservatory of Music in the fall. This was over her parents’ objections, who appeared to want her to study closer to home.
Per normal, we’d bailed from school around noon to lunch in Alyssa’s empty house and finish practicing in the music room there. Alyssa had just played a few minutes of her composition, Gossamer, and I loved it. Somehow she conveyed a sense of obscurity without the heaviness that usually accompanies such pieces. A surprising spirit hid in the notes, something in the darkness. She could have titled the piece Alyssa, it was so like her. I clapped and whooped until a text brought me back to reality. “? U R home now (SB!) HMU ltr” – it was from Manolo, my other best friend, boyfriend, and loyal timekeeper. He didn’t know what my specific plans were for that night, but it was like him to remind me of my schedule.
I went from musical joy to “Fuck!” and apologies before running out. Alyssa didn’t bat a single lash but raised an eyebrow. At least her house was closer to home than the school had been.
I could have raced to my house in a flash, but not on a Friday afternoon. There were too many people outside to see a teenage girl breaking the world record with a 1.5-mile dash at the speed of a jacked up cheetah. Instead, I focused on moving without drawing notice. Focused on trying to prepare myself for the birth of Maala’s son, find the calm missing in action. Just one more turn. Around the back of the Jacksons’ property. Enter through the side yard. I was halfway through the screen door, halfway to a reasonable excuse when Mama stepped out from a shadowed doorway.
“Do you forget yourself… girl?” I stiffened at the rebuke, but… such a soft voice, Mama’s ability to hand out a verbal slap without a change in decibels always knocked me off guard. Ah, but my Mama knew this simple phrase was all I needed to remind me of months worth of arguments and discussions–blah, blah blah. Mama opposed Nana in this whole first circle experiment. She didn’t think I displayed enough maturity and if I’d sided with her, I could have avoided all this frustration. However, I didn’t want to be the complete child Mama treated me as, so I had taken Nana’s part. But Mama knew me. Her comment was, is, a layered insult. Thumbras don’t normally forget anything, ever. If we claim to forget something, it is because we don’t want to acknowledge the problem. Mama was sure I was doing this whole thing to spite her, not out of dedication to my people. With those words, she reminded me of the place I’d chosen to put myself into. I understood she had more to say, so I squared my shoulders, and waited while Mama moved to face me.
“Your mind is disordered – pull it together and still yourself. Am I to leave you behind or can you hold the circle?” Mama leaned back against the doorjamb with crossed arms and an expression that just dared me to flip my shit. She stood maybe an inch taller than me, her skin, not only darker but somehow richer - coffee with red undertones and a buttery finish. Her burgundy hair coiled loosely on top of her head in the Senegalese braids she preferred. My mother reminded me of a fertility idol, infinite curves and stern power. I watched her brown eyes spark, but no irritation emanated from her and they didn’t shift towards black. Somehow, her full lips relaxed, despite the tautness of her words. I looked like I came from her, but I sure didn’t act like it. Mama radiated calm control, she didn’t get agitated like me or angry like Nana. She looked at you and let you wither under her stare while she read you and told you about yourself in that lilting Afro Caribbean accent she favored. I swallowed acid and turmoil, a bitter clot in my throat. I was totally stuck between Mama and a hard place. Hell, she barely thought I was ready to merely attend the birth because the last one I’d been at, had been my own. As much as I didn’t want this - I didn’t want her seeing me as a child to be my out. I wanted to straddle the line between childhood and adulthood. Who doesn’t crave the respect, without the distressing parts? Seeing that I couldn’t let her win, my options were simplified. I lifted a mental trapdoor, shoved in all my anxiety and the
turbulence I felt, then I dropped that damn door. Lifting my chin, I gave her the stone-faced Thumbra she wanted to see, “I’ll be in the car in 5 minutes” and then strode down the hall.
I reached my bedroom, entering and slamming the door behind me, leaning against it for just a moment. My bedroom was all faux-boho chic, done up in shades of deep purple, fuchsia, and hints of tangerine. It was a room designed to pull you in, it said, “sit, chill for a minute”. The battered purple hued quilt on my canopy bed beckoned, but there was no time to sit, much less to chill. Instead, I dropped my practice violin in the hard-sided case on the bed and turned to the vintage teak armoire. At the top, not too near the front, nor the back was Fiddle, wrapped in oilcloth, ensconced in a soft-sided case that forever smelled of oil and rosin. Fingertips reaching, gripping- there it was in my hands. I loved Fiddle. I don’t know who’d named it, Fiddle wasn’t a fiddle, it was a 5 string violin. It also wasn’t a magicked instrument – it hadn’t been cursed or blessed. Still, its previous owners were many gifted and magical musicians, and it held a glimmer of the powerful essences of those beings. Fiddle was my secret weapon to hold the circle; keep the loving group of females focused on the health and beauty of Maala’s new child while she metaphorically sweated him into being. I was an able Empath without Fiddle; I could read the emotions of everyone in a room and change… push rather… the emotions of a single individual or a group. However, with Fiddle in my hands, I completely owned anyone in hearing range. It was as if every musical note was a tendril weaving a wire trap. I didn’t have to see you to control you. I could pick you up and seize your heart, puff it up with feelings of fulfillment and joy or squeeze it dry.
Short on time, I stole a quick look in the mirror. Rather than struggle with my hair, I lengthened it and loosened up the corkscrewiness to make a stable, yet messy, ponytail. I was so young then. My skin, the shade of golden almonds, always shone. My eyes, a gray edged in a light brown, hinted at the luminosity that was held, sternly banked, within. I thought I knew how powerful I was, but considering I was about to help lead a shape-shifter birthing… power was a relative concept.
Satisfied with my hair, I pulled a red hoodie over my fitted plaid shirt. I kept the jeans, but traded the ballerina flats for my high-top Converse. My facade complete, I grabbed my Fiddle and pre-packed rucksack and headed out the door just as Mama blasted the horn.
4 - Are we there yet?
Chymaera
Okay, time for an intermezzo. After this, shit gets real for lack of a better expression. And, before that we need clarity. It’s funny, you gain a measure of notoriety or celebrity and your life is not your own. Details of events become public, albeit out of order and context, and people think they know you. That their limited account suffices to understand you. Then the judgment rain begins, only to turn into a deluge. Now, I have no problem with standing behind the choices I’ve made, but I get pissed off over misinformation. What is common knowledge presently, wasn’t so common when I was going through it. So, I guess I want to set the record straight as to what I knew at this point. What truths I was contemplating as I headed towards that birthing ceremony.
First off, I am a Thumbra, AKA a shape-shifter. That is the easy part, now try to keep up. We are a human extract as humans are a primate extract. Many millennia ago, a few proto-Thumbras were born to human parents with a minor mutation, a recessive trait that evolved into our characteristics. In the beginning, maybe their bones were hardier, they had better motor control, swifter reflexes. That alone would have marked them as prized mates within their groups, but they gravitated towards each other to reproduce. Each successive generation gained a little more conscious command over their bodies. More of their brain became activated with increasingly complex neural connections. After thousands of years, we developed the ability to manipulate the body’s appearance. At some point we underwent a magnificent change. While humans remained locked in their flesh, we morphed into malleable energy. We have a tiny, dense nucleus and that is the real physical us; the brain, the consciousness- the core of it all. That essence remains cloaked in our shell. It is the shadow form that is only visible when we are born and when we die. The exterior can be anything we imagine and it is virtually indestructible. Our shell is our greatest sensory organ, our skin sees and smells better than what passes for eyes and nose. Besides the shape-shifting bit, some of us have special abilities, like my empathic “gifts”.
All this I learned in my mother’s womb. A Thumbra mother knows her child from the moment of conception, no joke. We don’t need birth control because we can only conceive with deliberate action. And only a Thumbra mother can birth a Thumbra child. It goes something like this. Mama Thumbra takes a fragment of her core and joins it with the same from her mate. She coaxes these bits into a distinct particle of life and shapes it within her. She envisions the child in her mind and encourages the child towards her design, the initial representation - the superficial stuff. Better yet, a mother shares knowledge with her child. Whatever she desires for that child to understand, is what it learns. She doesn’t control who her child will become, but she starts the process and guides it. And information is everything.
I saw a science fiction movie once where aliens just sat in an education pod to learn. It was straight jacked into their brain. Our gestation is a similar experience though gentler. A mother can share her thoughts and memories as well. It is communication that runs both ways, birth severs the connection.
The most important thing our mothers instruct us on in that fetal stage is how damned important it is to never reveal ourselves to humans. Passing is the number one life skill you have to learn as a child. My parents have always told me passing is easier and safer, for us. I adhered to that as a teen, but I kind of didn’t see what the big deal was. We aren’t all that different.
To be blunt, we Thumbras eat, shit and fuck, just like humans do; well almost like humans do. We also go through the full range of emotions. All the human problems you have, I have them - in a different form.
Thumbras don’t require food, but we must consume energy. For example, I can gulp down a cheeseburger and create chemical processes within my shell to release heat from the food and then use that energy. I can excrete out a neat package of waste products. Less than humans though because my process is more efficient and I can make use of more organic (and inorganic) material as an energy source. We can, but we mostly don’t.
It is too laborious for strict energy consumption. Instead, we suck the existing energy from the world. Some energy is free floating - like people in emotional states shed energy into the air and we soak it up. We can also absorb the kinetic energy from movement around us, but that takes time and skill to do without notice. As for a more direct supply, well it is easiest to sip from lower life forms. You know, all manners of plant and simple animal life, even lower forms. A Thumbra doesn’t need much more for normal activities than to just prune their trees and keep the house pest free. The energy one takes from the trees will slow their growth rate, but not damage them. As for the others, let’s say you won’t find any unwanted critters in our homes or on our persons. We avoid feeding on hominids (humans and apes); they instinctively know when they are being encroached upon and seek to protect themselves. They can’t prevent our feeding, but it makes them agitated- and that draws attention we don’t want. Oh, and we don’t require contact, certainly nothing penetrative, it isn’t some kind of vampire situation; although, someone might have come up with the vampire myth based on a misunderstanding.
As for intimate activities, need I remind you we can make our shells into any kind of body we desire? We form ourselves to match our partner’s passion and get down however works for them and is fun for us. I guess you could say most Thumbras are pansexual in the truest sense. There is little concern about gender appearance or plumbing for shape-shifters. I’m attracted to personalities more than anything. And most Thumbra live long enough to try everything. Everything. Now, when it comes down to love a
nd commitment type relationships, we stick with our own. Choosing to live your life with a non-Thumbra is restrictive. Humans are fragile and short lived. And you can never be honest with them, they will either assume you’re insane or fear you. So you can never relax. We aren’t interested in living that kind of lie for long. There are a few non-human, non-Thumbra species out there. However, except for Keros-Ki (don’t call them werewolves, they don’t like it and it isn’t accurate), most of them cannot pass for human. At least not for extended periods of time. Those that can’t pass live in isolated settlements, eschewing modern life. Although some have lifespans nearer our own, choosing one of them means losing the world. Mostly, non-Thumbras were poor relations when I was growing up. It made more sense to find a Thumbra partner and blend in with the human majority. We picked a profession. Bought a house. Lived a few (or more) lifetimes. Altered our appearance to mark the passage of time we didn’t feel. When we got sick of that life, we started over. Switched it up. Different ethnic and/or gender representations. A change in countries and continents. By the time my parents had me, they’d lived for several hundreds of years. My Nana was thousands of years old.
We even died when we wanted to. Not because our bodies failed. A wise Thumbra told me once, “We aren’t immortal, but our youth is pitiless and persistent.” Some Thumbras, with more years behind them than they cared to tally, could grow so dissatisfied with life that they didn’t want to exist anymore. They’d unform their shell and allow their shadow to disperse into the world around them. We called that disincorporation – it was a rare thing. Rarer still was a forced disincorporation.