“I like them,” he said. “They’re so cool.”
I looked away from the beetles, staring at the boy in his bedroom with his narrow bed and his socks. I ignored the sounds of beetles crying out for freedom and grass and decaying things and air. They scratched at their glass, and I drank milk, and the boy watched me.
“My name’s Peter,” the boy said. “What’s yours?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I lied, and he did not look surprised that I had spoken.
He reached out tentative fingers to touch my fur. A static spark jumped between us and he started, knocking the bowl of milk over. It clattered, splashed milk as high as his knees. Somewhere deep inside the house, the woman’s voice called out, and the creak of her barefooted tread moved toward his bedroom.
“You have to go,” he whispered, his voice urgent. “Please.”
“Okay,” I said. He stared at me as the rumble came closer. “Good luck, Peter.”
I leaped down into the dark garden as his bedroom door opened and listened to their voices. She spoke to him softly, and he answered in whispers. I didn’t leave until her hand emerged, white as dandelion fluff in the moonlight, and pulled his window shut.
*
The third time I met the boy, I was a deer.
I’d wandered. I wasn’t made to linger, and it hurt my soul to wait for him. I amused myself elsewhere. I turned into a woman and led a little girl into the woods to find strawberries, and left her there for a day and a night before sending her back with red-stained cheeks and a dress made of lichen. I was a mouse in a cobbler’s house for a month, thinning the soles of every shoe he made until he started using iron nails and I had to leave. As a moth, I whispered into the ear of a banker while he slept, and when he woke, he was holding his wife’s kidney in his clenched fist.
Small diversions.
I was a deer the night I came back for him. White, dappled with brown, to catch his attention. I wanted him to climb out of his window and follow me into the hills. I wanted to plant marigolds in his mouth and sew his eyes shut with thread made from spider’s silk. I wandered up to his window, and it was open, and there was a salt rock there.
Clever boy. He’d been reading up. I licked at the rock with a forked pink tongue.
“Is that what your real tongue looks like?” he murmured from behind me. I jumped. I hadn’t expected to see him outside, and he’d crept up so quietly.
“No,” I said. “It’s just how I like it to look when I’m a deer. When did you get so tall?”
“What do you really look like?” he asked.
I flicked my tongue at the salt rock again. “What do you really look like?” I asked.
Peter cocked his head at me like a crow. “I look like this,” he said, gesturing to himself. I snorted.
“I’ve been waiting for you for so long. Years,” he said. “I almost thought I made you up.” I looked up at him and my eyes iridesced in the moonlight and he stared.
“Come with me,” I said.
“Show me what you’re really like,” he said.
I shoved my wet black deer-nose into his palm. He hesitated, then ran his hand across my head. My fur was as soft as butter that night. He caressed my face, brushed the underside of my chin. I turned my face into his hand and breathed in the smell of his skin, his pulse. I closed my teeth around the pad of flesh at the base of his thumb and sank them in, biting down deep and hard and fast.
“What the fuck—” he cried out, but before he could pull his hand away, I flicked my tongue out and tasted his blood.
“That’s what I’m really like,” I said, my voice low and rough. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and I licked his blood from my muzzle. It burned going down—iron—but it was enough to bind us. He would run from me, but he would never be able to escape me altogether. Not now.
He cradled his hand against his chest.
“I have to go,” he whispered.
I watched him walk inside, and I felt the burning in my belly, and I knew he was mine.
*
Every time I came back to the boy Peter, he was a little different. When I was a toad drinking milk out of a saucer in his palm, he had hair on his chin and a pimple on his nose. When I was a dove pecking at bread crumbs on his bedside table, he was a twitchy, stretched-out thing, eyeing the door and wiping sweat from his palms. When I was a kangaroo mouse nibbling at rock salt on the hood of his car, he was a weaving drunk in a black suit with tears streaming down his face.
“It’s my house now, you know,” he said as he walked from the car to the front door. “The old bastard’s dead. You can come inside, and you don’t have to hide or anything.” He held the door open, leaning against the frame, staring down at me.
“You don’t have to live there,” I said. “You could come with me. I know a place in the forest where there’s a bed made from soft mosses and a bower made from dew. You could come with me and live there and eat berries that will make you immortal.” His vertebrae would hang from the tree branches like wind chimes, and the caterpillars would string their cocoons from his ribs in the summertime. “Come with me.”
“Tell me what you are.”
“Come with me.”
“Show me what you really look like,” he said.
“Come with me, and I will,” I replied.
He looked at me for a long time, and then he took a step toward me, and I was sure he was going to follow me. But then he leaned over and vomited onto the front porch of the house that was now his, and then the door slammed in my face, and I was left outside with my salt.
*
“You can take any form you want, right?”
His fingertip traced patterns in the milk that was spilled across his kitchen counter. I was a huge snake, black with a rainbow sheen across my scales like oil on water.
“I suppose so,” I replied, sliding through a puddle on my belly. I was getting fat and slow on the boy’s bribes. He held his fingers out and passively stroked my back as I slipped past.
“Why aren’t you ever a person?” he asked.
“What kind of a person would I be?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Like . . . a person. A regular person.”
“Like this?” I took the form of his mother, and he flinched. Then I took the form of a woman I’d known once, a woman who had also left out bread and milk and salt. Bright eyes and big curls and a body like honeyed wine. I flicked a forked tongue at him, my deer-tongue, and his answering laugh was strange.
“Yes, like that. Just like that.” He laughed that strange laugh again, and I turned back into a snake. “Why don’t you ever look like yourself?” he asked.
“Why don’t you?” I answered. He rested his hand in my path, and I slid over it. He frowned.
“I do look like myself, though,” he said. “I look like myself all the time.”
“So do I,” I said. He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I’ve been researching you. Did you know that? I’ve been reading, and I know what you are now. I know what you look like.”