“Do you now?” I drawled. His hands were warm under my belly and I was sleepy from the milk and the heat. He moved me, set me down. Paper rasped beneath me.
“You look like that,” he whispered. The page he’d set me upon featured a watercolor of a child with butterfly wings and fat, smiling cheeks. She was sitting on a red and white toadstool.
“Aha,” I said, curling into coils. “Aren’t you clever.”
“You can show me,” he said. “I’m a safe person for you to show. I promise.”
He traced my coils with a fingertip, and I curled them tight-tight-tighter, until I was no bigger than the toadstool in the drawing. But I couldn’t make my snake-self smaller than his fingertip.
*
“Come inside,” he said.
It had been two years. I had stayed away long enough to forget the reasons I was staying away. My memory is a long one, but he had been putting out bread, and milk, and salt, and the smell of them was so strong, and I was so hungry, and the hunger made me forget. And my belly still ached where his blood had seared me.
I was bound. And I am what I am. So I followed.
“I have something to show you,” he said. “It’s the culmination of my work.” He led me into his childhood bedroom—the same desk was there, but instead of jars, it was taken up by a large glass tank and an elaborate maze. I was a chinchilla that day, too big for the maze, the right size for the tank. I perched on his hand and nibbled at a bread crust and looked with noctilucent green eyes.
“Watch,” he said, and he reached into the tank with the hand that wasn’t holding me. When he opened his palm in front of my eyes, a large brown cockroach straddled his life line, its antennae waving.
“You’re still . . . collecting?” I asked, watching the cockroach smell the air. She almost certainly smelled me. Chinchilla-me, and the real me underneath.
“Oh, yes,” he replied. “Well. Yes and no. This is part of my research.”
The cockroach took a tentative step forward. Peter tipped his hand toward the maze, and the roach fell in.
“Watch,” Peter said again, moving me to his shoulder. I looked into his ear—he’d started growing a few hairs in there.
“You’re so strange,” I said, and his cheek plumped as he grinned.
“Watch,” he whispered a final time, so I watched.
He picked up a little cube from the corner of the desk and began twiddling his thumbs over the top of it. As he did, the cockroach spun in a slow, deliberate circle. “Do you see?” he said, and I didn’t see, so he showed me. He slid his thumbs across the top of the cube, and the cockroach navigated the maze with all the speed and accuracy of—
“A robot?” I asked. It was a word I’d heard several times from several people over the years I’d been gone; a word the boy Peter had used when he whispered to me about his secrets and dreams.
“Not quite,” he said, swallowing a laugh.
“I don’t understand.” I finished my bread and licked my fingers clean.
“I installed receivers in her rear brain,” he said. “I can control where she goes.” He turned and looked at me, so close that he was mostly eye. “How many brains do you have?”
I started to jump from his shoulder, but his hand was there in my way. “I’d like to go now,” I said.
“Why? Did I say something wrong?”
His hand was in my way, no matter where I turned. Unless I turned toward his face, and then his mouth loomed close, too close. “I just . . . I need to go,” I said. “Please let me go.”
“Tell me why,” he demanded. “I can’t fix it if I don’t know what I did.”
I turned into the woman, making myself too heavy for his shoulder to support. He fell backward and I leaped up, standing over him. “You turned that creature into a toy,” I said.
“So what?” he asked, still sitting on the floor, staring up at me with his mouth half open. Staring at my skin. “How is that different from what you do?” I didn’t know how to answer, and he took my silence as an answer. “That’s right,” he said, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I’ve been reading. All these years. I know what your kind does. You turn people into toys, don’t you? Why is that better than me steering a stupid bug around?”
I took a step away from him, toward the window. It was closed, but I could open it with my human hands and then jump out of it as a rabbit or a sparrow. “It’s different,” I said. “I don’t turn humans into toys. I just let them do what they already wanted to do. You’re—you don’t even know what you are!” My voice was shaking. I rested a hand on the windowsill and then flinched away as my skin sizzled. I looked down—the sill was an inch deep with iron shavings.
“What am I, then?” He stood up and moved toward me. “What am I?”
I changed, a different form with every breath. Him as a little boy. Him on the cusp of manhood. Him on the night of his father’s funeral. Him now. “You claim to be you,” I spat. “Just you. But what are you? Are you a fat little boy whose parents don’t love him enough to stop fighting? Or are you a youth who can’t escape home? Or are you a man whose father died before you could make him love you—”
I was still in his shape, speaking with his voice, when he slapped me hard across the mouth, knocking me-him to the floor. My head struck the corner of his desk, rattling the maze and the roach inside it, and I saw stars, and I lost control.
I lost control.
“Oh my god,” he whispered. I blinked hard and realized my mistake.
I was me.
No disguises, no glamours, no fur or scales or feathers. Just me. Nothing like the little watercolor girl sitting on the toadstool. Wings, yes, but not like a butterfly’s wings at all. More like . . . leaves, I suppose. Like leaves when the beetles have been at them, but beautiful. Fine-veined and translucent and shimmering even in the low light of his house. Strong, supple, quick. Flashing.
I am thankful for the pain that brightened the inside of my head in the moments after I fell, because it dampens the memory. His hand on the back of my neck. His knee at the base of my spine. His fists at the place where my wings met my shoulders.
The noise they made when he tore them off.
I tried to change my shape to protect myself. When I wasn’t in my true form, my wings were hidden, and in that terrible moment when his weight was on top of me and the tearing hadn’t begun I thought that maybe I could escape by shifting. I went back to the woman-shape, because it was what I had most recently been before I was him, and it was all wrong, and it hurt, and my wings hurt—
And then he was laughing.
“I didn’t think,” he said, panting with exertion, “it would be so easy.”
I screamed.
“They’re beautiful,” he said. He shook my wings—my beautiful, strong wings—and braced a hand on the desk to pull himself to his feet.
I screamed.
“Wow,” he breathed, running his fingertips over the delicate frills at the top of one wing. “Just . . . wow.”
I screamed.
*
He put my wings into a cabinet with an iron door, and he locked the iron door and wore the iron key around his throat.