Shapeshifter

by Bethany Brengan

At first, he thought he was turning

into a werewolf. He ran through

the fields of corn at night, fueled

by shame and delight, howling

even when the sky was empty.

“That’s a coyot’,”

his father said. “Look how dainty

the tracks are. When you see

a wolf print, your stomach

thinks you escaped something.”

The boy was so confused he spent

the next night as an owl

and couldn’t shift back

when morning came.

His mother gasped when

she saw him, sitting

in the maple tree, broad daylight.

“A bad sign,” she sobbed

to the sheriff’s receptionist,

begging they find her boy.

It took him two nights to change

back (he came so close to eating

a shrew). He told his folks that

he’d gotten turned around

in the woods, trailing a coyote.

Almost true, but for a month

his mother asked unsubtle

questions about drugs. His father,

however, cocked his head

toward the trees and mumbled,

as if not to be heard: “Your Grandma

always said you gotta watch out

for these woods; once they mark

a body, they never let him go.

People think it’s the city

that’s dangerous. But ’least if you die there,

someone will eventually find something

to bury.” The boy didn’t shift into anything

for a long time after that. Then second

semester at his out-of-state college,

he dreamt of green sunlight, filtering

down, down, through the pond

deep in the northside of the wood,

and he woke up as a box turtle.

This was more embarrassing

than the accent he was smothering

under a pillow of books or the phrases

and ideologies he mimicked in the shower

until they sounded casual enough

to be repeated in class, mistaken as his own.

Once he got caught under an arch

of remnant oaks near the library. Ours, ours,

ours, pounded in his ears, even as he ran,

even as he forced his bones to stay

in the shape he’d poured.

Bethany F. Brengan is a freelance writer and editor with a contradictory love of both cats and birds. She grew up in Kentucky and now lives in the US Pacific Northwest. She writes about books, comics, disability, and writing. She also writes a lot of poetry. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in The Comstock Review, Seaside Gothic, NewMyths.Com, and Abyss & Apex. She can be found at https://medium.com/@bethanybrengan.