#it may be the autism | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

pangur-and-grim · 2 months ago

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oh yay that's so nice! I think I hid it due to embarrassment, but I'll bring it back now:

CHAPTER ONE

Anna Stewart is changeling. Anna is not a human being.

In the first month of its life, the wrinkled infant produced by Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, with fists bunched and face red from crying, was taken from its bassinet and cradled in long, thin arms. If the Stewarts, sleeping in an adjacent bed, noticed anything, it would’ve been sleep-fogged relief at the sudden quiet. Birch-white hands left Anna in its place. Those same hands dressed it in clothing stripped from the infant. The pink rabbit onesie hung baggy on the changeling – perhaps the earliest indicator that human society would be a poor fit.

It did not cry. It did not complain. It simply stared with bright, alert eyes, and waited, its mouth puckered in ravenous anticipation.

The Stewarts did not notice the change, not at first, although within the week Mrs. Stewart had switched to formula.

And how could they notice? The changeling’s appearance had been shaped for them. Its teeth filed, its skin smoothed, its limbs condensed into uselessness. Throughout the years as it grew, its form strained at these boundaries, aching for expression, but the cocoon of humanity remained rigid about it. The changeling stayed a Stewart.

It grew up. It went to high school. It got into none of the colleges that Mrs. Stewart helped it apply to. It lost multiple jobs in a row, due to some inexact quality that it could not correct in itself, but that made dogs bark and humans curl their lip. It turned 22, with no money, and no driver’s licence, having failed to gain distance from its childhood bedroom.

And now it woke up.

Mrs. Stewart had friends over. Their high-pitched laughter pierced the morning quiet and invaded the warm nest of it bedding. It tried, futilely, to submerge back into dreaming, but another laugh sounded – a braying AHHhahahaha!

It gave up and kicked its way out of twisted blankets and pillows.

The changeling staggered to the bathroom to perform it morning routines. It practiced a smile, showing only the upper teeth, not the lower. Then it walked out, wishing only to slip past the crowd, and grab whatever food it could from the kitchen counter.

Immediate failure – its carefully lowered foot drew a creak from the top step, and the humans turned as one. It froze, pinned like an insect by their stares.

“What is that on your face?” called Mrs. Stewart, too loudly. As though it did not descend the stairs each day slathered in lotion. Its delicate skin, better suited for the humidity of the Other World, did not agree with indoor heating.

“Moisturizer. You know this,” it said, in its own performance. “I do this every winter.” It scanned the faces of the guests, to see how they’d take that information – that its mother had pretended not to know! That Mrs. Stewart had taken a stance against her own (supposed) child!

“Might want to rub it in,” said one of the women, and another laughed.

“You should rub it in,” said Mrs. Stewart. “Really, Anna”

The guests, gathered around a coffee table in an array of plush seating, exchanged glances with wrinkled foreheads and twitching lips. With a sigh, it plodded back up the stairs. The lotion leant more moisture if it packed on thick and left to sit – and why not do so, in its own house?

The betrayal also stung. All it had was its mother.

Mr. Stewart was not a factor.

He was, after all, the reason for its presence here. A deal made, a child promised – and wouldn’t you know, the cheap patch of land he had purchased churned out a fascinating amount of oil.

But he hadn’t been able to live with the child that had supplanted his own. In a moment of drunken anger (directed not toward the changeling, but at her fled spouse) Mrs. Stewart had ranted.

“He couldn’t stop talking about your ‘black bird eyes,’ or how you never smile, or how you can’t put on weight” – pausing, Mrs. Stewarts’ eyes had glinted with a malice that had it bracing its shoulders – “he even suggested giving you up for adoption. Can you imagine? His own flesh and blood?”

Except that it wasn’t his flesh and blood.

It had simply done its best approximation of a smile, nodded vigorously between her exclamations, and said, “What a bastard!” which seemed to satisfy, or at least amuse her.

It never had the courage to ask if her feelings would change, if a link of blood did not, in fact, connect them. If it were simply a child raised by a mother, and not one born from her. If it would still, in that case, be an acceptable burden, or if she would snarl at all her wasted energy and finally cast it off.

The changeling lay in bed with these thoughts. A tear slid down its cheek and was absorbed into its thick coating of lotion.

“You are spiralling,” it said to itself, sternly. “You are self-indulging in negativity.” Likely exacerbated by its empty stomach. It always ate with a speed that hinged on desperation, though this translated not to fat, but to wiry muscles that wrapped its arms and legs. This might grant grace to another, but the changeling had the jerky, sudden movements of a lizard.

It rubbed at eyes itchy with tears. Venturing downstairs in this state was not an option. Instead, it dressed for the outside world (wiping its face clean, and combing its long, lank hair) and opened its bedroom window. It stepped out onto the branches of a hybrid poplar, whose growth it had encouraged for this exact purpose. The young tree bowed under its weight, but the changeling whispered encouragement, and it held.

In summer, it grew sunflowers along this side of the house. They obscured windows with their yellow petals and granted privacy for its excursions. By early winter, these blackened and drooped and rotted. The changeling moved with great care, ducking beneath the corpses of sunflowers to avoid attracting gazes from the living room. Easily done; the guests seemed consumed by one another, enraptured by each other’s wit and company. Which baffled it, as on the few occasions it had joined them, when it was younger and smaller and possibly cuter, they had proved to be such dull conversationalists that it had bit the inside of its cheek to blood, and very nearly been moved to rage.

Now it scampered down the curve of the ravine that its family home sat at the edge of. The frost that coated their shorn grass melted under the warmth of its bare feet. If it had left through the front door, Mrs. Stewart would have yelled at it to wear shoes, and almost certainly socks as well.

The trees greeted the changeling as they always did; with sways and creaks, and releases of chemicals that teased the bare skin of its face and hands. It replied, as it always did, with boundless affection.

“I love you, I love you,” it said, ducking beneath outstretched branches, and bounding over roots. “Thank you, thank you!”

Slipping into the other world could be done in any forest, but it was particularly easy in the changeling’s ravine. All one must do is ask the trees, please, please can you shudder a hole in reality through which I might slip like a rabbit disappearing into its labyrinthian warren, and the trees say “okay!” and do just that. Ask this of them a hundred times, and then a thousand, and they will intuit your forward progress, and shiver up a hole before a request can leave your throat.

And sometimes, horribly, if a tree is particularly friendly and obliging, they’ll extend that favour to anyone who passes.

This is what it found on that morning.

It shrugged happily through a ripple in space and felt the cold winter slip away, the only evidence of it being the frost-nipped redness of its fingers and toes. It was about to merrily skip to its planted orchard, for a morning feast of its own succulent harvest, when it saw the footprints.

Or boot prints, rather, as these sole-blind fools had constrained themselves with footwear.

“Who the fuck…?” It said, and then put a finger to its mouth to gnaw at, anxiously. Don’t Spiral, Anna!

Most likely, the idiot tree that had opened the way for these intruders would repeat its trick if they wandered back along the same path. But would they think to? To duck under the same branch, touch a hand on the same trunk, all of them at once? For the changeling could see three trails of disturbance.

Boot prints pushed deep into the soft soil, advertising the passage of someone large and heavy. And there, a patch of moss scraped at by a hand. The height of the finger rakes implied someone smaller in statue. And the third – oh, it did not like the third at all. The third left a massacre in their wake, broken branches, plucked leaves, thrown stones, kicks and scores in the earth. Someone deeply under-stimulated, certainly, but also someone who failed to heed or appreciate the chemical screams of vegetation.

It sighed. If this third individual caused sufficient offence, the trees might turn peevish and refuse to open the way back, even if they perfectly retraced their steps. This left the trio doomed to their fate.

“Curse my gentle nature,” it said, and growled out its annoyance, before going through the breathing exercises prescribed by its therapist. It could never tell if they actually did anything physiologically, or if they simply provided a distraction, but regardless, it worked to soothe them at least one out of every three times.

That done, it sighed in a performance that the trees lacked the capacity to appreciate, and started off down the very obvious, very messy trail, to save three unconsenting humans from getting trapped in a better world.

#I'm going to attempt to finish this by May. and it will continue to be a very poorly disguised metaphor for autism

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