Changeling
A woman gave birth to a sip of water. No, that’s not right. A puddle gave birth to a child. No –
A woman gave birth to a little girl.
The girl was too small even to speak when she was turned to ice. No, when she was taken and it was the woman’s new daughter who was made of ice and then the little girl was no one’s daughter. She was somewhere else. She had no shadow.
The shadow stayed with her replacement as the new child melted away slowly against the heat of her mother’s breast.
Because it was forced to shrink continuously, the shadow came to realize the trick, but the mother – staying whole – did not.
She wasn’t negligent. She knew her baby didn’t make baby sounds. But she could hold it in her arms and watch its shadow be consumed by her own and remember the time before when it moved within her so very alive and never made a sound at all.
The shadow began to resent this, certain that real love notices. But who was the shadow to question such ordinary devotion?
At night, the shadow longed for its body.
A shadow always remembers its body. It dreams about the body while the body sleeps, while they sleep together – the shadow and the body – embracing like lovers. But the body feels nothing. The body dreams of other forms.
Maybe the little girl felt this longing or maybe she didn’t feel anything at all, but she was somewhere else.
One night, the woman sat in the dark, not a single bulb illuminated in the house. The last of the child melted away. It dripped from the fingers of one hand while the other rested upturned beneath her breast, cupped and ready to receive her love. Her love, which flashed moon-silver as it fell to the carpet below.
Without a body of any kind to keep it, the shadow fled. Like water crawling up the fabric of the woman’s shirt, it could expand its borders as it saw fit, dissolve over floorboards into every corner of the house.
When it crossed the woman’s shadow, it became lost for a moment, waiting to be led. But she was still. Asleep maybe. And so it stretched itself further until it passed through the crack beneath the door and flowed out into the night.
Outside, the shadow grew. And then it was everywhere. It was something else.
Saskia Nislow (they/she/he) is a queer writer, artist, and educator based in Kansas City, MO. Their writing has been published in The Write Launch, The Banshee Journal, and Arsenal Pulp Press’s forthcoming anthology, “Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry.” You can find more of their work at siramuks.com, and @dirtbagsappho on Twitter and Instagram.
