1Written for the 2017 Northern Illinois Big 12 Literary Festival. Winner of Critic's Choice in Short Fiction. Enjoy!
Every morning, I let out my dogs and said hi to the shapeshifter over the fence.
Her name was Hedley. Most of the time, she looked like a beetle — if a beetle had four limbs, white hair, and eyes with pupils like a cat's. Or if a beetle wore stereo headphones and basketball shorts. I never saw her leave the porch, not even to prune her seven orange trees. She just clack, clack, clacked her way from her squat brick house, perched in a giant pink chair with her carapaced legs pulled to her chest, and rasped through a strange, clicking accent, "Greetings, Valencia."
I always answered, "Hey, Hedley." Sometimes, I waved. Sometimes, Hedley raised a three-clawed hand in return.
I couldn't pinpoint the time I knew something was wrong. Probably a Saturday, maybe a year since I'd moved in. I had let out the dogs and was nursing a coffee in front of the morning news. As always, they obsessed over wars, failures, tension between humans and the fantasy creatures we lived with. Human politicians insulting cryptids, blaming them for economic failures and water shortages and long lines at stores. Parades of protesters, despite the rain in Washington. A giant with four eyes and no arms used a cop car as a stepstool, shouting a slogan the news didn't want us to hear. Idly, I swirled the dregs of my coffee.
It was then, I think, that I realized I hadn't seen Hedley yet. When I leaned out my window, I saw her pink chair was empty. She couldn't be gone. She never left her house. Like always in Florida, the weather was too nice to stay in.
So I went to her door and knocked.
To my surprise, the door was open, swinging in with an ugly, rusted shriek. I could hear the news again — same channel, same report. It was dark. To the right was a pulsing blue glow.
"Hedley?" I called.
I knocked again before giving up and squeezing inside. The door was oddly narrow...and, well, I was fat.
"Hedley, it's Valencia. Your door's unlocked…"
As soon as I stepped in, I shivered — deep in the house, the air conditioning roared. The blue glow was the pause screen of a computer game, lighting the room enough to navigate its clutter. Cracked lawn flamingoes, tangles of yarn, an engine of dubious use. A torn sheet. A shattered vase. Huge gouges in the wood floor, one as wide as my wrist. A phone nearby.
I picked up the phone. Still unlocked, opened to a text conversation. There had been twenty new messages in the past five minutes — the other person was still typing.
My throat was tight. Squeezing the phone, I continued out of the office and into a dark living room.
And found myself watching a monster.
It filled the couch it sat in and overflowed into the living room; its solid, dark mass pushed up against the ceiling. Silver spines lined its back, glinting in the icy light of the TV. And it didn't move — only shook. Shivered. I could see some of the TV from where I stood, and the monster was watching it, the same news clip I had seen from my own safe home.
The protest. The giant, climbing onto the police car, giving his speech. Staggering back, slipping from his pedestal. Bleeding blue blood from a handful of holes.
The phone slipped from my hand and the monster whirled around.
I might have screamed. But I didn't get much out before the monster's form glitched — flickering, fluctuating, and shrinking in a mass of white hair and grey carapace until it was gone. In the place of the monster was Hedley, curled up on the sofa, blue eyes bright with tears.
"Valencia…"
Her shoulders shook. Just like the monster's had. She fumbled with a TV remote and switched it off, drowning the room in darkness and silence, but I could still see her glowing eyes. She blinked too much. "I — Valencia, I am — welcome — I mean — you are sorry — "
"Are you okay?" I asked.
Hedley went quiet.
"I'm going to open the windows. For light," I said. She didn't tell me not to, so I shuffled to the far wall and pulled back the dark curtains. When I turned back to her, she was still on the sofa with her chin on her knees, staring out at nothing. So I moved a pile of magazines and sat next to her. "Do you need to talk?"
She made a small clicking noise that didn't tell me anything, then bit her lips, dragging her white fangs over her grey skin. She said, "I don't know."
I asked, "Do you want me to leave?"
"No."
Her voice kept getting smaller and she curled tighter into herself. Once, she flickered like before and I panicked — I didn't need to see that thing again — but nothing happened. It was only Hedley, sinking into the understuffed cushions as if waiting to be swallowed up.
"I can't shapeshift," she said suddenly. I frowned.
"What do you mean?"
She jerked her hand. "Can't. Only enough to break my house."
I realized she was pointing to something — the remnants of her glass coffee table. A matching set to the splintered floors. "You did all that?" I asked, though I knew the answer. Hedley just nibbled her claws.
I tried to be helpful. "I think you're a good shapeshifter. Us humans can't do it at all."
"I can't fight," Hedley replied, her voice shaking. "They all say, 'Stand up, fight. Shoot back.' I — I can't. I am just…"
"Just you."
She said nothing. I looked at my hands.
"Hey," I said, "I get it. It's hard. Wanting to change something, when you...really can't. Having to watch from the sidelines."
"What do you do about it?" she asked.
I inhaled. If she had known what it meant, I would have told her that my mother crossed the Mexican border before cryptids were even uncovered. That I was five when my neighbors were dragged away, when my people stood on boxes and stared down the barrels of guns. I would have told her it was twenty years ago. And that fifty years from now, we'd have new people to hate.
"You wait," I said instead. "You think about other things. You live while you can. And you find people like you, and you wait."
She didn't move, didn't reply, only stared at her clawed feet. One claw twisted the hem of her shirt. Something tightened in my chest.
"Hey," I murmured, putting my hand on her thin shoulder. "I'll help you clean up. I don't know how to fix floors, but I do know some tricks to keep a house nice."
Again, silence.
"Hedley?"
Silence still. But she moved, and when she did, I didn't have time to react. She hugged me. It was strange — she was warm; I hadn't expected that. Her exoskeleton wasn't hard or sharp. Her arms didn't even wrap all the way around me.
She was just…Hedley. She didn't have to speak.
I stayed.