I was born with years on my back, a child of no promises. Like none of my kind, was sired with a yen for transformations, for folding into myself, re-cocooning to digest and mutate the basics of size and shape, so when I split and burst from myself I was another creature or person entirely. Some of my kind labeled it a gift, most a curse, consensus landing on it being a gift-curse, the best and worst of all magical habits wrapped into a smallish man bereft of family. None could remember my mother, even fewer my father (though what would that be—fewer than none? A deficit: from then on, from the day they found me, tossed and scratched from head to toe, tangled in briars, whatever would be taken from me through the natural course of loss would describe the shape of a father in the negative). Since I was without bloodline, I was freer than the others, less beholden to a shape. I could choose what I was or could be, erase this face, remold it, disguise the past in the most intimate places, limbs, hands, trunk, buttocks, feet. It wasn’t long before they found a use for me, brought requests for resurrection, a beloved mother or sister or grandparent, a son or daughter taken early by disease or accident. They would carry their grief to me across the privacy of years lived and lost, both ways endured, and ask: can you give me a moment again with my person? They would offer money, privileges, and it was understood I should decline these, since my vocation was sacred, to be protected from the vagaries of being lost to a profession, a gift given through me to people who strained to understand me, inscrutable as I was, strange and eldritch to their conventions. But I was one who could change his shape by merely wishing, so they came for me.
Came for me. Not quite. Came for who they could bring me, kneeling at the edge of my circle etched with a finger in dust. Technique simple: they would walk to stand at the edge of my clearing, a meadow deadened by drought, wait until I gestured them over. They would come with the image and name of a loved one in mind, behind eyes, the very eyes that outlasted the visage of the person, to welcome sight of all the little forms of life that surpassed them, merely existing where they didn’t. I would disrobe from my tatters, naked to the waist, invite a laying on of hands, the face, always the face, best if both hands were pressed thumb to thumb, palms covering mouth and chin and nose, straightened fingers cowling eyes and forehead. Then not to speak aloud the name: to think it. Say it aloud in mind and memory, and call back from a drift between both an appearance, a shape, however they sought best to remember it, young and strong and healthy, or sickly but tender on a death bed. That. That would be enough, subtle instance of transmission. Memory would pass from hands through face, into a receptive molten impulse within me. From there, hands released from face back to the person who’d brought them to me, I’d take crosslegged to the dust and extend an arm far as it could reach, pointer finger extended as well, sketch a circle around my pre-mutated incarnation, neat and evenly as a compass might, pivoting from a rooted center, then wait.
Whoever came bringing a grief knew: their contribution to the ritual was to render themselves scarce, to leave their memory within me. They were to return home and speak nothing of it to their family. Night was needed, a season all its own. Dark being a natural conjugator of forms, trees and boulders and animals expanding beyond their silhouettes to meld with the general lightlessness and operate as a single forest, sounds and smells and tactile hauntings beneath stars and clouds, moon whittling its shape according to the whims of the month. I would curl over myself, hunched. Would bury my head in my lap, hands cupped behind my neck. Bones would soften, hair fall out and regrow. Cartilage would give beneath perusing forces, remolded to novel resemblances. Breasts would swell, hips widen, genitals pucker, submerge, invaginate to reimagine a long-lost native sex. Privacy was needed, no eyes watching.
Early in my services to supplicants from the surrounding regions, there were some who out of suspicion or curiosity doubled back after making a show of leaving, who hid at the edge of the clearing and waited to observe how the changes were made. It was a mystery to all how a runt such as myself could metamorphose at will, reading a wish in their minds. Theories had circulated among disbelievers (what shapeshifter doesn’t sport their share of skeptics eager to discredit them?—a compliment to the strength of their craft, that it should attract such criticism and envy), so more and more the grievers returning from their visitations with me were challenged in their accounts of what they’d seen, who’d they’d met after they’d touched the shapeshifter’s face then according to his instruction left to walk a fair ways from his designated transformation ground, to wait an evening and a morning, before returning to the same dusty meadow the following afternoon. Soon the sum total of doubters outnumbered the true believers, until the latter, bowing to the strength of arguments counter to what they claimed they had witnessed, had perhaps begun to doubt a little what they had seen and experienced. Proof was needed more to relieve the believers, for they were much pressed upon. So spies were sent to crouch among the brush at the meadow’s edge to watch me. They sent a representative to play the part of a griever, a skinny girl who had lost her mother during the labor to birth her. No direct memory, no image of her mother, since she’d been an infant, so new to the world as to be barely conscious. But over the years, as she grew, whenever she would ask after her mother, family members and friends would describe her, so the young woman came to form a distinct picture and sense of this mother she killed in the process of vacating a womb. Even this was a provocation on the part of the doubters. Let’s see, they said. Let’s present the flesh-oracle with a real challenge. A be-grieved memory not formed from first-hand knowledge but one cobbled together through hearsay and scattered recollection. Though the girl had a vision of her mother in her mind, one nursed by other people’s descriptions, many of the doubters knew the woman personally, could remember her, so figured if the shapeshifter were to assume her form, they would gauge just how accurately that had been accomplished. Would the outcome at all resemble the actual woman? Or would it resemble a variation the girl carried in her mind?
I was aware, of course. I could feel their eyes on me. I could sense it, really, as soon as the girl approached, carefully, pretending aloneness. But far be it from me to challenge a girl who’d been conscripted to disprove my craft and talents. Nothing would be learned. I played along, stood, presented myself, invited the girl to press her hands over my face, lips, nose, eyes. Her fingers trembled as she did so. A wisp of a woman passed between us, but also the root origins of each of that briefest woman’s features, the people who had sat with the girl over the years to describe this or that part of her lost mother. And since many of those people were nearby, hidden in briars and blending with tree-shade, I could feel them where they crouched, half-embedded in the cherished mental dream of a mother, half-waiting to scrutinize the changes that would or wouldn’t overcome me. Removing her hands, the girl nervously lowered her eyes. She thanked me and, knowing what was next required of her, turned and left. Once she was out of view I sat down as I always did, crosslegged, to sketch with an extended finger a circle in the dust around me. Hunching over myself, I gave myself over to the involuntary labors of self-sculpting. A long evening of watching and waiting followed, eyes in the underbrush fixed on the silent figure of someone passing through a series of middle-forms. A long night, boring. The doubters, being doubters, became impatient, eager to catch me out as a liar and defame me, so decided to approach, startle me in my purported fakery. From the dark of the forest they walked as a group, but carefully, carrying torches, oil-soaked rags wrapped around the ends of sticks and lit. I cannot describe what they saw. Being a half-ling creature when they approached, part man, part memory, a swarm of intermediary resemblances, I was blind and unconscious to what I was. Interrupt a shifter mid-change, one should be prepared to come upon a monster, disfigured by their own selfish curiosity. Terrified. Some fixed where they stood. Others running off like children. My face, I imagine, a deformed piling-on of their own features, mixed with those of a hypothetical mother their emissary girl had brought to me.
After that fright, none again bothered or doubted me. Fearing me, they corroborated my powers of necromancy. I was left alone, respected as a figure of great sacrifice and suffering. Inspired by the encounter, a saying was coined and circulated among the people of the mountains and forests and surrounding valleys: “Look not directly at changes.” Implying what? And if one should be so foolish as to do so, what might become of them? “Look not directly at changes.” For hungry as the grave, they’ll devour a person.
Fear. Fear and fright. This was common. Those who believed enough to bring a grief to me often found themselves surprised by their own response to who stood in the clearing the next afternoon, waiting for them. It’s one thing to imagine a loved one, carry them through thoughts and dreams, another thing entirely to stand before that person resurrected in the flesh. Intense dissonance to such confrontations: knowing this is not the person, is but me in assumed form, but there, also, exact in every feature as they remember, the very proof of person. Fear would only be natural, then, once that subsides, their safety secure, that I would not step toward them or hurt them, sudden surges of strong emotion, a lifetime of grief all at once. Typical then for them to lose the strength of their legs and fall, weeping without purpose, or to run to embrace me, grief overpowering hesitation or even terror. I was just the image, of course, not the person. I did have access to the life, the shared experiences, could not speak as they had, nor laugh or console as they would. It was essential to my craft when holding an embrace to keep quiet. To bear counterpoint to their emotion with calmness. For it was a spell of sorts they were under and to reveal the many ways I diverged from who I resembled would be to risk breaking it: maintaining neutrality and silence during such exchanges was a kindness. To have damaged the encounter, asserting my own individuality, would have cheapened the emotion or somehow disproven it (how to disprove grief?—a strange question, but worth asking; for soon as such a thing is considered, it seems possible). Myriad are the reactions I’ve inspired, embodying these memories people have transfused into me. But after a time each settle into the same, a melancholy and a wistfulness, when the end of the afternoon is signaled, the shadows of trees having angled along the ground until they’ve reached me and my circle. They will have known to expect it from the testimonies of others who once visited: that near the end of a day together, I will lift an arm and point the way back, away from the meadow, through the forest, to leave from whence they came. Knowing: if they refuse, if they stay, they risk having the memory of their loved one taken from them, minds wiped clean. Such people they will have heard of and maybe met, sad cases who for the rest of their days strain to remember what inspires in them such persistent feelings of loneliness. This being the fate of those who couldn’t leave and insisted on staying: to live in grief without any recollection of a loved one. A horrible fate, none would choose it.
Once a woman made her way to me in secret, I remember her still. None of the details of her life needed to be divulged or explained, for these passed into me during her lay-on of hands. A vision of a young man, late in his teens, appeared in my mind. Who could this be, I asked myself, but the vision dragged behind it a feeling, a kind of vapor trail. The vapor wrapped around the vision within me and settled into awareness: this was her husband, who he had been upon her first making his acquaintance. He had lived one village over and had been hired to help her father carry stones and build a home, and after the home’s walls were completed, gathered rushes to lay out for drying and binding, to thatch a roof. He was a beautiful boy and when her father wasn’t looking, snuck glances her way. And why this? Why would she miss this boy, if she was a grown woman now, middle in years, decades in marriage to the man the boy became? I wasn’t certain until she returned the following afternoon, to meet me where I stood waiting, a boy brown of eyes and lanky. She wept in a way wholly unlike any other griever who’d fell at my feet before, thrown arms around me. A desperation to it, directed against herself. As if it wasn’t the boy she was missing, but herself. To be young again? I tested that feeling, but no, it wasn’t what she was wanting. Not a matter of wanting to be someone she had once been, or someone else: merely to no longer be who she’d become, without relief provided by assuming some other form. For she was this woman her husband no longer cherished much less cared to notice, a nuisance and a burden. Here was the boy who saw her and loved her, and not as she had once been, but as she was, thicker of waist, features marked with stress lines and wrinkles. End of that afternoon, shadows of trees reaching us at an angle along the ground, when she turned and left, catching smaller and smaller sights of me over her shoulder, I was fearful of what would become of her. Through her touch I knew: days later people walking along the edges of a pond would notice the pale island of a body floating facedown among the water. This she brought to me in confidence, a boy who would devolve back into the shape of me, a neutral stranger, the following morning. After she was found, I was certain her husband would visit, ask me to become her. But sadly, that didn’t happen. Making her own heartache all the more painful, and honest.
What others? Many brought themselves, asked me to conjure younger, more confident or innocent versions of who they once were. These would inspire odd displays of conviviality, old men mentoring their teenage selves, rough-housing or even challenging them to feats of strength or contests of wit. They’d drag me to ground and force me to wrestle, or disclose their regrets to me in vivid detail, insisting I choose my path through their life differently. These were awkward encounters, for it seemed they foisted upon me sole responsibility for relieving them of their grief, by undoing it. Not possible, not even preferable, since the regrets they carried prompted them to seek me out, these aggressive fathers of boys they could no longer be.
Boys, girls long ago immolated by time's slow burn. Infants stillborn, fetuses miscarried. The children barren mothers or fathers couldn’t sire and gift with being. Ancestors lost to the generations, either in the past or from an un-arrived future. Friends no longer friends, lovers estranged, irreconcilable, even loves unreciprocated. People of the valleys and mountains and forests brought me into versions of grief I couldn’t have imagined until I was called forth from a memory, to embody them. Some veered me into forms beyond the human, so after the labors of transformation I found myself on all fours, a cat or dog, a beloved pet recently expired, or flapping from the ground with wings, a songbird. The forms I was called to assume were as varied as the heart’s affections, when they’re threaded through death and loss, and tied up into the most steadfast knots. Difficult to undo, grief, with only one pair of hands and one life, not two or many. Only I was gifted with such protean pliability: when they touched me, I received their heaviest parts and of these shaped a figure. Should it be a beast or a child, a favorite toy or a home-place, my body answered to the memory and transformed itself. Once, touched by a supplicant once a shepherd, I found myself changed into a miniature version of a hillside he had minded as a boy alongside his father. Standing over me, teary-eyed, sentimental, he could spy even more miniature versions of sheep he’d once tended, lowering head to graze from my grasses.
