Shapeshifter
Patience Mackarness
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Minette turns squirrel and streaks up the trunk of a young oak tree, pausing on a branch twelve feet from the ground. Her long fur is splotched like sunlight, her ears tawnily tufted, her golden eyes rimmed mascara-black. There are Siberian tree-cats in her ancestry, and it shows.
Minette turns brown bear and descends tail-first, paw over paw. She often uses this skill to impress her humans, who laugh and applaud. They’re absent now, the cottage is shuttered, but it’s good to keep in practice.
Minette turns hare and bounds over the field, skimming wet grass, to the farm where her meals are left on a dish by the back door. The farm cats won’t let her inside, but she doesn’t care. The servings are adequate if supplemented with warm fresh fieldmouse. The cottage is her place, shuttered or not, empty or not. On wet days, she curls up in the woodshed.
Tonight, in the dark of the moon, she’s asleep on a sack when a vehicle stops in the drive. Minette goes out to check if it’s her humans returned, but the voices are wrong, low and rumbly. Wisps of tobacco smoke drift up the garden. A banging begins, a splintering of wood, muffled cursing.
Minette turns pipistrelle bat, dive-bombs the tallest man’s head as he crowbars a shutter. He swears loudly and is hushed by the others. Another man swings a hammer and looses a musical tinkle of glass. Minette turns viper and shoots past their feet, an arrowing flash in the torchbeam. The man with the hammer jumps straight up in the air, lands on his ankle, curses as it twists.
Both shutters are off now. The smallest man climbs on the sill, and reaches between glass-shards to turn the catch. The window swings open. All three men climb in, the injured one grunting in pain, and drop to the livingroom floor. Minette follows, noiseless.
The room where she’s often stretched on the rug, stared gold-eyed into the flames of a log fire, lain purring on friendly knees, now smells of spiders and damp. Cupboards are open, objects scattered on the floor.
Minette turns fire salamander. Not a small black-and-yellow newt like the ones in the garden, but a three-metre beast that crouches on the cold hearth, blinking eyes of living flame. She gives a hissing roar, her breath like the clash of live coals.
The torch drops and smashes. Blood smears the window-shards as the men tumble out, fall on the grass screaming and sobbing, stagger to their van, and screech away into the night.
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Dedication
For Minette.
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Patience Mackarness lives and writes in Brittany, in a cottage that sometimes attracts burglars, with a cat who is sadly not a shapeshifter. Her work has appeared in JMWW, Lost Balloon, Lunch Ticket, Citron Review, Flash Flood, and elsewhere.
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Posted in Boudin April '24 Pet and tagged in #boudin, #fiction