The Changeling's Fate

One: The Watcher

My first piece of fiction. Constructive criticism and feedback welcome. All images are available in the public domain. Enjoy

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A prickle between my shoulder blades has them drawing together, tight with tension, as I feel the persistent stare of a watcher for the fourth time today. Roughly shoving yet another treatise onto its place on the shelf, I take the opportunity to gaze around the stacks as I blindly reach toward my still-full library cart. I'm met with nothing but rows of aged books, empty of life, silent but for the quiet whirr of the building's air conditioning and the comfort of a distant impression of chatter and laughter from some other part of the building. The Linguistics Section of the stacks almost never sees attention from the students at Amelia Technical Institute, a low-to-middling technical school with a limited offering of liberal arts programs only the most desperate of students – including yours truly – pursue. Dismissing my sudden unease, I sigh and rehash the inner debate that's dogged my mind since enrolling in a graduate degree at Amelia less than a year ago.

Bad enough to get a Bachelor's in Classics, Alexandra. Why are you sinking your time into a useless degree, in Folklore of all things, when you could be getting a real job and paying off your damn loans? And at a technical school to boot! My lips twisted into a sour grimace as my mental voice comes out in a perfect approximation of my foster-mother, Judy. We weren't the closest during the time I spent in her care, never able to bond the way some of the other kids in her home did. But I sincerely believed she wished the best for me, and I returned the sentiment for her.

As a safe-haven baby dropped in the doorway of the small-town Louisa, Virginia, Fire Department, I spent plenty of my formative years moving from home to home until placed with Judy at the age of fourteen. Unlike the horror stories borne by many other kids in the system, my previous homes had never resulted in abuse or neglection – but there was still a film of malaise that covered those earlier memories, a knowledge that those years were plagued by feelings that should have been unknown at that young age. Dwelling on those memories always summoned back the near omnipresent sensation of un-belonging I had at the time, and the memories themselves faded together but for the constant feeling of caution, of wariness, my foster parents expressed towards me, and my reciprocal unease of them. All of it underlined by the recurring, conscious mandate to ­leave-now, leave-now-and-go-back, that popped up during the course of my daily life, despite not being able to articulate where "back" was.

I didn't express those feelings, or for sure I would've at best, ended up in the expensive chair of a Child Psychologist or at worst be placed into some specialized home. Nevertheless I ended up shuffled from home-to-home with greater frequency than even my misbehaving counterparts. Until Judy. At fourteen, I was pretty damn bitter about my lot, and when I arrived at her faded-yellow farmhouse in the outskirts of Louisa I could tell she held the same wariness for me as I did for her, and I braced myself for another rehoming. I was pretty much a huge bitch on arrival, not obliged to exert any effort into integrating into a household I would soon be leaving. But as a 75-year-old widow born during the last years of the Great Depression and left with the immense task of managing a dairy farm after the death of her husband some 10 years before, Judy took no quarter from me and straightened my shit out.

With a stiff upper lip towards whatever misgivings Judy had with me (as I'm sure she had them), she treated me the same as all her other charges. I spent my teenage years working in my off-time with other kids my age, repairing tired bits of her turn-of-the-century Victorian, milking cows, mucking out dairy stalls, even sorting and filing the paperwork generated by the farm. Allowances were made for those who wanted to spend their spare time bettering themselves through sports or study, anything which might "better your character" as Judy would say, but she strongly subscribed to the idea that idle hands were the devil's tools, and whenever I had a moment to sit around and stew in my existential angst I quickly found myself put to work. I started out hating it, begrudging every shovel full of cow shit I had to throw about, but I can no longer deny the method's success. Judy and I grew to tolerate, and to a limited extent, enjoy each other's company. Once I got into a love of reading, Judy lessened my share of the farm work, and ultimately, I put in enough effort at high school to earn a partial scholarship to Amelia Tech. In rare form, Judy gave me one of her sparse compliments, an admission of pride, until she learned I was to study the classics, an act which Judy begrudged, but eventually relented when I pointed out its ability to build towards more useful things, like law. But to then go on to get a Masters in Folklore at the same school, without even trying to get a job, or at least go for a more prestigious university and a more grounded degree? It was Codswallop to her mind.

In a way, I guess I understood. I didn't fully understand my own obsession with ancient mythologies and folklore. It started one day during one of those oppressing Virginia summers, when the sweltering heat hangs low and heavy around the earth, the humidity a stickiness that grabbed on to you and doesn't let go. I stood in Judy's attic, leaning against an old bookshelf and choking on the explosion of dust that filled the air after I fumbled a box of old knick-knacks Judy wanted stored. A heavy, leather-bound tome stored on the shelf caught my eye, its cracked and faded cover reminiscent of the brownish-red of dried blood. As I lifted the book from its place, more dust motes entered the air, flying about as if eager to join in the acrobatics of the dust I had already disturbed. I brushed my fingers across the faded gold lettering of the book's worn binding, revealing fanciful script proclaiming the book as Homer's Iliad. Intrigued for the first time in memory, I dragged the tome back downstairs, informed a bemused Judy that it had come from her attic, and devoured the epic in a couple of days.

I felt something click, then. A piece of a that puzzle I didn't know existed fell into place and filled me with a sense of completion, the act of reading wiping away the undercurrents of disbelief that had plagued my life. You belong to this, the book seemed to whisper, and this belongs to you. The Iliad was followed by the Odyssey, which was followed by multiple trips to the library to inspect and check out the collections on ancient Greek and Roman plays, literature, and mythology. And I didn't limit myself to the Greek or Roman pantheons, either – Egyptian, Norse, even ancient Irish mythos sucked me in, tempting me with that feeling of belonging, of purpose, becoming an addiction I near-constantly craved. My undergraduate studies took the edge off my need, and those years were some of the happiest and most social of my life – I made friends, went to parties, flirted and romanced the more tolerable males of the engineering department, and near seamlessly ingrained into a society that had thus-far proven elusive to me. When my degree neared completion and I stared fearfully into a future that looked as empty as my pre-college past, I panicked, and made a last-minute application to enter a master's degree in one of the only places still accepting: Amelia's smallest graduate program, folklore.

An abrupt and muffled cop pulls me from my musing with a returning sense of unease and I glance around sharply. The empty stacks have a more sinister air, now, looming tall and imposing, looking the way the forest must have seemed to Little Red Riding Hood – a monolithic entity, sentient but uncaring, waiting to swallow the unwary who dared enter. Signs of life still evade my gaze, and I feel my face scrunch into a frown. The sound was surely made by a person, and it was surely a cough. Dry, amusing, and perhaps a bit contemptuous, it was the cough you might make when someone says something ridiculously stupid, and you want to express your disdain while still feigning politeness. A "Bless your Heart" moment, as Judy would describe it.

A chill wracks through me, and, shivering, I turn quickly back to the shelf, eager to finish replacing the books on here and head to other, more populated sections of the library. Looking down at the title in my hand, I growl in frustration at the book's empty spot at the base of the binding where its callsign belongs, twisting my head sideways to read the blocky print of the title. A Midsummer Night's Dream. I chew on my lip, and glance up again, expecting to see Liza, the only other graduate student enrolled in Folklore, pop out from behind a stack with her quick laughter and sparkling eyes. Liza's obsessed with Fae Folklore, and Robin Goodfellow in particular, who according to her is, I quote, "a sexy beast of a fairy." With her behavior and appearance, I could almost swear she was a fairy herself, and the stalking, the cough, and placement of the book were just the sort of prank she'd find amusing.

The scene in front of me remains unchanged, no Liza appearing suddenly in a gale of laughter and "got-you's." I suck in a breath and think– I certainly didn't put this book in my cart, which is only meant to transport books headed for Linguistics, Psychology, or Social Work shelves. I had loaded the trolley myself and knew better than to have placed a book like that on it, especially one without a call sign. Shaking my head, I drop the book back onto the cart and make my way to the more populated sections of the library, rolling the cart forward with shoulders pushed back and spine held stiff as I do my best to ignore the continuing prickle of an unseen watcher who never takes his eyes off me.