Solitary Creatures | Charlie Rogers & Jaime Gill
It’s not the first time I’ve seen myself on a MISSING poster. One version of myself, anyway, a face that never really belonged to me. The chalk-white skin, shock-red beard, deep green eyes—they were always borrowed. My new face, with its porcelain-perfect features, still feels foreign to me, just like this new black hair rippling to my shoulders.
I know the man taping up the poster. I watch him, studying his movements with a mourning so deep I feel it run down my spine, through my shins, and deep, deep down into the soil below.
Diego.
I have nobody to blame but myself.
There are rules. From the moment I could understand human speech, my mother drilled them into me—they’re not like you, and if you forget this, they’ll kill you. Or worse. Until I met Diego, I’d never been tempted to break any rule. I’ve cycled through nine bodies now, a new one every fourth year, and never once allowed myself to attach to a human. That’s the first rule.
The second is not to hang around after a change—too risky. I try to migrate at least a hundred miles for every new identity.
I shouldn’t still be in this city, let alone in Diego’s favorite park. I convinced myself I was stopping here to savor one last autumn afternoon—the new colors unleashed by the change of seasons— before heading south. A lie, of course. As soon as I saw Diego, the truth revealed itself.
I’m breaking Mother’s rules yet again, for one more moment in his long shadow. His face is leonine handsome, and that loose shirt hides a taut, elongated body… but I know better than most how meaningless surface details are. It’s what lives behind those cheekbones that drew me to him.
We met three summers ago, on the other side of this park. I’d lived decades avoiding humans, lurking in the undergrowth at the edges of their lives, but I found everything about them fascinating. I’d spent forty-five minutes imagining the life of the stranger who’d left behind a quarter-filled coffee cup on my park bench. But then Diego appeared, his face etched with consternation, as he taped a different poster to a tree. I waited until he was gone and approached it, studying the inscrutable expression of a tortoiseshell cat named Ralphie. Black on one side of her face, mottled brown on the other.
“Oh, sorry.” I was startled by his lilting voice behind me. “I wasn’t sneaking up on you. But I saw you looking and wondered if you’d seen her?”
I shook my head, profoundly wordless.
“She’s my neighbor’s,” he continued. “I’m just helping out…. We’re worried sick about her.”
That was the moment. I couldn’t fathom being so concerned about someone else’s house pet—it was as if he was speaking to me in a foreign tongue. A language of kindness, an empathy so all-embracing I later believed it might even be expansive enough to include the real me.
“I’m Patrick,” I said, wishing I’d chosen a better name for myself. Mother’s rules hissed at me—never volunteer information—but for the first time, I let myself ignore them.
Here and now, I’ve been staring, and Diego’s noticed. He strides towards me with such purpose that a sudden breathlessness overtakes me—does he somehow recognize me? I should be alarmed at the prospect of discovery, but I’m not. So many nights in our bed I lay still and sleepless, desperate to tell him the truth, or some version of it. I crafted whole monologues in my head, reworking my explanations, but never worked up the courage to say a word of them. The thought of disappointing him frightened me more than the knowledge I’d have to leave.
“Excuse me, Miss.” That last word stamps out hope like a boot on embers. Yet his voice is a forgotten song, a drumbeat calling me to a home that no longer exists.
He peels the top poster off his stack and hands it to me. “Have you seen this man?”
I still haven’t acclimated to this new body. Usually, the transition is easier—my biggest worry is the invention of a new life for myself. But it’s been twelve years since I’ve shifted into a female form, and I’d forgotten how much smaller I’d be. Diego towers over me now. My fingers brush his as I take the flyer—his touch electrifies me, same as it ever did.
I study my old face as if trying to remember where I might have seen it before, then look up into Diego’s eyes. A thousand volts surge, but now—for the first time—only in one direction. “I’m sorry, I don’t think so. What happened to him?”
The moment I hear my strange, soft voice ask the question, I know it’s a mistake.
“He’s my boyfriend.” Diego takes the seat next to mine. There are only inches between our arms now. They might as well be a universe. “He’s been missing for three days. He didn’t take any of his stuff, so I’m worried. This isn’t like him.”
When I was eight years old, Mother vanished. I was already assuming adult forms—changers mature faster than humans—and we were posing as brother and sister in Miami. One afternoon she took me to a parade and ditched me in the crowd. She’d warned me it would happen, but not when. I searched for her, of course, hours spent wandering through hordes of drunk revelers, hope leaking away like water from a basin. She was gone. That was that. Sometimes I wonder if she ever tries to check up on me, but she’d have no way of finding me again, and I wouldn’t recognize her even if she did.
I never—not once—thought about how that day might have felt for her. Diego and I once watched a nature documentary about a tigress who had abandoned her almost full-grown cub. Tigers are solitary creatures, just as my kind are meant to be. I ached to tell Diego the truth then, but I couldn’t think how to explain myself—Mother never taught me.
“That’s terrible.” That’s all I can think to say now. “I hope he turns up.”
The lie feels cruel. For a fleeting second there, I thought perhaps I could reach Diego again through this new body, but now I understand the stark impossibility. He used to look at me with hunger. Now it’s a kind of indifference—he has no interest in this new form. That was too much to ask.
Finally, I understand why we have these rules. It’s not just to evade detection, as I always believed. I wish it were.
It’s to avoid this.
I fold the poster in half, the crease running across my old mouth. “I’m Lyss, by the way.” Why am I telling him this? Am I still nursing some kind of hope?
“Diego.” He stands up again, but then he turns to me and some life sparks back into his dark, tired eyes. “Wait. Have we met before?”
He does recognize me. Somehow. But as understanding and forgiving as I know he is, he could never understand this. And I can’t confess that our three perfect years together were all a lie.
I’ve been a walking lie since the day I was born.
What’s one more?
“I don’t think so.” This untruth shouldn’t be any different but it is, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.
Diego stands and nods a sad-smiled goodbye to me before bustling off. I sigh. He’s as awkward as ever.
A breeze picks up and rains leaves around me, a riot of reds and yellows. I reach forward to catch one. A glossy chartreuse, shed from the ginkgo one bench over. They won’t have those trees where I’m going. The leaf appears so vibrantly alive, but that’s an illusion. It’s already dead.
I stand. Diego and his shadow are walking back home, and after watching him a few more seconds, I turn in the opposite direction and force my legs to move. The bus leaves soon.
Read by one of the authors, Charlie Rogers:
about the authors:
Charlie Rogers is a writer living in New York City. His stories have been Pushcart-nominated and featured in several publications including Bull, Permafrost, and Uncharted, as well as the anthologies Weird Weird West, Hope, and Alchemy.
Jaime Gill is a British-born writer living in Cambodia. He is a Pushcart-nominee and his stories have won a Bridport prize and been published in Trampset, Blue Earth, Orca, New Flash Fiction Review and others.
Charlie and Jaime are Trans-Pacific friends and collaborators, with shared interests in queer lives, writing, cinema, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. More at
www.charlierogerswrites.com and www.jaimegill.com.