The Shape of Desire Read Online Free Page A

and no easy way around it, so I have plenty of time to sit in my car and think. I don’t know much about Dante’s siblings—truth be told, I don’t know as much about Dante as I would like. It’s amazing how completely I have allowed him to dictate the parameters of our relationship. I accept what he tells me. I rarely push for more details. I never insist on proof that what he tells me is true.
    In the past fifteen years, I have never once seen him transmogrify into a different form. I have only his word for it that, when he leaves me,he is something else entirely—something that a sane person would never consider to be credible. There have been times when I entertained doubts, of course, as anyone would. But as the years have passed and his story has not varied, and what I have
experienced
of his life seemed to tally with what he has
told
me of his life, I have come to believe him. Mostly. With only a faint shadow of uncertainty now and then…
    I think it was meeting Christina and William ten years ago that really won me over. Because they all told the same tale, or variations on it, with no theatrics, no lurking twinkle, no indication that they were merely waiting for me to swear I believed them before they cried out, “Fooled you!” Of course, they all could have been subject to the same hallucinatory hysteria, victims of an insane parent who whispered to them from infancy that they were different, they were special, they closed their eyes at night and dreamed they were dogs and sheep and bears, but the dreams were real…
    And yet, when they discussed their habits of changing, how it felt and when it happened, they seemed merely to be discussing their lives. As my cousins and I might talk about how our skin reacts to a different moisturizer, how the hair on our legs grows thicker in the winter, maybe because we forget to shave. Dante and his siblings never seem to be trying to convince me of anything. They never seem to be pretending.
    Although they share a certain family resemblance, they’re very different, both in attitudes and shape-shifting rituals. By the time I met Christina and William, I had finally learned a few details about Dante’s own situation. During the first years of his life, he didn’t change forms very often—maybe for one or two days a month. He couldn’t remember the first time it had happened, which he assumed meant that he had been changing shapes since he was a baby. It was never scary; it was never strange. It just was.
    From the beginning, he had had little control over what animal he would become or when the transformation would occur. He had learnedto recognize the symptoms that preceded the event—the day before it happened, he would feel a buildup of pressure at the back of his head, and lights would begin flickering at the corners of his eyes. These signals proved vastly useful once he decoded them, because he made sure he was never sitting in a classroom or visiting a public space on the day he would become something else.
    He never described to me the exact mechanics of transformation, though he said the process tended to be quick—five or ten minutes at the most. When he was a child, he usually turned into a small animal, such as a cat or a rabbit. As he aged and grew, acquiring weight and muscle mass, he became somewhat larger creatures, like beavers, goats, deer, and foxes. Once he attained his full adult height, he said, he was never again a creature weighing less than fifty pounds. These days when he changed, he found himself to be a wolf, a collie, a mountain lion. Mostly, he said, he took on an animal shape that was suitable to his environment.
    Mostly.
    “So you might turn into a bear when you’re walking the streets of a major city?” I asked him one day.
    “I try not to be in an urban area when I think I’m going to change.”
    “Maybe you should. Maybe if you always stayed in town, you’d never turn into anything except a German shepherd or a Labrador