The Shape of Desire Read Online Free Page B

retriever.”
    He had not answered that. I filed the suggestion away as something to mention again if the time ever seemed right.
    Something else happened as he grew older: His periods in animal form became longer and longer, until he was only human about half the time—and then even less. These days, he’s in the shape of a man only about one week out of every month. I live in absolute terror of the day he changes into another creature and never changes back.
    “That won’t happen,” he once told me.
    “But how do you know?”
    He’d laughed. “Because I’ll be dead before then.”
    “What?”
    He’d shrugged and given the most minimal answer, clearly sorry he’d brought it up. “Shape-shifters tend not to live very long lives. Too much wear and tear on the body, maybe. Or too much time in the form of animals that die much sooner than humans do. If I spend half a month as a collie, well, that’s a much bigger percentage of a dog’s life than it is of a man’s life. It ages me.”
    “Then don’t be a dog anymore,” I said urgently. “Be a—Be a giant sea tortoise! They live for centuries! Slow down the process. Reverse it!”
    I hadn’t been kidding, but he’d laughed. “You have no reason to believe you’ll live any longer than I will,” he teased. “You could go in a car accident—or a plane crash. You could get cancer or meningitis. A gas leak could cause your house to blow up. Anything could—”
    “I get the point! I could die! But the
probability
is that I will live to eighty or so. And you’re telling me that your probability is significantly less—”
    He’d shrugged again. “I’m saying I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about it. I can change my shape but I can’t change my destiny. I’m at peace with whatever happens.”
    I wasn’t, of course. I fretted about that conversation for days, for weeks, until I finally realized that my anxiety did nothing but irritate him and exhaust me. It was clear I couldn’t change him; I couldn’t even change myself.
    Christina and William, though born to the same set of parents, seem to be governed by an entirely different set of rules. William, who is five years younger than Dante, has always been animal more often than he’s been human, and he’s never been anything except a dog or a wolf. He claims to be able to decide when to shift between states, which raises the very interesting question of why he is so rarely human. There is apermanent wildness to his face that always reminds me of
new Dante
. If you didn’t know William was a shape-shifter, you’d think he was one of those children raised by feral animals in a cave somewhere, not rescued by man until he was ten or twelve years old. You get the sense that he has learned to mimic human behaviors but that they will never be instinctive to him. He left home when he was fifteen, and it is rare, these days, that his siblings know exactly where he is.
    By contrast, Christina is the most normal of the three. Younger than William by three years, she’s always human, except for two or three days a month; those days are usually associated with her menstrual cycle. According to her, if the need is great enough, she can resist changing, even when her body longs for transmogrification. Like Dante, she experiences useful symptoms that let her know alteration is imminent. She can make sure she’s locked in her house, away from shocked strangers and prying eyes, when she allows the metamorphosis to take her. The shapes she takes are varied, though she has never been explicit about them, at least not with me.
    Their mother had been a shape-shifter, too, more like Christina than William and, from what I can tell, gifted with a preternatural patience and tranquillity. She died the summer Dante graduated from college; I never met her, which I regret to this day.
    Of their father, never a word is spoken.
    There might be stranger families in the world, but I have never been able to imagine what