Lucy Zhang
These kinds of tales usually start with a betrayal, but I’d argue I was betrayed first, in the prelude, by my own son who was born a hare instead of a human, and his father who’d long disappeared into a black top hat. I’ve betrayed no one by keeping my son in the sunroom on the second floor, where he chews cardboard boxes and poops pellets in hay. It’s far too dangerous for him to roam outside where the hungry wolves and sphinx lurk. Yet he has the audacity to insist I’ve betrayed him by not treating him as a pet instead of a son. A pet is exactly what he is. I’ve not called him anything but “hare” or “you” or “boy.”
It hardly surprises me when he breaks free one evening while I’m brewing green tea and watching a pot of ginger boil. The house is full of cracks shaped by rats’ teeth. I’ve given up on closing the gaps in the walls because the rats eat through the filler cement even faster than normal wall—like they know this race determines who has dominance over the property. The cracks are large enough for my son to slip through. His fur makes him seem larger than he is. I can wrap my tiny hands around his body with no problem.
When I find him missing from the sun room, I panic. Even the rats prefer here to outside, where food is more abundant and diverse.
I search the yard for him first. The yard is protected by tall, pointed fences on which I’ve seen three-legged crows perch, like guardians of this residence. Wolves know better than to approach, else the crows will pluck out their eyes and feed them to their young. My son cannot have roamed too far off, especially with the crows watching.
“Have you seen him?” I ask them. “Or the direction he was headed?”
The crows caw and blink their three beady eyes that resemble planets orbiting their small skulls.
“Useless,” I mutter. My son is neither in the yard nor in any of the holes dug up by gem hounds whom I welcome because they leave precious stones behind as payment, enough to afford both my lifestyle and my son’s vegetation.
I haven’t left my property since I first birthed my son, so it feels odd to unlatch the fence and slip through with nothing but my footsteps to stop me. But I suppose being a mother makes you fearless, and the thought of facing a sphinx seems feasible so long as I maintain a steady posture and tell it what it wants to hear. I am good at that. You must be good at whispering sweet words when no one will believe you about your son, and your parents insist on buying onesies and pacifiers when what he needs is a new succulent plant to chew through.
The world beyond my home hasn’t changed much since I last remember it: uneven growths of forest, some patches of wildflowers completely decapitated by hungry fairies, and other patches thriving next to vapor plants that emit gas toxic to fairies. Up ahead are several fox dens that you can only spot if you know about them already.
I find my son in one of the dens, a hole guarded by boulders and dense bushes. He’s napping like a little fox even though he’d probably make one of their meals instead.
“Wake up,” I say, picking him up by the scruff.
He jolts awake and springs out of my grip. “I’m not going back,” he cries.
“You are. There’s no other place for you.”
“The wolves and foxes are nice here. They’ve asked me to join their pack. And the sphinx offers more motherly guidance than you ever could,” he declares.
“To eat you, at the end of the day,” I sigh. My son possesses no survival instincts. Maybe that’s part of the human side he inherited.
“They say they have plenty of food out here. No need to eat a scrawny thing like me,” he says proudly. There’s nothing to be proud about. His scrawniness only reminds me that I failed to feed him properly. Not too little, but also not too much else, or he’ll end up with GI stasis.
“Just one week. Let me join them for a week, and then you’ll see how much happier I will be.”
Perhaps he inherited the lack of survival instincts from me because I cave quickly. Or is this a mother’s weakness? To compensate with undeserved leniency because your child is just a child? A week is not too long. “Only if you promise to meet me back at our home after the week is up.”
My son hops in excitement. Then he dashes to my side and darts further into the forest. In the direction he’s heading, I see the shadow of two monolithic wings complete with layers of long, smooth feathers that let slivers of light slip through the dark. The body attached to the wings shifts toward my son, who grows further from me and closer to the beast. The beast moves into the light, and I make eye contact with a woman’s face—young, pretty, like someone who’s never pushed a dense mass of unknown species through her cervix or tried to feed a hare with increasingly saggy breasts. I envy her. She could birth a human, lion, or bird, and no one would bat an eye.
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Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at www.lucyzhang.tech.