CHANGELING

She never belonged with you. 

She slips below the arms of pines – runs through and over golden moss-crowned ruts where ancient humans ripped our soil up. Pools of peat black water lie between and sing to her, their mirror glass, a secret door. Her shimmer plastic fairy wings catch the wind beneath them. Oil greens and blues. They match her ear defenders and her beaded necklace chew. 

Far away, panicked Mam and Da try to call her back towards their world. Where people stare at hands that flap like wings and scowl at eyes that do not like to meet their own. Where they preach that good is only found inside obedience. Stillness. Where they teach her fairies don’t exist.

She drops her poppit – her hard, black fidget cube – discarding them as pine trees do their cones, upon generations of abandoned needles. She pulls the silence from her ears to hear the sigh of wind and buzz of bees and haunting, laughing calls of us that beckon her. Webs of spiders catch and kiss her cheeks, and all her thrumming, homesick magic beams.

The humans call her name –  the mourning cry that changelings’ parents always sing. The forest steals their echo. She does not answer them, but runs and flies into our golden green, new wings like those of dragonflies. I join her in the air. I caw and call, mimicking a crow as our kind often do, and teach her how to slip between divergent worlds like all of us like her. I tell her that she’s home.