Teresa Milbrodt, Fictioneer

Changelings

She lived alone in the forest and loved her quietude. The green smells were calm and comforting, but not so the cries of children left by the river. She found them two, three, four times a year, wailing for a mother’s tit. They came to her naked, small limbs flailing as they cried a protest. She took them home. They had flat foreheads, swine snouts, club feet. She knew the city had labeled them monsters, fit only for sacrifice to the wild. She held them to her breast, and her body mothered many.

Each child was a work of art, a living sculpture to be molded, something she discovered the first time she smoothed a baby’s cheek and found it yielded like clay dug from the riverbank. She remembered that in the city babies were swaddled, their unformed bodies wrapped tight as packages so they would emerge shaped like humans with straight backs and perfect posture. She didn’t care for humans much, so it was a joy to discover she could form the children as she pleased.

Some she gave small robin wings. Others she gave tiny horns because they smirked like they were already up to something. To all she gave knowing gazes, old and wise. She molded their ears pointy like cats, or rounded as shells to mimic mice. A few she gifted with third arms so they could reach and grab, or tails to hang upside down from branches.

They were happy, her children, and she was pleased to be surrounded by cherubs and devils and satyrs, the formerly outcast. The oldest learned to toddle to the river and bring home more abandoned babies. She crafted a race that became tiny boogeymen at dusk, scaring women who came to the stream for water and hunters who gasped and dropped their arrows in horror. She never set a bedtime for her dear little ones, but the secret to fearlessness at night was to know dark did not conceal evil but was merely a pleasant blanket, a rest for the eyes. She loved going out after dusk to listen to her children play, the hoots and whispers and giggles and shrieking laughter that kept humans inside until dawn. In their waking hours they offered more blessed children to the riverbank, assuring her cottage and their nightmares would never be empty.

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Following that theme of fairies and fair folk, my story “Over Coffee” just came out in an anthology about fairies. It’s titled Wee Folk and Wise, has some lovely reviews on Goodreads, and is available as a Kindle book on Amazon.