You can’t help but think about it. You’ve been thinking about it for twenty-five years. You’ve shifted into a wizard. You’ve shifted into a frog. A dragon. A schoolgirl. A Ninja warrior. A businessman. A librarian. A witch. A cow.

Your remaining shapeshifter contract time is short. Soon you will be required to choose a forever self. But because you have shifted so much, because you have been lucky enough to experience life through so many lenses, it’s hard to choose. It's the choice of a lifetime, and now you must.

Over the years, your answer has evolved. In youth, you imagined a lion. Lazy days of sunbathing, punctuated by thrilling hunts. In later years, retirement as a wizened elf felt tempting. But recently you’ve rejected the elf idea too.

Now it’s Friday. No time for rumination. You shift into the form of a buxom twenty-something with a tight dress and impeccable hair, and it’s out to the shapeshifter bar. You mount your customary stool. You drink.

It goes without saying the place is crowded already, all shapeshifters. Shooting pool, getting drunk. All of them have also taken the form of buxom twenty-somethings with tight dresses and impeccable hair. Shapeshifters themselves, they recognize you (the real you) finger-spinning your beer bottle.

And you see them eyeing you.

It’s only a matter of time until one of them ambles over, offers a backslap greeting, and broaches the retirement question. But you aren’t yet drunk enough to want to talk.

Minutes later, here comes Clyde. Just like you’d predicted. What makes shapeshifters so chatty?

So you do a curtain-hair. Drop your chin. Focus on the bottle in front of you. Invisibility is the only shape a shifter can never take.

Which sucks, because sometimes it is the only shape you want.

Alice Kinerk

spends her free time attempting to make complicated desserts, most of which are tasty failures, such as the time she tried to make a croquembouche. She’s published dozens of stories. Read more at her website:

https://alicekinerk.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Exploring the Extravagance of Croquembouche by Charles Oreve in The French Gourmet (15 July 2023)

⚡ Alice Kinerk interview in Oyster River Pages (18 May 2023)

⚡ Blue Bird by Alice Kinerk in Flash Frontier (December 2023: Manu | Bird)

⚡ Stop Calling It a “Word Salad” (11 July 2020), Kinerk’s commentary in response to garblings from #45 when asked about his “top priority items for a second term”