JIM PORTER, SHAPE-SHIFTER
A story by Nancy Wolf
Text Copyright © 2015 by Nancy Wolf
The frame of the window splintered seconds before the glass broke and a small bare foot, delicate and bleeding, was seen being carefully withdrawn. "Andu, you stupid," Jim Porter yelled from the kitchen. "Front door is open. You stupid."
"You broke the damn frame," Jim's wife Mary chimed in. "What's the big hurry to get in? Don't bleed on my floor." She made an exasperated noise as she got the box of band aids out of a kitchen cabinet.
Andu came through the front door then, hopping on one foot, and made her way into the kitchen. She made a surprising amount of noise for her size, which was tiny and thin. Mary Porter always said that Andu looked as though she'd escaped from one of those music boxes. Jim Porter would say, what music boxes; Mary Porter would say, you know, the kind with the little glass ballerinas that twirl around to the music. Jim Porter would say, how in the sweet name of everything green would I know about music boxes, with or without glass ballerinas? You're crazy, and so is she.
It was true that Andu was a little eccentric. Maybe more than a little. She had moved into the house next door, a huge Victorian broken up into apartments, and she lived in the very top apartment. "Where they always keep the crazy people," Jim Porter had observed on more than one occasion. Andu dressed bizarrely, combining things like a man's tweed jacket with gauzy tutus or secondhand saris she found at thrift shops. She wore jewelry made from things that should not be jewelry, and she never ever wore shoes, not that either of the Porters had ever seen. They didn't know what she did for a living.
The two little boys who lived in the ground floor apartment were equally fascinated by, and terrified of, Andu. Their bedroom window faced the Porters' kitchen and back porch, and Mary would always see the wide-eyed faces of Jackson and Logan peering at Andu whenever she came to visit Mary and Jim.
Which she did often. She was very fond of them both and felt happy in their company. She had told them this many times. After she told them the first time, Jim Porter's response had been, "Just what kind of a name is Andu?"
She didn't answer, as she didn't answer any question she didn't find interesting. She was always doing things like tonight: breaking things, tracking in mud, making a mess of one kind or another. Jim and Mary Porter had never had children, but there was something familial in the way they were always yelling at Andu, which Andu seemed to find somehow comforting.
"You don't use the brains God gave a sheep," Mary Porter scolded her now, washing off the injured foot and putting a band aid on the cut, which was minor. "What were you thinking, kicking the window in like that?"
"It didn't work," Andu said, as if this explained everything.
"Not even going to ask," Jim Porter growled, returning to his newspaper; then adding from behind it, "You stupid."
"What didn't work? What's this?" Mary Porter said, taking the book Andu was holding out to her, as if it explained everything. "'Shape-Shifting for Beginners'? What in the world is shape-shifting?"
"You know," Andu said, "it's when you take the form of something else. Or someone else, if you're really advanced. That probably wouldn't be in this book, probably."
"Take the form of-you mean, turn yourself into something, like a frog in a fairy tale?"
"I maybe should have started with a frog," Andu said, nodding. "I was going for a dog. I was trying to scratch on your window, to be let in."
Jim Porter snorted from behind his paper. "Well you got in, all right," Mary Porter said. "And dogs scratch at doors to get in, not windows."
"Well, I've never been a dog before," Andu said reasonably. She took the book back from Mary, who hadn't opened it.
