//------------------------------//
// The Poet and the Changeling (part 2) 
// Story: Love Letters Written on the Back of a Star Chart 
// by Dawn Stripes 
//------------------------------//

	When Ars awoke next morning, the tree was gone.
He scoured the sidewalk with twigs, in growing dismay. She had vanished almost without a trace—the only sign that a sycamore ever stood here were the holes left by her roots, now ready and waiting to trip him every time he walked out of his front door. Ars knew that trees didn’t simply abandon a perfectly good yard without provocation—this must have been what her brother had called a tremor.
So that was it, then. She could be anywhere now. Nightmares played through his head of a shriveled, slimy mass of tentacles shivering in a ditch. Or, even worse, crying out from the gurney-gleaming depths of a government laboratory. There was no way to find her. 
He felt like going right back to bed. In desperation Ars scraped the bottom of the bin for cookie dough, and baked it all on one giant cookie sheet. When they came out he poured himself a sixteen-ounce glass of milk and sat down on his front steps..
His plans changed when he noticed the panther on the lawn.
Half-dropping, half-dumping the cookies out of the tray, Ars held it in front of himself like a flimsy Teflon shield. “Nice kitty…”
He managed to back up slowly without making eye contact. But the three-foot journey back through the front door was long. After making it inside, Ars immediately locked every orifice to his house. Then he stood plastered to the parlor window, with his nose squished against the class in awe.
She was a black spot, easy to miss against the morning light. Ars wondered when she had transformed. How long had she been there, curled up sleeping as if the passing cars were of no concern? Even the garbage truck must have failed to faze her. She slept in stretching power as if the whole world was hers.
A watering can wouldn’t do much good anymore.
Ars didn’t know what would do her good. He didn’t much feel like offering up any of his limbs as a smackerel. So he took shelter inside and contented himself with checking up on her every now and then. It was a terrifying morning. Mostly he paced in his study, working on poems and finishing letters to friends he had long forgotten. Lunch consisted of cold deli meat on Wonderbread. In short, things indoors were very normal, but this in itself drove Ars to fascination.
Because every time he did check on her—every few nervous minutes at first, then less and less as the day wore on—she was doing well. No holes, at any rate, though he kept a sharp watch for leopard spots of a grotesque persuasion. 
There were so many things he’d wanted to ask that young man about love before he vanished. Or at least about what he meant by the word ‘love’. The word had been so trampled in English, it was hard to say what it meant. If it really was Ars’ doing that she seemed comfortable, did it mean that this was love? A second of sitting backwards on a tan sofa to make sure she was safe and sound?
At night, trashcans rattled and terrified neighbors phoned in. Ars pacified everyone as best he could. He had to fall back several times on his well-known habit of falling from abstraction into irrelevant imagery. More than one piercing question was deflected by speaking at length about how butterfly wings were like the stalk of a panther in the depths of a suburban jungle.
But Ars was biting his nails when the sun found him next morning. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she wasn’t doing well. Were panthers supposed to sleep so much? He hadn’t seen her move all day, save for the odd twitch of a pipe-cleaner tail. He didn’t know enough about panthers to tell if that was normal. All he knew was that instead of meat, this mighty cat needed love.
Ars fell to tearing his hair in frustration. As a panther, she was frightening enough to paralyze him. One sidelong look could send him into flight. How? How could he love her when it was so dangerous?
Despite having Tennyson, Frost, Donne, Morris Bishop and Silverstein on his shelves, he could make no progress on the conundrum. When he found himself too distraught to write a villanelle instead, he scrapped it in favor of dealing with another, equally pressing worry. What would happen if she wandered off? Her brother had said she was a danger to herself, and now Ars could see why. One call to the police and she would be shot. In fact, it was a miracle they weren’t already on their way.
Ars was too afraid to make a break for his car. But dug through his refrigerator for all the meat that wasn’t microwaveable—a few burger patties and a ham-bone of Christmas Past. He threw it into a clean trash bag and snuck out the back door, laying the meat on the lawn with a swiftly beating heart.
He felt like a walking jackhammer. Every step he took felt like a gunshot, because if the panther had gotten up already, he wouldn’t even hear her coming. But somehow he managed. First, he unlatched yard gate, and then crept a circle around his house, shutting the gate behind her as soon as she was inside.
Would it keep her in his backyard? Surely she could jump the fence with ease if so inclined. But luckily, it seemed she chose to stay. This made it a little less nerve-wracking for Ars to sit outside—on the roof, naturally—and watch her.
Perhaps a physical snack gave her current form a burst of energy, or perhaps she was showing off for Ars. Either way, he got to glimpse how powerful that panther body was. The sapling he had planted when Rodney King died, with all its wire ties, never stood a chance. 
She wasn’t showing off. That’s the conclusion Ars came to. This was grace without artifice, without thought. And Ars wondered—was this love the same as yesterday, merely changing as she changed? Or was he falling in love all over again? 
But he didn’t have time to find out. The day wasn’t quite gone when suddenly the panther vanished, twisting in the evening shadows until Ars couldn’t see anything. He climbed down the gutter with a stick in one hand, shaking, until he tripped over the box turtle which sat in the panther’s place. 
So he took her inside to keep her warm, and the next day it started all over again. First panic, then figuring out what to do. This time, to prove that his love wasn’t lazy, he did his research. Box turtles ate a variety of foods, including earthworms, peas, potatoes, and dandelion greens. He measured out amounts precisely by the book. And he even made another trip to the gardening store for a spade, so that he could dig her a pond with a plaster cherub fountain and everything. When that project failed to produce anything but a well-decorated mud puddle, he inflated a kiddie pool and filled that up instead.
She had a rash of tremors through the next couple weeks. An ostrich, an African violet, a skunk. One day Ars couldn’t find her, and he was pretty sure she spent that day as a gnat. The same story unfolded over and over. The neighbors quickly decided he was crazy. But Ars didn’t mind that. He was at a loss as to how it had taken them this long. And he was constantly occupied these days. She wasn’t easy to keep up with. Every week, her life was something new, and he was along for the ride. Every day he couldn’t be sure if she was really the same person he remembered—and was there ever any guarantee that he would fall in love again?
But although he was busier than before, his poetry began to flow—faster, thicker. The needle-thin stream from his pen was incapable of delivering ink fast enough. Ars started questioning his old decision to move into solitude for the sake of the art.
Some days, when he was very lucky, she would talk to him. She spent one day as an old Norwegian man. Ars learned to make a thick porridge while she told stories about growing up in the badland hives. For a few hours, on a night much later, she was a beautiful woman with hair beyond her waist, and she let Ars try to kiss her before turning into a woodpecker at the last second and darting to his eaves. They never did introduce themselves to each other—not in words, when words were precious.
But just as he needed her, she depended on him. Ars determined to learn everything he could about her, and not just about her costume of the day, either. He needed to know about her as a Changeling. 
There were many things about Changelings which you could only learn from other Changelings. But that proved to be a surmountable obstacle. Changelings were everywhere. Ars eventually figured out that he could find them if he stood in the center of a crowded supermarket, and while looking over the pomegranates whispered something about loyalty to the queens of ever-shifting shadow. Eventually some dapper-looking individual would stand over his shoulder, and Ars would explain his story in the fewest words possible before they realized he wasn’t one of their own.
The secrets weren’t free, of course. The young man had been right about the jealousy of Changelings. None of his contacts seemed particularly sympathetic to his story about taking care of a defective drone, either. To buy what he needed he offered himself up, sometimes as a one-night stand, and other times, as some Changelings preferred to take him, like the liquid in a syringe. These latter encounters left him feeling unable to write a single line of poetry for weeks on end.
But what he learned helped him to take better care of her. So it was worth it. Although one of his discoveries confused him for the longest time. It was one of the first things he learned, in fact. Changeling drones were androgynous. It made sense for the young man to have thought of himself and his sister as siblings, especially if they’d hatched from the same cluster of four or five eggs. But what had compelled him to call her his sister?
Perhaps—though Ars wasn’t convinced—it was because of her fickle nature. One day, for instance, just to prove to him that she had no limits, she was a statue when he got up to greet her.
He stood before her with his body slack. He arms hung loose, his jaw hung loose—pretty much everything. Her likeness was angelic, a perfect replica of the Venus de Milo. But her plaster was cold and hard for Ars to beat his hand against.
How could he even touch this? What place was there for him, if not to stand awkwardly to one side? There was no way to be nice to a statue. It just stood there, until after a few millennia the dust in the wind weathered it away. That’s what statues. Convinced there was no way to love an invulnerable lump of rock, Ars gave up and retreated into his writing desk. He managed to ignore her for over a day.
Of course, that only sent him flying up in bed with a cold sweat next afternoon. Weeping as he stumbled to the yard—what had he done to himself?—he leapt out, inspired to polish her from top to bottom and put up a tarp against the pounding rain.
That took very little time. So once he was done he ate lunch and dinner under the tarp, with her, by the light of an electric lamp. As if they’d had a fight, he bathed in her presence, pressing his cheek against her plaster robe. It wasn’t, but he tried to let himself admire her beauty without worrying what part he played in it.
That particular night was a long one. He didn’t feel like going to bed, only sitting as his tiny yard turned to mud. He some poetry there, using her plinth as a table. And as far as first drafts went, he was rather pleased. Not surprised—the best poetry was always written with itchy skin at midnight. But this was particularly promising. With a little work he might be published.
Eventually, as weeks passed, he stopped complaining about how his hands were tired. He started to smile at the bewildered lovers on the iron-wrought bridge, and shared knowing nods with the new parents, ruddy-faced in the early morning. Love was a lot like writing poetry—not because of any analogy Ars could think of. He just felt that way.
And when she became a falcon, some months later, he knew without philosophizing that he had to let her fly. She didn’t look back as she took off to wheel around the sun. Ars let the wind sting his eyes. It would be up to her whether or not she ever came back. But he, for his part, would be here waiting. And trying not to worry. Wherever she went in this world she would at least be well-fed.