We were in the middle of a perfectly ordinary dinner when Father abruptly paused, turning from his half-finished squash casserole to steadily look at my younger brother and me and state: “I saw a changeling underneath your bed today.”
Mother frowned. “Stop it. You’ll scare them.”
“Don’t worry,” he continued, as if discussing the weather. “I’ll take care of it after supper.”
Sure enough, once we had finished eating, my brother so stunned that he finished his broccoli without requiring the normal parental urging, Father went to the hall closet and dug around in the back for the dusty bag that held his golf clubs. He selected one—a nine iron?—and clenched it firmly in his teeth.
He shut the door to our room behind him. My brother and I waited outside, unsure whether we should cheer or help or go hide in the attic. There was a grunt, then a thump. Metal pinged off metal and I winced at the sound of glass breaking. More thumps sounded, spaced further and further apart until one final strike caused the door to rattle. Father’s muffled voice came: “And stay out!”
He opened the door, and trotted back to the closet to return the now slightly bent club. “I broke your lamp,” he informed us. “Don’t go in until your mother can clean up the glass.”
Later that night, laying in bed with my brother curled up next to me, I couldn’t follow him in the normally effortless transition to sleep. Father had always been considered particularly eccentric. Nopony would say such to him directly, but I could not count the occasions in which, ignored by my elders, I overheard fragments of supplementary whispers and tactful explanations of his profession as an artist that inevitably preceded a: “Oh, that explains so much.”
I had also heard more than once from teachers and counselors that I had inherited his peculiarities. But he and I had an understanding, and I knew that his quirks were never arbitrary or delusions. He acted with purpose, simply in ways that the average pony could not grasp.
Perhaps it had been a ruse, intended to reassure my brother, who often found himself plagued by nightmares.
But another theory troubled my mind. What if my father had indeed seen a changeling, and approached the matter with his customary honesty? And, further, if that had been the case, it brought an unsettling doubt that I could not put to rest:
What if the changeling had won the fight?
I rose early the next morning, unable to find solace in my scattered dreams. Father was sitting at the table, eating an orange. I went to the refrigerator, not looking at him as I scanned the shelves.
I selected an apple that looked appetizing. We had plenty, and why not? It had always been Father’s favorite fruit and customary breakfast.
From that moment, I watched everything, cataloguing discrepancies and building my case. That afternoon, I painstakingly checked our room, finding a place on the wood where I could make out a faint difference, next to a chip where the golf club had struck. A stain of something imperceptibly darker. Was it still sticky? Red? Or green? I struggled to push the bed away from the wall, searching for anything left underneath but coming up empty-hooved.
Things changed, and I noticed. When he took a lunch break from his sculpture work, he trotted into the kitchen to give Mother a kiss before retreating to the sofa. She, of course, was delighted by the attention. In the afternoons, he acceded to my brother’s urgings to go and play ball in the yard where previously he might have complained of being too busy or tired.
I watched him. I noticed him watching me in return, eyes slightly narrowed in concern. I could disguise my suspicion, but I could not disguise the cold realization that had choked out my love towards what I began to consider the creature in Father’s fur. He crept closer and closer to Mother and my brother, and all the while more distant from me.
I canvassed my school library, then the public one, for information. I could not risk checking out books so I read in the aisles, picking through encyclopedias and bestiaries for relevant information. I knew that I could not go to the authorities. I knew that my father was already gone. I would resolve my problems on my own.
It took weeks to decide on a plan of action and find an opportune moment to act. Early in the morning on Father’s Day, I rose, trotting past Mother preparing breakfast in the kitchen and into Father’s studio. I nosed through his tools, to select the sharpest of his chisels. Then I made my way back into the house and into his bedroom.
He lay twisted in the sheets, breathing steadily.
I had chosen a sharp tool because I was uncertain if the chitinous exoskeleton would persist in disguise. As it turned out, the chisel sank deep into his chest with hardly any effort at all, and with but a trickle of blood flowing out. His eyes flew open, some word choking out of his throat only to die on his lips.
I waited.
The books all said that changelings revert to their natural form on expiration.
But of course, books could be wrong, too.