PetPals

It has been going on for eleven years and there is still no word for it that everybody agrees on.

Animals wake up. Not all of them, not in any pattern anyone has found, and not because of anything anybody did. A fox in a ditch outside Marrow. A canary in a cage in a front room in the city, still in the cage, now much too large for it. A rat under a bakery floor who came up through a gap in the boards at four in the morning and asked the baker a question.

The bodies change to fit. Never completely. There is always something left over.

Some towns have a word. Some towns have a policy. Most have neither and simply look away, which the changed find easier to live with than either.

You have seen three in your life. The first was at a distance, on a road, and you were not certain until she turned her head and the turn went further than a neck should. The second was working behind a counter and did not want to talk about it. The third you did not speak to at all.

Everyone tells you the same thing, and everyone gets it slightly wrong: that they are like their animals. That the dogs are loyal and the cats are cold and the birds will not stop talking.

It is not true. It is what people say because the alternative is that eleven years ago a great many creatures woke up as strangers with no instruction and no help, and became whoever they were going to become, and none of them became the same thing twice.

The road out of town forks four ways and there is a river somewhere south of here and the hills go on a long way north.

So.

Where are you going?