For I am Human

Content warnings: The main character attempts suicide and the story is about a fictionalized persecution.

I have always longed to be a father. Or a mother. Never really cared which. My only aspiration was to become a parent. Alas, it has become apparent that my life’s dream is simply impossible. 

I’ve tried revealing my secret to many a lover, and many a time I have uprooted my life and sculpted a new face. 

Would’ve been more prudent to try being a step parent, but it’s too late now. Drifters aren’t trusted anywhere near orphans, and I no longer have it in me to spend a decade establishing myself. The sole remaining avenue would be to steal a child, but I am no monster. If only I could say the same for every person. It's one of the few fairy tales having so much as an inkling of truth in it.

I am too tired. Too tired to keep going on. Too tired to deceive every time someone sees the same face that they saw yesterday. Too tired to survive after another “the one” called me inhuman and betrayed me to the monster hunters.

By my nature, I am an honest soul. But the art of deceit has been drilled into me since I was young as a means of survival. My father learned it through the world of politics, where my mother had been trained for the same reasons as I. I’ve been blessed to be born with a silver spoon, for every time I must flee my family gives me aid and refuge, so long as it can be done behind closed doors. With their resources, I have crafted many identities after my lover inevitably disgraces my secret. I've been a doctor, apothecary, undertaker, and my last identity was as a coroner. Sadly, my family would only support me in starting a family of my own if it's with a suitor of their choosing, something which I was too hopelessly romantic to accept. Now I'm too aged and downtrodden to bother with that anymore.

I am not an aberration. However, I am done with proving a restrictive definition of humanity. I have never been a natural schemer. I have, however, been trained as one by the codes of my continent's kingdoms since birth. I’m not a monster. I’m perfectly capable of pensioning my life for a monster’s bounty, however.

Entering the monster hunter’s guild, I meet a constable wearing an uninterested yet interesting face. I take in the peculiar length of his nose, the generic hue of his eyes, the field of stubble and the starscape of spots that define his face. He is, by the standards of most people, ugly. People with such special faces have always made me jealous. It must be nice, having your own visage, and seeing the person in the mirror be uniquely you. People like him can recite their height as a consistent fact. They can wear tailored dress made for their body as opposed to tailoring their body to their dress. When they hear their own voice, they never question if it sounds consistent to the previous day.

I greet the man and he responds with a bored tone of a near optimal voice foundation. It is a touch deeper than one I would personally wear myself, but it suits him quite well. Another pang of envy strikes me. The majority of people haven't a conception of the intricacies of tuning the dimensions of your own vocal cords, for this entire aspect of my life that took me years practice is simply nonexistent to most. It’s as if others get to play a violin without the chore of tuning it.

I offer to turn in a doppelgänger if he swears to donate the king's ransom of a bounty to a local orphanage instead of awarding it to me. He dismissively accepts, reciting a memorized statement informing me of the high standards of proof and that if I fail to meet those standards there is a one hour amnesty period to release whomever I have captured lest it be considered kidnapping. I simply shift my entire skin to a deep violet as my response. His expression immediately jumps from disinterest to alarm and confusion. He spurs into action, and I make no effort to resist as I am hastily bound.

I am denied the swift execution I expected, for the monster hunter carries suspicion of my intentions, throwing accusations of me acting as a martyr in a duplicitous plot. I explain my motives, but he has further interrogation. He questions why I don't breed with other monsters, to which I answer that monsters don’t exist. He asks me if humans and my ‘kind’ can even procreate. I reply yes, for I am human. He challenges my claim to humanity by asking why I deem it necessary to reveal my nature to lovers, and my response is that infants don’t understand that shapeshifting signs a death warrant on both themself and their mother, unless they happen to be born to people of influence. (The procedure for cases of a shapeshifting newborn is that the mother and child are executed. This barbaric law is founded on the rumor that shapeshifters steal the lives and identity of expecting mothers, taking them deep into the woods, never to be seen again. As self perpetuating as it is tragic, the fear seeded by these exact stories ironically creates the necessity for more mothers-to-be fleeing society. Furthering the pitiful irony, in discovered cases of shapeshifting infants, it’s most always the father whose blood gifts transformation, for the mother would be ill-advised to stick around).

The next question causes me extreme offense. I’m asked why don’t I do what is typical of “my kind” and steal a child. I retort, asking why he doesn't do the same, for a man as ugly as he can never sire children.

Regretting my remark, I expect my offense to become mutual. Instead, I'm met with laughter, and the interrogation shifts from the type given to a bound prisoner to one given after a performance. Having earned his respect, I finally receive an earnest inquiry seeking to understand me rather than expose me.

“Tell me everything about what you are.”

Obliging his request, I explain that I am simply a person, just as he, in all ways he’s accustomed to. I happen to possess a few extra features. The minor differences between us are that I am hermaphroditic (which is not the same as intersex) and have domain over my appearance, as well as slight influence on my habitus. This power is ancestral, and I do not know how or why it originated. Thousands of humans share this trait, though the overwhelming majority maintain one appearance and identity throughout their life. 

Next, I address the rumors, how they have no basis in truth, and are at best symptoms caused by our own persecution, if not utter fabrications. An example of the former is the tale of how “changelings” steal children. The vast majority would be repulsed by the mere idea, however sometimes people have been found to do such awful things when they cannot have children of their own (Sickeningly, there are even cases of people who are “normal” and aren’t hunted doing this).

The monster hunter proceeds to ask why “none of the other freaks he’s rounded up are normal like you are”. After pondering for a moment, I deduce that it is so easy to avoid capture that anyone caught in the cities would have to be either not of sound mind, suicidal, or otherwise in crisis. As for the woodland tribes, they consist of scared refugees fighting for survival or those who have lived there for generations and are confused about why they are even met with hostility in the first place. The hunter admits that while there are no holes in my story, my testimony does not dispute that, be it nature or nurture, my “people” are tricky and silver tongued. Therefore, he demands concrete evidence of my claims rather than conjecture.

It is quite fortunate that I happen to be one of the few people in the world in a position to demonstrate undeniable proof. I dress into my usual appearance and he quickly recognizes me as his local coroner. He speaks my name in disbelief, before requesting what my true name was all these years. I establish that I use no pseudonym, that the name I have been using for almost a decade is my true name, for it is what I answer to. Having defined myself as one of the individuals most qualified on the matters of anatomy, I reveal that my investigation of corpses has led to identification of a lone visible difference between those who are capable of morphing and those who are not. A blue appendix. That is the sole perceptible anatomical difference. 

In order to verify my theory, he leads me to a mass grave filled with about two dozen civilians whom had been hunted as beasts by people like him. We confirm that most of the bodies had blue appendices [suggesting monster hunters possess a roughly one third rate of error when slaughtering innocents]. To contrast the sample with the masses, I show him to the mortuary, where we identify that around one in ten people possess blue appendices. 

The hunter is astonished by the revelation that his anomalous and elusive bounty consists of many of his friends and neighbors. He finds my proof undeniable and congratulates me, calling me a “glorious bastard” and applauds my "righteous scheme” before asserting that he’s willing and eager to assist whatever comes next. I disappointingly inform him that my only scheme was to commit suicide while supporting orphans, and after that plan failed I merely was answering his questions. I never machinated for anything grander. Frankly, I haven’t a slightest idea of what happens next.