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At first Horace was sure he would turn himself into a rabbit. But then, no. Though they were swift as pebbles skipping across a pond, they were vulnerable, liable to be snatched up in a fox’s jaws or a hawk’s talons. Squirrels fell too easily into traps. And though mice and wood rats had a magical smallness, in the end they were much smaller than he wished to be. Snakes’ heads were too easily crushed, and he didn’t like the idea of his entire body slithering across all those twigs and feces and spit. Dogs lacked the physical grace he needed. More than anything else, he wanted to have grace. If he was going to the trouble of transforming himself, he might as well get exactly that. Butterflies were too frail, victims to wind. Cats had a physical freedom he loved to watch, the svelte, smooth, sliding motion of the great cats of Africa, but he could not see transforming himself into anything that would not fit the swampy woodlands of Southeastern North Carolina. He had to stay here.
No, truth to tell, what he wanted more than anything, he now realized, was to fly. A bird. He had known before, but he felt the need to sit down and ponder the possibilities. A ritual of choice, to make it real. A bird.
With that thought he rose, his stomach churning with excitement. A bird. Now to select the type. The species. The genus. He knew the very book to use in the school library; he knew the shelf, and could see the book there in its exact placement, now, slightly askew between a volume on bird-feeders no one ever moved and a treatise on egg collecting; he could see the exact angle at which it would be resting. Hadn’t the librarian, Mrs. Stokes, always teased him that he knew the library better than she ever would? And wasn’t she right?
He was sitting on the wall at the far end of the school campus, on the other side of the football field, beyond the gymnasium, beyond the main school building. He had wanted to be alone, to think undistracted. But now he was buoyed by the realization that he knew how he would spend the rest of his appointed time on this earth. Not as a tortured human, but as a bird free to swoop and dive, to dip and swerve over the cornfields and tobacco patches he had slaved in for what already seemed decades to his sixteen years. No longer would he be bound by human laws and human rules that he had constantly tripped over and frowned at. Now was his chance, for he had stumbled upon a passage by an ancient mystic, a monk, a man of God, and had found his salvation. It was so simple he wondered why no one had discovered it before. Yet how would anyone know? Suddenly, poor old Jeremiah or poor old Julia disappears. Everybody’s distraught; everybody worries. They search. They wait. Finally, the missing person is declared dead. And the silly folk go on about their business and don’t realize that old Julia turned herself into an eel and went to the bottom of the deep blue sea to see what she could see. There are no moral laws that say: You must remain human. And he would not.
His morning break was over. The other students were hustling back to third period. But he decided to skip. What did it matter? In a few days he would be transformed into a creature of the air. He could soar by his physics class and listen to Mrs. Hedgeson deliver her monotone lecture about electrons; he could perch on the ledge and watch the biology students dissect pickled frogs; hear the Spanish class tripping over their tongues; glide over the school band as they practiced their awkward maneuvers on the football field, squawking their gleaming instruments. All unfettered, unbound and free.
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