Sunglasses 5: Shifterpedia

Did I end that last part too dramatically?

The thing is, my present situation is kind of nerve-wracking and it's coloring my memories. That storm I heard in the stock room actually drifted south less than an hour later, and not a drop of rain fell. I should also add that not much happened during my shift.

The drama all came at the end, when the thunder returned.

Shit, let me just tell the story.

After forcing myself to do some invoices, it took half an hour to dig through all the boxes and load the restock tray. I hefted it onto my hip and eased back into the store. Terry and Derry were still yammering while Rory listened in. Fortunately, tuning out the Wagners was a skill I’d honed since youth. Ignoring them, I began topping up our inventory.

Restocking was good work when my head was screwy. Filling the shelves required just enough concentration to keep my thoughts from wandering, but not so much that I had to pay close attention. I fell into a trance as I wandered our three small aisles, pulling products out of the tray and plugging gaps.

Fifteen minutes later, after wedging in the last bags of Potato Pops and generic pork rinds, the tray was empty. A bolt of pain lanced up my spine as I stood, making me grimace.

Damn, I need to start exercising. Well…stretching anyway. I sighed. Or what about not sitting sideways on the recliner tonight?

Yeah. That last one was achievable. At least my headache had been nice enough to leave so the new pain could move in. I grabbed my lower back and did my best to unjumble my spine. As I kneaded, Derry and Terry's talking filtered back in.

“…shifters aren't real, man.” Derry’s nasal but confident drawl.

I looked over to the front booth where the brothers were sitting. Terry scratched his head, a bag of gummy sharks forgotten in one hand. “I dunno bro, that's a major stretch.”

Fuck me…had they been talking about shifters this whole time? What had I started? Suppressing my good judgement, I walked over and bulled my way into the conversation.

“What shifters aren't real?” I asked.

“According to Derry?” Rory replied. “All of them.” He snickered.

“That’s right,” Derry confirmed.

“All of them?” I stared for a moment, then carefully leaned the empty tray against a shelf. “You're saying all shifters aren't real?” 

A smug smile curled his lips. “Obvies.”

“So…the videos,” I said. “The photos. The news stories. The social media posts. Every history book.” I spread my arms. “All of the Shifter League Sports teams? It's all a hoax. That’s your belief.”

His eyes gave a languid blink. “That’s the facts, Cal.”

“You’re a California Kaijus fan!”

“Yeah, ‘cause the Cali Kais are awesome. Best SLS team, right?” Pause. “I mean, it’s all computer generated, but they’re still fun to watch. See, there's this guy online who explains how they—”

“Don't.” I held up my hand. “I'm too tired to have a conversation this dumb.”

Terry laughed, but Derry crossed his arms and looked a lot like Hogzilla right before one of her escape attempts from the Wagners’ pen on the far side of the road. 

“Have you ever met a shifter, Cal?” he challenged.

I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it.

“Mm hm.” Derry noted.

“Settle down, Sherlock,” I grumbled. Stooping—Dammit! Ouch!—to retrieve the tray, I fixed him with an irritated glance. “I've seen shifters, okay? I've just never talked to one.”

“Oh yeah?” Terry asked. “Where about?” He wasn't being a jerk like his brother, he was actually interested.

“Remember that carnival that came through Hoisington a year ago? They had a show with a lion shifter couple. It was like…” I shook my head. “Well, it was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

“You saw them shift?” Derry said skeptically.

“Of course. Sort of. I mean, I did, but they were doing it under these poncho things. Oh, except for the first shift when the show started…” I trailed off as Derry’s expression somehow achieved new heights of smugness. My jaw clenched. “Look, it was an act only shifters could do! They sort of traded roles in this nonstop way that's…that’s hard to describe.” It sounded lame even to me.

Derry scoffed. “Changed behind ponchos? Scam.”

“It wasn't a scam.” I felt my cheeks begin to warm. “They had to do it that way because regular clothes disintegrate. I was trying to say that the first shift—”

“Was fake?” Derry interrupted. “F-A-K-to-the-E?” 

“Wow,” I said drily. “Your spelling made it all the way to four letters.”

Terry laughed. “It wasn't fake, man.” He smirked. “It was because shifters can't flash dong at a family show.” 

I pointed to him triumphantly. Proof of where the tiebreaker IQ point had landed between them. “I'm going to put this away,” I said, waggling the tray. I nodded at Terry. “The gummy sharks are on the house.” It was best to reward him for calling out his brother's stupider shit.

Thankfully, they’d gotten into an argument over fireworks vendors by the time I returned, sparing me from wasting more minutes arguing. Rory waited until I got up to the counter before clocking out. I clocked in, and my shift was officially underway.

Rory turned back after a few steps towards the exit. “So…the cookout?” His question was quiet, like he thought Terry might revoke the invite if he heard.

“See you on Sunday,” I said. He beamed and almost strutted out of the store.

The Wagners hung around for a couple more hours while I did maintenance checks and directed one lost motorist towards Interstate 70. Then, around six, Derry made loud noises about needing the last two hours of daylight for “cornering” drills. He waited for eager questions, but neither of us replied. Muttering, he left. We watched him pull the start cord, put on his helmet, and wedge himself into the puttering go-kart frame. 

“He’s going to wreck his back,” I said.

“He’s a pain in my ass, so it serves him right,” Terry replied, unconcerned.

As soon as Derry’s engine faded below the ever-present hum of the coolers, Terry wandered into the back and returned with a PBR. He cracked open the beer and pointedly ignored my scowl.

“You invite Rory to the cookout?”

“Yeah. Like you invited your beer into our cooler.”

He took a considering sip. “S’fine,” he said after a moment. “Kid just eats too damn much for someone that skinny.”

“Maybe he and Mrs. Wagner can have a burger eating contest.”

Terry squinted. “You calling Ma fat?”

I grinned. Mrs. Wagner was almost as skinny as Rory thanks to her steady diet of cigarettes. “I just want to know whose tape worm is stronger.”

He snorted and a few drops of beer dribbled onto his shirt. “Asshole.” We traded waves and he exited. For the first time in hours I was finally alone.

That embarrassing talk about shifters was still bugging me.

Derry’s willful ignorance aside, it had made me realize I was pretty clueless myself. Of course folks in Drywell—obnoxious exception noted—knew shifters were real. We just…didn't have many examples. Kansas’s shifter population was tiny apart from the packland reserves, and those shifters didn’t talk to anybody. 

Pulling out my phone, I checked to confirm I’d charged it. If what I suspected about Mel was true, it was time to push Drywell’s one bar of cell reception to the breaking point. I typed “shifter facts” into my browser’s search bar, and waited for results to load. And kept waiting.

God, our internet sucked.

Over the next three hours, my slow-ass job consisted of helping two customers with pump two, signing for the weekly diesel delivery, and chatting with the fuel truck guy about the impressive lightning display happening in the muddle of gray clouds to the south.

Every other second was spent reading about shifters.

Early on, I lucked into a massive forum post where someone had collected dozens of articles. Every question a person might have was covered. As I read over the contents, I realized I had a hell of a lot of questions.

Even here, at a nowhere-stop along the nation’s longest three-digit highway, it had been easy to assume I knew everything about shifters. They made up only ten percent of the world’s population, but that was still hundreds of millions of people. I saw shifters every day, even if it was just online. Even my vintage TV shows had shifter characters—though, okay, the stereotyping was awful.

I have to interrupt the story here. Yeah, yeah, it's more rambling, but I need to talk to my fellow ordinary humans for a second.

Do you ever think about how fucking miraculous shifters are? I mean, one in ten people has the ability to transform into an honest-to-God animal. Like, through an act of will. One second you're looking at a human, then their form gets weird and blurry, and bam! Now they’re an animal.

It’s bizarre how normal that seems, right?

We watch magic acts and performers, see commercials for CoatShine wipes and shifter sports, and, depending on where you live, some of us make way for tigers coming down the sidewalk. And then, if we think about it at all, we say, “Neat!”  

I don't know if I'm doing a good job of making my point or not, but I bet if you’d grown up in a world without shifters, it would seem like an impossible miracle every time a person turned into a wolf.

Anyway, as I started reading the list of articles that night, the wonder of it clicked for me like it hadn't before.

Sure, there were rules, but scientists didn't understand them very well. For some reason, shifters could only turn into mammals. Despite the popularity of the Dragyn Shyfter franchise, there were no dragon shifters. Or unicorns, or birds, or fish. And size mattered. Nothing smaller than a hare or larger than a moose. It had to do with evolutionary biology and conservation of energy, but I wisely skipped the linked scientific papers.

The transformation itself was a total mystery. Despite study after study, no one had figured it out. The “blurriness” of the change was reflected in every measuring device invented. Current theorists believed it was an effect of quantum states, and one article suggested I buy a copy of Shifter Morphology and the Pattern Superintraposition Quandary: Third Edition if I wanted to learn more.

Like I needed a cinder-block-sized textbook when the word “magic” worked just as easy.

I kept scrolling and skimming…and then my thumb just seemed to stop on its own. I silently read the section title.

Mate Bonds: Physiology or Fate?

I stared at the words. Everything I knew about Mate Bonds was from internet memes or TV series that aired decades ago. The shows depicted it with maximum cheese. Zoom shots on surprised faces as ultra dramatic music played, lots of gasping and whispered names. The memes came at it from the other direction. One example from the r/lolmated subreddit was a crude drawing of cupid aiming an orbital laser at two unsuspecting victims. In both cases, mate bonds were framed as over-the-top, unbreakable love connections.

Feeling oddly nervous, I made myself read the overview article.

Fuck.

This had to be a joke. Mate bonds were that real? I was supposed to believe that thirty percent of all shifters would experience what this article was describing? My reading sped up along with my heart.

Shifter mate bonds can happen to existing couples or long time friends. They can happen to relative strangers. They occur across all human subspecies, including baseline, or “regular” humans. Results of surveys indicate that both shifter-shifter bonds and human-shifter bonds experience identical effects. Further surveys…

I lowered the phone. My fingers were trembling, but I didn’t know why. “This is nuts,” I told the cash register. “There’s nothing to worry about. She’s probably not even a shifter.” The phone felt slippery in my suddenly damp palm. I had to keep going.

Telling myself I was mostly skimming it for laughs, I read that mate bonds usually struck in a person’s twenties, but they could happen to older and younger shifters as well. I squinted, unnerved by the randomness. Hadn't there been a recent story about a bunch of high schoolers who ended up in mate bonds around the same time? It had happened in one town last year and was so rare that it made the national news. Shit. It was like…an outbreak.

“Or chain lightning,” I confided to the lottery scratch-offs. Zap! And you’re mated for life. And I was in the middle of the prime age range like Drywell was in the middle of tornado country. “No…this is dumb,” I told the box of meat sticks—minus the one I'd gifted to Mel.

I was overreacting. None of this meant a damn thing. I wasn't about to mate bond with anybody.

Awful to even think about it. Like…instant brain washing. Even if all the quotes from bonded mates described it different. They made it sound like mate bonding was finding someone you were destined for. Assured compatibility. A soulmate so close you would sometimes sense their emotions.

“Crazy, right?” The meat sticks didn’t answer.

My phone clattered onto the counter as I abandoned it beside the cash register. I rubbed my sweat-slicked forehead. Rory had probably been dicking around with the thermostat again.

This article was having a strange impact on me. The echo of my headache was lurking and my heart was jumping like a fluttering bird. Even with my new obsession for a certain storm chaser, I wanted nothing as intimate as a mate bond. Mel could just bond with someone else.

As soon as the idea formed, my stomach start copying my heart on the jumping and twisting. I felt a twinge of nausea. God…was she bonded with someone? Was there a way to tell? What if it was someone like that Ángel asshole?

I snatched up my phone and tapped the back button with a quivering thumb. The screen refilled with the master list, taking me safely out of the entire section.

Scrolling randomly, I tapped a different link—anything to keep my mind off that mystifying article. I dove in, reading several paragraphs without processing a word. Only slowly did I realize I was now reading about partial shifts, the ability shifters had to call up their animal defenses in human form. This was comfortable territory. The action shows I grew up on always had at least one character who was growling and slicing shit up.

I studied the list of bullet-points. Claws…sharp teeth…superior smell…night vision…even a tendency to sprout fur. Most shifters had at least some of those traits, and that was on top of the increased strength all of them possessed.

Then my gaze landed on a single passage that made my breath lock like our fuel truck’s parking brake.

Shifter eyes deserve special mention. If you see animal eyes in a human face, it means that shifter’s “primal self” is watching you. Take care! A primal shifter is in the grip of strong emotions. They may seem intense, direct, or even dangerous. Having eyes that are literal “windows to the soul” makes some shifters so uncomfortable that they hide them behind glasses.

Mel’s face swam into my mind. I pictured the way her almost harsh beauty softened when her sensuous lips tipped into a smile. And how alert and watchful she seemed behind the brown-gold tint of her aviators.

I was arrested by a sudden daydream. A vision of my fingers gently tugging those glasses down, of Mel letting me take them off.

In my head I saw the lenses flash as they fell away to reveal the long swoop of dark lashes against perfect cheeks. But no matter how much I strained my imagination, when Mel finally looked up, gazing at me for the first time…I couldn’t see it. No mental image fit. My chest ached with disappointed longing, and my hand absently rubbed my shirt to soothe the pain.

Jesus…what was happening to me?