Shapeshifters

Denji, one of my favorite shapeshifters (from Chainsaw Man by Tatsuki Fujimoto)

I’ve been sitting on this piece for a while. It still feels very unpolished and disjointed to me but I think that’s because it’s about self-expression, something I continue to fiddle with and fumble over. Don’t we all! At the very least I think it was helpful to put some of it into words. Obviously my experiences with self-expression and gender aren’t universal. My writing reflects my personal experience. Content warnings for lots of blood and guts. Thanks for reading and supporting!

~ Sica

When I was a child, I thought I was a werewolf.

There’s something there, something beyond the obvious part (that I was a weird kid), something about the carnage of being a little girl because yes, I think I was a girl once. Still, even then that truth was accompanied by a more sinister prophecy lurking underneath, a prophecy about the shapeshifter I would become.

I’ve always had a slightly brutal inner life. I wrote my first poem in elementary school, and it was about starving inside a cage. My teacher at the time, perhaps having a bit of a sick streak herself, made me read it aloud in front of my whole class. I know it was because she liked it, and thought it had merit, but it didn’t make anyone think I was cool or smart. It just cemented my status as a bit of a freak weirdo to the other elementary schoolers.

This was probably always going to happen though. I wasn’t ever really good at hiding who I was, even when I knew it would make my life easier. I was a problem child. I bit and scratched and clawed at my classmates. I thought I was a changeling. I found an old letter opener in a drawer in my parents’ office, the hilt of which was molded into the shape of a faerie woman’s head. I slept with it under my pillow for weeks, praying for the faeries to take me back to where I belonged. I was obsessed with knives, blades, swords, daggers, their sharpness, their elegance, their danger.

Again, this was foretold. My family name, “Sica” a shortsword used in gladiatorial combat, curved, like a scythe, to reap grain and draw blood, maybe these things are the same.

People often describe blood as having the flavor of iron, but we knew the taste of blood long before the acrid construction of metal. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this metal tastes like us, that blood on the tongue is sharp as a blade, more sensation than a flavor. Perhaps we made those blades because we longed for that taste, to split and spill open, and when we cross swords we are drinking in ourselves. The mouth wants blood the way skin wants light, sickeningly, and with the knowledge that all color will fade from us without it. We are yearning for ourselves, eating creatures, impossible to satiate.

My father thinks our ancestors were fig farmers, not killers. I think otherwise. I think we’re all killers, even now. Especially now. In the cafe where I write this, for a second, the sharp scent of grinding coffee beans smells like blood. I search my hands for a warm knife. I search myself for a fresh wound.

But I beg of you, don’t mind the viscera. I’ve just been thinking a lot about the carving up of a body as a holy act of creation and transformation, and how that relates to gender, catholicism, and more ancient practices like ritual sacrifice. It seems to me that for a long time, we’ve viewed the carving of a body as a potent means to an end. A sacrifice appeases a hungry god, and a surgery quiets internal chaos. Maybe queerness is a hungry god.

At this point in my life, I don’t desire any gender-affirming surgeries, but I still romanticize opening up my body and rooting around in there, finding the hidden parts, warm, pulsing. I used to stare at old illustrated medical diagrams that showed skin peeled back to reveal organs underneath. It felt sacred and erotic. It occurred to me that my interior body was reacting to an image of itself. It was experiencing intimacy. It was experiencing being seen.

I’m still primal and foolish and animalistic and intense. I want to drink blood. I want someone to want to drink my blood. I think of myself in childhood, so convinced that there was some kind of monster inside me that was just waiting for the right opportunity to reveal itself. I think of myself now, even more convinced of this. I was never going to be the kind of shapeshifter who crawled inside a chrysalis to sleep. Change didn’t feel like simply waking up different, it felt like talons and teeth bursting through my skin under the light of a full moon.

The concept of a shapeshifter is inseparable from carnage. As the body breaks and stitches itself into a different form, the shapeshifter feels the movement of its viscera, becoming acutely acquainted with every tiny detail of themselves, every sinful inch. It’s an anatomical worship ceremony, an undoing of the form and order of things. A shapeshifter knows that carving up a body can be an act of love. A desperate act, a necessary act, a sacred act, an act that continues indefinitely, for the shapeshifter will never be satisfied in stillness.

I sit before the altar. I understand the trade I am making: any sense of certainty for the freedom of constant flux. Queerness is a hungry god. I know this now, an ancient one, because it demands flesh and blood.