Bath and Lisa were both in the third grade. They weren’t in the same class, but always saw each other at recess and hung out after school. Bath had more friends now, as did Lisa, and they played together. Lisa was much better at making friends than Bath, to his chagrin. No matter his efforts, social etiquette didn’t come as natural to him as he would have liked. Language and reading, those were easy. Knowledge collecting and logic made sense as well. He thought school laughably easy.
But interacting with his fellows was something he had yet to master.
He blamed this failure largely on the fact that social etiquette was remarkably fluid. A human child’s age had an enormous influence on their expected behavior. Even from month to month, Bath found the children around him changing the rules of the social game.
‘In any other species, the rules are the same,’ Bath snarled internally. Physical strength and overwhelming confidence: these were the keys to success. Yet here, amongst these children, he felt lost.
In many ways, he had to grudgingly admit, he was stuck in his ways. He tried to change, certainly, just as he assumed old humans tried to change their ways as well. But these children, they changed so quickly! Bath thought in decades; they thought in months.
Bath sighed. He couldn’t really blame the children for his bad mood. Their lifespans were so short: if they were like him and stuck in their ways already...that would be the equivalent of him having reached maturity in his millionth year. Just thinking of how he was back then compared to now made his mind race in fear.
Just the thought of reversion, of being forced back to how he was before, terrified him.
He shook his head. No, perhaps not his millionth year, maybe his hundred-millionth year. At least then he-
“Bath?”
He look up at the teacher.
“Sorry, Ms. Avery, I was spacing out,” he replied honestly, showing the blush of embarrassment as norm dictated appropriate.
Ms. Avery looked worried. “Are you okay?”
Bath was still in an irritated mood, and wanted to snap at her, but concealed his impatience. “Yeah, I was just thinking about a book I was reading. Can you please repeat the question?”
She nodded and smiled.
Bath felt a feeling of intense relief when class finished. The inside of the classroom felt stuffy, the low ceilings emulating a cage. Were he in the form of a cave dweller, or insect, perhaps he'd feel more comfortable. He had already been stuck in this human form for 9 years, however, and felt acutely the claustrophobia that one form imposed on him. The classroom’s cramped form seemed only to reinforce the feeling that he was trapped.
He knew he wasn’t really trapped, that he could take any form of his choosing at any time and go anywhere he wanted. This fact was daily on his mind.
In fact...
‘Why don’t I change form?’ Bath wondered to himself. His parents had stopped watching his every move years ago. He often had time alone. It should be easy enough for him to assume the form of a bird and feel the freedom of open air on his wings.
Bath felt every bit the fool for failing to think of this before. Why had he ever decided that he had to stay as a human? Sure, he needed to keep up appearances of being a human, but he could take breaks.
He was now sure that breaks in form would be necessary to ensure his sanity.
Bath recognized his lack of ingenuity as a personal failure. When you lived as long as he did, when time passed as fast as it did, he very rarely pondered problems and their possible solutions. He just lived, every day followed by the next. Because he started out in a position where he was unable to change form, he had continued with an “unable to change form” mindset for nearly a decade.
The thought nearly soured his mood again.
After breaking for lunch, Bath quickly found Lisa and met up with her. Their friend groups converged around Lisa. She was akin to a ball of light, drawing others into her magnificence. Or so Bath thought. He certainly felt her draw.
While they ate their lunches, Lisa described what everybody would be doing during recess.
“Today, we are going to play football!” she exclaimed. “I brought my foam football from home. The rules are as follows...”
Bath smiled fondly while Lisa explained. He felt the instinctual urge to reward her for her charisma, for showing strength. He pushed this urge aside.
Not my place, he thought to himself.
Soon everybody was out playing in the field. Bath was much better at controlling his child body than he was years ago. He was well-aware of the strength an average human child should have, and ensured that he had just about the same amount.
Perhaps a smidgen more.
Bath and the other children lined up across from each other in two lines. As was typical, both he and Lisa were the two quarterbacks. No children at their age could really be good at throwing the ball—being limited by a child’s muscles while using Lisa’s standard football—but he and Lisa were sufficient enough. Really, they were the leaders because they were the most competitive.
Bath had never met anybody who hated to lose more than Lisa. Then again, his exposure to humans was laughably limited, but all the same.
Both teams had already discussed strategy amongst themselves before the game began. All of the children had memorized a few major plays that they had all brainstormed together. This turned their frequent football matches into a game of strategy rather than just of luck or force.
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Lisa’s team started first.
“Hike!” she hollered at the top of her lungs while catching the ball. She stepped back, then pivoted her body left and threw the ball at one of her receivers. The girl caught the ball against her chest with a grunt and then started running towards the woodchips, the end zone on Bath’s side of the field.
“Defense!” he called out calmly. He already had a solid strategy laid out for this kind of maneuver. This was one of Lisa’s signature moves; whenever she had Kathy on her team, she took full advantage of the girl’s excellent ability as a long-range wide-receiver. Kathy hardly ever dropped the ball.
Her only weakness was that she was relatively slow.
Roger quickly overtook her and tapped her shoulder. She stopped as soon as she was tapped and set the ball on the ground.
One thing Bath could appreciate in children was their sense of honor.
“Nice play, Kathy, Roger,” he said, automatically affirming the behaviors of his two friends like he would the young of other animals.
“Thanks!” both replied with smiles.
They continued to play through the recess period. In the end, Lisa won; Bath congratulated her with a severe handshake. Both of them kept straight faces for a full five seconds, then burst into raucous laughter.
After recess, Bath only had thoughts of the sky under his wings.
✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽
“Honey, how was school?” Samantha asked.
“Fine,” Bath replied. “We played football at recess again.”
“Did you learn anything interesting in class?”
Bath thought for a moment. “We learned some geography.”
“Oh, really? Of which region?”
“We learned about the Sahara desert.” Bath personally preferred the Sahara desert as it was in the past; he still remembered what the desert was like when it overflowed with lush vegetation. Not that Bath disliked deserts in general. Like all things, deserts in their desolation provided a balancing force. When he desired relative peace and tranquility, Earth’s deserts provided.
“That’s neat! What do you think of the wildlife?”
“Hmm...the sand cat is really adorable.”
“Is it now?”
“Yup,” Bath said, sitting down at the kitchen island for a snack.
“Do you want to check on Avery later?” Samantha asked. Avery was one-and-a-half years old, the McLanes' second adopted child.
Bath beamed. “Sure!”
After a snack, he went upstairs to Avery’s crib where she had been taking a nap. She must have just woke up: she was playing with a toy in the corner of the crib and teething on a rattle.
“Avery,” Bath said clearly. She turned around and giggled.
“Brother!” Avery cried out. She stood up and lifted up her hands. Bath smiled and picked her up from the crib.
“How are you, Avery?”
“I good,” she replied.
“Did you take a nap?”
“Yah!” she giggled before hugging Bath’s legs.
“You want to see something really neat?” he asked, feeling a bit daring.
“Yah!” she repeated, eyes wide with wonder. Bath looked around, then shut the blinds. Avery wouldn’t remember anything until she was three or four, right?
“Okay,” he began, “I'm going to lift you up using the air! You're going to fly! Sound cool?”
“Fly! Fly! Aihpwane!”
Bath put one hand behind his back, turning it a shadow-like black gray, and then projected it outward towards Avery. To her credit, she didn’t scream, and only gave an exclamatory peep. Soon his former-hand spread out to encompass her body and gently lifted her into the air.
“You can steer by pointing your right finger,” Bath said. “Where’s your right finger? Can you wiggle it?”
Avery answered the challenge by waggling her right finger as hard as she could, which wasn’t very hard, but all the same...
“Okay, now point where you want to fly.”
Avery immediately pointed right at the window.
“You're taking after your brother,” Bath chuckled. “No, Avery, not outside this room.”
The girl began to point around the room and Bath dutifully elevated his shadowy, dispersed hand as required. After five minutes or so he saw the child growing tired and let her down. His hand quickly reformed behind his back.
“How was that?” he asked.
“Wow!” she drawled, putting her hands up as though trying to touch the stars. “I fly!”
“Yes, you were flying,” Bath grinned.
“Can we go downstairs?”
“Yes, but you need to walk.” She was terribly slow at traversing stairs; Bath knew she needed the practice.
“Okay,” she sighed.
Soon enough, Avery was with Samantha downstairs and Bath was back in his room. He gave a quick glance out the window to make sure nobody was outside. He then cracked the window open.
Bath drew himself into his Center, feeling his mass condense and fold like a many-layered flower. He took on the form of a tiny gnat, flew to the window, crawled through the screen, and promptly flew over to one of the hedges in the front yard. There, he shifted into the form of a sparrow. At this point only a few seconds had passed. He quickly flitted into the air, flying up until he reached a height where onlookers below would see only a vague bird-shaped outline. Finally, he shifted form to a brown bird of prey—he didn’t know its human name—and soared through the sky.
Today was a relatively fine day for flying. The thermals were abundant and allowed him to keep a consistently high height without exerting too much energy. He rejoiced in the superior vision of the bird and its power as it whipped through the sky like a razor.
How had he gone nine years without this? The folly of those who get stuck in their ways...
He realized that was one thing the humans had on him: the ability to change and think of new alternatives to current situations. For the first time since discovering the shrinking icebergs, he felt a tad of optimism: perhaps humans would be able to reverse the acceleration of the next extinction.
When Bath returned home, he decided that he had a good enough idea of human limits. He didn’t need to restrict himself unnecessarily just to fit in, so long as he could fake expectations well enough. He kept his enhanced vision and greatly enhanced his hearing and sense of smell. Each sense he could fine-tune when necessary, after all. Oh, how he missed the sense of power. The feeling of predatory rightness, of having a clear position and sense of purpose in nature.
When Bath came down the stairs it was dinner time. Apparently, Samantha had been trying to find him a while back and was quite alarmed that he had gone missing.
“Bath, where were you!?” she glared, fury clear on her features. “I thought you went missing!”
“Sorry mom, I was playing outside!”
Her eyes narrowed in what Bath recognized as suspicion. He heard her heart rate increase even more than it already had.
“How did you come back inside?”
Bath shrugged. “I was really quiet, I guess.”
Samantha put a hand to her forehead and sighed. Bath heard her heart rate begin to relax.
“Sorry for making you worry, Mom,” he said, his words dripping with concern. He did feel bad for making her worry, but not as bad as she likely thought he should. Remorse was a particularly potent human emotion, one he had never felt strongly in any other form. Even after assuming the form of a human for years, he still didn’t fully understand it.
“Okay, honey, just don’t scare me like that again.”
Bath nodded, then dragged Avery over to the couch to read a picture book to her while Samantha finished preparing dinner.