(October 30th, 1986, Atterberry Ranch, Ireland)

The canvas was alight with colour, orange on black, on green, on blue. My brush danced in hand as I painted. Each stroke deliberate, and every movement precise, carefully crafting my commendable creation into a kaleidoscopic cabal of conflagratingly configured colour. Hehe, conflagratingly isn't quite a word, which was dumb. It should've been, it fitted all the criteria of a proper word, but for some reason it wasn't. Language was silly like that. Limited in a million and one ways, yet an endless expanse ahead of its absence.

Me and Mom, Mom and I— thanks English— were painting. We were in the painting room, and we had brushes and palettes and paint tubes, and Mom was wearing her apron, and I had formed a copy of hers onto me, and we were painting!

Together! And talking, so much talking. It was still morning and yet I was pretty sure that this was the most I had ever seen Mom talk in one day. We just talked back and forth for the past hour as she told me about all the different little steps we had to do inorder to paint properly. We were both painting on the same canvas, making a luscious landscape. Mom painted the sky with cumulus clouds and a radiant dawn, meanwhile I painted the earth, forming triangular mountains and verdant hills.

“Anddd… there! Look Mom!” I said excitedly, having finished my latest addition. She looked down from where she was concentrated on her own section.

“Aww, that's a brilliant… butterfly?” I nodded enthusiastically, making a cute little ‘mm-hmm’ sound. “That's great, Sweety. It's very colourful.” I may have blushed a little at her complement. She patted my head twice before returning to her work, smiling a little wider than before. Mom had some serious smiling skillz today.

I was almost certain that Mom was just humouring me, and that my section of the painting was at least fifty times worse than her's, but luckily intellectual certainty has very little to do with the human emotional experience, so I was still as chipper as a cherry bird.

After I finished introspecting, I started work on my next little addition. The butterfly was too big for the hills it was painted over, which made it look weird… but, I could fix that. If I set up a foreground around the butterfly then its relative size could become correctly proportioned.

That's right, with the power of thinking, I found out how to un-giantify a butterfly! I got to work immediately, brushing careful lines into the bulbous hills of the midground.

⋇⋆✦⋆⋇

Astrid and Art looked upon their finished work, a blue sky fading into a golden dawn, rolling clouds both fluff and jagged, misty faraway mountains giving way bubbly hills, and a butterfly approaching a flower. What was once a blank canvas had been filled. The room they stood in was small, a little cramped with filled shelves and two people, but they didn't mind, in fact, they didn't even notice. Why would they need extra space to occupy when the only space they wanted was right there, specifically where they were, together.

“I think your bit's better.” Art said.

“It's not about being better,” Artrid replied.

“... I think my bit's worse?”

“Art, yours is perfect, there is nothing wrong with it.” she said, ruffling her child's hair.

“But it's-n't as nice as yours.”

“Bah, skies are easy to paint, it's just random shapes of paint added in the correct configuration of colours.”

“But Mommm, that's all any painting is!”

She started laughing, unable to resist her child's adorableness. “Art, dear,” she said. “I don't think you're getting the point. It isn't about a solidly measurable achievement of any kind. It's about having fun. Doing something nice, and then, maybe, in the end you can look at this painting again in the future and appreciate the inspiration you had now.”

“I… don't get it.”

“That's fine,” she said, patting Art's head. “I think we did good. I like how you made that flower in the foreground, it recontextualizes the butterfly. That was pretty smart, good job.” Her child turned their head away, trying to hide their cute blush.

Art mumbled something that sounded vaguely affirmative. After a short silence, Astrid explained how they would need to let it finish drying, then the two of them left the paint room.

“Is there anything else you wanted to do today, Cuddlebug?” she asked on their way back to the living room.

She briefly heard a fluttering, before Art tackled her from behind in a familiar twelve legged hug. She giggled, and then Art spoke. “I love you mom, so much. Yr th best.” The sound was a little wispy, and she didn't know how Art talked without a mouth, but it didn't matter. Art rested their head on her shoulder, purring a little… right next to her ear. Her heart was noticeably louder, to both of them. Her smile beaming, her adorable child clinging to her shoulders.

She shifted Art to her front when she sat on the couch, and Art in turn shifted back into their human form, curling up in her lap.

She was curious, Art looked just like her when she was little. Exactly like her in fact, right down to the tiny scar she had on her knee that she got at the age of five, but excluding the one on her forearm from when she was fourteen. It was mildly perplexing, but again, it didn't matter. Her child was a strange and beautiful creature, and that was all she cared to know.

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“I like cuddling with you.” her child said.

“I can tell,” she responded, giving them a little squeeze. “We could cuddle for the rest of the day, if you want.”

“Could you tell me about your birthdays?” her child asked.

“Of course,” And so she did. She couldn't remember some of her older birthdays, and explained how her baby photos were lost in a fire some time ago. Most of her birthdays were very similar to each other, they all had a structure to them. Tradition. She would wake up late, sleeping far into the morning. She would find her house colourful as this one was now, and her parents would be forced to eat her favourite breakfast.

“Why do I only have you? Shouldn't I have a dad?” she was interrupted. Astrid sighed she knew Art would ask about their dad, or rather lack thereof. She just hadn't expected it so soon, but Art had proven themself to be significantly smarter than she was expecting just by talking all morning, so maybe she should have seen it coming.

Still it was a little jarring.

“So… Do you know why most children need fathers Art?”

Her child briefly grimaced. “I am familiar with the human reproductive cycle, but I can tell that I couldn't’ve come about from the… standard approach.”

Astrid realised that she might have to have The Talk a lot earlier than she would’ve liked. “Well, the short answer is that I made you by myself, with magic. And the long answer is that I'll tell you when you're older.” Although at this rate she figured Art might reverse engineer themself before she gets around to it.

How long had Art been able to make clothes? The frilly pink dress they grew was made out of cloth, real cloth, with hundreds of threads per inch interwoven perfectly. Astrid didn't remember ever showing Art even basic clothing maintenance beyond how to wash them, so sh-they— Art, they— must have figured it out on their own. She had seen Art practising their shape-shifting before, opened their bedroom door to find some indev creation, a spine with fleshy roots growing over it, then receding back, then regrouping in a different configuration. So it wasn't just magic, Art had to design their creations, even if they made it look easy.

Another thing was their bed. Which they made. She had checked it out when Art had first made it, and at the time it was just some creature's furry hide stuffed with… cotton? Feathers? She didn't know, it was irrelevant. Anyways, it had changed colour several times, and texture a few, but she never inspected it after the first time.

A gentle poke from a tiny finger brought her out of her introspection. “Sorry, where was I?” she asked.

“How much older?”

“No, not that,”

“Birthday breakfast?”

“Ah, yes thank you, so as I was saying-” Favourite food, blah blah blah. After breakfast she and her father would play frisbee in the yard. At noon they would go to the city park and have a picnic atop the hill with the pretty tree on it. Her mom had always made these cute little sandwiches that were triangle shaped, filled with chicken, cheese, mayo, lettuce, and— most coveted of all— well sliced tomato.

Art nodded sagely, the apple did not fall far from her tree. As long as you didn't include Art's propensity for hunting and eating small critters, in which case the apple is admitted not from that peach tree it hatched under.

What even was that metaphor, and why did she think that she needed a metaphor to explain the common sense that is appreciation of well sliced tomato?

In the park she would fly her kite every year, until it broke. Then she started a new tradition of making a kite to fly every year. When they got home they would have a big party that all three of her friends would go to.

When she was seven that became all two of her friends. When she was nine that became one friend. She didn't tell Art about those parts, because when she became a witch she got new friends, half a dozen of them over the course of her education.

A lacking of friends is relative to one's own perspective, and she didn't want Art to go through that.

At the party there was cake, “which is like bread, but fluffier and sweeter.” She had explained. Once that was done the birthday-person would be gifted birthday presents, boxes wrapped in colourful paper containing objects of desire.

By that point it would be late in the day and her parents would tuck her into bed, reading her fairytales as they sat in her bed with her. In the end they would kiss her goodnight, and she would wake up the next morning to a less special day.

“Mm-hmm,” Art hummed from her collarbone. “So, we should go fly a kite?”

“We should do whatever you want to do. It's your birthday, you don't have to have the same traditions I used.” she responded.

“I like the idea of making a thing and then flying it with you, let's do that.” her child said as she stood up from her lap, stretching their arms— Wait, that didn't line up.

She double checked her last couple thoughts.

Astrid sighed, blaming her child's adorableness. She just had no hope of survival when faced with such cuteness. There was no way she was that cute looking when she was at Art's body's age. It must have been the dress, making them look like a cute little princess.

Art grabbed her hand and started pulling. “Come on Mom, we can't fly in the house!” She smiled, feeling a sparkle of pride. They walked out the door and across the porch until they stood several feet into the ranch house's extensive lawn. Art let go of her hand, and gave her a contemplative stare. They looked her up, lips twitching as they tried to keep themself from muttering. They looked up to meet her mildly confused eyes. Art let out a playful huff, before saying “Eh, it couldn't be that hard, could it?” Moments later they hunched over, and the wet squelching crack of a hundred breaking bones filled the yard as limbs of white bone and stringy muscle bursted from Art's back in a macabre display.

“Um, does that hurt, Sweetheart?” She couldn't help but ask. Art shapeshifted plenty, but she figured that it didn't hurt to ask, now that she could actually expect a response.

“Huh? Oh, no-no I'm fine,” They rotated their head a hundred and eighty degrees to look at their back. “I guess I could see how it might look kinda gruesome, from a certain perspective.” They collapsed to their hands and knees as their fleshy construction grew larger.

“So, you're designing a kite?” Astrid asked, looking up at the construct that was now taller than her by a significant margin.

Art frowned slightly before speaking. “Experimenting,” they answered as thirty different designs of appendages blossomed from the trunk of meat and bone that was now covered by a layer of grey oak bark. “I don't have a good grasp of large sized flight mechanics.” Art said, undulating the ugly branches of her tree one appendage at a time.

“Macro scale aerodynamics,” she supplied.

“Thank you,” Art said, looking at her through their currently upside-down face. There were a few awkward seconds— of Art smiling at Astrid, and Astrid trying to not look too off put by her child's… challenging peculiarities— before a quick shlurp caused by Art returning to their normal human form.

“I didn't know you could shift that big.” she said, but Art just gave a neutral ‘hmm’ in response.

Art rolled over and sat up, sitting cross-legged on the ground. Art clapped their hands together, and when they brought them apart there was a wooden spool. From the spool grew a white rope-like tendril that wrapped itself around the spool. Once the spool was filled the tendril grew out in front of them, and the extended portion hardened. The stick branched out forming the frame of a kite, and an orange membrane stretched itself to cover the kite. Lastly, from the left and right tips of the kite, four upscaled dragonfly wings sprouted.

It was after looking at that last detail that Astrid realised that it wasn't very windy today. A weak buzz accompanied the kite’s take off, the sound fading as it gained elevation. Astrid put a hand on her child's shoulder.

“Remember to hold on tight,” she said.

“I feel like you're being sarcaustic, it's not exactly windy today.” Art replied.

“Yes, I was being a little sarcastic. I could make it a little windier if you want.” After getting a nod from Art, she started waving her wand about. “Kaluwmbai Sukranji Druwnj Dirwium!” she spoke in what was probably one of the longest incantations that Art would hear for a while. That spell took a full seven seconds of incantation— at minimum—, and a full half of her stamina to boot. Not to brag, but she was one of the strongest mages she knew, at least when it came to endurance. She was only middling in terms of power output.

Regardless, the winds picked up, and the clear skies became cloudy. Now Art was digging their heels in buckling against the wind, a wide smile on their face. They held the kite winder in a death grip as they laughed maniacally, cackling against the storm.

Despite the forces at play, the kite held. The line was taunt, but it did not snap, and the wind was wild, but the membrane was not ripped from its frame. Astrid looked from the beautiful construct to her most beautiful construct. “I'm proud of you, Kid!” she hollered into the wind.

She couldn't tell if Art heard her or not, but ultimately she decided that it didn't matter. Art was having the best birthday of their life, and that was all she cared about.