My parents didn’t notice the change. They were spending more and more hours away from home. While they were gone, I leapt onto tables, clawed at the curtains and chased mice across the basement floor.

When I was six years old I would tell people I was a horse.  They never believed me even though it was true.  How could they miss my long, auburn mane and my four hooves, so hard and thick they clacked across the floors and pavement wherever I went?  I whinnied and flared my nostrils and still they said I was just a girl.  People see what they want to see.

“If I’m a girl, then why do you call me Roan?” I asked my mother.

“Because you were supposed to be a boy and Roan was your grandfather’s name,” she said.  She was stirring something on the stove and didn’t look up at me.  That’s how it was whenever I spoke to my mother.  She talked back to the stove or the kitchen sink or the ironing board.  I have trouble remembering the color of her eyes.

“Roan is the name for a horse’s coat.”  I turned my long neck to view my two-toned right flank.  “That’s why I’m called Roan.”

“Suit yourself,” she said.  “Now set the table.  It’s almost time for dinner.”

I sighed but didn’t argue.  I had already explained it was nearly impossible to pick up utensils with hooves, but she never listened.  I clomped into the kitchen and went about getting knives and forks, making as much noise as you would expect of a horse trying to set a dinner table.

For the next few years, living as a horse amongst humans wasn’t much of a problem.  Horses were very popular with the girls at school and every day at recess we would gallop and race across the playground.  Being the only real horse in the herd, I was easily the fastest and most graceful.  I remember, for the most part, being happy.  There were the after school meetings because of bad grades (why should a horse know how to read and do arithmetic?).  And the occasional bouts of jealousy from the girls because I was the best horse (girls can be that way).  But in the end, I knew who I was and that, in a way, I belonged.

Until the day I discovered I was really a cat.

It was during the fourth grade when this whole business about reading started to make sense.  Everything I read was an alternate reality—a new possibility.  When I stumbled upon a series about cats, I was hooked.  A smart, agile, cat could survive all on her own, evading danger and hunting her meals.  If she wanted, she could form clans with other cats.  All the choices were hers. The more I read about cats, the more I realized I must be a cat.  My legs shortened and my former hooves became padded paws with claws I could extend and retract.  My once straight back could arch or lower as I slinked through bushes, stalking unsuspecting prey.  My parents didn’t notice the change.  They were spending more and more hours away from home.  While they were gone, I leapt onto tables, clawed at the curtains and chased mice across the basement floor.

When I shared the books with the girls at school, the switch from horses to cats was immediate and seamless.  We passed around the copies and pooled our money for new books which came out every few months.  They named me leader of our clan: Roan the Rat Slayer.  Together we slunk around the boundary of our play yard, hissing at approaching boys.  On sunny days we chased after butterflies, yowling with glee as we sprung wildly toward the sky.

But as time went on, girl by girl, the clan grew smaller.  I wasn’t surprised.  They weren’t real cats after all.  They lost interest in mice and butterflies and started chasing the boys instead.  By middle school, we were a clan of two.  Serena could climb straight up a wall and leap off tree branches without making a sound.  We played hide and seek in the dark and I swear she had night vision.  How I wished she was a cat like me!

By now we knew not to slink around campus.  We swallowed our screeches and held back from pouncing at low flying birds.  We hissed with our eyes instead of our mouths.  For nearly two years we were practically inseparable.  But you can’t pretend forever to be something you’re not.

When Serena kissed me I nearly snarled at her.  Cats don’t like to be kissed.  Instead, I rubbed my nose against her neck and gently licked her ear.  But she shoved me away.

“God, Roan!” she said.  “I’m not a cat!”

I already knew this, of course.  Still, it was hard for me to hear her say it.

After that, she began to spend her lunches with Annie Berkshire and I roamed the yard alone.

By Freshman year I was used to being by myself, so when Justin Barone showed up and started lurking around I had decided to stay a one cat clan.  I hissed at him with my eyes, but it didn’t scare him off.  When I climbed up my tree at the edge of campus, he scrambled up after me.

“You are one strange girl,” he said, easing onto the branch beside me.

“Yes, I am,” I said, because all cats make strange girls.

I began to wonder about Justin Barone.  I wondered why he didn’t seem to care what people thought of him.  I wondered at how lithe and graceful his movements were.  I wondered if maybe, possibly, secretly, he was a cat.

A few weeks later, I found him pacing outside my window.  He leapt over the sill and we rolled about the carpet, all rough-tongued and kneading paws.  I knew he was feline by the way he made everything purr.  After that, we prowled the nights together, our night vision guiding us along the dark streets of our town.

When winter came, my father moved out and I barely noticed.  He sent me a ticket to join him for a drive up the Pacific Coast.  Cats don’t care for planes or oceans, but over spring break I experienced both.  After so many days of the sea and my father, the two will always be connected.  We stopped at some rocks where seals lounged and barked and sent their stink along the ocean breeze to where we were picnicking.

“Don’t hold your nose,” he said.  “One of them might be your relative.”

I was used to my father saying absurd things, so I had no reaction.  But he mistook my cat expression, one of boredom and slight disdain, as skepticism.

“Don’t believe me?  The selkie gene is very strong in our family.  You’ve heard of selkies—part seal, part human?  Seals in the water, but they shed their skins to be human on land.  Lots of flippered kin back in the old country.  In fact …”  He squinted his eyes against the sun.  “I believe that’s cousin Meara.  See, the big fat one warming her back side on the sunniest rock?”

We watched cousin Meara as we chewed our sandwiches.  I wondered how it would feel to have such slippery smooth skin instead of fur, or propel gracefully through salt water, my paws exchanged for strong flippers.  But cats can’t live in water and I felt closed in by an ocean that was endless and unsurmountable.  I was restless to be where I could roam, to be back in my own territory with Justin.

But when I returned, Justin wasn’t waiting outside my window.  At school he didn’t follow me up the branches of our tree.  I saw him prowling around Lucy Gonzales, could practically hear her purr from my sentry post.  When the last bell rang, I slunk soundlessly toward the ground.  But my claws failed me on the descent, and I landed too hard, spraining an ankle.

“All boys are like that,” my mother said to the TV.  She mostly talked to the TV now.

I sat on the couch, my leg on the coffee table, an ice pack on the swelling that hid my ankle bone.  As usual she misunderstood my tears.  I wasn’t crying for Justin.  Justin was a cat.  He was just doing what tomcats do.  With spring comes the urge to wander.

I was crying for the loss of myself.  I knew I was no longer a cat.  Cats do not get broken hearts from wandering toms.

Back at school I stomped around like a large mammal with extra appendages.  My crutches were two ivory tusks.  Between them swung a listless trunk, ending in my booted foot.  Later, when my ankle healed, I still felt awkward and heavy.  I no longer leapt onto walls or scrambled up trees.  Gravity’s pull held me firmly to the ground.  At lunch I fed my sandwich to the birds, watching with envy as they dove from my tree, snatched up their meal, and returned to the sky.

When the school year ended, I stopped moving my body from place to place, which was getting harder and harder to do.  It’s difficult to operate what you’re not familiar with, and I had no idea what I was.

At home, I settled into the coach and slowly turned into mineral.  The TV talked but I didn’t talk back.  During commercials my mother explained I would be going to stay with my father.  She had to raise her voice over the description of gastrointestinal side effects, including nausea, constipation and diarrhea.  My father had moved from the coast to the center of his new state, so I wouldn’t be confined by an ocean.  Being made of stone, that made little difference to me now.

After I arrived, I learned there was a river that flowed around his town.  I began to rise early every morning just to place my stony toes in its current.  I wondered how long it would take for the water to wear my feet down into tiny grains of sand.

One morning, I saw a family of river otters splashing near the opposite bank.  A mother and her pups were summersaulting over one another, so entangled it was hard to tell where one otter ended and another began.

Suddenly, more than anything, I wanted be one of them.  What would it feel like to be at the center of all that energy?  Maybe it would feel something like love.

The current swirled about me as I waded toward them.  My legs and newly webbed feet fused together as I got ready to dive.

“Kind of makes you wish you could be one.”

I whirled around to see a woman holding a fishing pole, gray hair sprouting beneath a cap lined with flies.

“Just play in the river all day, not a care in the world.  And they don’t need one of these to get a nice trout,” she said lifting the rod.

I turned back to the otters who were drifting downstream.

“Of course, river otters can’t do everything.”

“Like what?” I said, watching them longingly.

“Like… play the ukulele.”

The idea was so unexpected I found myself laughing.  It travelled through me like a thermos of tea, warming my core.   As my center thawed, I realized I couldn’t feel my feet and stumbled to shore on two blocks of ice.

Sitting on the bank, rubbing the feeling back into my toes, I asked, “What else?”

Without hesitation she said, “Juggling flaming torches.”

I looked at her as she cast out her line.  “Can you juggle flaming torches?”

“No,” she said, taking her eyes of the river and resting them on me.  “But I bet a girl like you could do it.”

I stared back at her and slowly nodded.  I saw my dancing hands making fire patterns in the sky.

Maybe I was a girl after all.