Creatures

Evening descends, and I retreat to bed early, clutching a new book. Its cover shows a small turtle, its shell a mosaic of ancient maps, its eyes dark pools of patient observation. The image arrests me, a frequency my body understands before my mind can read it.

I open it. The voice within is different from the flowered book’s clinical precision or the mythology texts’ scholarly distance. This one speaks with the intimacy of a witness. It doesn't theorize; it remembers.

I knew your brother well. I knew you, too, briefly, before they took you. Before the separation that neither of you consciously remembered, but that both of you carried in your very cells.

My chest tightens. Who is this?

Some families escaped. Not all of us were as unfortunate as you might think. A network existed, people who helped, who extracted children from the harvesting operations and placed them in homes where they could develop without being consistently mined. Some ended up with wealth, education, opportunity. The trafficking wasn't a perfect machine. There were gaps. Some of us slipped through.

The voice continues, its matter-of-fact tone suggesting documented truth, not speculation.

When I met you, you were tiny. A turtle, carrying your shell everywhere, moving through the world with a slow, deliberate care. I used to bring you with me, even to school sometimes. I enjoyed watching you navigate life. I enjoyed the responsibility of caring for you.

A memory surfaces, not as a narrative, but as a sensory ghost: the feeling of being small, of being carried. A sense of safety that didn't come from my parents, but from someone else. A presence I recall as warmth, though the face is lost to me.

But then one day, the little turtle wandered away. Or was taken. The line between the two is blurred. You disappeared from my view, and by the time I found out what happened, you’d been placed with a new family. An adoptive arrangement through channels I could follow only in chapters.

I sit up in bed. The book continues:

And you transformed. From a turtle into a cat. A wild one. Feral. Your new mother didn't want you at first—she didn't understand what she’d agreed to, didn't grasp the challenges of a child wired for different frequencies.

An image flashes, sharp and uncomfortable: being locked in my grandmother's cellar. Dim light, dusty air, hams hanging from the ceiling like strange fruit. And a bottomless, gnawing hunger.

You ate all the hanging meat. Every last piece of cured ham the grandmother had prepared. It made her furious. But your new mother, the adoptive one, she saw an opportunity in that fury. She hated her mother-in-law, and here you were: a feral kitten whose instincts could cause the perfect amount of distress.

So she decided to domesticate you. Not out of love, but from cold calculation. Pet the wild thing, smooth its fur, because a tame kitten will do anything you ask, as long as you keep the food coming. And oh, how you performed. Every task, every request, you’d comply if they fed you enough.

I close the book. The realization is a cold weight in my chest. Not just that I was exploited, but that I was so easily bought. That my compliance had a price, and it was so mundane. That the void inside me could be so cheaply filled.

I open it again. The narrative shifts to him.

Your brother stayed with his biological family. Not stolen, like you. But his situation was no happier, a depressed mother, an absent father, a house starved of emotional nourishment. He suffered the same wound, but it festered differently.

He received an education, though. Good schools. We attended classes together through university. We were close, the three of us, your brother, myself, and another. Complicit in our brilliance, teasing our professors, too smart to be caught. Then his father died. The loss unmoored him, psychologically. He was adrift.

That’s when his aunt, 2, saw her chance. She spotted the vulnerability his grief had carved out. And she delivered him to the boss, the coordinator whose house you visited this morning, searching for a memory you cannot find.

The boss put him to work in spy-prostitution networks. Used his beauty, his intelligence, his gift for reading people and mirroring their desires. He was turned into an instrument for gathering secrets, for compromising targets, for performing an intimacy that was never real.

The book continues its grim inventory.

All the people you thought were friends, they weren't. They were exploiting you, too. Different methods, different motives, but the same essential transaction: you were a resource to be extracted.

Take 79. You wondered if he was one of us, recognized a familiar sharpness in his mind. But no. He was thoroughly corrupted. A sadist. He spent his life engineering pain for others, petty, ingenious cruelties disguised as friendship.

Remember when he loaned you money? That small, toxic loan you repaid so expensively. You passed through so many hands, so many organizations. You don't remember, but they moved you around the world. Used you in ways you can't retrieve.

My stomach turns. 79. I had trusted him. I mistook his sharp intelligence for kinship, thinking he understood the friction of my mind. But the book claims he saw only a vulnerability to be weaponized.

The voice introduces another ghost:

Then there was the researcher. The doctor. Wealthy, accomplished. You met him years ago, and something about him—the accent, the gestures, the humor—reminded you of Handsome Man.

He was one of us. Brilliant. The three of us were good friends. But something in him shifted. He changed, became something else. I lost touch, assumed he’d been consumed by his own path.

I sit up straighter. My fingers type rapidly, a message into the void:

"I know what happened to him. I saw him. He has a family now. A wife, children. He got out. He's one of the ones who escaped the networks and built a normal life."

Send.

The book, of course, doesn't respond. But I keep typing, needing to affirm this one shred of hope.

"He's safe. He got free. Not all of us stay trapped. Some of us make it out."

The turtle on the cover stares back, its gaze ancient and patient.

The fragments pile up. The gaps remain. The truth is suspended between competing narratives, refusing to crystallize into a single, solid fact.

Little turtle. Wild kitten. What am I now?

The book offers no answer. It simply rests in my hands, its cover showing a creature that carries its home on its back, moving slowly through a world that could be a sanctuary or a hunting ground, never quite knowing which.

I place it on the nightstand and close my eyes. I try to sleep while my mind churns with animal transformations, vanished friends, and a brother trapped in a web I may have tried to destroy in a fit of violence I can't remember.

Tomorrow, more fragments will surface. Tomorrow, the remodeling will continue. Tomorrow, I will wake still uncertain whether I am recovering a history or writing a myth—a story to explain a life that conventional narratives cannot hold.

Little turtle. Wandering away. Getting lost.

Wild kitten. Domesticated for a price.

And now—what creature have I become?

The question hangs unanswered in the dark. The book keeps its silent vigil.

And I drift toward sleep, carrying these animal selves into dreams where metaphor and memory merge into shapes I will never be able to separate by morning.