#shapeshifter — Public Fediverse posts

New post today: a Grab Bag featuring word puzzles inspired from solving puzzles off of RedHead64's blog. Two Line 'Em Up and two Shapeshifter puzzles for you to enjoy:

https://thegriddle.net/1002

#Puzzles #WordPuzzles #Shapeshifter #MovingStaircases #LineEmUp

New post today: a Grab Bag featuring word puzzles inspired from solving puzzles off of RedHead64's blog. Two Line 'Em Up and two Shapeshifter puzzles for you to enjoy:

https://thegriddle.net/1002

#Puzzles #WordPuzzles #Shapeshifter #MovingStaircases #LineEmUp

New post today: a Grab Bag featuring word puzzles inspired from solving puzzles off of RedHead64's blog. Two Line 'Em Up and two Shapeshifter puzzles for you to enjoy:

https://thegriddle.net/1002

#Puzzles #WordPuzzles #Shapeshifter #MovingStaircases #LineEmUp

New post today: a Grab Bag featuring word puzzles inspired from solving puzzles off of RedHead64's blog. Two Line 'Em Up and two Shapeshifter puzzles for you to enjoy:

https://thegriddle.net/1002

#Puzzles #WordPuzzles #Shapeshifter #MovingStaircases #LineEmUp

New post today: a Grab Bag featuring word puzzles inspired from solving puzzles off of RedHead64's blog. Two Line 'Em Up and two Shapeshifter puzzles for you to enjoy:

https://thegriddle.net/1002

#Puzzles #WordPuzzles #Shapeshifter #MovingStaircases #LineEmUp

BCS #463 ebook is out early today at @WeightlessBooks & Kindle Store and for subscribers, featuring stories of shapeshifters and humanness by returning BCS author Richard Parks (a sequel to several of his previous BCS stories) and Chezza Lee, behind cover art by returning BCS artist Tyler Edlin.

https://weightlessbooks.com/fiction/beneath-ceaseless-skies-issue-463/
https://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Ceaseless-Skies-Issue-463-ebook/dp/B0H9W4W5QG/
#fantasy #sff #shortstory #litmag #shapeshifter #ebook

BCS #463 ebook is out early today at @WeightlessBooks & Kindle Store and for subscribers, featuring stories of shapeshifters and humanness by returning BCS author Richard Parks (a sequel to several of his previous BCS stories) and Chezza Lee, behind cover art by returning BCS artist Tyler Edlin.

https://weightlessbooks.com/fiction/beneath-ceaseless-skies-issue-463/
https://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Ceaseless-Skies-Issue-463-ebook/dp/B0H9W4W5QG/
#fantasy #sff #shortstory #litmag #shapeshifter #ebook

BCS #463 ebook is out early today at @WeightlessBooks & Kindle Store and for subscribers, featuring stories of shapeshifters and humanness by returning BCS author Richard Parks (a sequel to several of his previous BCS stories) and Chezza Lee, behind cover art by returning BCS artist Tyler Edlin.

https://weightlessbooks.com/fiction/beneath-ceaseless-skies-issue-463/
https://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Ceaseless-Skies-Issue-463-ebook/dp/B0H9W4W5QG/
#fantasy #sff #shortstory #litmag #shapeshifter #ebook

BCS #463 ebook is out early today at @WeightlessBooks & Kindle Store and for subscribers, featuring stories of shapeshifters and humanness by returning BCS author Richard Parks (a sequel to several of his previous BCS stories) and Chezza Lee, behind cover art by returning BCS artist Tyler Edlin.

https://weightlessbooks.com/fiction/beneath-ceaseless-skies-issue-463/
https://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Ceaseless-Skies-Issue-463-ebook/dp/B0H9W4W5QG/
#fantasy #sff #shortstory #litmag #shapeshifter #ebook

BCS #463 ebook is out early today at @WeightlessBooks & Kindle Store and for subscribers, featuring stories of shapeshifters and humanness by returning BCS author Richard Parks (a sequel to several of his previous BCS stories) and Chezza Lee, behind cover art by returning BCS artist Tyler Edlin.

https://weightlessbooks.com/fiction/beneath-ceaseless-skies-issue-463/
https://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Ceaseless-Skies-Issue-463-ebook/dp/B0H9W4W5QG/
#fantasy #sff #shortstory #litmag #shapeshifter #ebook

PLP432_2: Oliver Hunter (It Isn't) #art #MastoArt #DigitalArt #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #Photoshop #Sketch #SpeedPaint #Fantasy #Character #ShapeShifter #TeamTragedy #ArtFight

PLP432_2: Oliver Hunter (It Isn't) #art #MastoArt #DigitalArt #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #Photoshop #Sketch #SpeedPaint #Fantasy #Character #ShapeShifter #TeamTragedy #ArtFight

PLP432_2: Oliver Hunter (It Isn't) #art #MastoArt #DigitalArt #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #Photoshop #Sketch #SpeedPaint #Fantasy #Character #ShapeShifter #TeamTragedy #ArtFight

PLP432_2: Oliver Hunter (It Isn't) #art #MastoArt #DigitalArt #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #Photoshop #Sketch #SpeedPaint #Fantasy #Character #ShapeShifter #TeamTragedy #ArtFight

The Shapeshifter

“Let your ‘Yes’ be yes and your ‘No,’ no.” — Matthew 5:37

Last night, before sleep, I found myself thinking about the way I change.

Not always dramatically. Not always visibly. Sometimes it is a small shift in tone, a slight adjustment in posture, a revised sentence, a softened opinion, a joke added too quickly, a silence held too long. Sometimes I do not even know I have shifted until later, when I feel the ache of it.

I have called this being sensitive. I have called it empathy. And I think that is partly true.

There is a gift in being able to read a room. There is a gift in noticing the tremor beneath someone’s words, the disappointment beneath their politeness, the anger beneath their quietness, the plea beneath their criticism. Some people move through the world loudly, unaware of what their presence does to others. I do not usually have that problem. I notice. I absorb. I adjust.

This can be love.

It can be pastoral. It can be merciful. It can be wise. It can help me avoid needless harm. It can help me make room for others. It can help me speak peace into places where bluntness would only bruise.

But there is another side.

Sometimes I do not simply respond to what someone has actually said. I respond to what I believe they might be saying. I answer the accusation I imagine beneath their question. I apologize for the disappointment I think I see in their eyes. I defend myself against a criticism that has not yet fully arrived. I revise myself before I have even been asked to explain myself.

And then I disappear a little.

The shapeshifter survives, but the true self waits somewhere behind the curtain.

This is where the gift becomes a burden. Empathy becomes prediction. Sensitivity becomes self-protection. Peacekeeping becomes evasion. Instead of staying present, I become fluid. Instead of saying, “What did you mean?” I silently assume. Instead of saying, “That hurt,” I swallow it. Instead of responding honestly in the moment, I retreat, rehearse, reinterpret, and let the thing fester.

Then anger comes later.

Not always because the other person was cruel. Sometimes because I abandoned myself too quickly. Sometimes because I changed shape before I knew whether change was required. Sometimes because I mistook someone else’s reaction for a commandment.

There is a difference between being responsive and being ruled.

There is a difference between empathy and erasure.

There is a difference between humility and hiding.

Maybe the work is not to stop being sensitive. I do not want to become hard, oblivious, or careless. I do not want to lose the part of me that can feel the emotional weather in a room. That part of me has helped me pastor, create, love, listen, and make peace.

But perhaps I need to learn a slower form of shapeshifting.

A sacred pause.

Before I adapt, I can ask:

What did they actually say?
What am I imagining they meant?
What am I feeling in my body?
Am I trying to love them, or am I trying to escape discomfort?
Is this a moment for flexibility, or a moment for truthful rootedness?

The goal is not rigidity. Trees bend in the wind, but they do not become wind. Rivers change course, but they still remain water. Christ was deeply responsive to people, but he was not controlled by every expectation placed upon him. He listened, but he also withdrew. He answered, but he also stayed silent. He served, but he did not surrender his center.

Perhaps that is the invitation: not to stop changing, but to stop vanishing.

To remain kind without becoming formless.

To remain open without becoming absorbent of every accusation.

To remain peaceful without pretending I am not hurt.

A Possible Action Response

When I feel myself shifting too quickly, I will try to pause before I change shape. I will breathe, feel my feet, and ask myself: What was actually said? What am I adding? What do I need to ask before I assume?

Then, when possible, I can say:

“I may be reacting to what I think you mean, not what you actually said. Can you help me understand?”

Or:

“I want to respond honestly, but I need a moment so I don’t answer from fear or defensiveness.”

Or:

“That feels like criticism to me, and I want to stay open, but I also want to be clear about what you mean.”

These are not perfect words. They are practice words. They are small anchors. They help me stay present without hiding, defending, exploding, or disappearing.

I do not have to become whatever this moment seems to demand.

I can be loving and still be myself.
I can be sensitive and still be solid.
I can be peaceable without disappearing.

The shapeshifter does not need to be banished. He may have saved me many times. But maybe he does not need to run the whole house anymore.

Maybe he can become a servant of love rather than a servant of fear.

Maybe he can learn to change shape slowly, honestly, prayerfully.

Maybe he can finally rest.

Prayer

God of truth and tenderness,

Help me honor the gift of sensitivity without becoming captive to it.

Teach me to listen deeply without imagining more than has been spoken. Teach me to care for others without abandoning myself. Teach me to receive correction without collapsing, and to feel hurt without hiding it until it turns into anger.

Give me the grace of the sacred pause.

When I feel myself shifting too quickly, help me breathe. Help me return to my body, my heart, my center, and to you. Let my yes be yes. Let my no be no. Let my silence be honest, not evasive. Let my words be gentle, but true.

May the shapeshifter in me become healed and holy. May he no longer serve fear, shame, or resentment. May he become a servant of wisdom, compassion, and peace.

Keep me open.

Keep me rooted.

Keep me from disappearing.

Amen.

I have a new project with Wet Ink Games. It is a super natural horror game set during the American Revolution. I wrote some really cool stuff for this game and I want ya'll to feel that terror. We only have a few days left and a long way to go. Support the revolution today!

#ttrpg #rpg #America #4thofjuly #july4th #250 #independenceday #revelation #roleplaying #witches #shapeshifter #werewolves #supernatural #wetinkgames #patriots #washington #games #tabletopgaming

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/wet-ink-games/our-lives-our-fortunes

I have a new project with Wet Ink Games. It is a super natural horror game set during the American Revolution. I wrote some really cool stuff for this game and I want ya'll to feel that terror. We only have a few days left and a long way to go. Support the revolution today!

#ttrpg #rpg #America #4thofjuly #july4th #250 #independenceday #revelation #roleplaying #witches #shapeshifter #werewolves #supernatural #wetinkgames #patriots #washington #games #tabletopgaming

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/wet-ink-games/our-lives-our-fortunes

Yimmy being the insane gremlin that he is.

#art #oc #originalcharacter #outerspunk #yimmy #alien #shapeshifter #webcomic

Yimmy being the insane gremlin that he is.

#art #oc #originalcharacter #outerspunk #yimmy #alien #shapeshifter #webcomic

Yimmy being the insane gremlin that he is.

#art #oc #originalcharacter #outerspunk #yimmy #alien #shapeshifter #webcomic

Yimmy being the insane gremlin that he is.

#art #oc #originalcharacter #outerspunk #yimmy #alien #shapeshifter #webcomic

Wolfboy!Killer listens in awe as faunkid!kidd tells him all about pirates and thier adventures on the high seas

#eustasscaptainkid, #massacresoldierkiller, #onepiece, #kidpirates, #shapeshifter

assorted Carn // art backlog

#pumpkiniumart #oc #carn #shapeshifter #pumpky #kriiva

So a while back, you might have seen the Rudragon around. Well, Kota surprised me a while back and made this cute mugshot upon seeing a small project of mine...

Be sure to give https://bsky.app/profile/kotacat.bsky.social a shout out for this amazing art!

#furry #dragon #weredragon #shapeshifter

So a while back, you might have seen the Rudragon around. Well, Kota surprised me a while back and made this cute mugshot upon seeing a small project of mine...

Be sure to give https://bsky.app/profile/kotacat.bsky.social a shout out for this amazing art!

#furry #dragon #weredragon #shapeshifter

So a while back, you might have seen the Rudragon around. Well, Kota surprised me a while back and made this cute mugshot upon seeing a small project of mine...

Be sure to give https://bsky.app/profile/kotacat.bsky.social a shout out for this amazing art!

#furry #dragon #weredragon #shapeshifter

So a while back, you might have seen the Rudragon around. Well, Kota surprised me a while back and made this cute mugshot upon seeing a small project of mine...

Be sure to give https://bsky.app/profile/kotacat.bsky.social a shout out for this amazing art!

#furry #dragon #weredragon #shapeshifter

So a while back, you might have seen the Rudragon around. Well, Kota surprised me a while back and made this cute mugshot upon seeing a small project of mine...

Be sure to give https://bsky.app/profile/kotacat.bsky.social a shout out for this amazing art!

#furry #dragon #weredragon #shapeshifter

Odo tried to turn into a potted plant to avoid me on the Promenade. As if I wouldn't recognize him in a ficus! #LwaxanaTroi #ShapeShifter #AllStarTrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #Mastodon

Odo tried to turn into a potted plant to avoid me on the Promenade. As if I wouldn't recognize him in a ficus! #LwaxanaTroi #ShapeShifter #AllStarTrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #Mastodon

Odo tried to turn into a potted plant to avoid me on the Promenade. As if I wouldn't recognize him in a ficus! #LwaxanaTroi #ShapeShifter #AllStarTrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #Mastodon

Odo tried to turn into a potted plant to avoid me on the Promenade. As if I wouldn't recognize him in a ficus! #LwaxanaTroi #ShapeShifter #AllStarTrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #Mastodon

Odo tried to turn into a potted plant to avoid me on the Promenade. As if I wouldn't recognize him in a ficus! #LwaxanaTroi #ShapeShifter #AllStarTrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #Mastodon

Image by James Brown jamesbrowne.net #GothicSpring #AncientSky #Mythology #MythologySky #ScottishMythology #CelticMythology #Folklore #FolkloreSky #ScottishFolklore #CelticFolklore #Scotland #ScottishSky #Celtic #CelticSky #Monster #MonsterSky #Fairy #FairySky #Faerie #Shapeshifter #Seal #Selkie

Psycho Shifters (Cruel Shifterverse Book 1) "These men think they own me" Sale: $19.99 to $0.00 by Jasmine Mas Rating: 4.3/5 (39,334 Reviews) #shapeshifter #darkromance #bisexualromance #enemiestolovers #fantasy #booktok #booksky #books #mustread #jasminemas

Psycho Shifters (Cruel Shifter...

Jessica’s friend, Hope, has been avoiding her for the last month. Now, Jessica wants to know why. She had no idea what she’d be asking of Hope when she decided to find out. #UrbanFantasy #ShapeShifter #ShortStory

https://medium.com/@webboy42/her-friends-a-night-mare-c4e7f6a98191

Jessica’s friend, Hope, has been avoiding her for the last month. Now, Jessica wants to know why. She had no idea what she’d be asking of Hope when she decided to find out. #UrbanFantasy #ShapeShifter #ShortStory

https://medium.com/@webboy42/her-friends-a-night-mare-c4e7f6a98191

I received wonderful new reviews for the audiobook versions of my shape-shifter romances "Enemies by Nature" and "Shifting Nature":

"The slow thaw between Tala and Faith is truly something special. ... Watching that guarded tension shift into real affection made my romantic heart swoon."

Thanks so much to The Lesbian Review and their wonderful reviewers!

https://thelesbianreview.com/enemies-nature-shifting-nature-jae/

#paranormalromance #pnr #shapeshifter #sapphicbooks

I received wonderful new reviews for the audiobook versions of my shape-shifter romances "Enemies by Nature" and "Shifting Nature":

"The slow thaw between Tala and Faith is truly something special. ... Watching that guarded tension shift into real affection made my romantic heart swoon."

Thanks so much to The Lesbian Review and their wonderful reviewers!

https://thelesbianreview.com/enemies-nature-shifting-nature-jae/

#paranormalromance #pnr #shapeshifter #sapphicbooks

I received wonderful new reviews for the audiobook versions of my shape-shifter romances "Enemies by Nature" and "Shifting Nature":

"The slow thaw between Tala and Faith is truly something special. ... Watching that guarded tension shift into real affection made my romantic heart swoon."

Thanks so much to The Lesbian Review and their wonderful reviewers!

https://thelesbianreview.com/enemies-nature-shifting-nature-jae/

#paranormalromance #pnr #shapeshifter #sapphicbooks

I received wonderful new reviews for the audiobook versions of my shape-shifter romances "Enemies by Nature" and "Shifting Nature":

"The slow thaw between Tala and Faith is truly something special. ... Watching that guarded tension shift into real affection made my romantic heart swoon."

Thanks so much to The Lesbian Review and their wonderful reviewers!

https://thelesbianreview.com/enemies-nature-shifting-nature-jae/

#paranormalromance #pnr #shapeshifter #sapphicbooks

I received wonderful new reviews for the audiobook versions of my shape-shifter romances "Enemies by Nature" and "Shifting Nature":

"The slow thaw between Tala and Faith is truly something special. ... Watching that guarded tension shift into real affection made my romantic heart swoon."

Thanks so much to The Lesbian Review and their wonderful reviewers!

https://thelesbianreview.com/enemies-nature-shifting-nature-jae/

#paranormalromance #pnr #shapeshifter #sapphicbooks

I redrew this in 2025!

I redrew this in 2025!

The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back

I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.

That image has been sitting in my head for nearly five decades, paying rent in the form of a question I could not discharge: what is the relationship between the face and the person behind it? Is the face a window or a wall? If it is a window, what passes through it, and in which direction? If it is a wall, who built it, and what is it defending?

The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is now available from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing as a Kindle ebook and a trade paperback. It is the answer to that question, and the answer is worse than I expected.

The Mechanism

Asa Greer is five years old when he stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio and watches his reflection change. His cheekbones soften. His jaw loses its angles. For three seconds, he is wearing the face of the boy next door on his own skull. Then the face collapses, his features rush back, and the bathroom is loud again.

Asa can copy any face he sees. He can build composites from dozens of sources. He can walk through a room wearing the face that room requires, and the room will respond to the face without checking whether anything exists behind it. Each transformation extracts a sensory capacity he will never recover. Over fifty years, the ledger of things he can no longer smell, taste, feel, or hear grows longer than the ledger of things he retains.

I wanted the horror to be specific. Each loss is granular and irreplaceable: the smell of his own skin, the texture of his winter coat, the taste of tap water, his heartbeat’s internal sensation, the tonal distinctions that give melody its emotional contour. These are the small, unremarkable anchors that tether a person to the life they are living as opposed to any other life, and Asa severs them one by one and replaces them with borrowed faces that connect him to other people’s responses and sever him from his own existence.

The mechanism is supernatural. The cost is not.

The Kindness Problem

At twenty-eight, Asa discovers that performed goodness is the most powerful face he can build. Competence generates compliance. Charisma generates admiration. Authority generates obedience. Goodness generates worship. A room that witnesses an act of apparent compassion will defend the person who performed it against any attack, because the attack threatens the room’s belief that compassion exists.

Asa builds a kindness persona. He deploys it across a career that ascends from political consulting to the corridors of institutional power. The warmth that other people’s trust generates in his body is narcotic. His body is allergic to it. Every deployment produces an inflammatory response that begins at the jaw hinge and spreads through the muscles the performance recruits. The threshold contracts with each use. By his fifties, the margin between the face the world needs and the face his body can sustain is measured in minutes.

Writing this section of the book required me to think carefully about something I have observed across thirty years in theatre, publishing, and public life: the distance between a person’s performed concern and their actual capacity for being affected by another human being. Asa is an extreme case. The condition is not extreme. Every public figure, every institutional spokesperson, every person who has stood at a podium and projected the appearance of caring about something they were hired to manage rather than moved to address, operates on the same spectrum. Asa sits at the far end. The spectrum itself is ordinary.

Harlan Moeck and the Ditch

Every book needs a counter-argument, and this book’s counter-argument is a boy named Harlan Moeck who sits in the front row of Asa’s second-grade classroom and performs no performance at all. Harlan is kind because Harlan is kind, the way a heart beats because a heart beats. Asa can see it. He can catalog it. He cannot replicate it. He tries. The result is a window painted on a wall. Every measurement is precise. Light does not pass through.

Harlan appears three times across fifty years. Each appearance finds him doing invisible work: maintaining water systems, testing samples, keeping the infrastructure alive that the public consumes without awareness of the labor that produced it. The dedication reads: For the good men who dig the ditches. The water flows. No one applauds.

I have known Harlan Moecks. Every writer has. They are the people who do the work that makes the visible work possible, whose names appear in no coverage, whose labor sustains the systems that the public credits to the faces standing in front of cameras. I wrote Harlan because the book needed someone whose goodness was structural rather than performed, and because the horror of Asa’s condition is legible only when measured against a person for whom goodness is a condition of being alive rather than an overlay applied to a composite.

Cordelia’s Secret

Asa’s mother, Cordelia Greer, runs the household with efficiency and without affection. Touching her son only when logistics require it. Pushing his hair from his forehead with the heel of her hand. Washing a glass that is already clean, alone, in the dark, in the middle of the night, while the rest of the house sleeps.

The book’s final section, On the Lability, includes a clinical appendix: case notes of uncertain provenance describing Asa’s condition in medical language. Filed separately, an addendum describes a woman who presented at a clinic in 1987 asking whether the condition could be passed to a child. She said her father had possessed the ability to move his face and that it had eaten him from inside. She had spent her life holding still so it would not start.

That woman is Cordelia. The reader connects the dates and the details without being told. Every scene of emotional distance, every closed face, every hand that withdrew, is retroactively reframed. Cordelia was containing the same condition that consumed her son. The holding still was an act of will maintained across an entire lifetime. The coldness was a firewall.

I am proudest of this element of the book. The revelation arrives in a clinical register that has no capacity for grief, which is exactly why the grief hits as hard as it does. The driest language in the book carries the heaviest weight. If the mechanism works, the reader finishes the appendix and then sits for a moment and thinks about Cordelia washing the glass.

The Mirror on the Back Cover

One design detail I want to mention. On the paperback’s back cover, the title of the book appears reversed, as a mirror image. Letters flipped. Name reading backward. Below the reversed title, two amber eyes stare out, the same eyes that appear in the dissolving face on the front cover. Asa Greer is five years old in the first scene, standing in a bathroom, looking at a mirror. Turn the book over, and the mirror looks back.

The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is available now from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing at BolesBooks.com. Kindle eBook and paperback.

David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. He lives in New York City.

The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back

I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.

That image has been sitting in my head for nearly five decades, paying rent in the form of a question I could not discharge: what is the relationship between the face and the person behind it? Is the face a window or a wall? If it is a window, what passes through it, and in which direction? If it is a wall, who built it, and what is it defending?

The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is now available from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing as a Kindle ebook and a trade paperback. It is the answer to that question, and the answer is worse than I expected.

The Mechanism

Asa Greer is five years old when he stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio and watches his reflection change. His cheekbones soften. His jaw loses its angles. For three seconds, he is wearing the face of the boy next door on his own skull. Then the face collapses, his features rush back, and the bathroom is loud again.

Asa can copy any face he sees. He can build composites from dozens of sources. He can walk through a room wearing the face that room requires, and the room will respond to the face without checking whether anything exists behind it. Each transformation extracts a sensory capacity he will never recover. Over fifty years, the ledger of things he can no longer smell, taste, feel, or hear grows longer than the ledger of things he retains.

I wanted the horror to be specific. Each loss is granular and irreplaceable: the smell of his own skin, the texture of his winter coat, the taste of tap water, his heartbeat’s internal sensation, the tonal distinctions that give melody its emotional contour. These are the small, unremarkable anchors that tether a person to the life they are living as opposed to any other life, and Asa severs them one by one and replaces them with borrowed faces that connect him to other people’s responses and sever him from his own existence.

The mechanism is supernatural. The cost is not.

The Kindness Problem

At twenty-eight, Asa discovers that performed goodness is the most powerful face he can build. Competence generates compliance. Charisma generates admiration. Authority generates obedience. Goodness generates worship. A room that witnesses an act of apparent compassion will defend the person who performed it against any attack, because the attack threatens the room’s belief that compassion exists.

Asa builds a kindness persona. He deploys it across a career that ascends from political consulting to the corridors of institutional power. The warmth that other people’s trust generates in his body is narcotic. His body is allergic to it. Every deployment produces an inflammatory response that begins at the jaw hinge and spreads through the muscles the performance recruits. The threshold contracts with each use. By his fifties, the margin between the face the world needs and the face his body can sustain is measured in minutes.

Writing this section of the book required me to think carefully about something I have observed across thirty years in theatre, publishing, and public life: the distance between a person’s performed concern and their actual capacity for being affected by another human being. Asa is an extreme case. The condition is not extreme. Every public figure, every institutional spokesperson, every person who has stood at a podium and projected the appearance of caring about something they were hired to manage rather than moved to address, operates on the same spectrum. Asa sits at the far end. The spectrum itself is ordinary.

Harlan Moeck and the Ditch

Every book needs a counter-argument, and this book’s counter-argument is a boy named Harlan Moeck who sits in the front row of Asa’s second-grade classroom and performs no performance at all. Harlan is kind because Harlan is kind, the way a heart beats because a heart beats. Asa can see it. He can catalog it. He cannot replicate it. He tries. The result is a window painted on a wall. Every measurement is precise. Light does not pass through.

Harlan appears three times across fifty years. Each appearance finds him doing invisible work: maintaining water systems, testing samples, keeping the infrastructure alive that the public consumes without awareness of the labor that produced it. The dedication reads: For the good men who dig the ditches. The water flows. No one applauds.

I have known Harlan Moecks. Every writer has. They are the people who do the work that makes the visible work possible, whose names appear in no coverage, whose labor sustains the systems that the public credits to the faces standing in front of cameras. I wrote Harlan because the book needed someone whose goodness was structural rather than performed, and because the horror of Asa’s condition is legible only when measured against a person for whom goodness is a condition of being alive rather than an overlay applied to a composite.

Cordelia’s Secret

Asa’s mother, Cordelia Greer, runs the household with efficiency and without affection. Touching her son only when logistics require it. Pushing his hair from his forehead with the heel of her hand. Washing a glass that is already clean, alone, in the dark, in the middle of the night, while the rest of the house sleeps.

The book’s final section, On the Lability, includes a clinical appendix: case notes of uncertain provenance describing Asa’s condition in medical language. Filed separately, an addendum describes a woman who presented at a clinic in 1987 asking whether the condition could be passed to a child. She said her father had possessed the ability to move his face and that it had eaten him from inside. She had spent her life holding still so it would not start.

That woman is Cordelia. The reader connects the dates and the details without being told. Every scene of emotional distance, every closed face, every hand that withdrew, is retroactively reframed. Cordelia was containing the same condition that consumed her son. The holding still was an act of will maintained across an entire lifetime. The coldness was a firewall.

I am proudest of this element of the book. The revelation arrives in a clinical register that has no capacity for grief, which is exactly why the grief hits as hard as it does. The driest language in the book carries the heaviest weight. If the mechanism works, the reader finishes the appendix and then sits for a moment and thinks about Cordelia washing the glass.

The Mirror on the Back Cover

One design detail I want to mention. On the paperback’s back cover, the title of the book appears reversed, as a mirror image. Letters flipped. Name reading backward. Below the reversed title, two amber eyes stare out, the same eyes that appear in the dissolving face on the front cover. Asa Greer is five years old in the first scene, standing in a bathroom, looking at a mirror. Turn the book over, and the mirror looks back.

The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is available now from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing at BolesBooks.com. Kindle eBook and paperback.

David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. He lives in New York City.

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I love being so many different species :>

#furryart #fursona #anthroart #drawing #bear #macaw #bird #monkey #dragon #pitador #dog #scalie #shapeshifter #illustration #transman

I love being so many different species :>

#furryart #fursona #anthroart #drawing #bear #macaw #bird #monkey #dragon #pitador #dog #scalie #shapeshifter #illustration #transman

I love being so many different species :>

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