I first found the boy down by the lake one autumn just as it was starting to turn cold. There were still a few leaves on the trees, but he looked up at me to show me a particularly brilliant scarlet one he’d found. His eyes were the deepest brown of the waters. His back was a small, firm turtle shell, and I knew he’d have a snapping bite, but not at me.

When I couldn’t find his grown-ups, I took him home and fed him wild rice and squash and nuts, and he fell asleep under my auntie’s quilt. I thought he’d be gone when I woke up in the morning, and I had a hard time falling asleep for the thought of it.

But when I woke he was sitting on my kitchen floor, eating an apple from my newly harvested stash. I hoisted him up to sit on my sturdy oak table where I could look at him properly. “Well,” I said, “you sure you got no people?”

His voice was deep for his little body, with laughter hidden in its depths. “You’re my people.”

In the before times I would have looked much harder. I would have taken him to a…precinct, my memory shied away but I knew the word. There would have been so many more people to ask: do you know him, do you know people missing a little boy, parents, grandparents, a big sibling calling for him in a crowded playground?

“What’s your name?” I asked, and he looked at me bright and cheerful, like the question was rhetorical, so I decided aloud: “Micah,” and he nodded and took another bite of apple. I had liked a dozen names for children, in the dreams that had felt so far away until now. He looked like a Micah.

In the before times there would have been a fuss about his shell. At least I could spare him that. In the before times people and animals were separate, or we liked to pretend they were. When I took him with me to trade apples for wild rice, the neighbors there gave his shell a keen look, but they had too many manners to say anything. I asked whether they’d seen a baby like him or a little boy before, whether they knew where he might come from. No one did.

Lana, my best friend among the neighbors, shook his hand gravely and watched as he stumped off to wave a stick through the tall grass at the edge of their lake. “Just turned up, did he?”

“Never seen him before, or anyone like him,” I agreed.

“So the land heard you wanted a kid, eh?”

I made a scoffing noise and scuffed my shoe in the leaves. I had given up on having a kid. The world had changed so much, and the odds of finding someone to have one with—at my age—it seemed better to find contentment with what I did have than yearn after what I didn’t. If I could. I looked out after Micah, stifled the urge to tell him not to fall in. The wind rippled the chilly lake. He was nowhere near falling in.

I turned back to Lana. “So what do I do with him, though?”

She shrugged. “Teach him to make those apple muffins you make; those are pretty good. And the charm you do against the acorn puff-bombs; that’ll be useful.”

I shuddered. The year the acorns all went toxic was a bad, bad year; Lana was absolutely right that it would be good if Micah knew how to keep that at bay. “You think there’s anything special turtle kids have to know?”

“I think you’ll find out.” Lana wasn’t a mom to begin with, but her brother died in the crisis and left her sister-in-law with two toddlers, so Auntie Lana became an approximation of a second mom pretty quick. The older one hadn’t started out with a loon wing, but—well, the crisis. So.

“That how it works?”

“That’s the only way I know how it works.”

I thought about that a minute. And then, after all, I shouted down, “Micah! Don’t fall in the lake!”

He waved his hand at me without looking around.

“See?” said Lana. “You’ll figure it out. And so will he. And also? Turtle kid. Maybe freak out less about the lake.”

“I just keep thinking…his own people will want him back. And what do I do then.”

“You always were one for borrowing trouble,” said Lana. I fake-swiped at her, and she dodged, laughing, her long braid swinging. She wasn’t wrong.

Micah himself remained serene through this, though he wandered back in earshot for the end of our conversation. I expected that one day he would break down crying for his mother; one day he would tell me some detail of his life before. Instead, he was more keenly interested in the little box bed that I built him, the way I prepared the corn patch for winter, the bites of smoked trout and the pages of richly colored picture books from my stash. He loved to cuddle up to me to be read to. I was surprised at how cold he always was, but he warmed up quickly by the fire, our heads together over the pages. A knot inside my chest relaxed that I hadn’t even known was there.

I hadn’t remembered how many fairy tale treasuries I had—or how many of them contained stories of magical children brought to the childless home, mice and frogs and children no bigger than one’s hand sent by witchcraft to fill the heart, all with surprisingly happy endings for fairy tales. My boy was the size of an average four-year-old, though I couldn’t get him to tell me how old he was—four seemed like a good approximation—but he seemed drawn to those stories too, smoothing his thumb over the pictures of an old woman holding a tiny pixie child in the palm of her hand or rocking them to sleep in a cigar box, though I doubted he’d ever seen a cigar.

I wanted to tell him I wasn’t old like the pictures, that the kerchief in my hair was a bandana to keep the sweat out of my eyes. But upon reflection I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear how he responded to that, if he laughed at it. I was feeling younger than I had in years, and also older. I didn’t chase after him much, but he still took a lot of energy. And yet I seemed to have more than days before.

He picked up the few charms I knew pretty fast, and he seemed to be thinking about them, turning them over in his head, but for as little as he talked about other things, he talked about that even less. I didn’t push him on that. And he didn’t push me, I suppose—we were well-suited that way.

I did push him to my idea of hygiene, to which he acquiesced with grumpy little sighs through his nose. He didn’t mind baths, but he didn’t really see why he should make any effort to stay clean after them. He was four, or thereabouts. It was a work in progress.

I believed in his snap from the moment I saw him, but I only saw it once that fall. He had wandered away from me as afternoon was turning to evening—there was only so much I could insist on keeping him right by my side, and after the first few weeks with no adults and no accidents I started to relax. Then one afternoon I was filling the woodpile for winter when I heard an unearthly scream from down by the lake where I had first found Micah. I had the axe down and was across the field at a run before I had made a conscious decision.

So I was in time to see Micah, annoyance written across his stubborn little face, with the raccoon’s tail still in his mouth. “No!” I shouted. I meant it for the raccoon—I was afraid, in that moment, that it would turn on him, that it would swipe its claws across his face or bite him. But he spit out the raccoon’s tail and curled up into himself, not against the raccoon but against my shriek.

It sprinted off along the lakeshore, which by now glistened with shards of forming ice, and was gone.

“Micah,” I said slowly, “what happened.”

“Don’t like it when you yell.”

“No, I’m sorry, baby. I was yelling at the raccoon, not you.”

His jaw worked. He was starting to come out of his shell. “Took care of the raccoon myself. Bit it.”

“But why, buddy?”

He scowled and squinched his face up, hunching back under his shell again. “Eating the fish out of my lake.”

“We don’t bite the raccoons, though, Micah.”

His small mouth twisted skeptically, as clear an indication as I could ask for that while I might not bite the raccoons, he certainly would if he liked.

I sighed. “I’m not mad.” He peered out at me. He still needed convincing. “Come on, let’s see if any of the ducks are doing anything with the glowing muck on the slough.”

The glowing muck was of endless fascination to him, and was worth delaying my chores for half an hour to get him into a more helpful mood, I felt solidly sure. Perhaps there would have been a time when I would have questioned those priorities, but that time was long past. I did think about the combination of the snap and the shell—more turtle than I’d ever seen him—but I put it from my mind in favor of the boy in front of me.

We had more than a full turning of the moon together, me pointing out to him how it changed and tracking it on my calendar to show him how we recorded such things from the before times. It was enough for me to teach him to sing “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” enough for him to make a serious dent in my stores of cherry jam. Enough for me to get used to his bumbling little hum behind me in the house, to learn to automatically check that I wasn’t going to step on him when I moved around the kitchen.

Enough that I got comfortable. Enough that I started to think of him as mine.

All the stories we’d read together of the fairy children found by childless couples—always couples—talked about the fairy children setting out to see the world. They didn’t talk about how their parents would wander the house after their departure, lost in what was supposed to be familiar, alone where solitude had once been acceptable.

The first snow was the worst possible time for him to leave—the smooth lack of tracks making me feel particularly stupid not to see where he had gone, not to see it coming. I looked for him for weeks afterward despite seeing no traces of him. I searched the woods calling his name until more than just my heart was numb. I had thought that I’d spend the winter hours indoors teaching him to make spoonbread, to sing more songs, perhaps to read his letters. Instead it was just me, and once I came inside I just stared into the fire and sang “Shine On, Harvest Moon” ridiculously late into the snow season.

When there was a dry spell around the full moon at Midwinter, I knew my neighbors would be having a gather down at the long lake to check in on each other. I didn’t go. I couldn’t face them and tell them I’d lost my boy. I should have expected what came next: Lana trudging through the dry old snow to check on me, make sure nothing had prevented me coming. When she got unwrapped from her coat and hat and scarves, she glanced around my cabin and cocked her head.

“Boy’s gone,” I confirmed. I wanted to sound matter of fact. Couldn’t, though it seemed like he’d been gone forever.

“So that’s it,” she said. “I wondered. Well, here’s a package from that sister of yours, came by mail.” The post comes a few times a year, and my sister down in the city is stubborn, sends spices and seeds and a long letter of update. I write back in resignation. But if it had just been that Lana would have kept it for me. The neighbors had to make sure no accident or encroachment had befallen me—or the boy, if they thought he was still here.

I hoped it wasn’t an encroachment. I’d thought of it a dozen times a day since I awoke to find him gone.

“Do you think a child like that could just be—be taken?”

Lana turned it over in her head. I’ve always liked that about her, that she doesn’t say the comforting thing right off, not if she doesn’t believe in it. “We don’t really know what’s possible anymore. Did he seem happy with you?”

“Absolutely. And I’d just made squash pancakes and shown him how to do the charm that shows cracks in the walls before winter, and—” I took a deep breath that shook more than I wanted it to.

“You were happy with him. I know. So yes, I’d say maybe something took him. Or maybe he just had to go.”

I poured us each a cup of crowberry tisane. “What would that mean, that a child that small had to go?”

Lana wrapped her hands around the warmth of her cup. “Why did he come in the first place?”

I had carefully not asked that. I looked away.

“Why did you want him to?”

Now that just seemed silly; I snorted.

“No, but really,” she persisted. “Why did you want a child? Why is it better to have him than to have a friend—to have me, or Olaf down in the hollow, or Les on the creek?”

How to put words to the ache that the little body, the creaky little voice, the strange little wit, filled so perfectly? It had never occurred to me to try. He was there, and he was just what I always wanted in himself, humming a song or being silent, asking silly questions or seeing the answer. He was Micah.

“I wanted—I want—to be able to help him grow into who he is. You and Olaf down in the hollow, you’re already yourselves. Micah is all becoming,” I tried. I thought a minute longer. “Also sometimes his hair smells like outside and little kid and I don’t have anything grand to say about that, I just like to give him a hug and smell him.”

“I bet you didn’t imagine cuddling up to a turtle shell,” said Lana.

“Fuck you,” I spat automatically.

She nodded. “Good. So he’s not what you imagined, and you don’t care. That’s good, that’s how it was with mine, too. The people who are too hung up on what they thought it was going to be make the worst parents.”

“But I’m making the worst parent,” I wailed, “because my kid is gone.”

Lana put her hand on mine. “You’re his home. He’ll come back.”

“You can’t know that. Also, he’s a turtle boy, he’s got his home on his back.”

She rolled her eyes. “Lots of us have more than one home. Drink your tea, and carve something useful, you’ll wish you had when summer comes.”

I took her advice to heart and carved spoons, bowls, mugs, everything. I carved a whole set with turtle backs, to be Micah’s when he came home. If he came home. I made myself say if instead of when because it seemed healthier to admit doubt, even though Lana thought it would be healthier to hold out certainty. He was so small, and the world was so big, and its magic was so new. I only knew a handful of charms. He had protected himself against the raccoon, but who knew what else was out there.

I made a little chair for him to sit outside by my chair, by the fire. I kept making things. It was what I’d done after the crisis. It was what I knew how to do.

When spring came, there were more things I knew how to do, clearing out and preparing the garden for planting. The ice cracked across the lake, and I saw a raccoon running away. I bit my lip thinking of the boy. The sun was bright that day. I walked down to a patch where the water was already clear near the shore, to get water to wet down some of the higher soil that hadn’t stayed as muddy as I’d liked in the thaw.

There, climbing out of the mud, was my boy. He was head to toe covered in mud, he was stretching and wincing like an old man, but he was there.

“Is that where you’ve been this whole time?” I blurted in disbelief. He didn’t answer me, and I suppose it didn’t deserve an answer. I rushed forward to hug him regardless of the mud, to try to rub some of it off with my own shirt. I got his shell wiped clean enough that a dunk back in the lake could get the rest off, leaving him his normal shades of green and boy-brown rather than muddied.

“The house is warm,” I said softly, and he nodded, and he stretched some more.

He wanted to spend the next few days either basking on the rocks by the lake or next to the fire in the cabin. It was the better part of a week before he was tottering around after me the way he had before. His words also came back in spurts, as though they had been buried in the mud and were just surfacing.

As for me, my words were readily available from the first, and they all said, “Promise me you’ll never do that again.” I bit them back. The ice would come again in the winter. The fairy children of stories were seeking their fortune in the world, but this was not a world of fortune-seeking any more. And wasn’t it better that way? That he should learn from the deep instead of the far?

I’d told Lana that I wanted a child, wanted him because he was all becoming. I didn’t understand how he would become, what he would become. And that was, after all, the point. She’d told me lots of us had two homes. Some of them were closer than others, and those were the lucky ones.

“One or two apples left from the fall,” I told him, and he scrambled happily ahead of me into the kitchen.

(Editors’ Note: Marissa Lingen is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2024 Marissa Lingen