I'm in my parents' living room, at some family reunion. I'm bored. I don't talk much. Nothing in common.

I just sit by their big back window, looking out over Silicon Valley and the Bay.

A large animal crosses the lawn, carrying a limp skunk or big black squirrel in its mouth. The animal's big, maybe a hundred pounds, much too lithe for a bear, too stocky for a wolf, rather like a raccoon but far too big. It has long, luxuriant fur, striped cream and cinnamon.

Unsure just WHAT it is...

Then it detaches from its fur, leaves the thick coat absent-mindedly behind as it slips off on a side trip thru the flowers! It--no, she--is a feral child! With a heavy fur coat for disguise.

Or IS she a feral human? Even away from her fur coat she has cat-whiskers, and a short neat pelt like a seal, and she's a bit too fast and natural as a quadruped. Beautiful in her nonhuman way, even sexy.

I watch quietly. Don't want to spook her. She explores the yard, then takes her lunch in her teeth again and slinks out past the back fence again.

To meet... her mentors! Looming figures masked in heavy furs.

They lean down and scold her a bit. She chitters back, defensive. I think she's going through a rite of passage by entering human territory, and they're displeased she let her outer fur slip...

Even thru the noise in the living room and the glass and the language and species barrier, I can recognize nagging: "You ran out from under your fur! You let a HUMAN see your inner pelt!"

But they're wrong. She was safe enough, revealing herself to me.

Just luck, or did she sense I'm like her--in disguise?

Just passing for human.

THE ANSWERS

• Dead skunk lunch: I was very hungry, going home through the park. Saw a roadkill skunk, and for a moment thought "lunch!" then "Oh, wait, I'm an herbivore this time around, and it's raw and might have parasites, and..."
• Feral child: saw a PBS documentary comparing Jeannie, a severely neglected child found in LA, with the Wild Boy of Aveyron, the truly feral child Truffaut dramatized in his film The Wild Child. I grew up unsocialized--identify with both Jeannie and Truffaut's wolf boy.
• Under the outer fur, a pelt not human skin: my posing as a shaman and psychic doesn't cover up a damaged/feral human self, but a healthy nonhuman self!
• Seal-pelt: shapeshifting. Celtic "selkies", were-seals, have this. Proof she's neither human nor animal.
• ACTION: Don't expect to change too much. My inner nature is not very human! Seek a place in the world on my terms, NOT human ones. I do long to bare myself, even though it's risky. But not always...here I/she picked a safe witness. Can I do this, sense those who are like me? Or will I just bare my soul on the Net and let humans snipe at me?

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