I had a daughter and then I didn’t.

I woke in the cradle of midnight, shivering from a supernatural cold. I thought at first that she was crying, that she had woken me, like so many midnights before. But there was silence all around me. I sat up on one arm and peered into her crib. She was gone. In her place was wrapped a sallow, horned little boy. His eyes blinked open. I look at him. He looked at me. Changeling, I thought.

Then he started to scream.

“Why weren’t the windows lined with salt?” The first cop at my apartment couldn’t keep his voice to a whisper, despite the changeling slumbering in my arms. It would not stay asleep anywhere but there.

“I tried to remember to renew the wards,” I said, numb with cold and shock and sleep deprivation.

“Have you been leaving milk by the kitchen door?” his partner asked me as he waved around a flashlight bigger than my bicep. Light danced across the changeling’s closed eyes. I grimaced as it wriggled and squirmed, threatening to wake.

“I haven’t been producing any surplus,” I admitted. “I didn’t have breast milk to spare. I was leaving out whole milk, most nights. But I haven’t been able to make it to the grocery store these past two weeks. I … I ran out.”

“You know this piece of stained glass is a hazard, right?” He aimed the flashlight at the little stained-glass scene that hung in the window beside my bed, beside her bassinet. Yellow stars and swirls of white clouds against a night-dark sky. It was the size of my hand. It had been mine when I was a child.

“It’s just a piece of stained glass,” I mumbled.

“It’s a potential portal,” he chastised me. “You can’t keep it so close to a baby.”

“What about a changeling?” I said darkly. The thing was an alien in my arms. It snored softly, twitching. Its horns poked into the skin above my collarbones.

The cop shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”

He looked at me and his eyes were almost sympathetic, but I knew he thought this was my fault. A good mother would have made sure the windows were properly salted. A good mother would have restocked her cow’s milk; a better mother would have produced enough milk of her own to sate any fae who happened by her kitchen door, demanding tribute. A great mother would have followed all the anti-portal regulations to a tee. After all, the rules and rituals keep our babies safe. That’s why they have courses for us to watch before we give birth and why they remind us of the most important rules before we leave the hospital for home. It was my fault for not protecting her.

Yes, sometimes switches were made even when families did everything right. Yes, it was about prevention, not blame, because accidents do happen. But this cop knew—and so did I—that it happened most of all to those who deserved it.

I tried to make my peace with the changeling, this fragile, horned boy, even as I hated him. Living did not seem to come naturally or easily to him. He flinched back from bright sunlight and tunneled into my chest, as though he wished to entombed himself within the cavern of my body. He struggled to eat. He slept in fitful bursts and then woke in a flurry of squawks and sobs. He cut his hands on his own horns.

Perhaps it was the paranoia borne of sleep deprivation, but when I looked out the window at night, I was sure I was being watched.

“Can’t we come help you?” my mother asked, a thousand miles over the phone.

“He won’t let anyone else hold him,” I sobbed. I couldn’t bear to shoulder anyone else’s shame.

“Can’t the office help you at all?” My father, who thought work was the solution to every problem, could not seem to accept that being a lawyer who specialized in fae contracts neither made me special nor insulated me in this tragedy.

“I’m on maternity leave,” I hissed, instead of trying to once again explain the inexplicable.

I didn’t know what else to do. I coaxed the changeling into eating. I sang him old lullabies. I swaddled him and lay him down to sleep upon his back. I rubbed his back when he cried, letting him shriek against my shoulder, pressing my cheek to his. His distress was relentless. His need was constant, and no one could meet his needs but me.

“What can we get you from the store?” my friends texted.

My old life back, I wanted to say.

Instead, I asked for food I could eat with just one hand and salt to keep in my pockets.

The changeling grew teeth. Canines, and rows of them. My baby—my real baby—didn’t have teeth yet. I wasn’t ready for this.

The warm, dark nursery devoured my hiss of pain as he bit into my breast. It was hours past midnight and hours before sunrise. I wanted to be anywhere but there, doing anything but this.

“Let go,” I whimpered.

The changeling ignored me. He bit again and I swallowed my gasp of pain. Just like labor, I thought. Breathe through the pain. Master it.

“Let go,” I tried again, now commanding.

The changeling glanced up at me, mouth still closed. If I ignored his teeth, triple-rowed like a shark’s, and the horns that curled around his temples—if I only looked at his eyes, really—then he was just a baby boy.

“I’m trying to keep you alive,” I pleaded. “Can’t you make this a little easier for me?”

He stopped chewing. Tentatively, I slipped a finger under his upper lip. The changeling opened his mouth slightly.

A lump of relief rising in my throat, I pulled my nipple clear—and then his white teeth flashed in the darkness. The changeling snapped his jaws shut around my finger.

I shrieked. He sucked desperately and I flared, wrenching my hand from his mouth. There was blood on his chin. We stared at each other for a moment, panting in the darkness.

The changeling started to wail.

When he was finally sleeping—after hours of gingerly setting down a snoring, horned boy in a bassinet, only for his eyes to immediately pop open as I tried to slink away—I turned to the window.

A pair of yellow eyes, pupils slitted like a cat’s, met my own, and held my gaze.

I gasped, then immediately looked to the bassinet. The changeling flailed for a moment, and then settled back into sleep. I resisted the urge to be proud. He wasn’t my son, after all. I looked back at the eyes that awaited me outside the window.

I had never seen her before, but I already knew who she was. I knew the rules and rituals; I knew the law. Better yet, I knew the stories.

“You came back,” I whispered.

She continued to stare.

I took a step towards the glass and, slowly, pressed my palm into the window pane.

“What did you come for this time?” I moaned.

She shook her head.

The protocols for dealing with fae are not so different than those for dealing with vampires. One doesn’t invite them in. One doesn’t give them the chance to get close to you, or the chance to make themselves comfortable inside. That’s why we line the windows with salt, and leave bowls of milk beside the back door, and don’t allow for the possibility of portals.

Knowing this, I still opened the window. I stuck my head out.

“Take him back,” I begged softly.

She shook her head again.

“Take him back,” I said again, this time louder. Desperation was a stone atop my chest.

“No,” she said in a voice like the soft edges of river stones.

“Give me back my daughter. Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll give you anything.”

“I can’t,” she said in a voice like the unrolling of a spool of silk.

“Then why are you here?” I cried out. Behind me, the changeling began to fuss. She flinched as he cried. “Have you come just to torment me?” I shouted, uncaring. “Hasn’t your son done that enough?”

She opened her mouth as though to speak, but all the anger of sleepless nights and nightmarish days roiled out of me, fierce as thunder. My hand darted into the pocket of my worn, knit cardigan. The fae shrieked as the crystals of salt I hurled at her crackled against her skin.

“Get away!” I screamed. The changeling roared into waking behind me. “Get away!”

She fled, a flash of lightning fading from the back of one’s eyes, into the night.

The changeling began to wail.

I scrubbed my hands after, but it was as though the salt had stuck. The changeling broke out in welts and hives beneath my touch when I tried to soothe him back to sleep. The emergency room claimed, after a six hour wait, that they had no way to treat changelings.

“You can try a milk and oat bath,” a nurse offered. “It works for the human ones.”

A friend brought me boxes of oats and bottles of milk. I sat with the changeling in a bath full of breakfast.

“My whole life smells like dairy,” I complained.

“You can’t hold this all on your own,” my friend said. “You know, there are groups for parents of changelings.”

“Groups?”

“For support. Conversation circles, once a week, that sort of thing.”

“Someone doesn’t tolerate my being out of his line of site,” I said, gesturing towards the oatmeal-covered creature masquerading as my baby.

“I’ll watch him. Even if he screams the whole time. You can at least go and commiserate with the other moms.”

“I’m not his mother,” I insisted.

“Big words for someone acting like it,” she shot back.

“This can’t be the meaning of motherhood,” I said. “Motherhood isn’t supposed to be a misery. Motherhood is loving your baby—your human baby—who might be difficult, but doesn’t have horns and sharp teeth.”

“You file his horns. You brush his—how many, again? Thirteen?—his thirteen teeth. You sing him to sleep. What else does it mean to be a mother?”

Two weeks later, I went to one of the groups. When I did, it was the first time I had left my house in close to half a year.

“It’s my fault,” nearly everyone said as we went around in a circle, talking about the nights our lives had changed. “I didn’t keep the rituals.”

“I didn’t buy the iodized salt.”

“I left a jacket with silver buttons too close to the window.”

“I sang a song my grandmother said her grandmother taught to her, in a language that barely exists anymore, on the night of a full moon.”

“Is it a crime to run out of whole milk?” I hadn’t quite meant to speak the words out loud, but I was finding the conversation as irritating as an oyster’s grain of sand. I had come to this group for support, not to add others’ punishment to my own self-flagellation. I could have stayed home and saved myself the cost of a takeout dinner for my generous friend if that’s what I’d been looking for. Having a child had made me so aware of the value of my own time.

I caught the quiet snort that escaped the man sitting next to me. Our eyes met, briefly, and I saw the glint of recognition there. At the end of the session, packing up our bags, he touched my elbow softly.

“I’m Daniel,” he introduced himself. “I guess it’s not just me who was hoping for a little more from this group than collective punishment.”

“Not just you,” I affirmed. “It’s hard enough already, isn’t it?”

His smile was tired, but genuine. “You’re here by yourself. I hope you don’t mind me asking: is it just you?”

I nodded. “Just me. I decided I wanted a child only after I decided I wanted a high-powered career and had made all the requisite decisions to be successful there.  And you?” He wore a wedding ring, I noticed, but also appeared to be here alone.

This time, the soft smile on his lips was sad. “My wife died in childbirth,” he said. Before I could apologize, he added, “Of course, I couldn’t keep the rituals. I could barely do anything at all. Now, instead of the only living thing left of her, I have this…creature instead. It’s hard to sit here and agree with everyone that I really did something to deserve this.”

There was a pause in which I tried to think of what could possibly be appropriate to say. “Take my number,” was somehow what came out of my mouth. “In case you need anything.”

I didn’t think about Daniel again until the next group meeting had come and gone, and I hadn’t left my house. My phone buzzed five minutes after the meeting must have ended. You had the right idea, he said. I can’t go back next week. Then, a few minutes later: why don’t we have coffee during that time instead? It’d be good for me to talk with someone else doing this on their own.

I’d love to, but I don’t know if I can find a babysitter, I replied.

Bring your changeling, Daniel said. They’re not illegal in public spaces, after all.

I laughed aloud and, to my surprise, my changeling, strapped into a highchair across from me, laughed too. I had never heard him laugh before. It sounded like the babbling of a brook over wet river stones.

I was thinking of Daniel that night when I saw the yellow eyes waiting just beyond my window once again. I had begun leaving it cracked at night. To do so flew in the face of all the rituals I had been taught, but I had nothing to lose. Besides, the breeze seemed to help the changeling sleep.

“Fuck off,” I said, speaking over the changeling’s head as I held him to my chest and bounced. I didn’t have much else left to offer.

She didn’t move. She watched me, unblinking, as I sang to the little boy, letting his eyelids grow heavy in my arms. I laid him down, keeping a hand against his head, softly shushing him until he drifted off to sleep.

I checked the window. The fae was still there.

I leaned close to the glass. “Are you here to mock me?” I asked. “To taunt me for the imperfections that allowed you into my house?”

She shook her head.

“Then what?” I demanded. “Have you come to bring me my daughter back?”

“No,” she said in a voice that trembled like pebbles in an earthquake. “I came to ask for your advice.”

It was such a strange sentence that I almost burst into laughter. “On what?” I had to know.

Her voice was very soft, like the threads of a spiderweb. “On parenting.”

“You have some gall,” I said. “You left me with a terror instead of an infant. Why should I give you any advice?”

“You say that as though the girl who was once yours is an angel and not a human,” she snapped, voice like a glacier splitting. “She feeds upon me constantly and then vomits up a portion of every meal. She will only sleep while being held. She cannot speak yet makes demands constantly.”

I frowned. Her woes were oddly familiar. “Your son has thirteen fangs.”

A smile broke out across her face. “How precocious,” she said, and then forced the corners of her mouth back into a straight line, voice like dappled sunlight. “Your daughter can roll over.”

My heart ached. “Why won’t you give her back to me?”

“I can’t,” she said in a voice like the breeze between willow leaves. “Do you know why?”

My frown deepened.

“The fae children you call changelings don’t survive long in our world,” she said in a voice like the wind over flat sheets of mountain stone. “They don’t have the proper constitution. We leave them with humans so that they might still live, and take a human child in return so that ours might be adopted more fully.”

“That doesn’t earn you my pity,” I said.

“But perhaps it earns you his.”

I thought of how well my changeling had been sleeping recently, and the pride that flickered like a candle in my chest.

I nodded once, curtly.

“Is that a promise?” she asked, voice like the straining of roots through the soil. “You’ll take care of him?”

“I’ll only make you a promise if you grant me one in return,” I said. I knew the rituals and the rules.

She hesitated for only a moment, then nodded, too.

“I promise I’ll take care of him,” I said softly, “if you’ll take care of her.”

“I promise.” She paused. “I did not expect it to be so hard, to have a changeling,” she said.

Her voice sounded like a mother’s love.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: Jamie Johnson.

Accessibility Editor: The Accessibility Department.