True Names

by maelucky

I sat further downstream for hours, trying to shake the interaction I had with the stranger. They’d acted like they knew what I was going through, and yet they couldn't shut up about how perfect their life was now. Sure, maybe they had a lot going on with their adoptive family, and everyone hates school, but no one gets a perfect life like they described just hand delivered on a platter. No one could possibly be that god damned lucky. If anyone did get that lucky, why them? Why couldn't I get hand-delivered amazing looks, a better family, and a better school? Am I fated to just suffer forever? If I am, I can't find a good reason not to end it now. 

They seemed so much like that kid I barely remember from childhood. Maybe that's why the other kid never left before me, because their family lived in the forest. Just like the kid in the forest, I couldn't help but be so damn jealous of them. Come to think of it, I couldn't recall if I’d ever gotten that kid's name either. They couldn't be the same person, though, could they? The house they live in now is the house of their original parents that they didn't even know existed; the kid from the river was old enough that surely they would have remembered their parents, if that were the case? He said he had a twin brother, so maybe the person I remember playing with as a kid was him, except the kid looked to be about the same age as me, and the stranger seemed to be a fair bit older. If I ever met the kid again, would they remember me? 

Despite trying to relate with what they assumed were my issues, it didn't really seem like they were there just to try and help, or even that they were there because they took pity on me. More than anything, they seemed to just be bored and want someone to talk to. They were also SO sure the two of us were alike in some way, despite the two of us only talking for a short while together. What kind of book is so good that you want to talk to a random stranger about it? They said they only recently started looking beautiful and unmistakably androgynous despite the short hair. How did they do that? Could I do that somehow? Could they teach me to look like them, or even more feminine than that? They said they went to the same high school, but I had never seen them before. How long have they been out of school? I'm not exactly the best with faces, but I think I would have noticed someone like that. I definitely don't remember seeing the kid from the river at school either. Maybe his twin brother was always homeschooled. Despite my best efforts to stay mad and dismiss any questions I had about the whole situation, the more I think about it, the more questions I have. I suppose if I’m going to kill myself anyway, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s today or tomorrow. I could always ask the stranger whatever questions I have and kill myself afterwards.

Resolving myself to wait another day, I go home. Luckily I’m back before curfew and I’ve long since stopped crying. In the morning, I leave home with my backpack again, so as not to make Dad suspicious. On the way to the river, I pick up any large stones I find along the way, and add them to the empty bag. If nothing else, talking with the stranger today gives me another chance to try and drown myself. While I suppose there’s no real rush, maybe I could get lucky and fall in; if I do, the stones will help make sure I can’t get back out. 

Despite living on the other side of the river, I walk down the usual path towards school, and hop over the fence to cross the railyard to get to the river. I don’t visit the river often enough to trust that I would be able to find the same bend in the river any other way.The stranger never mentioned when to visit them again, but I figure I can walk up and down the edge of the river looking for large rocks while I wait. The railyard on the way there has some surprisingly cool rocks. I don’t think I would have ever realized, had I not been filling my bag in hopes of drowning. It seems rather unusual how many of the rocks by the railroad are hard, sharp, and volcanic, considering there aren’t any volcanoes in the area. I would have suspected them to be mostly smooth and round like those down by the river. Perhaps it has something to do with the terrain necessary to build train tracks on? Perhaps it’s simply the cheapest material. Down by the river a lot of the rocks seem to shine, wetted by the running water. It’s rather captivating and I spend so much time admiring the stones that for a second I forget to even add to my load. I’m caught entirely by surprise when I hear a voice on the other side of the river call out to me.

“Hey, you came!” the stranger calls.

“Ah, you scared me. I was just looking at rocks while I waited for you.”

“Oh, I was wondering why we were so low to the ground. Well, come on over, I want to show you my book!” they shout, holding a large leather-bound book in the air above them.

I look over at the wet stone path barely sticking above the river that leads to the other side, and for a moment my dumbass bastard brain starts getting doubts about crossing the slippery path while carrying all that weight in my bag. I tell myself I simply don’t want to die before getting a chance to ask the stranger some questions, but I know that, despite it being my sole intention, I might still be too much of a pussy to want to die today. I curse myself for my cowardice and ask, “Actually, why don’t you come over here? This side is just as pretty.”

The stranger looks down at the surface of the river for a while, before responding.

“I can’t, the fog isn’t out today.”

“The fog?”

“Never mind that, just walk across the stones! I want to show you my book already. You won’t get hurt.”

The stranger seeks to assure me of my safety, but their cold dead eyes staring right through me as they say it make me imagine them having truly evil intent. Somehow the idea of this genderless fantasy wanting to lure me to my death convinces me I should do it. Oddly, I think I trust them. If I make it across, then I make it across, and if they decide to trick me into falling in and drowning, then I think I might just let them. I’d surely try to kill me if I had a chance as well, and I’m sure I’m plenty murderable. Maybe it’s revenge for me shouting at them the other day? I wonder as I carefully step from stone to stone across the rushing river. 

Despite the width of the river being quite considerable, I make it over in little to no time at all. The stranger is right by the edge of the river as I reach the last stone, and they offer their hand to take, in order to help me reach the shore. I take their hand, and feel a blush creep up on me completely unwarranted. They don’t let go of my hand when I safely reach shore, though; instead, they lead me away from the shore into the field of flowers behind the treeline. The field is full of sunflowers, lilies, daisies,  and lavender. It looks like there are blackberries and ivy along the outer edges, and May-tree flowers are littered across the ground. They sit down in the flowers, taking me down with them, all the while their chivalry makes me feel like the princess in all those cheesy romance books. They take their hand back to open the heavy leather book they’ve been carrying with them, and I’m suddenly reminded I’m supposed to be a straight heterosexual man™.

"Thanks for coming back. I've always been really interested in cryptids and world mythology type stuff, but my family tends to view a lot of it as culturally insensitive and unrealistic. My parents, their parents, my aunts and uncles, they're all storytellers, writers, and poets too, so they have a lot of specific critical opinions about the genre as a whole. Any other thing I'm obsessed with, they'll let me talk about for hours, but I haven't had many people to talk to about mythology who won't give a ten-hour literary takedown about it, since I left Griffith Secondary. Used to be all that I would read at the bookstore across the road."

“Aw man, I miss that bookstore, I was so sad when they closed.”

“Yeah… This is one of the last books I ever got from the bookstore. I did the book-binding myself, though. My mom taught me how,” they say, flipping through the pages.

“Really? That’s actually really cool. What’s all this writing?” I ask, pointing to what looks like old Irish text.

The text is scribbled all over in the margins. Things are circled and underlined; they look like notes, but none of the text is in English, although it might look like it at first glance. All of the text is rather loopy and stylized and throughout all of the text there’s a surprising lack of d’s and s’s. None of the recognizable letters spell out any English word. Were it not for the lack of Cyrillic letters, I’d assume it was fancier Russian.

“Oh, my dad is kind of like a history teacher, and he ended up spending several hours one time making corrections to the parts of the book he said were wrong.”

They flip to a page talking about Bigfoot and there are more notes on these two pages than I’ve seen on any other page. There are what look to be footnotes and citations to the corrections, and there are more written words than printed.

“Wow. Your dad sure has a lot of opinions about Bigfoot, doesn’t he?”

The stranger lets out a deep heavy sigh and rolls their eyes.

“Yeah, do not even get him started on Bigfoot. You’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Seems a little odd for a history teacher, but okay.”

The stranger lets out a weird nervous chuckle.

“Anyway… I actually like hearing some of what he has to say on the matter. It is cool to learn more about the stuff from someone who knows what they’re talking about. I always really felt a connection to cryptids and fairy tale creatures. I never really felt like I fit in with everyone else on a fundamental level, like I wasn’t even human. In school it always felt like everyone was always standing by, just waiting for you to mess up somehow, looking for any reason to brand you an outcast and exclude you. It wasn’t much better at home for me, either.”

“I get that, I think. I never felt like I fit in with other guys. The few good friends I have are girls, but even they don’t seem to really understand everything. Sometimes I’ll share a funny story about my dad and they’ll just act completely horrified. They always try to treat me like some charity case, anyway.”

“I never felt like I really fit in with guys or girls.”

I hesitate to ask for a moment, afraid learning what their true gender is will break this spell they have over me. That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it? Especially if they are a boy. On top of everything else, I don’t think I could handle the beating Dad would give me if he learned I was truly a fag. If they’re a girl, then surely it would excuse and explain my ever beating heart. Although for some reason the thought of them being a girl saddens me in a deep and inexplicable way. As if them not being a girl or a boy is what draws me to them. There’s a horrifying thought laying dormant in my mind that the thought of them being neither makes me feel closer to them, like maybe perhaps they weren’t wrong to assume the two of us aren’t so different. A silence draws between the two of us; I pull my hand away upon realizing we had once again been holding each other’s during the lapse in their page-turning. My curiosity wins the epic battle for my emotions and I decide to address the elephant in the field.

“Which… are you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you a guy or a girl?”

“No.”

“What? No? That’s not an answer is it? You can’t just do that… can you? Can you just be neither?”

“Of course I can. I’m doing it right now. Rarely is one born as they are, and often only you and Lady Fate herself know your truest self. They also say one often finds their fate when on a path to avoid it. That’s actually something that always appealed to me about one type of cryptid story in particular, actually,” they say, flipping the pages in their book to a dog eared and bookmarked section full of depictions of fairies, mushrooms, and elves.

I’m left processing the absolute bombshell the stranger has just dropped on me. For some reason their response or perhaps even a refusal to give one has both confirmed and denied my greatest fears about myself, and I’m left dumbstruck as they casually infodump about their interests with no recognition of the state they’ve just left me in.

“I had to fiercely guard this section of the book from my father, but he’s pretty much confirmed for me almost all of these kinds of tales are wildly misinterpreted, mistranslated, and subject to decades of cultural appropriation from colonizers, propagandizing from Christian churches about pagan traditions and beliefs, and retellings that leave out context and favor the oppressors. Despite the inaccuracies and insensitivity and overall lack of nuance, a common theme in tales about fairies is one of true names. I’m sure I would have been just as drawn towards tales of fairies for other reasons even if they weren’t so wildly inaccurate, but the true names trope still holds a special place in my heart. The idea that whoever knows one’s true name can control them. The themes of one’s lack of autonomy in the face of a given name or tales where a person’s true name isn’t the one they were given. My favorite, however, are the tales where a fae could steal one’s given name so they can escape their old gender, their old life for something better…”

“Ah so that must be what happened to you,” I joke, after a long melancholy pause on their behalf.

“What?”

“I mean you got a new gender, a new family, a new life. Sounds like your dreams came true. What I wouldn’t give for that… Surely fairies must have been involved, right?”

“Uh, no. Of course not! It’s just stories. It’s all non fiction. ‘True names’ don’t even work like that. A-and fae aren’t even real,” they ramble, looking rather panicked.

My humor is clearly lost on them. And their demeanor is suddenly that of a frightened deer that sees you in a clearing.

“Look, I, uh, I gotta go,” they say, nervously looking all around them before closing the book and running off.

Before I can even get up to stop them, to tell them I was joking, they’ve almost cleared the length of the pasture. I have so many more questions than when I left the first time, and am absolutely certain now that there is something deeply wrong with the stranger. If they aren’t somehow blessed by magical fairies, they’re almost certainly in a very weird cult. I realize, rather frustrated, that I never got to ask them any of my questions. I never got their name. I never got to find out if they were the kid from my childhood, and I suddenly have a lot of questions about my own sexuality, and maybe also my gender? I leave the river almost on instinct as I think about all of the questions today left me with, and am halfway home before I realize I forgot to drown myself today, and suddenly find myself too tired and lazy to walk back to the river and try.