The Curse of Ideas

"My brother is a troll."

The best ideas come when you're bone-tired and want nothing more than to sleep. This one came in the middle of the night a few days ago, and I had to drag myself out of bed, scramble around in the dark until I found my notebook and a pen, and finally figure out how to work the light switch so I could scribble down the full story.
Note-taking doesn't work, either. I'll start writing down bullets, and then suddenly, I'll get an idea for the first sentence. That first sentence will then become the second sentence, and then spiral out of control until I have a complete story before me and a couple hours of sleep wasted. I suppose that's the curse of getting an idea, but I really wouldn't mind if my inspiration came in the middle of the day when I'm bored and not trying to catch up on sleep.

The stories of changelings have always been interesting to me. What would it be like to meet the person you were changed with? Even stranger, what would it be like to meet a sibling that had been swapped? This is what I think it would be like...

Changelings

            My brother is a troll.

            No, I’m not being mean. He is literally a troll. It’s actually a lot more common than one would think. A recent survey taken in 2006 revealed that an average of 0.02 children per household are in fact trolls—changelings swapped with human children at birth. It’s hard to tell at first sometimes, because the changelings usually don’t look that much different from humans.

            Seth has actually always been a good-looking boy; dark hair, tanned skin, etc., but if you look closely, you’ll notice that his eyes aren’t really light hazel—they’re gold. His pupils narrow into slits in dim light as well, and he can see extremely well in the dark. Even so, it wasn’t until he started talking that we realized what he was.

            When he was three, he asked my mother where her tail was.

            We all thought this was strange, but we assumed he’d been watching the cat, Sigurd, and had figured that all creatures have to have tails. We thought this, that is, until he turned six and asked my dad why mom hadn’t tried to eat me yet. We finally began to piece things together when he was eight, and he walked into the house with a huge black timber wolf following meekly at his heels like a trained dog.

            Despite all of this, we’ve treated him and loved him as part of the family. He and I fought together, committed small crimes together, and got in trouble together like regular siblings, though the thought occasionally crossed my mind, Who was my real brother? I always pushed that thought aside, because I love Seth as my brother, and I knew I never would meet my blood brother. At least so I thought.

            I finished high school four years ahead of Seth, and then we parted ways for a time while I went to college and he finished up high school. He was always very intelligent, especially in science classes. He once took an ecology class in which he had to go outside and identify birds. He swept through that unit without missing a question, but later confessed to me that he’d cheated; He’d asked the birds what people call them and they’d told him the answers.

            The summer after my first year of college, I returned home to visit. Seth and I talked a lot and walked out back in the hilly woods that surrounded our house, listening to birdsongs and turning over rocks in the creeks bed like when we were kids. Seth had Fenris, the timber wolf he’d befriended, following at his heels like he always had since he was eight. A couple of rabbits tried to follow him, too, but Fenris scared them off.

            I remember walking farther than we ever had before that day. The trees grew taller and taller as we walked, and the path that we were following became rougher and rougher until we had to hack aside tree branches and reaching tendrils of prickly thorns. We didn’t even think about turning back; we both felt a sort of urgency, as if we needed to be somewhere on time.

            We came to a part of the forest that was the beginning.

            There was no other word for it; the forest had begun there, and the trees that grew there were so old, so tall, and so incredibly wise that they knew every detail that had happened in the forest, from the mightiest forest fire to the tiniest fluttering of a bee’s wing. The air was very still.

            We weren’t alone. There was another family of people at the other end of the grove. There were four of them, two of which looked older than the others, with wilder hair and longer tails. They all had very tanned, leathery skin and shaggy, coarse black hair tangled with twigs. They had long tails—like those of a donkey—which they kept curled around their bare feet.

            We moved towards them, and them towards us—silently, so as not to disturb the ancient quiet of the grove. We met in the middle and stared at one another for a spell, neither group speaking or moving.

            I recognized the two parent trolls; they had the same high cheekbones, hawk-like noses and serious eyes as Seth, as well as the shimmering gold irises and slitted pupils. The young girl troll looked like him as well, though younger. I recognized the fourth troll as well, though he was not quite like the other three.

            He was a little paler of skin, and his face a little less heavily lined by wind and rain. His nose matched my mother’s and his heavy eyebrows my father’s, and the way his hair curled looked like mine. Most important were his eyes—light blue in color, with rounded pupils and a tendency to squint in the dark. He and I stared at one another for a spell, while Seth and his blood sister stared at one another as well. The parent trolls watched us all, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d ever regretted switching their son for that of another.

            Finally, we turned and left—not a word spoken nor a sign exchanged—Seth and I towards our home and the trolls towards theirs. We left that grove of old, wise trees for the young, new trees of the woods we knew well, and eventually made our way back home to finish my visit with my parents. I eventually went back to college, and Seth moved on to become a naturalist. The two of us settled down to our respective lives and families, and between us, we kept mum on that which we saw in the old forest. That day stayed with me, though, all through my life; the day I saw my real brother.