🗝️ Lost Animal Identities—Fiction (sort of)

From my collection Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion

Photo by Charles Jackson on Unsplash

The first time I turned, I was seven years old. I sat on a hard mattress in my grandmother’s guest bedroom on the second floor with a man I truly liked, the clean-faced husband of my grandmother’s sister. The man and I were in the habit of making excursions together on his bicycle. Together, we dove into the village swimming pool or watched swans flap their threatening wings when we came too close. That afternoon, however, while my grandmother and his wife were downstairs, chatting in the quarreling manner that was their style, the man and I were alone in the bedroom for a reason I cannot recall. He touched me or held me or handled me for another reason I cannot recall, but what I do remember is that I turned, from an obedient child into a sly fox. My fur was a gorgeous bristly red and made him gasp. In his confusion, I squirmed from his hands with one smooth lie—I’m hungry—and fled the room. The metamorphosis didn’t last long, my fur gone before I reached my grandmother, but the fox’s trace in me forbade me forevermore to sit on the rear end of the man’s bicycle.

I played on a sunny field of grass when I turned a second time. I loved wrestling with my older brother, my youngish stepmother, with anyone who tossed me around without hurting me on purpose. Wrestling was a way for me to connect and simultaneously release anger. That day, I was wrestling with my scout leader while a semicircle of eager girls surrounded us: They waited to take my place. He was an unattractive guy, we all agreed, and I doubt any of us were sweet on him, and his age, twice our own, put him off-limits even for our fantasies, but male attention is male attention. I wrestled with him until one of my emerging breasts got in the way. Instantly, I turned into a snake who showed her fangs. He released me just as quickly and backed away, lest I bite. I hissed so loudly that other scout leaders rushed toward us and put a stop to the weekly wrestling for good.

I turned many times in the years to come. The neighbor who peeked at my naked mother suntanning in our fenced garden made me grow a turtle shell. The boyfriend pushing my boundaries freed the buzzing bee in me. The cook at the retirement home where I delivered meals birthed my inner porcupine when his hands bumped into my butt cheeks more than accidentally possible. The flasher on the Paris metro met my toxic frog and flirtatious professors of all stripes gave me wings. Whenever men were heading to places where I didn’t want to go, I turned.

At twenty-one, I turned for the last time. Men didn’t stop bothering me, but … you’ll see. I lived with a guy who wanted me to have his babies, and because he called me selfish for my wanting to have my university degrees first, we fought a lot. One day in the kitchen, he tried to shove me out the back door onto the closed-in patio, where it was snowing. I had been there before, cooped up without a coat, and wasn’t looking forward to waiting for his mercy again in the winter cold. So the bear in me broke out. My partner was a big guy, yet surprise won me the advantage. He stumbled backward against the cupboard. The sound of clattering things. I raised my paw to slash him open, but just before I struck, I caught my reflection in the oven glass. A woman was standing there with her thin arm raised. No bear in sight. I roared.

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“Lost Animal Identities” was originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea. It will be republished in the collection Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion scheduled for release by Vine Leaves Press in July 2025.

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Why Did I Write “Lost Animal Identities” ?

When the Me Too Movement took off in 2017, I spoke with my husband about my own bad experiences with men in my youth and was surprised by two things: How numerous the unpleasant encounters had been and how I had never mentioned them to him before.

Did my memories embarrass me? Had I considered them unimportant or irrelevant in the greater scheme of things? Minor compared to what other women had suffered? I read more essays and memoirs on the subject, and most vividly remember Roxane Gay’s Hunger. I, too, considered myself a bad feminist, and admired how she gave voice to her trauma and kept changing her opinions.

My own bad experiences lay mostly unexplored in my memory, perhaps waiting for a story that would do them justice.

One day, while looking for inspiration, I browsed through a document of undeveloped ideas when a title jumped at me: Lost Animal Identities. I began writing the piece as fiction, inventing reasons why humans might transform themselves into another types of animals. The more details I borrowed from my own life, the more I trimmed the fiction. In the end, only the transformations were left as non-truths. Without intent, I had written something very close to the bone.

Desk Journeys aka Reading Recommendations

I recently received a review copy of Daphne by Kristen Case, a hybrid book of poetry and lyrical essays (Tupelo Press, 2025).

I was intrigued by the title, the haunting myth of a woman who transforms into a tree to escape being raped by a god. And by the pitch: a meditation on the centrality of predation.

Kristen Case writes from her own experience with violence, her own obsession with how we can get to know one other not only through beauty but also through brutality. She shines a light on long-existing power structures in our literary tradition and beyond. Ovid, Heidegger, Shakespeare, Keats, and Beethoven pass by, to name a few. The author wants to know: How might we better express our longing? How may two people let their bodies meet so they can enjoy similar experiences?

“[…] I think often about the space between desire and love, and whether there is a space, and whether love is a laurel crown or a transformation past all capture or joy at another’s strange and sudden flourishing, and whether desire is compatible with love or love’s destroying machine.”

The question that struck me the most was, What must we give up to find love?

Daphne by Kristen Case is a beautiful investigation into the complex world of human desire and how we might protect ourselves from others without closing ourselves down.

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Related Essays

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in reading:

🗝️ I Invented a New Leader—Fiction

🗝️ What She Really Wants to Know—Fiction

⌂ Brief Shameless Thoughts on Being Human and Limited

Time to Say Goodbye

Daniel and I are in our last week in San Miguel de Allende. We mostly enjoyed this pretty town, but it’s been very rainy lately and we’re ready to leave our noisy neighbors behind. This is the great privilege of our nomadic life: We can pack up and walk away.

Next on our route: Querétaro for one night before we fly to Merída and visit the island of Holbox, off the Yucatán peninsula. Our flight to Lima, Peru, departs from Cancún, so we figured: Why not enjoy a week of sea and sunshine on our way to the Andes mountains? We found a tiny house there that will do just fine.

All my best,

Claire

P.S. If reading about my bad experiences with men makes you want to share yours, please do. I’ll make sure (to the best of my abilities) that this comment section remains a safe space. Other comments about my story are very welcome, too!