Changelings

 In summer, the lovely girls would come out to the pier

to be ogled at by the boys under the docks.

Their teacher’s warnings of disappearances along that part of the coast

failed to dissuade them.

Though searchers were always sent out on the rocks,

this fishing town seemed resigned to a cryptic fate.

The truth beneath the silence had seeped through and bloomed into nervous minds.

Heedless, one night the twin sisters snuck out to the pier.

They dared each other to make excursions further down the rocks.

But they’d never known the kind of terror they’d soon suffer.

A half-drunken sailor in his skiff heard the twins’ screams echo over the waves.

From the crack of a sea cave came their cries at the things that pulled them in.

Old men in the tavern listened to the sailor’s tale with glistening eyes,

shook their heads, turned away.

They pretended ignorance of the cavern’s changelings,

as they were sometimes called in whispers.

Meanwhile, the slippery things restraining the sisters in darkness stood awestruck.

The sisters’ similarity astonished them.

Many digits poked one sister’s face, then the other.

A synchronized droning said: “We drink you.”

One twin, hearing her sister sobbing as digits pricked her face,

tore loose in defiance.

She heard the things’ frightened gasps.

Using this fear, the twins would come to command the cave—

as they too began to change.