Transfigure/Transform/Transmogrify: An Essay

Abstract

Transfigure/Transform/TransmogrifyAn Essay Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn (bio) I dreamt about a castle; I dreamt I was a castle. Dreams are funny like that. A thing can look like or be something else entirely. Your pet cat appears before you as an extinct woodland bird, and though you’ve never owned a pair of binoculars or bought feeder seed, you are absolutely certain of the avian species and are, simultaneously, confident that it is your cat. The question why? never crosses your sleeping mind. People are funny like that, too. I say dream, but I mean nightmare. It was recurring. It sent me out of my bed, out from under its soft, pink blanket, out and around the small circle of the house, whimpering from hallway to living room, to dining room, to kitchen, to hallway and living room again. In this dream, the castle was under invasion. Small arrows were launched against my walls; rocks were hurled over my ramparts. There were so many men, but it was not their assaults that made it a nightmare. The bolts’ impacts hardly hurt; the army, though determined, was puny compared to my size. And besides, a castle has defenses. My ramparts were lined with cauldrons of ore, molten and orange-hot. As the army raised its toothpick ladders to scale my sides, my hand was the mechanism that upended the crucibles’ contents onto the heads of the soldiers. As I followed the house’s circle, trying to outpace my dream, I dragged my hand over doorknobs, chair rails, countertops to remember that my hand was only my hand. The arrows did not hurt, but this did: I was both the castle and the men. Both stone and flesh; both invaded and invader. The hot, viscous metal took the fat right off my bones. Dreams, you know? [End Page 121] In a different world (or maybe the same one), a girl sits in a doctor’s office with her legs folded up in an oversized leather chair. She looks out the plate-glass window. She looks at the closed soundproof door. The doctor clicks his pen into readiness, clears his throat. His tie has small skeletons playing violins on it. It would be funnier, she says, pointing, if you were a surgeon. Something to do more concretely with death. His pen moves. Do you think there’s no risk here? The girl tries and fails to hide her eye roll. He is unprepared for her, for this, she thinks, despite his wall plaques, his volumes of bound scritta paper, his stately, studded furniture. He thinks it’s as simple as separating the obvious from the impossible. On the doctor’s desk is a brass lion, some file folders, and a piece of string—a rope, she thinks—as thick as her ring finger. He sets aside his notes and stands. He shrugs off his jacket. He takes two steps and is suddenly across the room. Have you done this before? he asks. The girl imagines she is the brass lion. Done what? Measured yourself, the doctor says. She blinks, catlike. He picks the rope up off his desk and lets an end drop to the floor to display its full length. You see, he says, the object is to guess the circumference of any part of your body. How big around do you think your arms are? Better than the lion, she is a sphinx. The doctor will not stop talking. Your legs? You guess, marking it off on the rope. Then you measure. Compare the difference. You’re always smaller than you think. But she is not smaller than she thinks. She is bigger than he knows. She has grown wings. She has riddles and hunger. She will eat the doctor and pass through the glass window without shattering it and fly away. _______ I find it confusing, having a body. One night, after I’d gone to bed with too little dinner, my tongue started growing. My teeth folded over [End Page 122] under its expansion like they were dispensing paper tickets. It didn’t hurt; it was a hallucination. I mean, it was hunger. I mean, I...