Six Sentence Sunday, 14 August 2011 (The Shape-shifter’s Tale)

I walk the colonnade of the vast stadium, its staircases rising past the locked gates. Along the top runs a frieze in which the counties are carved, all ninety-eight of them, geography in alphabetical order. The colonnade curves, outsize, all the more so when I’m four-legged: loping as a dog—once as a wolf, too dangerous a form—or a cat, sliding through the shadows as the roof looms overhead. No one notices me. The air is full of news: sex and territory, the tang of urine and hormones, the enticing odors of possible food, furry and live, or fried and redolent of grease, in the leavings by the trash-cans. Squirrels, mice, the occasional rat—no, I don’t tangle with the rats, I’ve been a rat and I know what they’re about.