I live in New Mexico
My family moved from Eastern Washington State to New Mexico when I was five. The official story was that my grandfather needed his family close due to his health. My father, being the good son he was, packed up his life to move. The real story was that my father was a great at his job, but it didn’t mean he was any good at running a business. My parents sold our house and pretty much everything in it to pay off the debt. Everything left fit in one U-Haul and the backseat of my parents’ car. I was young enough to think of moving half-way across the country to camp on grandma and grandpa’s living room floor in a sleeping bag was an adventure.
It took a few years for us to go from camping to a small, single-wide trailer. We lived in it for another seven years before my parents were able to get a house that didn’t have an axle. By then I was in junior high, and it was clear that there was something different about this place. People either learn to live with it, or just pretend it doesn’t exist. My parents chose the second.
I didn’t have a choice. We lived in the middle of nowhere, a couple of miles away from the nearest town, and the only neighbors were old people. Two miles doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is under the New Mexico sun. It’s always been hard for me to make friends. People say I’m intense. That means I scare people. They swear that I just appear around them, but I’m just quiet. People approach me like I’m a wild animal that they weren’t sure if, or when, it would attack.
My parents decided that if they ignored it, then it wasn’t an issue. It was the method they chose to treat me. Unless we were in public, I was a part of the family as much as the car.
That sounded more dramatic than I intended.
Basically, I grew up alone more often than not. I honestly didn’t mind. It was better that way. Just like this place, I’m different. Sometimes I see things that haven’t happened yet, sometimes it’s something that has happened that I shouldn’t know, and other times, I just see things.
Spirits.
Ghosts.
Creatures.
The aura of energy that each person emits.
It helps to be quiet. They don’t notice me as much. I couldn’t do anything about the ones that did.
My parents were very religious. Having a kid like me was not possible. Therefore, it was easier to just ignore me. The fact that my imaginary friend happened to be a girl who had the same name as my dead sister that I didn’t know about was random chance. When I could remember things that hadn’t happened yet was due to my wild imagination.
We lived in a small town of about four-thousand people, so everybody knew everybody, or at least knew someone who knew them. Technically, we lived a couple miles outside of town, but were still close enough to count.
What I mean to say is that word spreads really quick in a small town. Being the weird, quiet kid in First Grade sticks with me to this day. It became easy to recognize others that were different too. Most of the time if felt like I was able to see them, but they couldn’t see me due to assignment than ability. Other times, I could seem them looking back at me. Someone on my level, though not a direct translation.
That was how I met Sam. It was my junior year when we had a class together. She was a senior and needed it before she could graduate. There were a few other seniors in the same situation, but they kept their distance from her. It was a common occurrence in my daily life, which meant she was sitting in the spot I usually took. We ended up sitting beside each other for the entire semester.
Up until the last week of class we didn’t really talk. The short interactions were focused on passing out worksheets and asking for a pencil rather than our plans for life. During the last week, the teacher decided to leave us pretty much to our own devices. Being the only two that were not part of a group of friends we had our first real conversation out of necessity.
“So.” I said. “Why do they treat you like that?”
Not smooth in the least, but I hadn’t had the chance to talk to someone who was different like I was before. Sam looked at me from the corner of her eye. It took her a moment to decide if I had spoken to her or if she was hearing things. Once she realized she had heard me, she needed to decide if she chose to hear me.
“They’re all scared of me.” She motioned with her chin to the group of kids.
They were Dine’ and they purposely never looked at her. I knew just enough about the Dine’ to know that I didn’t know a lot. There were a number of clans in the tribe and that was the depth of my knowledge at the time. I thought that maybe it had to do with that. The Dine’ had been around for a long, long time and a reputation is a hard thing to change.
Her social exile could have been something more mundane. She was part of the number of kids that lived in the dorms. Their families lived deep in the Reservation, and this was the closest school district. It wasn’t possible to transport the students daily to and from the various schools, so they were offered a place in the dorms. Maybe she did something in the dorms to freak people out.
“Why?” I asked.
So far this conversation had lasted longer than I had expected.
“My grandfather.” She replied.
“They’re scared of your grandfather?” I asked.
She really looked at me for the first time. For her, it was rare to encounter someone who didn’t know her story. I was completely disconnected to her social sphere. She leaned closer to me. Her voice dropped to a hush.
“Do you know what a Skinwalker is?” She asked.
I had lived in New Mexico for nearly twelve years at that point. I knew what a Skinwalker was.
“Yeah, I’ve heard about them.” I nodded. “I know they exist. I’ve seen one.”
Her expression of hope flickered for a moment.
“They don’t run like normal animals.” She squinted at me.
“I know.” I rolled my eyes. “A rabbit doesn’t move like that. It had happened that previous summer. My friend was trying to get ahold of her boyfriend, but he wasn’t answering the phone. The guy was going through a rough patch, so she was worried about him. I went to go check on him when I saw something jump out of the brush and run away. It was the shape of a rabbit at first, but it grew into human legs for a brief moment to push itself away at a faster speed than a real rabbit could ever go.”
I paused to see if she understood what I was saying. She just stared at me. How could I explain it better?
“Ok.” I groaned. “You know how at track meets the sprinters launch out of their starter position? It was like the rabbit started to jump with rabbit legs, were replaced the sprinters legs, and then back again once it was in the air.”
She went silent for a while. I figured that was the end of it.
“My grandfather was a skinwalker.” She said.
I still didn’t know her name yet. Kind of. When the teacher took attendance they said her name, I just didn’t pay attention to what it was. I listened for my name, raised my hand, and then went back to whatever I was doing.
I turned my head to look at her.
“A Skinwalker isn’t a monster.” She answered the question in my eyes. “Not all of them. They are medicine men who practice a different kind of medicine. It’s true that they have to take the skin of an animal to become them, but that doesn’t mean they are evil. My grandfather was not evil. They killed him anyway when he was discovered. Now everyone thinks our whole family are Skinwalkers. They’re afraid of us. I’d kill them all if I was one.”
“A different kind of medicine?” I asked. “Kind of how witches used a different kind of magic from the Church?”
“Close enough.” She shrugged. “The stories don’t help. We’re the monster parents threaten their kids with when they don’t behave. It wouldn’t be so bad if some of them weren’t true. The medicine isn’t easy to handle. My grandfather even said he heard the call. He would sun himself on a rock and feel the call to just stay there and wear the snake’s skin until he would forget her was a man.” She shook her head. “He said it was a mighty struggle to gather the willpower to come back. There are medicine men who accept it and drift away. The skin is theirs now. Those are the stories of animals that are too big or too smart, but never trouble. Some fall too deep into the skin and fight to come back. They are unstable, sometimes dangerous. Those stories are the ones with animal calls that don’t sound right or aren’t where they belong.”
“Spooky stories at sleep overs and campfires.” I offered.
She nodded.
“The dangerous ones, the real scary stories.” She continued. “Those are the ones who embraced the call on purpose. They want the power that comes with it. Those ones are deadly. Monster movie stuff. They can still become a man, but their mind becomes more animal with each one they add.”
“And the worst?” I asked. “The ones that wear people skin?”
“They were evil already.” She sneered. “They have to seek out how to do that. It’s not something you find by accident.”
“Sorry about your grandfather.” I offered.
“Thank you.” She replied. “I’m Sam.”
“Don.” I said.
We settled into an easy silence. It felt like I was chilling out with a friend rather than sitting by a stranger.
“So.” I asked. “Are your family Skinwalkers?”
“My grandfather told me I had to ask if I wanted to learn.” She spoke low. “I hadn’t decided yet.”
“Sorry.” I said again. It felt useless, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“What about you?” She ignored my apology.
“I scare people.” I chuckled.
She stared at me, silently asking a question.
“People don’t pay attention to me, so I disappear.” I tried to explain. “To them, I’m not there, until I suddenly am. They jump. I try not to be annoyed.” I shrugged. “It happens.”
“That’s it?” She asked.
“I know things, see things, and remember things I shouldn’t.” I grumbled. “Sometimes I do things that no one is supposed to do.”
“Hm.” She responded. “Like?”
“See the future.” I shrugged. “A couple of other things I’m not sure about yet. Everything gets harder to do if don’t believe in what I’m doing. So, I don’t know if it’s something I can do, or if it’s something I can keep doing.”
She nodded. “That happens.”
“I’ve wanted someone to teach me.” I offered.
“I can’t help you.” Sam sighed. “It’s not yours to learn.”
“Figured.” I said.
Talking to Sam helped me acknowledge a couple of things. One, I wasn’t crazy, everything that I had seen, and heard, and done, was real. Second, I wasn’t the only one. Truly. I wasn’t alone. My observation of other people could have easily been an untreated mental illness.
Funny thing is, I do have diagnosed mental issues. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I thought controlling my environment in detail would help make sense of things. Personally, I’d call it a coping mechanism. Either way, I am aware and in treatment for it. Thanks to medication I no longer have to constantly rearrange my furniture.
Everything else works fine. I thought I share some.