• Sometimes I wonder if I’m broken. No one has ever acted like me, never been like me… or if someone has, they aren’t around anymore. It scares me sometimes that I’m so powerless, so formed… I’m not supposed to be. Everyone from where I came from changed shapes at will. Children (at least I think they were children) changed forms, growing and shrinking to their hearts content. They used to enjoy scaring me, changing into lions and bears. Sometimes they changed into me, which frightened me worst of all. Our world changed with every breath. I remember waking up one morning and finding my bed on a street corner. My house had decided to go for a walk. He left me behind because I hadn’t locked the door. I found him five blocks away, changed into some kind of windmill. He told me to change into some grain, but I couldn’t. I never could change right. Sometimes I can get taller, but it hurts me. I have to concentrate, get past the pain. As long as I concentrate a little, I stay the same size. The shrinking only happens if I forget completely. Once, I just let it go. I decided I would just let myself shrink until I stopped shrinking. I woke up the next morning so small I was scared of vanishing completely. I was under a thimble, which was my house. It had changed to match my new size. He was angry with me, because no one pays attention to the best thimble on the block. I never did that again.
    Eventually, the others realized I couldn’t change form. They started getting angry with me then. I still don’t understand it. Not really. Eventually, they talked my house into their scheme too. He went across town, expecting me to come find him. I already knew what was going on. That’s why I left. I just started walking, out across the desert. Some of them followed me, but their forms degraded the further away from the village we travelled. Mine stayed the same. Eventually, when I looked back, no one was behind me. Unfortunately, since I was looking backward, I fell down something. I bumped my head, and blanked out. I woke up a few times, but never for long. The sights and sounds inside the tunnel scared me, pushed my mind past the breaking point.
    Eventually, I reached a place where I saw people like me. They shifted occasionally, but their basic form never changed. They were near some strange beings, but I didn’t notice those at first. I ran out to my kind, but the second I stepped out into the alley the other beings ran away, taking my kind with them. I ran into the beings rather often as I explored, and every time, they were scared of me. Except for the children. They weren’t afraid of me. They explained that my kind are called shadows here. The children also told me that the shadows were attached to them. So if they went one place, their shadows followed. I tried to talk to the shadows, but they never spoke back to me. I decided then that these shadows had no relation to me. I liked the children, though. I stayed near them. They gave me clothes to wear, all taken out of their grandparents’ drawers. I guess I looked a little funny… at least, when the first set of children grew up, they said I did. That was when I realized that when the children were given time, they changed into the beings I had seen first. So I went out and found another set of children, and another, until eventually I started noticing a change.
    The children accepted me for a very long time at first. Recently, though, I’ve had to leave them at younger and younger ages. They aren’t really afraid of me, but they don’t like me. It’s strange. They know that I’m not their imagination now. Yesterday, a ten year old told me that I shouldn’t be out on the street. It was dangerous for people like me, ‘cause the government puts shadows without owners in prison. I was… intrigued. I thought that I had finally discovered my people, and if they were in prison I planned on joining them there.
    I didn’t go inside. I went into the street, into the brightest light I could find… and no one could see me. I still don’t understand it. Any other time, they would have seen me. I realized it was the light. I always stuck to shadowy areas, where I fit in. in the light, I vanished. I realized that when I left my home, and noticed the people behind me vanishing, I was actually vanishing too. The light rendered me formless. I was standing in the middle of the street, and a car went right through me. The drivers couldn’t see me. I stood there for a very long time, until I noticed the sun going down. I started walking away. Someone took a photo of me from across the street. I walked behind him, and saw myself in the photo. I did look weird. I walked away, barely hearing the people scream as they saw me in the picture. Later, I walked by a computer café. Inside, a man was looking at the photo from the day before. Underneath the picture was a caption.
    It read “the Slenderman.”