Young Writers Society

I basically wrote this on a whim and had a lot of fun with it. It's for a book that I have planned, but I'm not sure whether I would actually include this as a prologue or just abandon it (because prologues are often unnecessary) and go straight into the first chapter. Nonetheless, feedback would be appreciated!

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Lydia was seven years old when she managed to turn into a red setter for the first time.

She couldn’t have explained precisely how she managed to do it. It was much like moving an arm or flexing the fingers – there was no specific technique; it just happened. Lydia didn’t think too much of it. She thought that there must, doubtlessly, be many other shapeshifting children all over the place, so she busied herself with squeezing through a gap in the fence that her human body was too gangly to fit through.

In actual fact, there were only two other people in the town who could transform into dogs and they only ever did so on certain occasions – as a party trick, for example, or to reach the pens that had fallen under the desk. They never spent long in dog-form, disliking the discoloured vision and disarming sensation of having twenty times more scent receptors than usual. For them, their shapeshifting abilities were little more than an interesting bit of personal trivia. Something to put on the CV.

Lydia, however, was very pleased to be a dog. She’d recently decided that humans were a bit rubbish and started pestering her mother to let her become something else, eliciting typical responses like ‘not until you’re fourteen’ and ‘I’m not made of money, you know’. She had always thought that, given the choice, she would like to be a komodo dragon or a crocodile – something with lots of teeth – but she was happy enough to be a red setter, even if they only had ten more teeth than the average human.

The bottom of her garden, what with its weedy flowers and dry, crunching grass, was a lot more interesting from a dog’s perspective. When Lydia transformed, the world transformed with her, into a slate blur mapped out with columns of specific, layered scents, and to smell them was much like flicking quickly through the pages of a book. Wood smoke was an old, heavy tome, yellowed with age, and washing-up liquid a stiff, modern novel with glossy pages, and ice-cream, her favourite scent of all, a squat, cardboard picture book for little children.

Lydia tried explaining this once or twice to her father, but he wasn’t that interested.

“A dog? You couldn’t have learnt to transform into something interesting?” he said, scouring the bookshelves. “I spent some time as an anteater during my gap year. You should turn into one of those instead. They’re much better than dogs.”

“Don’t be silly, Daddy. Anteaters aren’t at all interesting. They don’t have any teeth.”

Instead of replying, he yanked a novel out from the shelf, opened it at the third page, pressed a hand flat against the text – and disappeared. Lydia sighed, crouching down next to where the book had landed on the carpet. It was a classic, thick and old, yellowed-paged like the scent she had been describing, with scrawny print like ant footprints. He wouldn’t be back for hours.

So Lydia did what she always did when her parents weren’t home, and visited the stray dogs.

It had taken her a long time to find her place within their pack. She’d first tried to win their trust by talking to them, but that had been useless. Ignorant to the nuances of their language, she merely barked phrases such as ‘flour with old tongues’ and ‘chicken beds on ice’ into their faces, and they barked back incomprehensible insults in turn. (You cat-licker! You Elizabethan collar!) Then she attempted to captivate them with a succession of dog tricks that sent humans into raptures, capering back and forth on her hind legs and throwing her front paws to the side in a vaguely Thriller-esque manner. They remained unimpressed.

So she guided them to a butcher’s, transformed into a human, and let them in through the back door. They liked her very much after that.

And then? Well, then she started getting into all sorts of trouble.