She knew she had a shapeshifter in the house.
She first came across it when she found an ornately framed oil painting of Renoir’s ‘Roses in a Vase’ hanging in her living room. When she approached it to take a closer look, the painting instantly shapeshifted to become a fly and took off. However, it became apparent to her over the following days that not all shapeshifters are particularly good at what they do. The following day she found a vacuum cleaner lying on the sun lounge, beside the pool in the back garden. On drawing closer, it became a dead leaf, which was instantly whipped up by a breeze and blown into the flower bed somewhere, among a great many other such leaves.
Before these events, she had only the vaguest notion regarding the phenomenon of shapeshifting. She was to learn more and more as time went on. One website said that you could trap them, but you had to be quick. Then there were the events, the more practical experiences, like the day she found an egg whisk in the bath tub, which turned to water and drained away as she peered in at it. Then there was the elaborate Queen Anne chair in the corner of the laundry, a full-size casino roulette wheel sitting precariously on top of the microwave oven in the kitchen, a leaf rake propped up behind the television, a pair of binoculars hanging in the closet, the hedge clippers she found lying on the settee, not to mention the roller skates sitting in the kitchen sink.
Most of these unexpected items changed by morphing into flies; this being the creature’s favourite mode of transformation. It was this fact that gave her the idea of having a can of fly spray handy at all times. In doing this, and giving the matter some serious thought, the horrible woman across the road that had once made a derogatory comment about the condition of her front fence, had become her primary focus.
Her lucky break came late one evening.
She was watching television when she noticed that a pencil sharpener had suddenly appeared on the coffee table in front of her. She carefully picked up the can from beside her chair and zapped it. The thing had barely gone through the process of changing when it received a direct hit.
It was not dead, but stunned.
She slipped the fly, little legs still twitching, into a prepared envelope that was addressed to ‘The House Owner’.
Quietly, with the envelope held to her ear, listening with satisfaction to the buzzing, she crept across the road in the dark.
She pushed the envelope silently through the woman’s letter box.