Max the changeling child sits in the mud where the other boys have pushed him. They've dumped his schoolbag into a puddle and now they're tossing his homework, a shoebox diorama he built with his mom, like it's a football. The boys are hooting and laughing and one of them catches the diorama so roughly that the construction paper sky rips open and the cottonball clouds come loose and the toothpick men rattle and scatter like a routed army.
The boys circle around Max the changeling child and throw dirt and stones and snatch his glasses and rive his shirt, and it's funny, it's so funny, they're all laughing, and Max the changeling child is laughing, too, because he knows one day not today but some day his people, his real people, will come swarming out of the forest, they'll ride in on a storm, ride in on lightning, with claws and teeth and vengeance, to retrieve him, their lost loved boy, and requite the misunderstandings wrought so painfully upon him all these days, make them pay, and then bring him, finally, safely, home.
(This story originally appeared in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine.)