Eve Morton

Tag: LGBTQ

  • 31 for 31: Strange Creatures by Eve Morton

    A cryptid story!

    Strange Creatures follows Emma, a YouTube investigator of all things ooky-spooky, when she actually finds something terrifying. The Turtle Lake Monster is real! And now she needs to document it for the world, or at the very least, for her followers.

    But, of course, something doesn’t go quite as she plans.

    I loved writing this story. I got to condense and throw all of my monster and cryptid lore at the wall and see what stuck around. I had also been going through a minor obsessive phase with the satirical author Chuck Tingle, so there may be a little of that energy in the story as well.

    Either way, this is a horror story that is more on the silly, campy side of things. Hopefully no nightmares tonight!

    Strange Creatures

    Emma blinked once. When the purple skin, slit by gills, still remained in her line of sight, she set her binoculars down by her side. There was no way she was looking at what she thought she was. There was simply no way. First of all, The Turtle Lake Monster was a water-creature and this one was on land. Secondly, the skin was purple, and everyone knew that The Turtle Lake Monster was green, or at least, dark blue. Lastly—and most importantly—that creature was not real. It was an urban legend, a folklore perpetuated by townspeople and internet conspiracy boards. Even if she was a so-called cryptid hunter and spent the bulk of her life on those boards or spinning her own theories on YouTube, none of this was really real, right?

    Right?

    Emma took a deep breath and looked through her binoculars again. The creature was still there. The skin was still purple. Turtle Lake was twenty feet away from the body at most, making it nearly forty feet from her position behind a bush. She was pretty far, so maybe this body was just a doll or prop that fell off a boat. Maybe this was leftover from a movie shot in the wilderness, someone trying to make hoax footage like Patterson-Gimlin. She had convinced herself the body was a stock prop from Supernatural or a practical joke left behind—it was April 19th, after all—but by the time she closed ten feet of distance, her heart sunk.

    The body of the creature was lifeless. The gills did not suck in water or air. A fetid, rotting smell hung around them. The creature was definitely dead—but that meant it had once been alive.

    “This can’t be real,” she said, barely above a whisper. The dusk air seemed to whisper back a confirmation. Real, real, real. She suddenly became aware of her prone position, alone at the edge of the woods. The nearest town wasn’t for miles. Most of the cabins had tourists inside of them who minded their own business. No one would hear her scream. If something did happen, she’d be just another trans woman to add to a missing list and not investigate further. 

    But the feeling didn’t stay. Curiosity and the thrill of discovery replaced the fear and left her with the body of a creature she would have called the definitive Turtle Lake Monster on her YouTube channel. With its dead body in front of her, she didn’t want to default to genus or origin stories from folklore. She wanted to know who the creature had really been.

    The investigator side of her personality, the one that had grown up watching The X-Files and Outer Limits and who disdained the melodramatic side that Supernatural had now taken, started to creep out. She hunched down by the body with her flashlight and shone against its skin. Most lore said the Turtle Lake Monster was like a large sea-horse with a curved body, scaly, and with a canine head. But this creature resembled the gill-man from the b-movie about the black lagoon. It was fish-like with humanoid features, such as arms and legs and the ability to walk on the shore, as well as swim in the water. 

    At least, she figured as much. She used her encyclopaedic knowledge of cryptids to decipher the creature’s life before its untimely end while also categorizing and updating her knowledge on the lore itself. The eyes of the creature were harder to place; they definitely seemed reptilian and not human or fish-like, since they were more on the side of its head. Perhaps it was a creature that migrated? Maybe it was evolving? She considered all of these possibilities without touching or moving the body; she had no idea what killed it, and if that thing itself was contagious. She saw no wounds—but then again, it was out of the water. Lack of air could have killed it, but if it had flipped to the surface, she would have thought it’d crawl right back in. 

    She raised her flashlight to the lake. The sun had set now. The wind was getting colder. She rose from the creature’s body and examined the area of grass from its body to the shoreline. It smelled like the damp part of her dad’s basement; the cleaning supply closest at the hospital where her dad finally died; and the stale smell of vitamins that her mother insisted she take when she was six or seven to make her a ‘strong boy.’ 

    Emma walked towards the lake with her flashlight in one hand and her Swiss army knife in the other. She wasn’t exactly sure what she could fight off with a corkscrew or a small blade, but it made her feel better. Always be prepared was the Boy Scouts code, even if Canada didn’t exactly have the Boy Scouts, but some kind of No Name Brand imitation. Her training came back to her in a whirl, warped with the crypto-zoology and The X-Files episodes she kept on repeat.

    The water lapped against the rocks on the shoreline. A few signs had been erected close by declaring the lake a part of Canadian National heritage. One smaller sign followed and apologized in a white-washed way for taking indigenous land. The park was located on a large swathe of land just outside of a reservation in rural Saskatchewan that had been repurposed into a tourist trap that held dozens of cabins for people looking to get away. Whenever Emma made the nearly two hour trek from Saskatoon to hunt for monsters here, she’d only end up finding adults making out like teenagers in the bushes. She’d stopped filming her trips altogether because of it. 

    “The one time I find a real monster. The one damn time…” she muttered under her breath under she heard a twig snap behind her. Emma turned around so fast she worried she’d knock off her own glasses. 

    Her flashlight barely illuminated in front of her. All she saw was a slick line of goop from the shoreline to where the body of the Lake Monster had been.

    It’s gone.

    A chill slammed down Emma’s back, lodging deep in her abdomen. Oh, God. The one time I find a monster and I don’t have a camera… and the monster gets up to leave. 

    Emma picked up her binoculars and scanned the area. It was too dark now. She should have left fifteen minutes ago. She saw nothing, only blackness, until purple glittered under twilight. Stars had come out, along with Venus, and directed light on what Emma thought was a moving creature. No, a dead creature being dragged. She remembered the way in which her father’s body had been limp yet stiff in death. Those jerky movements were unmistakable, even on a cryptid. The Lake Monster was now being dragged toward a rock-face several hundred feet in front of Emma. The rock wall seemed to shudder. Then all the purple scales, glittering in starlight, disappeared.

    Emma put down the binoculars. The wind that had once seemed so comforting warned her. You are not alone here. All of this is real, real, real and you are in danger. 

    She stamped down her fear long enough to take a sample of the gloop on the grass. Then she ran, faster than she ever remembered, for her car.

    *

    Alana was home when she called, but Emma spoke so fast that she hung up. Emma called back within seconds and held her tongue between her teeth so she didn’t lose her mind.

    “That was you?” Alana baulked. “I thought someone was crank calling me with your phone. Sorry.”

    “You have no idea what I have discovered.” Each syllabus felt like a stone under her tongue, slowing her down. “The Turtle Lake Monster. It’s real. I found it tonight. It looks like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but it’s the Turtle Lake Monster. I swear.”

    “Uh-huh. And who donned the gill-suit this time around?”

    Emma huffed. “You know I never hire actors for my videos. I just don’t shake the tree of doubt.”

    “And you capitalize on smudges.”

    Emma huffed again, but didn’t argue. Her YouTube channel had gone viral when she claimed to have found Old Yellow Top on a trip to Niagara Falls. She’d taken a photo in the woods on a whim and soon noticed a strange shadow and blonde fuzz in the background. She’d then showcased the photo in a confessional YouTube video, embellishing her vision of the Sasquatch-like cryptid known to haunt Ontario—but only a little bit. Her photo was like a magic eye painting; some days, she saw it and believed her story so fully. Other days, it made her feel nauseated by stretching her eyes too long with no payoff. 

    Regardless, people believed her enough to frequent her channel and demand more from her. And Emma had coveted the attention. For once, internet fame had come to a trans person from something other than a before and after gender montage set to some sentimental song. Trans women could have other damn interests—like cryptozoology. Her trans identity was incidental to her belief in strange creatures. No one wanted to hear about hormone injections and surgery rejection letters; about transphobia in her workplace and getting sir’d at the bank. They craved Old Yellow Top, a dozen different versions of Igopogo, and her adventures in Saskatoon’s national parks, looking for other creatures not yet discovered. Her audience knew she was trans—she hated to say it was kind of obvious judging on her jawline and the cadence of her voice when she got excited—but it didn’t matter. For once, people actually didn’t care what was in her pants. They cared about what was in the damn woods. 

    “I don’t need to have smudges anymore,” Emma insisted. “Not when I have the real thing.”

    “Yeah, uh huh. Sure.” Alana’s bored voice was only half an act. Her role on Emma’s show had always been to play the sceptic to her true believer stance. In a way, they were the inverse Scully and Mulder in terms of the roles they played and who they looked like the most. Before Alana had transitioned, she’d been a tall and brooding boy who exchanged a dozen letters with pen-pals about monsters in the wilderness; sort of like a Red Shoe Diaries and Fox Mulder hybrid. Though Alana tried to play to Scully’s sceptic, she also wanted to believe so deeply. She just never wanted to let go until she saw the proof.

    Until she saw the damn body in front of her—like Emma just found. In another burst of excited chatter, Emma tried to tell Alana the whole story from beginning to end. The whole truth. She emphasized that point several times before it finally seemed to sink in.

    “Wait,” Alana said. “So you’re not reading from a script?”

    “Again, I don’t have scripts or actors. Just talking points and smudges.”

    “So you actually found something? And you weren’t fucking filming? You whore.”

    “You bitch,” Emma said right back in a playful tone. Then she sighed. “But no. No filming.”

    “Well, you have photos, right? With your phone?”

    Emma’s silence made Alana huff. All the excitement that had once been in her voice was now drained. She didn’t even bother to trade spars back and forth. “So you still have nothing. This is still a wet dream, like us ever getting our licenses to match who we are?”

    Emma laughed, though the joke was awful. It hit her in all her most vulnerable places. She grabbed the spare sheet of paper out from her jeans pockets. The goop was in the centre of the page. “I have a sample. From the body. There have got to be chemicals in it. My cell reception always goes wonky in this area. It’s part of why I was looking here earlier tonight. I figured it was going to be aliens if I found anything at all, but now we have a creature.”

    “No, we literally have the creature’s wet dream. Ugh. I hate you so much right now.” 

    Emma smiled. Alana was this close to believing. Just one subtle push and—

    “All right,” Alana said. “Take me to where you found the body. I have to see this for myself.”

    *

    As soon as Emma pulled the car into the lot, she felt like they were being watched. It was half passed midnight, and all the stars that had once been so bright seemed dimmed. Even Venus was no longer visible.

    “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

    “Now you’re getting cold feet? You know,” Alana said, shaking her head, “I’m starting to think you’re a fake. Like the National Enquirer.”

    “Hey now. Those magazines actually do report stuff. Serious political issues and cover-ups. They just bury it next to Batboy’s baby mamma so it’s not taken seriously.”

    “And now you’re the Lone Gunmen. All in one.” Alana rolled her eyes. “Soon enough you’ll start talking to me about chemtrails. And then we’re going to have a serious issue.”

    “First of all, how dare you.”

    Emma and Alana locked eyes for a long, extended moment before bursting into laugher. Alana started to mimic the now famous InfoWars segment about frogs turning gay, tying it to their own transition. “If only the water really gave us boobs,” Alana said forlornly, “then wouldn’t need doctors at all.”

    “But this conspiracy,” Emma said, feeling the gravity of the situation. “What if it is real?

     What if what I’ve found is actually something that would have been buried in the National Enquirer? What if…?”

    “You’re given a Pulitzer in crazy talk?” Alana laughed again. “Well, if that’s the case, then we’re sharing it because that snot bubble you trapped on paper is nothing. We’re getting more, okay? And then we’ll talk about, especially if that means we’re given the keys to the InfoWars castle. God, can you imagine?” 

    Alana continued to chuckle as she got out of the car. Emma opened the backseat and gathered the lap equipment they’d both lifted from Alana’s veterinarian’s office. She could test the sample there come morning, and be able to report back with some kind of definitive certainty what they’d found. Alana had already theorized that it could just be normal guck from lake life that had been warped through plastics and other chemicals. It didn’t have to be some new kind of animals; and even if it was, they were discovering new bacteria all the time. So perhaps they would get an award for all of this. It only depended on what audience they wanted the most.

    “Ready?” Alana held her lab equipment. She gestured to Emma’s phone. “You better tape us this time.”

    Emma nodded. Her binoculars were around her neck, her Swiss army knife, and back-up hand-crank flashlight in her belt loops. She used the flashlight on her phone to guide her. While Alana walked towards the lake with her own light, Emma flipped open the camera and started the intro shot. 

    “Hello Tubies. We’re on a secret mission. Alana is convinced that I’m wrong about finding a gill-man body tonight, which could be the infamous Turtle Lake Monster. In spite of her scepticism, and how my creature differs from the standard lore, I’m still pretty sure I’m right and what I found is real. It disappeared the moment I turned away, but who knows what still lingers in the water? Come on.”

    She turned the phone away from her face and held it out as a guide. Her voice had taken on the cadence of a performance; part circus announcer and part confessional queen. A deep fear lingered behind her, something that Emma hadn’t quite faced. She didn’t tell Alana how the body had disappeared. Only that it did.

    As Emma walked, Emma glanced towards the rock face several feet away. Nothing glittered. Nothing glinted. But the sensation of being watched was still so acute. 

    “Here?” Alana asked. She dropped down the kit she carried and examined the grass. “I think I see the purple goo. You getting’ this? I’m not doing this twice and I’m definitely not staging anything.”

    “Hush now. We never stage.”

    “Uh-huh. Just tell me I’m in the right place.”

    “You are. That’s where I found the body.”

    Emma filmed as Alana took out tweezers and plucked up some grass. She added them into baggies. When they reached the water, the purple goo had faded, most likely washed away. Rocks lingered at the edge, interspersed with what looked to be egg shells. When Emma pointed it out, Alana shot her a look.

    “I saw them. It’s not my first rodeo.” She sighed with what Emma thought was fear as she knelt down to collect the shells. “This is probably nothing. So many people camp in this area it’s probably just leftover breakfast. But I’ll collect it, anyway. Anything to prove you wrong.”

    Emma made a noise of feigned pain. She turned the camera to face herself once again. “Well, everyone, what do you think? Are those egg shells from omelettes or something else? Does The Turtle Lake Monster actually sleep out here? Will it come back and rescue its babies? Or will this video be too dark and I’ll be unable to upload it and have to scrap all this effort tonight?”

    Alana laughed just as Emma cut the camera. She slipped the phone into her pocket before kneeling down to where Alana was. She examined the eggshells through the plastic baggie, her brows knit with confusion.

    “Are you okay? You seemed… spooked. Or dare I say, like a believer.”

    “This is really strange, Emma.” It was all Alana said for some time. She extended the bag over to Emma, who looked at the shells. They were striated with lines, faintly purple on the inside. Not familiar, not omelette eggs. Not even close. When Emma looked up, she swore she saw the same glitter of light by the rock face. There and then gone. The lapping of the water and wind was the only sound. 

    “It is strange,” Emma agreed. “But is it real?”

    “I think…I think we may actually be onto something. For once, this may not actually be a hoax.”

    *

    After two weeks and testing the results twice, the results came back as inconclusive. Unfamiliar. Strange. Not even Alana’s boss understood what he was looking at, and he was an expert in tropical fish. He had no idea what the two of them were doing, but he wanted to publish whatever they found in an academic journal. More people were spiralling into this story, all without warning. Alana had been talking to her former pen-pals who were now email buddies about monsters once again, causing Emma’s channel to explode once more overnight. A new audience was already pre-emptively setting up to wait for the big reveal. The cryptid and conspiracy community beckoned her. The screeching mantle of InfoWars would be passed. Full acceptance. A captive audience. Everything she ever wanted. She had wanted to believe and now she could believe. 

    But the video remained on her phone, untouched and unedited. She didn’t want to upload the scene because it still felt lacking. She was the only living witness to the gill-man Lake Turtle Monster; everyone else was the friend of a friend, the second stage. They were the ones keeping the lore alive—even Alana. She claimed to have a front seat to the evidence, but she didn’t see the body. She only saw the goop.

    As far as Emma was concerned, this was her cryptid. And her cryptid still seemed so distant to her, even though she had been so close to his death. 

    When Alana called for the sixth time in one night, Emma finally let her phone power down. She didn’t want to talk about the types of tours they’d do now; the books they could write; or even the podcasts they could do. Fuck being a cog in the conspiracy. She never wanted to be on a panel of experts or screech about what was in the water. When she was a kid, and she’d first heard about Bigfoot, she had wanted to go out and meet him. She’d been a scared boy on a Boy Scout trip, listening to the urban legends and fearing that she’d pee her pants. But when those campers finally delivered the punch line in the scary stories, the monsters seemed more like her friends. They were more like herself, in her strange creature form, waiting to emerge into daylight.

    Emma got into her car and drove to Turtle Lake. 

    *

    A well-worn pathway in the grass directed her to the rock-face, where another pathway, lined with small evergreens and black pebbles, led her to the top of a steep hill. When she felt along the rock for edges, her finger dipped into a crack. She squinted. The cracks lined up and led her fingers to a doorknob. She turned it and a sharp grating sound followed. Not a knob, but a bell. She stood in front of the fuzzy door and waited. Someone would come, she was sure of it. She needed to reveal herself in order to be revealed.

    “My name is Emma,” she said after a moment. “Emma Bryant.”

    The door quaked. It slid apart. An older woman with a sharp nose and thin lips appeared. Her hair was dyed a monochrome black and pulled back into a ponytail so tight it seemed more like a hood than hair. Lines around her mouth revealed her advanced age, along with the lines near her eyes that spoke wisdom. She smiled when she saw Emma. 

    “No friend tonight?”

    “No. Just me.”

    The woman ushered her inside. The steep hill had been hollowed out, making Emma think of the first plans for Mount Rushmore. On a road trip to see her cousins, her father had taken her to the monument and told her all about the crazy inventor who’d wanted to keep important records inside the Presidents’ heads. He died before it was complete, so the rocks stayed piled up and nothing was ever stored inside. Emma could sense, from the smell of decay and printed paper alone, that the woman had managed to succeed where one man had failed. Her records became evident once Emma’s eyes adjusted to the low light. 

    Each wall was covered in photographs, many of which were amber with age. Emma recognized many of them from her crypto-zoological studies. There was the original 1947 image of Caddy, a sea serpent in BC, a visual rendition of the Igopogo lake monster of Ontario, and a frame of the famous Bigfoot footage from the 1960s, mixed in with other cryptids from around the globe. She even saw her own photo of Old Yellow Top, the one from her YouTube channel that had been repeated on a dozen postcards in her online shop. Emma was about to ask the woman how she knew of these images, when she spotted a framed photo of the woman (years younger) standing next to Old Yellow Top himself. Emma paused, blinked several times, and then pressed her face close enough to the photo she could see lingering fingerprints on the glass. This was Old Yellow Top. Not a costume, but very real. The woman’s records weren’t just a wunderkammer of any crypto-scientists’ wet dream. They were her records, like her own family photos.

    “Tea?”

    “No thank you,” Emma said. She sat on the chair the woman offered to her. Her kitchen was also filled with photographs, along with knick-knacks and trinkets which took up every spare shelf and mantelpiece. A stuffed jackalope hung over where the tea mugs were placed. The woman brushed the head of the jackalope, as if for luck, before pouring herself some tea.

    “I would appreciate it if you do not expose this place,” the woman said. 

    “Oh. Um.”

    “I know you have a channel. And I know you take this seriously. But you can’t.”

    Emma buckled under the criticism. She always hated it when people told her what she could and couldn’t do, especially with the occult. The only thing other prohibition that irked her this much was when people told her what to do with her gender. 

    “I…” In spite of her anger, the woman’s cool gaze made Emma bite back her tone to a more cordial disagreement. “I don’t see how that matters to you.”

    “Not to me. But to the animals and creatures, it matters a lot.”

    “What do you mean?” 

    Before the woman could answer, small hissing noises broke up the room. Emma thought it was the kettle, but the woman had already poured her tea. The woman rose from her seat and opened a door next to the kitchen. Several small purple creatures nestled together in a makeshift bed. They were small lizard-like creatures, but with humanoid arms and legs. Their skin looked gooey, almost like raw chicken, except that it was purple. 

    “Oh my God,” Emma said. 

    “Yes,” the woman answered. She opened a drawer and removed a plastic bag that seemed to skitter with life. She dropped some live beetles into the baby Turtle Monster’s nest. The creatures ate it up. “These are what remains of The Turtle Monster you found two weeks ago.”

    “It… it can have babies?”

    The woman smiled. “How else do you think they reproduce? They are not created through thought forms, like the tulpas. They must also breed like you or me.”

    “Obviously. I mean. I just…”

    “What you found on the grass was afterbirth. The mother laid her eggs, but she died in the process. It happens every so often.”

    “Oh, okay.” Emma bit her lip, pretending to understand. In no textbook or strange small-fonted website on Angelfire had she ever seen this kind of information. Everything was familiar—yet brand fucking new. “I am glad her babies survived.”

    “I am too. But you must respect them.” The woman placed the paper bag back into the shelf and shut the door to the babies’ room. A flash of light emitted before the door was shut, as if a hot lamp went on from a sensor once the door was closed. The hissing died down. “So I do not ask that you hold back your video for me, but for them. For the generations of cryptids like them.”

    “Like Old Yellow Top? You have to make sure he gets busy and breeds, too?”

    When the woman nodded, Emma held back a laugh. No way this was real. What was this woman, the cryptid whisperer? Was she proficient in Cryptid husbandry? It made no sense. It was like some strange erotica found on Amazon and written by a crank author. She was about to say as much when the woman held up her hand.

    “You will find this foolish. But there is something dire happening here. When the land is destroyed, so is home of all wildlife. You take care of the caribou, the cougar, and the sea otter, while I’ve taken care of the cryptids. I’m not alone, but I’m the best.”

    “I have no way of checking that citation.”

    The woman smiled. She grabbed a worn leather book from a shelf behind her and extended it. The name Phoebe Cavanagh was written on the bottom. “That’s me. I’ve been doing this a long time. I started out as a doctor. Then I noticed that my patients kept getting ill in one area. So I went there. I realized they weren’t becoming ill, but being pushed out by a native species. The Thetis monster wanted its water back. It needed the reserve. So I gave it him.”

    Emma opened the book. A photo of the a creature that looked oh-so similar to the purple one she’d seen was on the front page, followed by newspaper clipping from the 1920s at the first sighting of the Thetis Lake Monster, and the sickness which came after and killed seven people. The second newspaper clipping was from the 1950s, during a second wave of sickness. Phoebe was quoted in a newspaper article from the 1950s, and pictures in an image. She somehow maintained her stoic wisdom even back then, while also remaining youthful. Her hair dark and her eyes were bright. In the book, Phoebe detailed how to treat the Thetis’s water so it could still live and thrive, and the town would no longer need to steal, but share the resources. 

    “My patients got better soon after we implemented a better system,” she said. “And the land got better too, because the cryptids were happy.”

    “And now you’re taking care of the woods?”

    She nodded. “All of Canada has monster problems. I’ve been all over—but here, in Saskatoon, there seems to be an influx of creatures dying. I’m still trying to figure it out. Luanne wasn’t the first patient I’ve lost, but at least she laid eggs this time around. At least there is another generation to keep going.”

    Luanne. Emma repeated the name inside her head. It was strange to think of that name fitting that creature—but it somehow did. Emma wanted to be like the monsters. She wanted to understand them. This was the best way to understand them—to learn their names and habits—and yet in spite of an overwhelming feeling to bond and learn, she looked at the scrapbook in front of her with scepticism like a shield.

    “Let’s say all of this is true,” Emma started. “And that my silence helps these creatures maintain their privacy so they can go on reproducing, what’s stopping me, really, from taking this scrapbook back to town as proof? Sure, most people will call me crazy and walk away. But a handful will come. And a handful will destroy this place, but possibly make me rich. There is nothing stopping me from uploading that video.”

    “Except a conscience.”

    “Fancy word. Doesn’t mean anything.”

    “But Luanne does. But names do. And you know them now.”

    Emma shook her head. Phoebe may have been right, but that still didn’t stop Alana. Emma may be more sentimental, but Alana was now on a mission. 

    “I can help you, you know. With your predicament.”

    “My predicament?” Emma had to laugh. She gestured to her body in a derisive manner. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m born this way. Haven’t you heard?”

    “I’ve heard a lot of things. And I’ve learned a lot of things. Flip to the back of the book.”

    With a curious head tilt, Emma examined photos from a mid-century circus with Lobster Boy and a The Fattest Man. Then of a woman and man hybrid called Donna/Donald. As the photographs continued, Donna disappeared and out emerged Donald. There were more sequences just like that, spanning from the early 1950s to modern times. Each image of a smiling face was familiar to Emma in spite of never knowing these trans people personally. She’d seen these before-and-after cascades so much on YouTube; all that was missing in Phoebe’s version was a Coldplay song. 

    Emma closed the book. “I don’t think you have what I want.”

    “Are you sure?”

    Emma wanted to get up. Leave the weird hollow stone and post her video for all the glory. But she stayed rooted to her chair. Phoebe noticed and went on.

    “I ask and offer these services to you because I know we can only live in two worlds for so long. We either embrace the supernatural and let it consume us, until Lake Monster eggs are quotidian and we know the skin is purple and never was another colour, or we turn our backs on this world and never look a strangeness again. We forget what’s hidden and we become normal.”

    “Being normal is overrated,” Emma said.

    “Being normal is what’s been denied to you. So you embrace the odd. That’s fine. I embraced the odd. I wanted to help—but I’m helping creatures stay normal, too. To have babies. To repair broken bones or amputate limbs caught in bear traps. This is my normal. This is not a freak-show to me. You have to decide if you want to be normal with humans or if you want to be normal among cryptids. You can’t have both anymore, Emma. That’s reached an end now.”

    Emma wanted to argue. She wanted to yell back like a child and complain that no one could ever tell her what to do. About gender. About the occult. The two most important things to her felt taken from her by an old witch—but they also felt finally explained. Emma had wanted to be a monster because she felt like a monster as a young boy. When she realized she didn’t have to be a scary boy eating vitamins to make him grow strong and following in his dad’s footsteps, she said fuck it. She left that world behind—only to be stuck in this one. Being trans without ID. Without a license. She did the YouTube stuff because the ad revenue from blurry photos paid her bills. She waited and waited and waited for surgery that would make her normal, while also knowing that it would never come. So she thought she’d just stay with monsters. 

    But these monsters were normal. It was different, but there was a normal here. They had photos on their walls. They posed with their friends and families. Their doctor. Phoebe was a doctor, just like the ones that acted as gatekeepers. Except that Phoebe provided her with a door to a normal life. Not one living as a freak in either realm—but she had to choose. 

    “Are you sure you can do this?”

    Phoebe nodded. “It’s kind of my speciality.”

    Emma didn’t want to ask how or why. It didn’t seem to matter. She closed the book and handed it over. “Okay, I won’t post.”

    “Thank you.” Phoebe rose from the table. She set out another pot of water to boil and took down another jar filled with herbs. When she offered tea to Emma this time, she said yes. 

    The darkness came faster than she thought possible.

    *

    “Hey, Tubies,” Emma said into her phone. It was daylight. Her body ached, but she was alive. Her smile was wider, her mind clearer. And her license was brand new in her purse. She could do anything now. She climbed up the rock face across from Turtle Lake and made sure the door to Phoebe’s world was hidden in her video. “I wanted to let you all know that this will be my last update. Ever. Alana will be taking over, though, and she has some amazing things to tell you guys.”

    Earlier in the week, Emma deleted the earlier footage. When Alana had asked why, she claimed it was too dark. Alana had been frustrated, especially since the vet’s had been broken into the night before. The sludge that was really after birth was now gone. No records of the strange lab experiments remained. Even Davis, Alana’s boss, somehow now had an explanation for what they’d seen that day, categorizing it as an obscure fish disease. He no longer wanted to publish.

    But Alana couldn’t let it go. 

    That was okay, though. Phoebe had assured Emma as much. Alana had never seen the Lake Monster up close. She only saw the traces, the edges of the monster. She only had the lore. There was no face to face contact, no crossing into another world. Alana was always going to be skating close to that edge, but she would never get inside unless she was lucky. It was always a million and one chance to be that lucky.

    Emma had used up all that luck. As a parting gift, handed over her YouTube Channel, now bursting with subscribers, to the person who would carry on the lore—but the lore only.

    “So, I’m moving to Ontario,” Emma said, still looking into the camera. “Not just because of Old Yellow Topper, but because there’s a lot cool things in Toronto. Boring things for you guys, but cool for me. I really did have a blast doing this show, guys. Probably more than you can even imagine.”

    Emma’s smile hurt. Her heart swelled. When she signed off, she gave her standard peace symbol with her fingers, but for the last time. She closed the camera on her phone. She would upload it when she had a signal again. She wouldn’t even need to edit it. 

    Then she would move. Her life would start over, utterly normal.

    She rose and stood next to the door. It would not open for her again. But when she pressed her ear against it, she heard the sounds of life on the other side. Hissing and the fussing. Baby cryptids, and a mother that would keep them safe. 

    A minute later, Emma walked towards her car and headed for home.

    END

  • 31 for 31: We Will Survive

    From urban legend to legends on stage, the tone shift from Magda Mayfly to We Will Survive is–to me–a wonderful form of whiplash.

    And the premise for We Will Survive was even better. It was also one of those few instances when I write a story specifically for an anthology, and it gets in!! First try!!

    “We Will Survive” was written for the Vinyl Cuts Anthology by Scary Dairy Press. Make a scary story but also have a tie in to some form of class rock music in some way. Oh, but don’t reproduce lyrics!

    Challenge accepted.

    Throw in some drag queens lip syncing their way to Gloria Gaynor and rescuing kids from a gay conversation camp and you pretty much have the whole story. It was a BLAST to write while my first kiddo was napping and I was experiencing a reprieve from the morning sickness of my second.

    I truly hope you enjoy it (and survive) too!

    We Will Survive

    By Eve Morton

    “How long has it been?” said Jan.

    I glanced at my watch, then at the clock on the idling car’s dashboard. I wanted the times to be different, but they weren’t. “At least a half hour.”

    “Shit. We’re screwed. We’re—” 

    I put a hand on Jan’s shoulder, but Jan brushed me away, so I turned down the radio instead. As much as I wanted to keep listening to the sultry stylings of Gloria Gaynor, the song only reminded me of what Jan already knew and what I had refused to acknowledge for the past thirty-five minutes. We really were fucked. 

    Only three days before, we’d all been getting ready to perform our latest number in the Haven Bar, a place for queers, freaks, and all those in between. Jan was in the Miss Terri get-up, transforming Jan’s current buzz cut into something more dazzling with a blond wig and a dress that cascaded down slim and ever so delicate shoulders. Markus, or Miss Mary Quite Contrary, had been in her fur number, the one with the thick collar and long sleeves to disguise the big footballer’s shoulders. Though Markus had not played the game in years, he often acted as the bouncer for Haven, so he had to cover up the muscles when he played his alter ego of Miss Mary. She was a stunning woman whenever she took the stage; a strong soprano with a show person’s charm. Last year, when she’d sung “Happy Birthday” to Haven’s owner, she’d done the Marilyn Monroe version. Just stunning, just wonderful. 

    I felt a tear slide down my cheek now, just thinking about it. Markus had left to get us gas when we’d run out on the side of the road in Arkansas, and it was now clear he was not coming back.

    “Why are we doing this?” Jan asked me, running a delicate hand through his short hair. “I mean, we hardly know this kid. We could just turn around right now. Go back.”

    “And do what?” I asked. “File a missing person’s report for Markus, which will just be ignored because he’s a big guy, or a faggy queen, and no one cares about us? Not to mention the other kid.”

    Jan looked down at his lap in shame. He’d looked the same when he’d called his father last Easter to wish him a happy holiday and a happy birthday, and his father pretended to not know who he was. I have no son, the stereotypical answer from all homophobic dads. Jan had been upset, but put on a stunning, cathartic performance of Miss Terri that night, as if to channel his father’s pronouncement. He was not his son anymore. Damn right, Miss Terri was a vixen queen who helped the less fortunate.

    I reminded Jan of that day now. “Your dad left you. My family left me. And we know Markus never really had a family to begin with. This kid—”

    “Barry,” he corrected me, and I knew he hadn’t forgotten his heart.

    “Right. Barry. He’s just like us. He’s come to watch us every single Saturday night for the past six months. Then he up and disappears. We know what’s happened to him. It’s what almost happened to all of us, what would have happened to us had there been such a thing as conversion therapy when we were his age.”

    “But there wasn’t. We just ended up homeless.”

    “And fabulous.” I tried to grin, but it was hard. The Arkansas woods around us, and the fact that Markus was still missing, got under my skin. The feeling seemed to have a life of its own. The moment we truly crossed into the Deep South, passed the freshness of Georgia’s peach stands and into the swamps of Louisiana, I felt as if we were surrounded by ghosts. Civil War soldiers; slaves; and of course the missing men and women who lay stranded like us, trying to channel Blanche Dubois and depend on the kindness of strangers, only to be taken off the earth.

    I shook my head and tried to focus. Panicking was going to get us nowhere fast. “We have to keep going.” 

    “But how?” Jan’s eyes were deep blue and utterly desperate. “Markus was bigger than both of us. And if he’s gone—”

    “Then we need to rely on what we’ve always been good at.” I looked into the backseat, where our bags had been tossed. Once we realized Barry was gone, and that his parents had sent him to one of those horrible rehabilitation camps that ran ads in the back of religious magazines, we had set off on our mission. There had been almost no discussion, just utter understanding between the three of us that we had to do this for the inner, abandoned child inside all of us. So we threw all of our clothing in a bag, plus some cash we had lying around and a map of the South that we found in the Haven’s lost and found. 

    It’ll be a fun road trip, Markus had said. If nothing else.

    Oh, we’d been so naive. Three days ago, all that worried us was whether we’d be able to break a kid who was not related to us out of a camp his parents had probably paid good money for. We had some half-baked notion of walking in, claiming to be his cousins and that there was a family emergency he needed to attend to. Since Barry often worshipped us from afar at the bar and asked us for advice between sets—advice that mostly amounted to finding the right shoes in a man’s size ten, not how to escape zealot family members—we were hoping that he’d recognize us out of makeup. If he didn’t, we were planning on humming a few songs to prime his memory pump. And then he’d go with us, and we’d introduce him to being a newly independent queer kid, and everything would be hunky-dory.

    Everything was not going hunky-dory. And without our strongest member, I had no idea what to do next. 

    Except to get dressed.

    “I think we need a disguise,” I said, and then shook my head. “No, no. I think we need to become who we really are. That’s the only way we can fight this place. That’s why Markus is missing—this would have never happened to Miss Mary. The land swallows you whole. You may as well be in a good skirt while it happens.”

    Jan looked at me as if I was crazy. Then as if I was a genius. He opened the passenger side door and, after a careful look around the woods where we were stuck, began looking through our travelling wardrobe in the backseat. “What are you waiting for, Miss Robin?”

    Power pulsed through me at my stage name. Oh, I missed her. The badass girl who could leap over tall buildings, a better Dick Grayson than the real Robin. And now we’re crime fighters, too. We looked through our clothing at the back, found the best outfits, and began to get dressed. 

    The entire time, I swore the woods were watching us. Be it ghosts or hicks or even Markus, lingering on the sidelines and waiting for us to emerge as our true selves, I could feel eyes on me. 

    And I thought, we may as well give them a final show.

    *

    Once we were dressed up, it was easier to find gas. We still had to walk from our broken-down car back towards the gas station we’d spotted off the interstate but when we did it together it was less scary. We were also dressed in a toned-down version of our typical garb. We weren’t performers right now; we were just women out for a walk because our car had broken down. 

    No one at the gas station looked too closely at either one of us. We were lucky, in a way. Jan’s hands were small and delicate, and though his voice was deeper, I’d sung for years in a choir and had better control over my cadence in the everyday waking world; we could mix between the genders, an array of masculine and feminine, and no one would look too closely. I asked softly for gas, holding a scarf over my Adam’s apple, and then asked the kid behind the counter if he remembered a big burly man coming through here and asking for gas an hour earlier.

    “That queer?” he said. He twisted his pockmarked face in disgust. “Yeah, I sold him gas.”

    “He’s a little funny, but that’s just because he’s from New York,” I said, and hoped that the explanation made sense. The kid just shrugged, reiterated that he’d sold him gas, but nothing else. 

    “So, he left here?” I asked.

    “Yes’m.”

    The rest of the conversation was like talking to a brick wall, and I felt as if we were already risking so much. We walked back to the car, arm in arm, as the sun was setting. 

    “It’s supposed to be summer,” Miss Terri, Jan’s alter ego, complained. “What happened to the sun staying out all night and beach parties and fun things?”

    “We’ll get them, my love,” I told her, gripping her arm hard. “We just have to survive.”

    When Miss Terri began to hum the beginning bars of Miss Gloria Gaynor’s hit, I thought it was the best idea we’d had so far. We hummed together, repeating the chorus like a call that would get us through this night. Because once there was gas in the car, and no other sign of Markus, we had to keep going forward. 

    Our plan pretending to be Barry’s cousins had now also changed. Our clothing made us feel powerful, and since we’d managed to get out of the Arkansas woods with them once, we didn’t want to take any further chances. 

    “We have to go in as women,” I said, once we were only a few miles from the camp. We’d been passing billboards as we turned deeper in Arkansas, each one proclaiming a line from the Bible about damnation and salvation or broadcasting an alert about another missing kid with a black and white photo. None of them were Barry, but so many looked the same: wispy hair, a genuine smile, and a fae presence that left me with a faint stirring of recognition. Oh, these boys. These were my boys and they were in trouble. 

    Miss Terri had been quiet, but when I met her gaze, she nodded. She reached down into her purse and grabbed more makeup and started to put it on using the car’s mirrors for guidance.

    “What are you doing?” I asked.

    “We’re going in as ladies of the night,” she said as if it was obvious. “We’re someone’s dates now. Someone in the camp, or someone working at the camp. Doesn’t matter. But they’ve called for us, so we gotta get in somehow.”

    I debated the merits of this. Either they’d see through the thin disguises we had on now, call us the faggots and queers and sinners we were to them, or they’d see us tarted up like Jezebels and try to get us. Or maybe we’d dazzle them. Maybe there would be just enough ambiguity that we could slip in while the confusion was still fresh, and pluck Barry to go home with us.

    Along with any other boy who wanted to come along. 

    “You think there are lesbians there, too?” I asked.

    “Of course. These people make no distinction. Probably make ’em play house together, too. Like some sick Norman Bates nonsense.”

    We both shuddered. I hated Psycho. Just gave dressing up a bad rap. As Jan continued to put on more makeup, fully becoming the elegant Miss Terri in the flesh, I continued to drive. The road changed from paved to dirt. She was done with her eyes by then, so the shaking didn’t rattle her around too much. But the lights that I had once relied on for the road, and the lingering sun, were now almost completely blotted out. The trees surrounding the dirt road became thicker and thicker. I slowed down on impulse, feeling as if I was going into a jungle.

    And that feeling of being watched came back. Ghosts or goblins or hicks, but definitely not the eager eyes of the audience I was used to. “Miss Terri,” I whispered. “I need to put on makeup.”

    She handed me her purse, her makeup, without caring. She could feel the eyes, the strange gazes from the woods, too. 

    “Maybe we should—”

    “We’re not turning back,” I said.

    “No. But I think that’s the camp. And we can’t drive up like this. We need to keep our car as a getaway vehicle.” She gestured into the distance. I was convinced she was crazy, that her vision was going, but the orb that I thought had been the moon rising on the horizon wasn’t that at all. There was no moon in the sky that night, I would later look up. Just blackness, just stars—and this single lamp outside the camp. 

    We pulled the car into thick brush between two trees. I finished a quick slather of my makeup, hands shaking as I did, and then we walked towards the light. We held hands, arms and elbows interlocking with each step forward. Each crunch of the dirt and rocks under our feet made us jump. Each snap of the trees in the woods filled my stomach with dread. I wanted to go back. Desperately so. But each time I remembered that look on Barry’s young face when we performed, longing and despair mixed into one, and I crept forward. I wished someone had done this for me. I wished someone had done this for all the missing boys I’d seen on those billboards as we came in.

    “Hello?” called a man’s voice from our left.

    We turned to see a shadowy figure wearing thick army coveralls and a camouflage jacket. He was clean-cut, and something gold glimmered around his neck. A cross, maybe. He was part of the camp.

    “Can I help you ladies?” he asked. 

    “Yes. We’re a present for one of your guests.” Miss Terri smiled and leaned close to him. She was acting brilliantly; only I saw that her hands shook as she made up our cover story. “Is Bobby inside?”

    “Yes, ma’am.” The man seemed baffled by our presence, but he was also polite. And when asked a direct question by a lady, or someone who seemed like a lady, you answered. “I didn’t know it was his birthday.”

    “It’s a bit early, yes. But we’ve been called in as special entertainment.”

    The man looked from Miss Terri to me, and then back again. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

    “No?” 

    “No.” He reached for something in the side of his pants, and in that split second, Miss Terri jumped on him. She wrestled his hand away from whatever was in his holster, and then used her much more massive body weight to pin him to the ground. When he struggled, she reached behind herself, grabbed a high heel, and gouged it deep into his stomach. He cried out in pain and released his hand from his pocket. 

    “It’s a fucking walkie-talkie!” Miss Terri threw the device away with her free hand and huffed. He struggled underneath her as she tried to feel him up and down for weapons. There were none. “What do I do now?”

    I grabbed the walkie-talkie instead of answering. I pressed the button to listen and heard murmurs of conversations, then I let it go and addressed the man we had pinned. “How many of you are touring the base?”

    “What?”

    “How many of you?” I got close to his face. “You have this walkie-talkie to talk to someone. So, how many someones?”

    He struggled under Terri. He spat at us. Miss Terri held his head against a rock, threatening him in muffled gasped, until he finally mumbled, “Three.”

    “Three?” Miss Terri repeated, but he was silent. She threatened him with the rock again, but he said nothing else. 

    So she knocked him out. 

    “Okay,” she said, looking to me. “Don’t worry, he’s not dead. But let’s take care of these brutes before we go inside.”

    We did the smart thing and stuck together, walking clockwise around the perimeter until we stumbled on two more men just like the one we’d found earlier. Miss Terri distracted the closest man, while I approached the other one from behind. On a silent count of three, we knocked them out, but didn’t kill either one, because we did not want to be murderers. It was tough work, though, and both of our knees were bloody and parts of our dresses were torn by the end of it. 

    “We have three now.” Miss Terri gestured with her head, her hair only slightly out of place, towards the front gate of the camp. We could see three main cabins now, and the one with the light on was the largest. “Let’s subdue whoever’s there, then move on to free all the troops. I sort of like the idea of the woods being filled with free gays and lesbians.”

    I chuckled, feeling the adrenaline pumping through me. But I also looked over my shoulder. I still felt like we were being watched. The men we’d knocked out, we’d also tied up with zip ties  we’d found on their persons, but there was something else. Something more.

    “Hey, wait,” I said to Miss Terri, hurrying to catch up as she took the lead. “Did that guy mean three including him, or three—”

    I didn’t get a chance to finish my question. Only paces in front of me, Miss Terri stepped into the light of the main cabin, and a different shadowy figure ran out of the dark and tackled her from the waist and into a thatch of trees. I froze and saw nothing, only heard grunts and screams of a struggle. My bladder seized with fear as I heard the piteous cries of someone losing a fight.

    I backed away from the cabin’s light and ran towards the woods. I was all fear, all animal instincts. I ran and ran, twigs and branches scraping against my dress and my face. My heels broke off, nearly tripping me, so I was running in flats and then in bare feet. I was almost shirtless, shoeless, and bleeding from both knees and one cheek by the time I reached our car. I got behind the wheel, only to realize that Miss Terri had the keys. Her dress was the only one with pockets. And it had seemed like a good idea at the time for her to carry them, like this whole thing seemed like a good idea only three days ago.

    “Oh no, no, no.” I sobbed onto the wheel, shuddering and shaking with fear. I kicked the floor, the dashboard, and then the radio. Something blinked in the car’s engine, and for a brief second, the car came to life. A snippet of the Gloria Gaynor song came on the air. It left just as quickly, and no matter how many times I kicked the car again, it did not return. Only her voice in my head lingered, the memories I had of performing it with my two other darling ladies.

    Markus was gone. Jan was gone. 

    It was only me now.

    And I was determined to survive. 

    *

    I dressed all in black, the outfit I usually wore to weddings and funerals. And baptisms, had I ever been invited. I thought of it as my “birth and death” dress, the little black number that all girls needed whether they were bio-girls or something else. I’d packed it on a whim, as if this new adventure would have ended in Barry’s eventual christening into a new life. I shimmied my way into it under the starlight of the Arkansas woods. I trembled as I slipped on new shoes, sneakers that did not go with the dress, but would help me as I went back into the woods and took back the only thing I could: Barry. 

    And hopefully some dignity, too.

    When I returned to the camp, I made sure to take a different pathway. I walked through the woods with careful footfalls and over fallen logs; I waited and listened and hunted like my father tried to teach me when I was younger. I was almost grateful for my violent, alcoholic father in that moment, though hunting anything still left me feeling weak. But the one thing he had given me before he kicked me out was the patience to wait for whatever you wanted, be it doe or buck or to save the queer kid from a life of horrible repression.

    I soon saw the men with walkie-talkies. Four of them. Damn. Each one we’d tied was now untied. I verified their numbers at least six times before I followed them with the grace that I still had from years of performing.

    “What should we do with the prisoners?” one of them said. 

    “Didn’t one get away?” another spoke up.

    “Damn. We’ll need to canvass the woods.”

    “With who? We need to watch the freak we still have. How are we supposed to find the other?”

    “That girly man is gone. Scared.”

    “Right. But the other one, the big one that got away. How do we get that back?”

    “Hmm. Maybe if we use the campers?”

    The four of them looked at one another and let out a laugh. “Of course,” one of them said. “Make them do the dirty work. I’ll wake them.”

    I waited on the edge of the forest, not moving from my position, as the four guards scattered into the base camp again. Lights flicked on in each one of the cabins that had once been shrouded in darkness. A whistle sounded, followed by a bell. And then masses and masses of boys and girls, none no more than seventeen years old and some seeming as young as twelve or thirteen, spilled out of the cabins. They all gathered in pajamas—drab and grey—in front of the base camp. The four men—boys, really, they had been so young–in army jackets with walkie-talkies took a secondary position while a man, tall and bone-thin, stepped out of the main cabin to address all of them. He wore a preacher’s outfit, sleek and dark and accented with a golden crucifix. When he spoke, he swayed from side to side as if this was a congregation.

    “Ladies and gentlemen, we have intruders on the base,” he proclaimed with high theatrics and in a Southern drawl. “We have caught some of the miscreants, but I am afraid their power of sin is no match for us. We need your help to scatter the evil that has laid waste to this camp and tried to turn it into a den of iniquity. You know your missions here.”

    The crowd tittered. Everyone seemed too tired and yet utterly afraid to move. The preacher man leaned towards the crowd, cupping a hand by his ear. “What do you say?”

    “We are here to live clear and righteous,” the crowd said in a dull, flat voice. “We will fight for the light of the Lord.”

    “Very good. Now go!”

    The four boys walked through the crowd and gave them large sticks to use as weapons. At first I thought they were merely walking sticks, or the type of poles you’d give teams in Capture the Flag, but one teenager slammed it into the ground. It stuck up out of the dirt like a bitter knife. 

    “I’m not using this,” the boy said. “I won’t kill anyone.”

    Barry. I knew that voice. That was Barry. I wanted to run to him, put my arms around him, but my joy was cut from me by a powerful slap. One of the guards had hit him, and then lectured him on the use of force. “You will protect the camp. You will protect your right to live a just life. Say it now.”

    “I will protect the right to live a just life,” Barry said, though the words were clouded by tears. 

    I wanted to vomit and cry along with him. But I forced myself to slink closer to the tree I was watching from, trying to blend into the night. The rest of the cabin’s inhabitants scattered into the woods. The movement sounded like a harsh echo, a wave of violence and sighs from the mouths of babes who did not want to do this, but only wanted, like we all wanted, to survive. 

    Barry moved slowly with his weapon. He was half-hearted in all his actions until the guard disappeared into the base camp with the preacher. They truly were letting the young ones do their dirty work. Maybe they were calling in reinforcements or doing something sinister behind closed doors—but it was here, as the main antagonist ostensibly went to bed, that I thought I had a chance.

    I tiptoed to Barry. He was skimming close to the edge of the forest, looking more at the flora and fauna around him than truly in search of intruders. I had to be careful to not scare him, so instead of calling his name, I hummed. 

    He froze, holding his back rigid, utterly afraid. When he recognized the song with a shoulder sway, I braved to say his name. “Barry.”

    He turned towards the sound but made no other movement. I emerged from the forest and hoped I didn’t look too beat up. He needed to recognize me for this to work. He needed—

    Barry ran into my arms, tossing his stick on the ground as he did. I embraced him easily, and when I thought of all I had lost to get here, I held him even tighter. “Come on,” I said, though my voice trembled. “We do not have a lot of time to waste.”

    Before we ran deeper and deeper into the woods, he grabbed his stick. Good boy, I thought. Thank you for that. I had no idea how we were going to escape beyond the woods. All I knew was that we had to run. Whenever we couldn’t run anymore, we were going to have to fight. As I repeated the words to “I Will Survive” in my head, I used it like a chant to spur myself forward. Like these small soldiers and the young men who trained them probably used Bible verses to convince themselves that what they were doing was right and just and true.

    Only, I was right. I may not survive this, I thought as we reached the edge of the woods and the world became darker all around me, but I know we are right. I regretted nothing of this strange errand. Except maybe that I definitely tore my dress.

    “What do we do?” said Barry as we burst out of the woods. He was out of breath, like me, and I had stopped us where the car was parked. 

    But the car wasn’t there. 

    “No, no, no,” I moaned. Damn. We were so close. We were … I got on my knees, my wounds stinging as I did, because there were tire tracks. The car had been here. I wasn’t lost. 

    “I don’t understand.” Barry stabbed his stick in the dirt, frustrated. “What do we do?”

    I wanted to scream at him that I was out of fucking ideas. This was it. I had nothing else, other than to embrace our death with dignity. And as I saw bright headlights come towards us, I knew that was the next step. 

    I was ready, world, to be taken into the arms of whoever was on the other side. Maybe I’d see Marilyn and Judy and the other queens I’d loved. I remained on the dirt road, my arms open in supplication.

    “Oh Mary,” I cried. “I’m ready to come home.”

    The car stopped in front of me. And Markus stuck his head out of the driver’s side window. “I’m not Mary right now, but it would definitely please me if you got in this car right fucking now.”

    I gasped, touching the headlights in front of me as if they truly were a heavenly vision. The car was back. The car was running. Miss Terri was in the passenger seat—looking a little worse for wear, as did Markus—but they were there. My Miss Mary and my Miss Terri, back in my life. Alive!

    A door slammed. Barry had already gotten in the backseat while I was still on my knees. Oh, that was ironic. I rose quickly and got into the other side. We’d left the stick behind, an abandoned flag for an unconquered land, but it didn’t matter. Not even as swarms and swarms of other kids came out of the woods with their sticks, along with the preacher and his minions, and surrounded the car with a violent aggressive swarm. We had gas. We had a vehicle.

    And we had Miss Gloria Gaynor on the stereo. 

    “You ready?” Markus asked, though he was already driving. “Better put on your seatbelts. We’re gonna need to go fast and rough.”

    “My middle name. All of them,” I said just as Markus floored it. I hit my head on the back window, seeing stars, but I didn’t care. Hours later, with the camp behind us, we would figure out what to do next, where to go next, and who to perform as next since our drag names were now discoverable. We’d bandage ourselves and sleep the restful sleep of the free. 

    Until then, though, I was going to enjoy the music.

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Storybook by Eve Morton

    I should preface this story with one thing: I have not seen the Babadook.

    I should, but I still haven’t and I definitely hadn’t seen it when I worked on this short story about a woman who receives a book for her new baby that spirals her into madness.

    Or maybe she was already mad?

    Maybe postpartum just sucks?

    There is a clear theme with my work published during 2020-2024. Having babies is hard! Lack of sleep is hard! And gift giving can also be very, very hard.

    And terrifying.

    I hope you enjoy this story–and while you’re reading, I should really get to seeing the Babadook.

    The Storybook

    By Eve Morton

    Noah was three days old when Cassandra found the storybook. It was amongst a pile of baby-things that people had delivered to the house over the course of the past week and a half, ever since she’d reached her due date. Noah had other plans about when he would arrive, and though the living room slowly became overrun with beautiful presents wrapped in blue paper announcing her baby boy, or regular cardboard boxes stamped with Amazon, she didn’t want to open them.

    “It feels like tempting fate,” she told Michael, her husband, every time his gaze wandered over towards their Christmas pile without a tree. “I can’t open anything until he arrives. And we know he’s safe.”

    “He’s safe,” Michael said, and often put his hands over Cassandra’s swelling belly. She’d hold her breath until the baby kicked and gave her some sign of life. When he did, because he always did, she’d smile and kiss Michael. 

    “You’re probably right,” she said many times and in many ways. “But I want to wait. The presents are for him, anyway. It’s rude to open something for someone who’s not here.”

    At the mention of decorum, Michael would usually relent. Since they had not had a baby shower–out of busy-ness and distance from their families rather than pure superstition–he’d been hoping to open some of the presents over Skype or Zoom in order for others to watch. So even when baby Noah came, and he was nine pounds and utterly perfect, the presents had remained in a strange sort of stasis: announcing his arrival, yet in pristine condition, the world going on around them.

    But now it was getting ridiculous. Had it not been for the sleep deprivation and the utter exhaustion Cassandra felt after giving birth–which, in fairness, some people had warned her about but those words now seemed like mere fairy tales to the aches from her neck down–she would have torn those gifts open the moment she was released from the hospital, decorum or Zoom be damned. She wanted to see what new toys her baby boy got; if someone had given her a harness or sling to carry him around, or if they’d need to jet out to the store (when?) to get that for themselves; and if someone had given her a parenting book at all. Because wow, she did not think that being a mom would be this hard, and without her own mother or sisters around, she did not know what she had to do from hour to hour. 

    Michael was napping when Cassandra finally had enough strength to move herself to the pile of presents lined up along their family room couch. Noah had fallen asleep after nursing, and though her nipples smarted and she was desperate for a shower that lasted longer than five minutes, plus a sandwich and a good stiff drink, Cassandra went for the presents. She was about to sit cross-legged, felt her stitches with a blinding ray of pain, and then decided she’d stand. Yes, standing was always better. 

    She opened a soft package first. More onesies, a size or two above newborn, from her aunt Abigail. Nice, wonderful, but not what she needed right now. She moved onto the next package, and then the next. A sling was there, along with some bottles and a breast pump. From her sister in law, she noted. What an odd thing to give someone–here is a machine for your breasts!–but she pushed that aside. It was a nice gesture, clearly done to make sure her brother, still the notorious slacker he’d been at fifteen in her mind, got involved. Cassandra did her best to lay each item, no matter how strange or wonderful, with the person’s card who had sent it to her, so she could write them a thank you note eventually. Maybe when Noah was five years old and in school, because that certainly felt when she’d have time again.

    Just as she reached the last present, Noah cried. Cassandra let out a huff of disappointment. She was almost done! She was half-driven by madness to open the last present. No one had given her parenting books yet–she guessed that was impolite, yet breast pumps and nursing bras and nipple guards were more than kosher–but this one was book shaped. It was wrapped in red paper, an odd color but a neutral one she supposed, and it was long and hard on the surface. Clearly a book. Maybe thin for a parenting book, but perhaps parenting books were released in small bite-sized volumes to not overwhelm the birth mother too soon. She liked that idea, and even as Noah’s cries turned pitiful, she tore back the blood-red paper. 

    A children’s storybook. 

    “Huh,” she said aloud. It had not been what she expected at all. Wasn’t this kid not going to read for at least a year and a half? Can’t we wait until the first birthday before we jack up the Baby Einstein pressure? 

    Of course, even if Noah couldn’t understand anything beyond pooping and farting at this stage in his development didn’t mean that Cassandra couldn’t read to him. Her mother had already sent Cassandra her old storybooks when she found out she was pregnant, just for the sake of nostalgia. “I Love You Forever,” her mother had said on the phone, and Cassandra had taken too long to remember the name of the Robert Munsch book that was designed to make people cry. “Oh, it is the best thing to read to your new baby. I’m sending it right away.”

    A Robert Munsch, or even a bizarre Dr. Seuss, this new storybook was not. Though the cover and the pages inside were unworn, and the book was brand new, there was a dated quality to the item. The art on the cover seemed as if it was hand-drawn, scrawled in haste more than carefully composed. Cassandra struggled to make any sense of the title across the front, since it was in cursive font, and the cover image was quite dark. 

    Welcome to the New World, Boy or Girl, she finally read. The cover image was, she thought, a sky at nighttime, save for a speck of light. The moon? Is this a knock-off Goodnight, Moon from Costco? Cassandra was about to see if Margaret Wise Brown was the author, but Noah’s cries were now persistent. Her breasts started to leak and milk soaked her shirt. She sighed. This felt like someone ringing the bell at the front desk of a hotel over and over, demanding service. Her body and her baby spoke without her conscious connection, whether she liked it or wanted it or not.

    Even after she scooped Noah into her arms, she was still thinking of the strange book. Who the hell would send something like that to her? She hurried her babe through his feeding, and when he finally fell milk drunk against her arms, she tucked him back into the crib and returned downstairs. Each muscle smarted. Each blink she made was a heavy weight. She should have gone right into bed with her husband, who was still napping away the early morning wake up from Noah, and from talking to his mother for over an hour and a half the day before on the phone. Cassandra should have been smart like him, and rest while the baby was resting.

    But she wanted to read the storybook.

    Cassandra sat on the couch with the book splayed on her thighs. She swore the light on the cover had moved. It was not a moon after all, but some sort of match or flame. She peered close to the design and tried to see if there was something beneath the illustration, a layered trick of the light, or something that the baby was supposed to touch to find and sort new sensations. She ran her hands all over the book’s fine edges before she slid it open. The title page had a reproduced image of the cover, with the title and the same light in the center, but the darker night had been pulled away. It was now in grey-scale, and it revealed a small child holding the light–a candle–and a slinking black pool beneath their feet. 

    No, not a pool. Cassandra bent closer to the image. That’s a snake. Or maybe a dragon? 

    She flipped the book around to see if there was any more information on the back, like an author or Disney symbol movie-tie-in. Did they do blurbs for kids’ books? But there was nothing. Just black, nothing printed. She sought out the copyright page inside, and that was missing, too. There was no author of this work. Just the title, and this strange slithery creature.

    “I don’t know how the hell this is for kids,” she said aloud. There was no sound in the house, not even the traffic out of their suburban home. It was silent, deadly silent.

    So Cassandra read. 

    Cassandra only got to the first page, where the black creature welcomed the new little boy or girl into the world, before her eyes shut tight in exhaustion. She slumped over the book on the couch, her entire body relenting and giving into the experience she had just gone through, but had never fully processed in the past three days. So when she dreamed of the black creature slithering out of the pages of the book, and moving up her legs, over her still swollen stomach, and filling up her nursing bra with black instead of the milky white, she thought it was just a dream. A strange dream, but just a dream. 

    Even as the black creature slithered out of her bra and went around her neck, and then through her hairline, Cassandra could not be pulled out of her sleep. Her body was too tired. Her body had been through hell. And the black creature knew it had a home in that space inside of her where the baby had once been. Soon, it slid between her ears and into her brain, where it wanted to stay.

    Just as it lay to rest, Cassandra burst into tears. 

    “Hey, hey.” Michael came down from the stairs. He was only wearing boxers and the same t-shirt he’d worn when she’d given birth. He rushed to her on the couch and slid an arm around her back. 

    “Michael!” She sobbed. She turned to him, buried her face in that shirt, and smelled the antiseptic of the hospital room. She remembered the blinding pain of being torn in two as her son came out of her. She wanted to let him go, but it had hurt so much. She fought the urge now to scream out, to yell that she wanted to stuff Noah back inside, so she could keep him safe forever. 

    “Michael,” Cassandra sobbed instead. Michael held her shoulders and rocked her as if she was a baby. Even as Noah cried out for attention, Michael rocked her.

    Good, Cassandra thought. This is the way it is supposed to be.

    Eventually, she ran out of tears. It felt like a purging, like the few times she’d thrown up in the first trimester. She was empty now. She felt better now. 

    “Are you okay?” Michael asked. Noah was still crying. 

    Cassandra nodded. “I’ll go get–“

    “Let me get him. I’ll bring him to you if he needs you.”

    Michael squeezed her shoulder one last time before he got up from the couch. Cassandra wiped her hands across her face, feeling the tightness of her skin from her tears as she did. She swallowed hard and tasted something bad. Like decay in her mouth, like her grandfather’s breath before he died, and when his blood sugar was too low. 

    Cassandra’s stomach rumbled loudly. She was soon bounding into the kitchen with a renewed energy and purpose. People had been sending food as well as gifts, and so, it was easy to locate soup and muffins. She ate a banana nut muffin with her left hand and served herself chicken noodle soup with her right. When she inhaled that meal in a matter of minutes, she went in search of ice cream at the back of the freezer. That was polished off in no time, too. She was in the middle of heating up a macaroni casserole when Michael came back into the kitchen.

    “I see you have your appetite again.” 

    She fought a wave of anger at Michael’s smile. “What? I couldn’t eat while giving birth and I think it finally caught up to me.”

    He held up his hands to show he meant no harm. “Noah’s good, by the way.”

    “Right. Thank you.” Cassandra’s stomach flipped. She was supposed to be concerned with him, wasn’t she? She should have offered to feed him before herself. She should have–

    “Hey.” Michael put a hand on her shoulder. She had been crying again. Right into the macaroni dish.

    “Oh wow.” Cassandra shook her head, causing the tears to roll down her cheeks faster. “I don’t know what is wrong with me.”

    “Baby blues,” Michael said as if it was obvious. “Hormones. Dude. You’ve just gone through a hell of a last couple days.”

    “Dude?”

    “You know what I mean, Mom.” All throughout her pregnancy, Cassandra had resisted that label, in much the same way she resisted the baby shower before Noah arrived. She was just a pregnant lady until then. Not a mom. 

    Cassandra thought she’d be elated when she heard the word now. But she felt empty. Sick. And filled with a sense of dread so profound it could not simply be hormones or the baby blues. 

    “Hey. Whoa.” Michael grabbed her arm. She’d been about to fall to the tile floor. He guided her out of the kitchen and into the living room again, the stacks of torn paper, gifts, and cards everywhere. She tried to apologize and explain that she’d kept track of who gave what, but he shushed her. “I don’t care about presents. Are you okay?”

    “I’m fine.” Cassandra was still crying. She wanted to say something else, but she thought if she opened her mouth, the entire world would come out. All the bad first. But then maybe, if she was good, the good parts of the world would also come out. It was a strange thought, one that didn’t feel wholly like her own.

    “I don’t know who gave us the book,” she said after another fifteen minutes. Michael had been rubbing her back, trying to calm her, a face full of tension that even he, expert lawyer he was, could not hide.

    “The book?” he repeated. “If it’s a parenting book, it’s probably my sister. And she means it for me, not you.”

    “No, she gave me a breast pump.”

    “Again, that’s not a reflection on you, but on me,” he insisted. 

    Cassandra didn’t want to argue that it was still her breasts that were part of the conversation. They didn’t feel like hers anymore. She went in search of the storybook instead, telling Michael about it in bits and pieces. “I can’t find it. Where did it go?”

    “It sounds bleak,” Michael said. “Maybe it’s good you can’t find it.”

    “No, I want to read it. I want to get to the end.” Cassandra was up from the couch, all sadness replaced by determination. She dropped to her knees on the floor, wincing as she did. Michael tried to convince her to get back to the couch yet again, but she was still in search of the book.

    “Knowing my mother,” Michael said. “She probably sent it to us. It’s probably something from a yard sale she went to. Or a random thing she found at the thrift store. Nothing with actual sentimental value. We can throw it right out the window if you’d like.”

    “But it looked brand new. I mean, the book itself seemed old, like a classic, but the book itself was new. Wrapped in red paper.”

    “Red paper?” Michael lifted a brow. “I’m glad you’ve lost it, then.”

    “Why? I want it.”

    “Then I’ll get it for you again on Amazon. Cassie, please.” Michael grabbed her wrist. It wasn’t hard, but his face was edged with concern. She furrowed her brows, confused at his confusion. Then she followed his darting gaze, and realized she’d soaked through her shirt with milk. And her pants with blood.

    “Oh God.” She stared at her body as if it was not her own. “Oh, God. I think I’m going to be sick.”

    “Are you all right?”

    “I’m fine. I just–“

    Cassandra ran up the stairs two by two, which didn’t help her stitches in the least. She didn’t care. She needed to throw up. She needed to cry. She needed to spill all sorts of substances from her body. Even though the milk was white and her blood was red, and any type of vomiting she did was a non-color like vomit always was, she expected it all to be black. 

    By the time she was done throwing up, her exhaustion came back. Michael was outside the door, and guided her to bed. Noah was crying–screaming, actually–and Cassandra worried he’d need her. 

    “Or my breasts,” she said, as if they were not part of her anymore. “He needs to feed.”

    “I will figure it out,” Michael said. “You sleep.”

    And she did. No arguments anymore. She slept and slept and slept, while Michael strapped his new son into a carrier and got him formula at the local grocery store. He also saw a couple parenting books, and after thumbing through them, bought the only one of the bunch that mentioned postpartum depression and psychosis. 

    After getting Noah to bed again, he went in search of Cassandra’s storybook. He did not find it in the mass of gifts, which in spite of Cassandra’s protests, were not organized in the least. Some of the cards had even been torn in two, as if in a rage or with her own teeth. When Michael also realized that Cassandra had put the breast pump from his sister in the trash compactor, his concern grew.

    Even more when Cassandra’s storybook couldn’t be found. No Amazon store or used book retailer had ever heard of it. And without an author, or tracking number from the package, he could do nothing to verify its existence. 

    There was also no red paper in the living room. Not even a spec of red on any of the torn up cards. 

    Michael was pacing the living room by the time his sister, Ashley, called. “Hey new dad. How’s the life?”

    “I think I need some help, Ash.” 

    Then Cassandra’s true nightmare–not the ones she had in her bedroom, about snakes and slugs that flowed through her body, repairing and revisiting her ever shrinking womb–began. 

    *

    “Will you give this to Noah?” Cassandra asked her husband six months later. 

    Cassandra and Michael, plus a sleeping Noah, met in the visiting room  at the local psych ward. Her bracelet, marking her time there and her condition, became visible as she slid the package across the table to her husband. Cassandra was no longer ashamed about the bracelet anymore; she used to hide it with long sleeves and had started training herself to use her right hand for most tasks, rather than the left where the bracelet was, but now she embraced it. 

    “We could open it now,” Cassandra said, “but I don’t want to wake him. It’s a bedtime story for him, anyway. Better to have when he can appreciate it more.”

    Michael nodded slowly, but didn’t take the package. “How are you feeling?”

    “Good. Really good.” Cassandra wasn’t lying. She had been seeing her therapist less and less now–though that was still once a week–and she was thriving now that she was on the right medication. The treatment she’d had at the local ward wasn’t horrifying, either. The staff was nice and understanding, and they allowed visits with her husband and son. It was the nights and some bright afternoons when Cassandra saw the black slug, and she knew she was being followed, that were difficult. But she was putting it all behind her, after putting it all down into a book.

    “In fact,” Cassandra added, “Dr. Melbourne thinks I can go home in another month. I’ll be around in time for this guy to say his first word. I can read to him, too.”

    Michael nodded, though his lips were thin and tight. There were bags under his eyes. His sister and mother had moved in to help with the baby, but there was only so much they could do to ease his worries about Cassandra.

    “I’m better now, really,” Cassandra said. She eyed the still-untouched package. “I drew it all out. I wrote it all out. I feel so much better, really. I want to be his mom.”

    “You were always his mom,” Michael said, voice weak. “And I’ve always been his dad. Even when he was the size of a pea, it was still true.”

    “I know that now. And I still have his entire life to prove it, even though it sucks I’ve missed this much. That’s what I wrote about, though. That’s what’s in the book.”

    Again, Michael only nodded. Cassandra’s heart sunk. He was not going to read it to their son. He was not going to read it himself. He was going to throw it in the backseat of the car and forget about it like he forgot about their dry cleaning or library books. She would have to be the one to tell Noah about the world, about light and darkness, and how there was only ever one way to rid yourself of the darkest parts. 

    “It’s okay,” Cassandra said, slipping the package back over to her side of the table. “Maybe I should keep it a bit longer. Get the drawings right.”

    Michael seemed relieved. He put his hands on the table so he could embrace hers. She did as he wanted, and when Noah awoke, she held him in her arms. Her body had healed, and though she no longer had milk that spurted at his faintest noises, she still felt like she belonged with him. Like he belonged to her.

    “Oh my baby boy,” she said, holding him so close that she could smell his baby-smell, and feel the shuddering of his tiny body in fear and delight as she whispered, “Welcome to the world, both good and bad. Remember, remember there is still a light somewhere, and momma will show you, soon enough, how to fight the dark.”

    END

  • 31 for 31: Biology’s Void by Eve Morton

    An alien story for today!

    “Biology’s Void” was written after I had an amazing conversation at an academic conference with another grad student who was really, really into aliens. Like really-really. She was doing her entire dissertation on the abduction narrative; she laid out the stages as she saw them, and as she’d built from her research. Meanwhile, I told her about Betty and Barney Hill, the interracial couple from the 1960s who were abducted, and who had just been covered on Last Podcast on the Left.

    We talked for hours.

    I always think I’m not very into alien stories–and then events like that happen, or I end up getting sucked into X-File marathons, and I remember my absolute love of the horror behind these experiences.

    The main character in “Biology’s Void” is directly inspired by Betty and Barney Hill, and the concept of ‘missing time’ as it relates to alien abductions (and also traumatic experiences; see Mysterious Skin for the other major influence here). It’s still one of my favourite stories that I wrote, probably because after that hours-long conversation, it was pretty much a breeze to write.

    I hope you enjoy it too! It would be published a few years later in an anthology that now seems to be defunct, but I found here.

    Biology’s Void

    It is November 12th 2017. 1:05 AM. My name is Barney Addison, and I am missing time. 

    Barney clutched at his throat. The words echoed in his head, but didn’t come out of his mouth. When he found no wounds on the front of his trachea, he reached behind his ears. Nothing. Next to his pulse and ankles. Nothing. His chest. Only the ruddy scars from his mastectomy six months earlier. They weren’t bleeding, but wetness clung around his dark T-shirt chest that smelled like plant matter or vacuumed space; like an office building basement after the cleaners come. His cargo shorts were singed at the edges. All of this could have been from falling asleep on the building roof with a cigarette in his mouth and a drink in his hand. Or it could be what his father always prepared him for.

    Barney stood up from lying down. The glow of the North York hospital and IKEA anchored him. He was the Sheridan building apartment roof, close to the Leslie Street subway station. He only recognized the building’s position from when he’d explored the neighbourhood earlier in the summer when he began delivering mail; he had no recollection of climbing the stairs or taking the back elevator entrance. All he could recall was coming home from work, changing his clothing, and then—three hours were gone.

    Barney’s heart rate skyrocketed. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. Alien invasions were something his bipolar father fixated on during his youth. They were something syndicated on the Syfy channel and Space Network, closed inside paperbacks. Not real, not real, not real. 

    “It is November 12th 2017. My name is Barney Addison,” he said aloud, repeating a drill he hadn’t done in at least ten years. “And I am missing time.”

    *

    Gordy’s window was open when Barney arrived.

    “Welcome,” Gordy said as soon as he saw Barney swing in from the fire escape. “By all means, come right in. Be sure to wipe your feet on the matt I’ve put out just for you.”

    Barney’s shoes crunched against newspaper by the window. He’d been coming into Gordy’s bedroom by whatever means necessary since the two were teens and next door neighbours. His window jumping was a hard habit that he’d maintained until this day, even when Gordy lived on the first stop on the Leslie Street subway and in a third floor apartment building.

    Barney opened his mouth to tell him about the aliens, but Gordy had turned around and walked into his kitchen. Music played on a speaker in the front area, sending low vibrations through the barely lit apartment. Several people in brightly coloured shirts sat on Gordy’s couch, lost to their own drug-induced world. Gordy’s pill collection was all over his end table, guarded by Chris, Gordy’s long-term boyfriend who also moonlighted as a nurse. Chris didn’t wave or look up. The apartment was already booming with business. 

    In the kitchen, Gordy took down a bottle of cheap scotch and started to pour it into glasses. He made sure to line up the drinks in front of Barney so he could watch every step of the drink making process. He let Barney choose what glass to take before he took a sip of his own.

    “So what’s up? I sense a meeting between us.”

    Barney clasped the glass, but didn’t drink until Gordy swallowed his first sip. His hands were shaking. “I’m missing time.”

    Gordy furrowed his brows. “Like…a black out? A Rohypnol episode?”

    “No.” Barney shook his head. “I know it’s not that. I was on a roof when I woke up.”

    “Wait. Back it up. Tell me from the moment you lost time.” Gordy leaned on the counter, sipping his drink. His eyes fixated on Barney, his face marked with concern. In spite of the party going on in his kitchen, it was clear that Gordy this was his first drink of the night.  

    After a sip, Barney went through the night as he remembered from work to changing clothing to three hours gone. “It’s not a bad date or a dream. I was alone. And nothing in my apartment was tampered, and I wasn’t taking any drugs.”

    “But you do go creepy crawling sometimes.” Gordy gestured to his own window and to Barney’s lifetime of climbing buildings or houses. When Barney worked as a maintenance man, he’d explored during his down time and basically had an entire layout of the Toronto apartment building complexes memorized. Once you figure out how to get into one building, you can get into any other. And with Barney’s array of grey uniforms from all his jobs, he could easily pass a worker to gain access on the ground floor before exploring bigger heights. He’d never break into strangers houses–only friends like Gordy who had given baseline consent to creepy crawl inside–but Barney liked roofs and did what he could to find as many as possible. He liked the lights of the city. It was all an escape from the mundane existence of being a teenager in small town Tweed, and then being an adult in a city so big everyone was anonymous. 

    “Maybe you hit your head,” Gordy suggested. “And this is a concussion.”

    Barney bowed his head in front of Gordy so he could examine his crown. “Nothing. Absolutely no marks like that. I know what a concussion feels like–and that is not it. There are no other marks on me except for the singe of my shorts and the smell, Gordy.” Barney bit his lip, utterly terrified. “That means one thing.”

    “And it has to be aliens, right?” Gordy took a drink, but didn’t shut Barney down. He let him explain how the smell signalled a particular alien theory popular in the 1990s, and how the singe meant they must be the Grays, not any other species, because of the technology in the spaceship. 

    In that moment, as Gordy listened and never said a word, Barney knew he could love Gordy–like a boyfriend, more than a friend. He was the only person through Barney’s entire gender transition who heard every last theory about his gender identity as if it was valid, and the only person who had gone through the same nonsense in their teenage years when both of their families realized they had queer kids on their hands and sent them away. Gordy and no one else understood the allure of believing in aliens in order to make sense of a world that seemed cruel, or to stave off the reality that his father was completely losing his mind.

    “So, okay. Say you have been abducted,” Gordy said, his voice clear and logical when Barney had talked himself hoarse. “Then what do you do next? Obviously they dropped you back here, so are you done with?”

    “Sometimes. I think. I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I’ve even been into this stuff.”

    “Right. And who exactly do you tell about it? Cops and FBI—or the Canadian FBI CSIS—are out. We’re not exactly close to Roswell, either so we can’t go backpacking for answers. I don’t even think Canada has its equivalent.”

    It did. Barney could recall the name and the circumstances like an old song he’d listened to on repeat. But he kept his mouth shut–instead he thought of his father, his dark skin and even darker eyes, and how scared he used to look whenever he’d be missing time, too. He couldn’t tell how much of his father’s descent into madness was now actually real or if it was a perfectly valid response to an insane experience like being abducted. Or maybe even a side-effect of being abducted. Did his disorder allow him contact with the aliens, did the aliens cause the disorder, or was there nothing wrong with Jason Addison at all? All outcomes blurred together into the same ending. 

    “I… I don’t want to end up like my dad.”

    Gordy nodded. He remembered Jason being taken away just as clearly as Barney did. “I know. You won’t. You’re long passed the age where hereditary illnesses like that form. Don’t most schizophrenics or bipolar people start in their early teens? We’re nearly thirty, Barney. You’ve long since passed the safety point. You’re fine.”

    Barney nodded, but he wasn’t so sure it was that easy. He’d only been Barney for ten years, on testosterone for five or six. It had made his hair thicker and given him a beard, along with giving him thick muscles and a deeper voice–but what if the internal clock on family illnesses started again, and he was a teenager in his body? Or what if it was testosterone in the first place, and being a guy made him more susceptible to his father’s lineage? He wondered what would fill in biology’s void in madness—his synthetic hormones coursing through him or father’s blood that did the same? And all of this was assuming that the mental illness was real, and not an excuse cooked up to cover up the alien’s invasion.

    Barney took another drink. His head swam. He didn’t even know where his father was now, so there was no way to ask him. He would probably be just as impossible to find as Barney was now with a new name and new likeness. 

    “You won’t end up like him,” Gordy said again, rubbing a hand over Barney’s elbow. “You’re not crazy. There is nothing wrong with you. We’re both absolutely, one hundred percent normal.” 

    “It’s the other people who are strange,” Barney said, echoing what the two of them had told one another in their youth. Barney was amazed at how many chants he had stored away in his head; his dad’s alien drills and Gordy’s pep statements against homophobia only being a handful. His mind felt like a locked cage of Japanese Koans, or at worst, bumper stickers. 

    When the music in the other room grew louder, Gordy invited Barney to stay the night. “The party is only beginning, you know.”

    “I know. But I should go back home.” 

    Gordy nodded. He topped up Barney’s glass before leaving to go to his living room. He didn’t bother to tell Barney to use the door to leave; the window was always open.

    *

    The next day at work, Barney fought a wave of nausea as he held up a package. He thought it was the alcohol coming back to have its revenge, but he was steady on his feet. Every time he looked away from the package, the world righted itself. His body achieved equilibrium. But the name and address on the package made him shudder deep inside. 

    He knew that building. He swore he did. He closed his eyes to see if he could conjure the place from a deeply held memory. Tables, needles, and doctors with face masks. Black out days and long, long stretches of nothing but beeping. He opened his eyes. The package in front of him was like a bruised aura leading him down a road he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go. Each time he looked away from the package–nothing. Just the sunny day and the streets of Leslie and Shepard, and his post office truck. The other mail for that street was for the North York hospital, yet another place that Barney knew all too well. Those memories weren’t pleasant either. The therapy program he and Gordy had gone to for being troubled kids (the code word for being queer) had been in one of the hospital’s basement rooms, too close for comfort to the other address that made his head spin. But maybe he was mixing and matching his memories, still in a hungover state, and merely poking an old wound when he was too sensitive. 

    Yes. That had to be it. He was just in a bad place, so everything became The Singular Bad Place in his mind. He loaded the hospital letters into his mail bag before he touched the package. The back of his eyes felt heavy.  

    “Fuck.” 

    Barney heaved at the side of the truck. No one was walking by, but he was sure he was going to arouse suspicion. And he couldn’t just forget his mail route. He had to deliver the package. Since it was so close to the hospital anyway, if he couldn’t take it and passed out, someone could deliver him to the ER. 

    On shaky legs, Barney made it to the front wing of the hospital. Though he looked nothing like the fourteen-year-old girl who had once been admitted to the psych ward, the front area made him weary. He was not going to be put away; not again–and not even for the same reason. There was no more conversion therapy in the Toronto wing of this hospital. People still had a hard time configuring trans identity, but at least people didn’t think they were possessed or troubled anymore. A lot had changed in those fifteen years since he was put into a room and told to confess all his secret sexual deviant thoughts, and then given proper sexual object choices and roles he was told to perfect like a marionette. 

    By the time he finished the mail route for the hospital, Barney felt as if he had walked through the fire and come out on the other side. People called him sir. Barney. Even Mr. Addison if they knew him. 

    He was a guy. Not a sad, afraid girl. But by the time he wandered around to the wooded area close to the hospital, in search of the package address, the sinking feeling came back. He meandered through the path, a parking lot, and more wooded area. He expected to find nothing but a dead end, but right there, on a street that seemed to come out of nowhere, was another steel building. Down the alleyway was a door and a dumpster. A red doorbell taunted him; he could ring it and know exactly what this place was beyond his nightmares–but his feet were lead. 

    He flung the package to the ground and ran away, through the woods and the parking lot and right by North York Hospital. He got into his post office truck and floored it, nearly crashing into a dark sedan. The horn blared and anchored him to this world. 

    “Mr. Addison,” he said to himself. “You are one hundred and ten percent normal.”

    He merged onto the road and went home, humming a tune he didn’t know. 

    *

    “Do you remember North York?”

    “Of course I do,” Gordy said, bitterness in his tone. “I was there for three weeks before you. And even when you got to leave, I was still stuck there.”

    “Right. Of course. I just… Do you remember where our therapy was located?”

    Gordy scoffed on the other end of the phone. Barney had his headphones in with the mic pressed close to his face. He’d gone to the gym after work, but the strange alleyway in the middle of the hospital’s grounds had frustrated him. Familiar, yet strange. And the song in his head now had lyrics—there is no self in cell division / all we know is human prisons / join biology’s void / and say hello to millions—ones that he couldn’t feed into Google to find an answer. The mystery package that had once made his knees weak seemed to be a blurry recollection as the song took dominance in his mind. It wasn’t quite like losing time, but it had been reshaped and remodelled in a way he didn’t like. So he’d called Gordy, the only other person he knew who had shared his therapy experience at North York when they were teens. 

    “I don’t understand why we’re walking down memory lane,” Gordy said. “It was not exactly a pleasant experience.”

    “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…I had to deliver the mail there today.”

    “Right. You’ve done that before. And they don’t do conversion therapy anymore, thank fucking God. They still have a psych ward, obviously, but sometimes those are needed.”

    “Sure,” Barney said, not wanting to argue the point. “But do you remember another building?”

    “Like the cafeteria?”

    “No. Another building, like close to North York but maybe on the other side of it. Near the woods. Do you, did we… ever get therapy there, too?”

    “I don’t know if what they did could be called therapy but…” Gordy seemed to think a long time. Barney wondered if his memories were coming back to him in the same way as his did earlier in the day. If so, he didn’t sound nearly as pained as Barney felt. “I don’t think so. I mean… No. I don’t exactly like to dwell on the many and varied treatments, but I remember most of it occurring in the main hospital.”

    “So no blinking lights or sleeping for days?” 

    “Barney,” Gordy said, carefully. “What happened today? Did you lose time again?”

    Barney pushed up a barbell, attempting to work out instead of answering. Gordy was always a stoic, though, and waited patiently until the silence became too much for Barney. “Not exactly. I didn’t lose time… more like retrieved a memory I thought I had forgotten and then promptly lost all form and shape of it.”

    “About our conversion therapy?”

    “I think so, but I don’t know. It seemed more medical than psychological.” Barney put the barbell up and sat on the bench. His story sounded so ludicrous, but he was sure that these two random events were tied. That the pieces of this puzzle were adding up. When he tried to explain the doctor masks and needles to Gordy, though, his voice was thin and angry.

    “No.”

    “No?”

    “No,” Gordy repeated. “This isn’t some MK-Ultra bullshit. Or some alien conspiracy to steal memories. The people who told us we were sick when we were kids were not some masterminds. They were just working with faulty psychology. This isn’t anything bigger than gigantic stupidity and shame about sexuality and gender identity. And no one in conversion therapy prodded us with needles. They didn’t need to in order to make our lives fucking shitty.”

    “Right,” Barney said. He nodded. Sweat fell from his brow onto his gym shorts. He’d been working out far too hard before he’d even called Gordy. He was just low on electrolytes after drinking. That was the only explanation for his random fuzzy memory because Gordy was always right. The people who fucked them up as kids were never the monsters they wanted to believe. They were just stupid and following orders. Most people who commit horrible mistakes usually are. 

    And the other stuff with aliens? Well, maybe it was time to see a therapist about grief over his father. Even if he didn’t exactly trust the profession. Things had changed a lot in the last fifteen years. Maybe therapy was a good thing again. “You are totally, one hundred percent right, Gordy. I’m just… having a rough week.”

    “I know. It’s okay. I think we all deserve a little break from reality every so often. It’s why Chris and I do what I do. You can come over tonight, you know. If you want. No charge.”

    Barney genuinely considered the offer. He’d gotten high at their place before, but the weightless feeling of being on opioids didn’t resonate with him. It was too much like slinking off the first veil of reality; like falling so deeply into a sunken place he couldn’t emerge from. It was, to put it bluntly, like the Rohypnol incident in his first early college years, when he’d been raped and woken up the next morning with the definitive idea that he wasn’t LeeAnne anymore, but Barney. 

    “You there?” Gordy asked. “You got really quiet.”

    “Yeah. I’m fine. Just at the gym and thinking of heading home.”

    “And then to our place?”

    “Maybe. I’ll see where I end up.” 

    “Okay, Barney. Take care of yourself.” 

    Barney followed up with some pleasantries before ending the phone conversation. He headed into the male locker room and waited for a stall to change in. As he waited, he removed his tank top to ring it out, allowing his scars to become visible. A man across the area seemed to gasp. Barney’s body went rigid, worrying for a moment if he had been outed as trans. 

    “Sorry, bro,” the guy at the other end said. “I didn’t mean to gawk. Looks like a nasty accident.”

    “Sort of,” Barney said.

    “You mind if I ask what happened, man?”

    Barney paused for only a minute. He’d long ago cooked up a dozen stories to explain away his mastectomy scars, years before he could even afford the surgery. I’ve been shot. Super bad piercing experience. And he’d even considered covering the scars with tattoos. But now, a more delightful excuse came through his head. “I’m an alien with two hearts. You know, a timelord.”

    “Oh, shit man. You can just say you don’t wanna say.”

    Barney nodded. A stall opened up and he went inside to change out of the rest of his gym clothing. He ran his hands over his scars, remembering the same feeling of weightlessness as the surgeon gave him anesthesia. You won’t remember a thing, she’d said. And she was right. For a long time afterwards in his drug haze, everything was gone. LeeAnne. His mother who disowned him. His sister who was fine to think he was a lesbian, but thought this ‘trans business’ was too strange and who had moved to California anyway. He forgot his father being taken away when he was twelve and the criminal record that soon followed his father. Breaking and entering, carrying a weapon, trespassing. His father had gone from a youthful Jamaican immigrant to a paranoid gun-toting alien contact survivor. And Barney had just forgotten it all. 

    Now though, he ran his fingers along his scars. He remembered the steel building next to North York, and the doctors who stood over him with needles and machines. They were just like the ones telling him he was a criminal for liking women, except that they were silent with darker eyes and longer fingers on their hands. Except that they were aliens. And they had a message for him. There is no self in cell division / all we know is human prisons / join biology’s void / and say hello to millions.

    Now, Barney remembered everything.

    *

    The next time a package from the steel building came in on his post office run, he wrote down the address. When his hand shook too much, he snapped a photo with his phone instead. He typed out a text to Gordy about the place—but soon decided to save it as a draft for later. Gordy had already gone through enough. He’d been in the psych ward much longer since the therapists never really believed him when he tried to convince them he was cured. In retrospect, Barney’s queerness had been easier to hide because he hadn’t even known what it was like to be a trans man fully. He was just a tomboy, and saying that he liked men got them off his case, and easier for him to do since it was half true. So Barney’s conversion therapy had only been a fraction by comparison to Gordy. 

    And maybe, because Gordy was cis and Barney turned out to be trans, there was another line dividing their experiences. Barney didn’t like to think that way, but he knew it was true. Cis people engaged with the world in a different way; their bodies were never quite marvels in the same way that trans bodies were. Trans bodies morphed and changed; obtained a second puberty and new facets of physicality. Maybe because of this morphing and changing, Barney was somehow more susceptible to whatever was going on in the steel building.

    Maybe. He didn’t know for sure. But he was determined to find out more than before. 

    As soon as Barney reached the door down the alleyway, he rang the red bell. He’d conned his way inside of enough apartment buildings as a maintenance man, he was sure he could get inside here if he had a package that he said needed signing. To his surprise, though, he didn’t need to con. As soon as he rang the doorbell, it opened. 

    “Hello?” Barney pushed his way inside. “Anyone here?”

    Silent. Pure silence, the kind where Barney heard his own blood in his ear. He put down the package between the door so it didn’t close. The package was heavy–like several phone books all bound together–so it worked as the perfect door stop.

    “Hello?” Barney asked again. He’d gone down a long corridor with numbers, rather than names, on each one. He tried each door knob, but nothing worked until the very end. Door 725 opened easily. A light flickered above a filing cabinet and next to a chalkboard that had the same number written on it.

    A chill passed through Barney. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He touched his throat, behind his ears. His arms, his ankles, and his chest. Nothing. He wasn’t being abducted or missing time, but an electrical charge in the air made his coarse hair stand on end.

    He opened the first drawer in the filing cabinet. It was easy enough to find the name Addison, and it was no shock that his old name LeeAnne was there next. With trembling fingers, he pulled out the file that was at least three CMs thick. The first page was the hospital intake form from the exact date he entered conversion therapy at North York’s psych ward. Nothing was amiss in the subsequent pages; everything was familiar and had checked out. 

    Perhaps this place was just an old filing centre, a storage area to keep things that they had to legally keep for a certain amount of time. He wasn’t that keen to keep on reading how “LeeAnne displays a preference for the same sex, but has spoken about dating boys if she can also become one” and wanted to put the file away. His creepy crawly mission seemed like a wasted afternoon until he came upon the last page of the file. A body chart had been laid out and marked off with round hollow dots, like crop circles on the elbows and viridians of a human body. Underneath were times and dates, along with injections. 

    “What kind of MK-Ultra bullshit is this?” he asked aloud. Seeing nothing else other than the cryptic writing that seemed to trigger long buried memoires, Barney put down his file and searched for Gordy in the large stack. Gordon Zednichek was the last file in the drawer and less thick than Barney’s. The last page bore the same chart with a body, crop circles on elbows, and the injections. The final words made Barney bit on his lip so hard he drew blood: Subject incompatible with desires. He will be sent back to the conversion centre. 

    Barney swallowed the blood in his mouth. He checked the last words of his file again. It was a date and a time and an injection rate, followed by the words “Pending…” It seemed like a lack lustre ending, nothing as definitive as Gordy. Barney tore through random files now, comparing the charts and the results. When he found another file that also bore the “Pending…” final words, he memorized the name: Casey Thompson. Age twenty-six now. The address was out of date–a parents’ place that Barney knew was now a vacant lot since he had delivered mail to that address years ago–but the name itself was familiar. He knew he had seen it before. 

    He took another photo with his phone and closed the filing area. A creak down the hall made his heart catch in his throat, but no one was there. The steel building really did seem like a storage area–but for what, Barney still wasn’t sure. 

    When he got back to his post office truck, his heart was pounding. His hands were shaking. But the elation that came over him once he found Casey Thompson’s name was worth it. He delivered mail to that address in the past–the Sheridan Apartment Building over by Leslie and Shepard.

    The same one he’d woken up on two weeks ago, when he’d lost time. Barney let out a deep, low breath, knowing that for once, he was onto something. 

    *

    He didn’t call Gordy, or even wander up to Casey Thompson’s apartment and ask them what had gone on years ago, and what was going on now. Hearing the answers from someone else didn’t seem to ease the itch that Barney had inside of him–and had had inside of him for a long time. Instead, as soon as it got dark, he put on one of his old maintenance uniforms and left his cell phone behind in his apartment. There was no note, but the phone itself and the last images he’d taken should be good enough.

    He conned his way into the Sheridan apartment building and went right up to the roof. The familiar scent of plant matter and vacuumed air greeting him, but it had faded significantly since his last lost time episode. There was a shed filled with tools for the building, along with a folding chair in the back. He took it out and put it in the centre of the roof. The North York Hospital insignia glowed blue like a beacon, along with IKEA and a McDonalds in the distance. 

    He waited. And he waited. 

    He thought of the first time his father had woken him up from sleeping in the back of his van. He’d told the then LeeAnne the ways to make sure you knew who and what you were when you lost time. He’d told the then LeeAnne that he’d had to pull the car off into the corn fields because a bright light had come over the car and tried to lift it up. 

    “But we’re here again. Everything is fine. It’s just like Betty and Barney Hill,” he said. “They were abducted in 1961–but they came back. They always come back. And once you do come back, you have to keep talking about it and keep telling people about it in order for the experience to become real. When you lose time, you lose a piece of yourself. So you have to keep talking. You have to keep remembering.”

    Barney knew he had been scared as a kid. His father had nearly totalled the car and then ranted in a near-yelling voice about identity and invasion. But now Barney thought of the coalescence around his own naming; how he’d woken up from a date-rape stupor and realized that his body had been taken from him the night before. How the experience bore so much similarity to conversion therapy, where he’d been brought into different buildings and made to feel and say and think things that weren’t true. Barney had been born out of LeeAnne in those moments, when his body and biology had been taken from him, and he’d fused his identity with his father’s alien conspiracies. It was why the name Barney, in a baby name book, seemed like the perfect fit when he’d skimmed over it.

    But Barney also thought of the feeling of having no body, of having no self as he was put under for his surgery. The weightlessness that came from drugs he controlled. His surgery was the last shed of LeeAnne being removed from himself, but Barney had also been removed in that black-out waiting period. You won’t remember a thing—and he hadn’t. He was a void then. A perfect and nothing void; no self to worry about, no memories to hold him down. Good or bad. Boy or girl. Right or wrong, under the knife he was cosmic. He was everywhere. He was alien. 

    There is no self in cell division. He went through the song until it abruptly ended. Across the street, the lights started to shift and change form. Barney braced himself. Pending… Pending. The blue turned to a gauzy green and violet as it was removed from the hospital. It swirled around in the air and then fixated over the apartment complex. It hovered there, seeming to check out Barney in the same glance that Barney checked it out. His heart beat very fast. He put a hand over his chest and his scars and felt the beats course through him like an electrical jolt. 

    He was afraid. He was relieved. 

    The lights lowered over him, embracing him like a hug. 

    “It is November 24 2017 4:25 AM,” Barney said. “My name is Barney Addison, and I have found my lost time.”

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Plague by Eve Morton

    This is the story that started it all, so to speak.

    “The Plague” was the first story that I published professionally. My friend Derek (of speculatingcanada.ca) had posted the call for submissions for his friend’s publication Postscript to Darkness. The call sounded doable: a short story that was speculative in some way, and was under 3000 words. The pay was decent, too. Enough to motivate me–but not enough to make me think I had to be too professional or serious.

    And so I wrote this little story I had in my head about a queer kid surviving the apocalypse and what that would feel like. In some ways, it’s a new beginning–and for a queer kid, that is sometimes the best thing we can get.

    So I wrote the story. I enjoyed writing it.

    And then it was accepted.

    And then I got to do a reading of this story in downtown Ottawa with other authors, some who have gone onto serious good things. That night was really magical for me. It was the first time a life of writing–and writing really weird things–seemed completely viable.

    Even fun!

    What a nice new beginning.

    The Plague

    No one ever really remembers a plague. It’s not like a war, where the planning, battles, and deaths are all categorized at once. Each step is made with the conscious fact that this will be history one day. In the present everyday life of war and destruction, an archivist is happy. There is always something to do. 

    But a plague is pieced together like a puzzle, always after the fact. It cannot be foreseen and even while it is happening, many people move about their daily life unnoticed and not affected. It is always understood after the deaths. Not the first or the second—these are merely incidental and could have very well been accidents of fate. But by the two hundredth or two thousandth, then something is happening. Only when one death tips into many deaths does it become history. When it is worth remembering and learning from, it is given a name. 

    Back during the cholera epidemics, John Snow tried to solve the mystery of the sickness. There was no such thing as bacteria and germs were thought to be spread through the air. The plague doctors wore bird masks stuffed with herbs and home remedies in the beak, hoping to keep away the death and not breathe it in. People avoided certain areas where the dead were piling up, but they did not look at the water. Snow followed an inventible ghost map of sickness, and later realized it was emerging from one pipe where everyone drank. Even without seeing the bacteria with a microscope, he knew the existence of the monster that was taking people one by one. As soon as the mystery of cholera was solved, then it could move onto history. Plagues are always created backwards, after the ending is known. 

    ***

    When my mother got sick, I was twelve years old. She called to me from her bed one morning, her voice hoarse and grainy. It was the sound of two bones rubbing together in sand, trying to sound out the syllables of my name. 

    “Abigail. AB-A-GALE.”

    I didn’t even fight her when she used my birth name. I just got up and gave her water to try and make the sound behind her voice stop. I gave her soup and other fluids, but nothing worked. I changed the sheets and tried not to touch anything. I washed my hands and I showered regularly. I wanted to stay home, but she told me to go to school. When I arrived and sat in my class, I counted the heads of each person who was there. Three students were away. It is just a flu, I told myself. 

    But I stopped going to school when three students became five and I could hear the same dried-out hollow voice in others. I went to the library before I left, wearing winter gloves though it was spring, and took out books on John Snow. I stopped showering, in case whatever was happening was in the water and it could get into my mouth or eyes. I boiled all the water in the house before anything touched our lips. I drank and did not get sick, but my mother, already sick, refused everything I gave her and spun in her bed at night. 

    It is only the water once, I thought to myself, and John Snow has already claimed that for his history lesson. I looked away from the pipes and the books collected dust on my shelves. I did not go to school for days, then months, then years. I learned more in my house than anywhere in the world. 

    To me, the plague started with my mother. But that is only because I know the doors and the roof and the walls of our house. I know our private history, the photos on the walls and where the dead cats are buried in the backyard. The plague always starts inward like this and spirals out. I only became aware of what I could see and feel with my own hands. But I did not know the history that was happening outside my window, not for a long time. 

    Really, the plague stated halfway around the country. Some sheep farmer was the first one to display symptoms. He had gotten too close to the dirt and to the bodies that were buried underneath, stepping on the ground in bare feet. Later, he would be rendered mute in bed, just like my mother, spinning like a millstone at night. The bodies underground were old corpses from one of the wars that Napoleon had started. I can’t remember what one exactly—Waterloo or the French Revolution—but the battle name is not really important. What I do remember is that Napoleon wasn’t really a short man. He was normal height, maybe a few inches less than average, but he was probably taller than I was when I was reading about him. He was only portrayed short to humiliate him by his enemies. Maybe that was why the bodies from underground wanted to lower us, to reach up and grab us by our toes and bare feet. They wanted to pull us down to their level. 

    Zombie is not quite the right word. Zombies come up to the surface and demand attention; they bite and infect you. These creatures were not solid and bold like zombies. They had broken themselves down into tiny pieces, the past history of a group of people, and they demanded to be remembered by pulling us all down with them. It got lonely underneath and we were doing a terrible job of keeping track of history, of keeping track of death. 

    When I checked my mother, she had no marks, no bite wounds. But the flesh on her feet glowed pink and I knew it was something in the garden. I scanned the ground, always wearing shoes and hopping on cement, to see where the disease had started. But there was no distinct portal, no distinct entryway. The sheep field was incidental; the farmer may have been the first infected, but there was nothing special about his land. The invasion of the illness was really something that had been brewing ever since Napoleon got the first short joke. There never is a distinct beginning to plagues, only our own interpretations. 

    I cut my hair first. I thought it may have had something to do with the illness, the same way arsenic and other poisons linger in follicles. But I scanned its roots and saw nothing, so I began to learn to start again. I wanted to be like John Snow so badly; I thought I had to be him in order to find the answers. After I read his books, I’d then stand in the mirror, my chest flattened across my skin from binding, and will myself to figure it out. I needed to know where it came from and its origins, how it could start so small and then explode out. I needed to understand that it could somehow get my mother, but not touch me. I needed to understand why we were so different, and yet we shared the same last name and facial features. Even when I stopped eating as much and my cheekbones stuck out and my hips disappeared, it did not seem to matter.  Not enough, at least. I was still her daughter to her, and she was still calling me Abigail from her bed while I pretended to be John Snow. Even if she couldn’t see my face, my bound chest, or my new cropped hair, she knew my voice and who was in the house with her.  Even at our most desperate, when she was dying and I still could not figure out the plague, I told her my name was only John Snow once. She never answered me and I don’t think she ever heard. I didn’t like the way the name sounded anyway; it was hollow and too blunt. It was only the water once, I thought. And there would only be one John Snow. I was not him. But I was still left wanting more than what I was given, what had been passed down from generations, and what I saw disappearing right in front of me.  

    I watched as my mother grew drier and drier. Her skin flaked off and into the wind. Her voice became distant and then it was nothing but bones rubbing together. The last time I went to see her, she was a pile of dirt on the bed. What was left was formed perfectly to her body, like a mummy, but in a thousand tiny pieces. The window was inexplicably open, and in one gust of wind she was gone. 

    This is how they all went. This was how they all left us and died. They touched the ground and the past infected them. They let the past hold onto their bones and take everything else away. And then by chance, they floated into the atmosphere, into the air. So long as you did not touch the ground and let the past get to you, you did not appear like ashes and dust. 

    I was alone in my house for weeks, piecing the mystery together. Others were also figuring it out. Men walked by my window regularly on stilts, their wooden limbs creaking as they learned to take new steps again. Other people realized it came through the dirt, and not the air. People began to talk to one another through a mutual exchange of their feet. To look at the sole, and not the soul, was oddly moving.

    Everything else in the world was the same except for this elaborate stepping stone game, like pretending the floor was lava when you were younger. Only once touched, the lava would burn you from the inside out, boiling away your blood and organs, turning you into ash and dirt without the least bit of pain. There was only lethargy, until you were dried out worse than the mummies in the museum, and then the wind took you. Peaceful, almost. Most people want their ashes spread across the world, as if it was the key to immortality, to be many places at once.

    One day, I moved to my still-open window and watched as pack of stilt walkers traipsed by. I went outside, being careful to stay on the pavement my house was surrounded by. The stilt walkers reached so close to the sky that I could barely see their faces. 

    Someone threw me a pair of stilts and they rattled to the ground. From up high, he yelled, “We could use someone like you.”

    I did not know what to say in return. I showed him my feet. 

    “Good. Good.” He smiled. “Let’s go.”

    I took his gift with shaking hands and tried to learn my new motions. From atop my wooden legs, I took in a sudden breath of the shallow air. Like looking down the water pipe, I began to understand what John Snow had felt. I was seeing the world and its history the way I had never witnessed before. This was a plague now, to me and all the others around. I could see the empty houses and the fallen bodies, the dust that spread up into the atmosphere and was almost thick enough to block the sun. I learned, as I walked with these new men, that they were calling the illness The Dust Disease. It now had a name and time would remember us, either as victims or survivors. It was a chance to start again. 

    “What is your name?” the man asked me. 

    I was still bald from my hair cutting and I looked very different than the soles of my feet. I was wearing what my father had left behind, not wanting to wear my own clothing or tarnish my mother’s memory by wearing hers. The pants and shirt were old, and now covered in dust, but it looked okay. The man regarded my new jacket, too big in the shoulders, before he looked at me and asked my name again.

    “I’m Max.”

    “Nice to meet you, Max,” he said with a smile. He introduced himself, and then we kept walking. It was hard to work my new legs at first. But he was patient, and waited for me as I caught up to him. I left my house behind me, the ash and dirt of others lingering in my path.

    ***

    This is what I have learned so far, now that I am fifteen. We are still piecing together what has happened to us, but we now know that we are not alone. More days past by and we find others on slits, and others who blow right by us in the wind. This is not a war, something deliberately made with the intent of remembering, recreating, or with a distinct end. This has all just happened, almost by accident, and it will keep going until someone like John Snow has a need to track it down. 

    But I am not John Snow anymore. I am Max. As the man beside me calls me by my name again, more people on stilts join us. We walk into the night.

    END

  • 31 for 31: Skeleton Key by Eve Morton

    I hope spooky season has been treating you well!

    I’ve really been enjoying going through my old stories to compile this list. It has reminded me how much my stories have changed–but also remained the same.

    One key theme that’s come out is my resistance to, or fear of, institutions, doctors, and the psychological industry. It can be so easy to declare someone unfit or unrecognizable in some way, and then have them turn into monsters on paper. So often that leads to a self-fufiling prophecy, and people who are declared monsters may as well become them.

    Or become haunted by them.

    The next story is one of many stories I wrote on those themes, but exploring them through the lens of gender transgression, transition, and trans identity. My PhD dealt with these themes, too–but I never got to truly express how horrible some of these scenarios were, or the lingering haunted feeling that stayed with me long after penning my research papers.

    “Skeleton Key” is a story that explores what is left behind when you are not recognized in a medical system–and then in a death industry–where your birth name and birth identity is the only thing that is ‘real.’ Be warned that this story–and many more invovling trans protagonists–confront the realities of being a minority. Sexism, racism, and many other -isms are the ‘monsters’ in these stories–but there are also literal monsters lurking around the corner. Because why not have both?

    Skeleton Key

    The last time I heard from Sally was in the ER the night I broke my wrist. We spent two hours waiting before a doctor saw me. Then, when my sex marker (F) didn’t match how I currently looked (M) or my name (Ryan), it was another two hours before the doctor came back with x-rays. 

    Sally made a jerk off motion behind the doctor’s back when he left for the second time and refused to meet our eyes. When we were alone, she made the jerk-off motion to me, too.

    “I bet that’s how you broke it. Too aggressive with your sex toys. I know you’re all about sex positivity, but you positively snapped that wrist.” 

    I laughed. Sally and I were quite the pair. I looked like a twelve year old boy before the testosterone shots made my chin sprout fuzz and my body bulk out. Her hormones made her face heart-shaped and gave her breasts. She was thirty-seven, but still dressing like she was in tenth grade and wanted to get the footballer’s attention. 

    I couldn’t blame her. I had broken my wrist trying to impress the local jock at my gym, only to slam backwards and snap against a wall. 

    “You know, you’re right,” I told her. “I was jerking off when I broke this.”

    “Told ya.” 

    I already knew the procedure for broken bones in the Ontario ER system.  After my x-rays, I was supposed to get a cast, but at this rate, I’d be there all night. 

    “You don’t have to stay, you know,” I told Sally. “Thanks for driving me, but I know you have a date.”

    “I do. A pretty date.”

    “The guy with the red car again?”

    “And the scar on his chin. The scar and the car,” she said and laughed. She was dressed in two inch heels and a pink top that matched the highlight of her eyes. When I’d met her in group, she said pink was her favourite colour. No one let her say that before she was thirty five, so she was catching up for lost time. Her nails glittered as she went through the file the doctor left in my stall. She held up my x-ray towards the light, her nails still shimmering.

    “Goddamn. It looks like you fractured this.”

    “Nope. Just a lot of little breaks,” I repeated the doctor’s words. “One of the most common injuries in adults. Not a big deal.” 

    “Yeah, but if you’re not careful, your bones will be all you have. So you gotta take care of ’em. That’s why you always gotta be on hormones. If you ever get your uterus out, you know to take them forever and ever, yeah? Don’t be like me. Don’t cut your balls and run.”

    I didn’t laugh at her joke this time. Her harsh lesson in biology had been her follow up to her favourite colour story in group. She’d gotten an orchiectomy, thinking it was the smart way to rid her body of testosterone. As it turned out, hormones are good for bone growth. And not just menopausal women break their hips. Sally had shattered her hip pelvis when she was thirty-four, three years after removing her nuts without actually transitioning. So when everything was all repaired, metal holding her skeleton together, she figured it was better late than never to start liking the colour pink. 

    “And if, you know, God Forbid we ever die,” she added, her tone just the same as when she asked if I had jerked myself off into this broken wrist, “our bones are gonna be the only things that identify us. So always make sure to check with your dentist. Change your name there first. And everything else, well, die in the proper clothing. And hope to God gender doesn’t’ exist in the goddamn afterlife.”

    “Stop,” I said. 

    “Too dark?”

    “Yeah, kind of. And my head hurts.”

    “You’re probably hungry. I’ll get you a snack.” She dropped the file back down on the counter and came back with a package of chips. We both ate them until the doctor came back and I was casted up. 

    “I have to go, love,” she said. “I have that big date.”

    I waved with my other hand, not in a cast. Sally raised a brow and grabbed a Sharpie from the counter. “Let me leave you with a last laugh,” she said. She wrote something on the back of my cast, something I could barely see without twisting my body all around. 

    “There you are,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”

    “Have a good night.”

    The next day, she was gone. 

    *

    I had theories about what happened to Sally. Most of the happier ones ended up with her living it up with the scar in a brand new car, him paying for her surgeries, and purchasing a mansion in Tahiti. 

    But I knew it was far more likely that the guy had shattered her skull instead. 

    When my cast came off six weeks later, I read about a body found in a local park. The doctor called me in from the waiting room before I could finish the article, so I tucked it under my hoodie and took it with me. 

    “Do you want to keep it?” the technician asked me, holding up my cast. “Sometimes people want to keep it.”

    I was about to say no, when I saw Sally’s writing. She’d signed the cast before leaving.

    I held open my backpack and the technician gave me the remnants of my cast. On the bus home, I read the newspaper about the dead body in the park. No head. No hands. No clothing.

    “It’s her,” I told my roommate. I put the newspaper down on our table, but he barely looked up from his video game. “It’s Sally. The body they found in the park.”

    “How do you know for sure?”

    Because bones were all we had. I didn’t say it aloud. I continued reading the article. The entire body hadn’t been found, and at the rapid rate of decomposition, it wasn’t likely they’d find any other pieces due to scavengers. Her pelvis, the one that she’d shattered and that doctors had to piece back together with metal and screws, must not have been found because there was no mention of tracing the serial numbers. 

    “DNA testing,” a reporter said, “noted that the skeleton belong to a man.”

    My heart sunk. This was Sally, I was sure of it now. I still had a toothbrush from when she’d stayed over and we talked all night. But if I came forward with her DNA, her body would be released back into her family. They would give her back her old name, bury her in a family plot, and call her their Darling Son.

    So I stayed quiet. I wrapped my cast with her last words on it with the newspaper that announced her death and hid it under my bed.

    Six weeks after that, I walked by the local commentary and saw them burying a bunch of bodies in pine boxes. Unnamed, unclaimed by family, and given a pauper’s funeral

    My wrist ached for her again. 

    *

    “You know, you have more masculinity in your pinky finger than most guys I know,” Sally told me in group. This had been after I reiterated the story of my broken home in front of everyone without shedding a tear. Absent father, daddy issues. The standard stuff that therapists wanted to hear about transgender men. 

    And I nailed it. 

    “Thank you,” I said.

    “You know, that’s not a compliment. Masculinity will be the death of this planet. So fragile. It snaps off like it’s nothing and then we’re left picking up the pieces.”

    I paused. My binder cut deep into my chest and I could barely move an inch without pain ricocheting through my body. My D-breasts were sandwiched across me, never moving. And that pain remained me of why I was here. “Masculinity is what I want, though. It’s what I need to pass.”

    “What you want is a body,” Sally said. “New skin. More hair in places you didn’t have it before. A voice. A little less fat off your chest. You don’t want masculinity. Most cis men don’t want masculinity. It’s something thrust upon you.”

    I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t really talk with my binder so tight, anyway. I hoped my silence counted as a response. In most conversations with men, I had learned that it did. 

    “You want to get breakfast?” she asked. “I’m feeling like eggs. I think eggs would be good right now.”

    It was four in the afternoon, but I said yes. We talked all night and into the morning. I laughed harder than I had in weeks. The next day, when I woke up and saw bruises across my chest, I went to the emergency room. 

    “What have you been doing, Rachel?”

    “It’s… Ryan. My name is Ryan.”

    “What have you been doing?” The doctor asked without looking up from the x-rays. “You have four fractured ribs. Has someone been hurting you?”

    “No,” I said. “I’ve just been having fun.”

    *

    “When the hyoid bone, located in the throat,” the medical examiner from TV said, “breaks, it means the cause of death is usually strangulation.”

    I shut off the TV. Another crime drama had paraded out transgender women as set design when talking about a prostitute’s death. Every single episode was the same, all the medical and legal information a rehashed version of the previous episode. When I was twelve, I used to find these shows comforting. Someone was killed. Medical science and detective work found the killer. And they were put away. 

    Now, at twenty-seven, everything seemed to ring hollow. Sally had been dead for months. There was no way anyone would ever find the scar with the car. Even if I came forward, I could barely make a dent in Sally’s case file given what I knew. So I went to bed instead of watching TV. 

    I slept with a hand around my throat. Sick fever dreams that pinned me to the bed. Pressure on my chest, like someone was weighing my breasts down with sandbags. When the bone in my throat–hyoid, hyoid I repeated, named after the Greek word for U–snapped, my body shot awake.

    And Sally stood in front of me.

    Her bare feet didn’t touch the floor. She was made up of light and gossamer, so thin I could see through her body and to the next wall. She wasn’t wearing loud colours or sequins or pink eyeliner. Her hair was short, too brown, and cropped close to her head. She wore a jean collared shirt over jeans. One of the worst cardinal sins of fashion.  

    “Sally?”

    “Ryan. You’ve gotta help me.” Her voice was soft, but dry. She sounded far away; like she was trapped under glass or underwater. “I’m dead.” 

    “I know. I’m sorry.”

    “Shut up. Sympathy is for the weak. I need you to do something.”

    “What?”

    “You have to make me the Skeleton Key.”

    “What?”

    “Skeleton Key,” she repeated, voice softer. Her silhouetted outline disappeared against my bedroom wall. 

    She was gone. Again. 

    I touched my throat and looked at it in the mirror, expecting to find bruises. There was nothing. I stared up at the ceiling, repeating the words in my mind over and over again. Her blue demined madness splashed in front of me. 

    We have genders in the afterlife, I realized. What a cruel, stupid fate.

    I made the jerk off motion with my hand. My wrist smarted from where I’d broken it. My ribs hurt from my binder earlier that day. And my hyoid bone still ached as if it had been snapped in two. 

    Had Sally been choked? I didn’t know. I shouldn’t care how she ended, only how she lived. That had been the motto at group when she disappeared. No one had had a funeral, excerpt for private eulogies we all had in our minds. To everyone else, Sally wasn’t dead. Just gone.

    A ghost.

    I saw her–except not her–in front of me again. How do you get rid of ghosts? I Googled all the options on my phone and only came up with burning the bones, burying the body. None of which seemed to work for her. It wasn’t that Sally was a ghost; it was that she wasn’t the right ghost. 

    Make me the Skeleton Key. That was what she wanted. So I searched up that next. A skeleton key was a master key that could open any door, usually part of a hotel. It was also a novel by Stephen King, who Sally read voraciously.

    “I’m always in waiting rooms for treatments,” she’d say. “So you need a couple hundred thousand words of nonsense from King to keep you going.”

    Her voice was so clear in my mind I started to laugh again. Then I nearly cried when I remembered her rant about Carrie, the girl with telekinetic powers who went to prom. It was evidence that Stephen King was a little bit trans. 

    “What other apparent middle aged man writes a revenge fantasy using period blood and prom as the main M.O.? Come, on,” Sally said. “That’s total Venus envy.” 

    Everything we touched, everything we read, became a little bit trans because we wanted it to be. Before Sally was a ghost, she was always haunting things. 

    So of course our bones were haunted. Of course they were already cursed. If a skeleton key opened all doors, could it also put her soul back together? If I found all of her bones, could I put Sally back together?

    The thought kept me up until morning. Then I went for a drive. 

    *

    I found a metal detector, the kind that beach combers use, from a pawn shop. I brought it to the local park where her body had been found. There were indentations in the grass from the spokes the crime scene unit must have used to put up barriers from the public. When nothing but bottle caps came up in this area, I expanded my search.

    And found tire tracks. From the scar with the car? I wasn’t sure and certainly didn’t know enough about cars to be able to trace the treads. I followed them from a picnic area into the back woods. Months had passed, I told myself. I was unlikely to find anything more but bottle caps again. But the beach comber went off. 

    A screw. Metal, industrial strength. From her pelvis. I followed the beeping and came up with another pile of bones. Her pelvis was shaped like the hyoid bone, only bigger. U-shaped and caked with dirt and metal that kept it intact. Next to the pelvis, I saw scattered bones from a hand. I picked up her pinky and slipped it into my pocket. Warmth flooded me. 

    “Hi, Sally,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

    I put what remained of her hands and other small bones that looked no more than stones into my backpack. Her pelvis slipped from my hands, shattering like it must have done years before. The bone shards fell down into a pattern, then rearranged themselves. They spelled out an address.  

    135 Stevenson Drive. 

    I looked it up on Google Maps. It was a hotel at the edge of town. 

    *

    My car was the only one in the lot. A black man sat at the front desk, a thick red-covered book in front of him. He raised his eyes from the words as soon as I stepped inside. “Hello.”

    “Hi,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m in the right place.”

    “What do you need?”

    “A skeleton key.”

    “Well, I need a skeleton.”

    “A whole one?”

    “A piece of one will do. But your favourite piece.” 

    “I’m… I’m very confused.” The pinky finger in my pocket warmed again. The shards of her pelvis now were too dangerous to handle; I’d barely been able to put them in my backpack without cutting my thumbs to ruins. 

    The man behind the counter, teeth wide like china bowls, smiled.  “You need to open a door and deliver a wandering soul, I’m guessing?”

    I nodded.

    “Good. Find that person’s body. Bring me a little bit o’ bone and I will give you the key to get to the other side. Deliver the rest of the bones to the portal–the door to the next world. Then your person will make it through.” 

    “And she’ll be better there?”

    “What is she like right now?”

    “Angry,” I said. I touched my neck and he didn’t seem fazed by it, like it happened all the time. “She’s also not who she died as.” 

    “Hmmm.” He pondered this a moment. When he set the book he’d been reading down in front of him, I realized it was all blank pages. Nothing there but tiny pin pricks like Braille, expect that the man could see. He looked passed me, through me, down to my very bones themselves. 

    “How did the ghost appear to you?” he asked.

    “As a man. But she’s a woman.”

    “Her bones–“

    “Her bones lied. She is a woman. I know her as one. She knows me as a man.”

    “Are you the only person who knows she’s dead?”

    “I think. Now. But someone found her body and they labeled her wrong.”

    “There you go. Our ghosts are only memories reread too many times until they manifest. So you need to counter the rumours with your facts. You need to bring her back to life.”

    “Can’t I do that by pushing her through the portal? Bringing all of her bones here?” I asked, exhaustion seeping into my tone. I ached and wanted to sleep. I hadn’t gone to my job in two days, and I had no sick days to draw from. “I just want her to rest.”

    “You need to counter with a memory. One that will last. That’s why there are headstones. People read the name. Name stays alive. Right now she’s anonymous. So you need to bring her back.”  

    “Do I do this before or after I send her bones through the portal?” 

    “Either will do. But within twenty-four hours.”

    I glanced at the clock in his office. It said three PM, but it seemed so much later than that. “Okay. I can do that.”

    “Good. Now give me a bone.”

    I took the pinky out of my pocket and handed it over to him. He sniffed it and smashed it into dust. It fell into the book and dissolved into the pages. His eyes turned to black orbs. 

    “Thank you. You can go.” 

    “But the key–you haven’t given me anything.” 

    “You need her skeleton. She is the key.” He drew his pen and wrote down several words. “Here is the address. Bring her bones there and give her a headstone. Then she will be free.”

    *

    When I was nine, my father threw me down the stairs. I broke my first two toes and fractured my shin. As I waited with my mother in the ER, I started to see spots. We learned that he’d also cracked my skull, like he’d cracked my mother’s years before. 

    The doctor who saw me was kind and spoke in an even voice. He told me random facts about this hospital, about the X-Men when he noticed my T-shirt, and then random facts about bones. Anything he could think of to keep me awake, so I didn’t fall asleep and never wake up. 

    “You know,” he said. “When you’re born, you have almost three hundred bones. As you grow up, you get fewer, right down to two hundred and six. “

    As I waited out my concussion, I also waited for my body to get bigger so I could break less. Instead, Social Services were finally called and my father was locked up. 

    I became the man of the house, then. 

    “Your father was awful,” Sally said when I told her my version of the story. “You don’t deserve to think of awful people. They’ll shrink and shrink and shrink out of your life if you don’t think about them. The good times will grow and grow and grow.” 

    My shins ached again, like they had when I was nine, as I dug up Sally’s body. Her grave was in the corner of the cemetery with little lightning and virtually no presence. It was dark enough, and warm enough at night now, so I could do this and not be caught. 

    At around midnight, I cracked open her casket and took out all the bones. I still had her hands from the park and her pelvis in a thousand pieces. The pinky had been used to pay her way. I had everything I needed… except for her head. 

    I ached as if it’d been split open. Could I get away without having her skull? Surely I had enough. As I stacked her bones up in my backpack, I worried that she’d be forced to live her life as a headless horseman, haunting the playground and warning little children about the dangers of gender.  

    The address the man at the hotel had given me was an hour away in the middle of a lake. When no boat rental place was open, I hacked the locks, grabbed a boat, and sped out into the middle of the lake. 

    I dropped each one down and counted them up. The din of the mosquitoes sounded inside my head, but none of them bit me, as if I was protected by something.  By the time I’d reached the end of the backpack, I tilted it open and scattered her bone dust on the surface. It dissolved. The water was blacker than the night around me. Nothing happened for a long time as I waited for the crushing feeling of my chest to disappear.

    The lake started to bubble. White mixed with the black surface. And Sally’s bones rose to the top. Her femur, her ribcage, and sections of her hands. They all floated. 

    “Oh no,” I cried out. 

    Sally’s jokes about her osteoporosis and how she was like a flightless bird thanks to her hollow bones rolled around in my mind. “Call me ostrich. Call me emu. If I keep eroding, maybe one day I’ll fly away.”

    I started to sob.

    “Sink, sink. Please go away. Please sink down.” 

    I paddled back to the shoreline and found rocks, flat black ones used to skip across the surface. I dug through the sand, ravenous and desperate for something heavy to weight her body down and get her to the portal. The more I dug, the more I felt something take over my body. Dirt clung to my nails. My skin split on the rocks. I uncovered a stone so white, so pristine I thought it wasn’t real.

    I pulled out a skull from the sand on the shore. A skull with a small bullet hole in its centre, like the plug of a basin that let life slip through. I held Sally’s skull in my hand and sighed. 

    “I have all of you now.” 

    I filled her skull with rocks to weigh it down and got back into the boat. In the centre of the lake, I dropped her into the water. The skull cracked. More bones, tiny and numerous like a baby’s, flew everywhere.

    But she started to go down. Down and down and down into the water, Sally disappeared. 

    The lake was black again and still. The humming of mosquitoes turned to the humming of music. 

    I still had one last piece to solve. 

    *

    “You know,” Sally said. “I don’t think I want surgery anymore.”

    We lay back on the car from the scar she was dating. Cherry red, hood long and flat. The two had had sex on it, but she still thought it was better for lounging than fucking. 

    “So why go to group?” I asked. “Therapy is only there so you can talk out your demons before the knife cuts you open and repurposes the flesh.”

    “Oh, creative. Since when did you become the Adam from clay?”

    “Since the doctors promised to make me but forgot to breathe life into me.”

    “You see, that’s why I don’t want surgery. I already have a life. I’m full of it.” Sally grinned and nudged my shoulder. “And I really think I have found someone who likes my body the way it is.”

    “A fuck on the hood of the car is hardly a vow.” 

    “Yeah, but I don’t want to be a wife.” 

    “What do you want to be?” I asked. “I mean who. Who do you want to be?”

    “Sally. That’s it. I don’t ask for much.” 

    All I thought of was how hard it was for me to be Ryan. Sally could forgo surgery, but she had an option. I could only have a penis crafted out of the skin of my thigh, called a franken-dick by most other trans men in group. I could only ever dream of having something I could reject. I always had to take whatever was handed to me. 

    “But you know,” Sally went on, “I also go to group for you. Where else would I get such cutting commentary about the state of men?”

    “The scar doesn’t talk?”

    “Oh, God no. Why would he? Masculinity makes them silent. Please learn from those mistakes.”

    I told her I would try. I knew those mistakes were the ones that had knocked me down stairs and broke my toes. Crushed my ribs and left me with purple bruises everywhere. Two weeks after the conversation on the scar’s car, I’d be in the hospital with a broken arm. 

    I’d always break myself to make myself feel whole. 

    And Sally would be dead.

    Both of us never fucking learned. 

    *

    When Sally’s body was under the water, I rowed to the shore. I picked up the piece of paper the man at the hotel had given me and a pen from the bottom of my backpack. I wrote down Sally’s name. Her date of birth (give or take) and added that her favourite colour was pink. Hot pink. 

    I floated the paper into the water. Watched it dissolve. I checked the black water. 

    Nothing moved. 

    When it wasn’t enough, I picked up my phone and called Sally’s answering machine. There was still enough space. I listed off all the bones that I had broken and what I had learned from each one. Shin, toes, skull, ribcage, wrist, hyoid (if only in a dream). I was still talking when an orb of white light appeared in the middle of the pond. The light constituted itself, piece by piece, until Sally was formed.

    She wore the same sequined top in bright pink she had on when she disappeared. Her hair was the same shade of bottled-blonde and down to her shoulders. She had no shoes, but her toes were painted in pink. 

    She waved at me. I waved at her. The wave turned into the jerking off motion, and I finally hung up the phone.

    “Thank you,” she said. “What a fucking relief.” 

    “I hate that the after world has genders. This is the worse lottery I’ve ever seen.”

    She laughed, loud and throaty. It made the water ripple towards me. 

    “It sucks, but you do what you can. Remember what I said, right?”

    I nodded. 

    “Good. ‘Cause I gotta go,” she said. “Never fall in love with men and their cars. And always speak up. Something else, too. Make my last words good, bro.” 

    I waited until she disappeared under the water again. When I couldn’t breathe, I thought I’d been choked again. Tears stung my face instead. I reached into my bag and pulled out the cast from my arm. 

    I left it in the hollow from where I’d dug up her skull. Her signature faced the dawn as it crept up over the trees along the lake. Water lapped at its surface, dissolving into nothing but dust.

    END