[ Mention of histories of sexual violence
& suicidal ideation ] Sometimes to break the surface means breath. I plunge a 1.5-inch needle into my ass and shoot Depo-Estradiol because I love me, the woman in the mirror, rising. Crystal K. is a queer trans writer, chapbooks editor at Newfound, and author of the novel Goodnight. Their flash and poetry have appeared in Passages North, Peach Mag, [PANK], Hobart, Anomaly, and elsewhere. Crystal has attended the Tin House Workshop and been nominated for Best of the Net. They write RPGs at Feverdream Games. Connect in Twitter and Instagram.
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The white guy in the hoodie looks like a shooter. He deadeyes me in the bathroom mirror. Hollow? Blank? Neither describes his face—my face.
“I’m being bad, daddy,” my girl brats from the bedroom. The beige carpet across our college-town rental swims with fleas, so being together means forgetting our legs. We play as if without histories as survivors of sexual violence, beyond good and evil. That mine is the hand of punishment widens the gap. Discomfort claws under my cheekbones, down into my arm, and raises the phone to my head. I selfie the blank, or the blank selfies me. “Daddy’s coming, baby,” says the man, doubled in my hands. I’m a hot vessel, a feast of blood. I say nothing about the selfie. I carry him to bed. . . . On a bench outside Graduate Fiction, National Book Award winner Tim O’Brien points a lit Carlton 100s nub at my printed story and says, “Read it to my wife. We laughed at the jokes.” With an anemic smile, all I can say is, “Wow.” Minutes later, he tells me to read a paragraph to the class, and I follow orders: “I want to shoot through glass. I mean my body and I mean the hallway window on the seventh floor of the campus library so that I can lace up my running shoes and work my shanks up to a healthy stride. The pane must bow some, like breath into a blower wand before the bubble bursts—and, in my daydreams, it does, not like a hunter’s rifle-crack across the valley (hit me, please) but with a tinkle of magic, Transformation, my pale hands and face done by that point, baloney shreds—away we go, flapping bye-bye.” Silence says my classmates have proof at last. I’m unhinged, and the workshop critiques Fiction. Cries for Help should be directed to the counselling center. I should drop out, but less loudly. Tim lifts his cap. Grimacing—grinning?—up at the fluorescents, he scratches his bald head. His judgements often swing wild—a year-long labor slain, a first draft praised. Any story about kids moves him to tears. My narrator would die before birthing anything others might call beautiful. “That’s good writing,” he says, and I adopt him as my literary father figure forever after. “The plot devolves, but …” Something about stakes and emotional registers. My previous instructors have been clear. I will never write evocative stories. Yet, my real pain masked as fiction is being praised? I’m unsure if this means I can live. . . . Hopelessly scrolling through goatees and receding hairlines for an author photo, I find the bathroom selfie—selfies. I’d shot myself nine times. My bare chest gleams under a gray hoodie, loosely zipped. I could describe me in the nearly identical photos as neutral, but each blank face screams. Six years post-MFA, I’ve published my first story, about my Appalachian “hillbilly” dad who ran away at 13 from a physically abusive father. My thesis based on his furious life, Inheritance, was an epic defeat. Six years and 500+ pages collapsed into a 3-page flash titled “Trophies.” When we were kids, my brother and I assumed Dad exaggerated the violence of his stories to entertain us—like his attempt to shoot a teacher who’d hit him. After school, had the 11-year-old truly shouldered a rifle with a chestnut stock and sighted the man rounding a hill on horseback? Aiming to kill, he’d fired three bullets. The teacher’s hat sailed off, and his horse galloped so fast, he’d cartoonishly clutched the mane for dear life. We laughed with Dad. The teacher never touched him again, the point being self-respect. Fed Dad’s stories, my little brother grew into a big Green Beret. And me? In retelling his victories, all I’d mouthed was bitter, grief. I meet Dad’s beefy face in the selfies, and I wonder about the compulsion to capture us, hope that the camera would see what my eyes couldn’t. I wonder about the correlation between growing out my facial hair and my depression. I wonder about victory while I delete them, all but one—proof of lineage, a failed draft toward a better story. . . . “Who is the speaker?” a friend asks about my 26-page essay on Chris Kraus’s book I Love Dick—how she wields vulnerability and makes autofiction of herself. The “objective” essayist voice obliterates me, and generously the question backspaces my life. I cut away the academese, everything but the personal “asides.” Fourteen drafts later, word count 800, there’s me—a bi femme of trans experience, cowering behind the cardboard cutout of cis-het masculinity. They’re not safe, yet. How do I coax the kid? I write as if my life depends on it. . . . A white guy emails after missing day one of my Senior Seminar in Fiction, and I reply within minutes, but the message bounces due to an Outlook error on his end. The next morning, I open a three-paragraph rant for “ignoring him.” He’s read the syllabus and deems my reading list “radical left.” Might I connect him with a classmate that “is occasionally not a completely arrogant faggotcunt”? He makes it clear he has access to a firearm. He closes, “Love.” The email is so loud, my eyes glaze over. I forward it to my department chair to drop the kid. “It’s only obscenity,” the chair says, and by university PPS, I must conference with the student. Campus police will stand by, as if that makes me feel safer. Red-goateed, he scowls in his roster photo. Already, I can hear his reductive workshop feedback. I can’t sit across a classroom facing this kid for four months, and I’m made to feel I have no choice. The day of the conference, a tall white man looms outside my office door. I uncap my sharpest pen for a Dad-style defense, and daydream that my brother helicopters down with his M4 assault rifle. With a nod of acknowledgment, the plainclothes officer squats into a hallway chair, roughing his comb over as if a younger man in trouble. Waiting behind my desk, I think about white masculine rage and the kid’s Gmail, MattzZz1927—the year Hitler’s speaking ban was lifted, Google says. I can’t shake the feeling that an evil version of a former self coming to kill me is a type of suicide. I need a hero who isn’t. Could any story I tell end him? . . . Sometimes to break the surface means breath. I plunge a 1.5-inch needle into my ass and shoot Depo-Estradiol because I love me, the woman in the mirror, rising. Disassociation is a common pre-transition symptom, I’ve learned. Facing the camera for my first HRT anniversary selfie, I’m grateful for the light in my eyes, something like a soul. Did I die that day of the confrontation, and this is the afterlife? Yes, in someone else’s story. I’m writing to tell you I made it out alive. |