trans.monster

character creation screen

by raziel 'nervwrack' plata

• the informed consent form for feminizing hormone therapy sits
• an arm’s length away
• from my bedroom chair
• i can see it in my periphery
• [but i know it’s looking straight at me]

• the capillaries in my chest are becoming a rubber band ball
• pulling itself together from the outside in

• my brain feels like its being picked from a list of rotating outfits in a videogame
• a view-master of people
• and i click, click, click
• trying to find the one i’m supposed to be
• in any current moment

A New Kind of Creature

by Sophie Mutiara Nova‍

They told me I wouldn’t survive the apocalypse. That I’d be one of the first ones out.

‍How could I run from danger if I was always grasping for my inhaler?  The world as it was had no time for the weak. The world now had nothing for us. It wanted us all dead. Especially those who nearly died just from running.

But they didn’t kill me. God, some people probably wished they could. ‍

But the monster got them first.‍

The monsters were true apex predators. They craved the hunt, craved for the fast and strong. They ignored me, passing me over for the bright and shiny young things, the magazine-pretty things. They were like dogs turning to the loudest birds first in the field. They went for the ones with the biggest guns. The biggest tanks. The survivalists and conspiracists and the power players. The ones who yelled and screamed and fought the most got cut down first. They ignored the invisible ones, the cull from the herd. I was used to hiding anyways.‍

How could I find safety in numbers if I was the freak? The odd one out?

‍If you don’t have friends—you don’t have enemies. ‍

When the apocalypse came. It gave me some perverse reason to keep going. I stopped thinking about dying. Just…just…

I worked from home already. I ran a call center, working remotely helping people find out how to turn off their computers and turn them on again. I was used to the isolation-- so it didn’t make me go insane like it did some people. I spent the whole first year hiding in my basement. Somehow, the internet still worked. The ones in power couldn’t cut it before the creatures swarmed. My face was lit by the blue of the computer screen. Binary code. Ones and zeroes streaming across an empty face, my eyes reflecting the hope that someday, somebody would reply to the endless messages I sent out. But also, secretly hoping nobody would. Because I yearned to be alone. To be safe.

I thought I was a zero, now I was just a one. ‍

And my one every waking thought was of the creatures.

**‍

The creatures slither within the walls. They reach through floorboards and their skin is like mirrors, reflecting the world around them perfectly and imperfectly. I cut open a can of crushed tomatoes, drinking the juice first then chewing on the pulp. I smile in the mirror—mirror just like the creatures’ skin. My teeth are stained red.

I wipe my lips and get up, first pushing myself to scraped hands then equally scraped knees. It’s silent. It’s nice in the silence. I don’t mind the creatures and their mirrors so much. It’s better than the eyes of other humans in some ways.

You can look at mirrors, but mirrors can’t look back at you. They can’t threaten you in parking lots or follow you home because you don’t look how you’re supposed to look to an elder folk who believes some people wear dresses and some people wear pants, and any other category of person just never existed at all. In parking lots where groups of girls called me slurs as I walked in holding the hand of my then-boyfriend who pretended he was tough but was secretly terrified of being called a bundle of sticks and twigs. He did nothing to defend me. He was stone-faced when I cried.

I wonder if he was stone-faced when they ate him alive.

The creatures don’t care what I look like or what I wear. They’re just hungry, thirsty, bored, but never sleepy. I envy them that—not sleeping. Without sleep, you don’t have dreams. Nightmares.

I empathize with these creatures. I too get hungry, thirsty, and sometimes, bored. I miss people sometimes. I miss the rare ones. The kind ones. The ones whose smiles reached their eyes. The ones who told off the creeps who followed me too closely in parking lots saying, “what are you? what are you?” like broken toy dogs sold at 0.99 cent stores because they can’t tell immediately what’s beneath your waistline. The friends who said: “I see you, do you see me?” and they meant it.

I settle against a wall, just to breathe. To take my inhaler and some medication (there’s a pharmacy you can get to that was overrun early with creatures. If you go through the bread aisle—you can cut right through the back without the creatures ever knowing you’re there). My lungs feel cooler, looser now. I exhale softly into the night air, mist past my lips.

Suddenly—the night air moves. I press my fingers in a little. I feel flesh. Smooth, kind of cooler than regular human skin. Like the skin of a reptile.

My reflection flickers as the creature readjusts. It does not stare—how can it? It has no eyes to stare, no mouth to hurl invectives from. It simply readjusts, then settles in again. My hand trails on mirrored flesh. I wonder how the creatures see our world. I never got close enough to find out…

…until now.

I breathe in, breathe out. The creature hardly moves at all. I wonder if it breathes. If it has to… “Hello.” I whisper.

The creature sighs, or I think it does.

I press my hand further into its skin. It does not flinch. It simply embraces. It feels like wearing leather gloves.

I remember wearing leather gloves once. I wore them to a party. It was New Years and my friend, Xan, he had come out to his parents. And I hugged him when he cried. When I helped him cut his hair, with a flurry of curled ringlets on the floor. A smoothness taking shape. We laughed together as we both put on leather. Trying to look like characters out of the Matrix, because if the real world didn’t have room for us. Perhaps the fictional ones would. I remember how oddly cool and hot the leather felt. How freeing…

Xan is alive somewhere. He has to be. Fictional characters don’t die.

The leather creature slides up my wrists. My arms. It cools my elbows, blocks my chest from the wind. I look down. It feels like pressure, the nice kind. The kind that holds you in and keeps the rest of the world out.

“Hello.” I whisper again. And the creature rumbles.

It stops, the skin pausing before it passes my neck. I look down at my body, a thrill running through me, a nervousness to see my transformation. I cannot see anything at all. The creature’s body, in enveloping my own, its skin acts as an invisible cloak. Hiding me from the rest of the world. But I am still myself, despite the creature’s barrier. I am not gone, simply transformed. Simply. Different.

The skin slides past my neck, up toward my ears, silky as a kiss above my lips.

“Thank you.”

The night sky looks so different when viewed through oblivion.

**

I did not survive the apocalypse.

I became it.

I stare at the blinking cursor on the computer, the creature enjoys the cool blue light. I see someone write back, answering a message I sent a week ago. I smile.

“Xan?”