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Think back to when you were little. You’re watching your favourite TV show. The volume is low, so as not to disturb your dad upstairs. You know if he hears you or finds out you’ve invited a boy over he would break your nose again, but it’s worth the risk because this show. Man, this show, it’s everything to you; there’s something about it that makes you feel a little less alone, a little less smaller in an already small town where no one lives. You’re born and die here. Not you though. You know you’d die if you stayed. So you run away to Phoenix. You change your name. You sleep in cheap hotels. You work at Build a Bear, telling yourself it’s not forever. Forever is shorter than you remember. Years cut down to the seconds.
You blink.
You turn 19, 20, 21…
You try to remember the TV show you used to watch with the boy who was two years younger than you. There was something about him, you don’t know what it is but you know that the two of you were meant to meet. That there was a heart-shaped hole inside of his chest like yours.
You try to remember the TV show you watched every Saturday night and it’s…it’s your memories being played back to you. You’re not you. You never were.
You watch the final episode. The protagonists reunite after years of being apart, only ever being able to communicate in a realm that wasn’t quite real and wasn’t quite a dream either. You called it Sleepaway Camp. Only, you’re staring at the back of your head on the TV screen and you know that’s not you, it’s like standing in front of a mirror with another mirror at the back of you and there’s an infinite number of yous spanning out in front of you, and you think: is that what I look like from behind? Is this how everyone sees me? And it’s all too much - the staring, the eyes that aren’t eyes but reflections staring back at you, thousands of them, a thousand of yous that aren’t yous, share the same troubled look. You look behind you, half expecting another you to be standing there. The light from the fish tank makes the wallpaper look like it’s bloated gut full of water. The wallpaper peels away from the walls.
When you look back, the you that isn’t you is gone, and the Henchmen have buried the other protagonist in the ground.
It feels almost poetic to be buried in the place you first met.
The bad guy wins. He’s not supposed to win. You’ve spent your whole life with this weight on your chest and now you know it’s the weight of the soil sealing you in, packing you in tight.
You said you’d die if you ever stayed.
You almost did.
You unplug the TV set from its sockets and haul it outside. You do not care how much noise you make, not this time. Nothing can be overheard from the sound of rising static. The TV screen is filled with it. You look closer. No. Not static. Maggots. Their fat, pale bodies squirm their way into every hole of the corpse they are on. You can’t see whose it is.
But you know, don’t you? You’ve known this entire time.
The boy. He died too. Or is dying. There was a hole next to yours, somewhere. You clawed your way out. You called out his real name. Isabel . Even if she could hear you, you’re not sure if she’d answer to the name.
There are more ways to die than there are ways to live. You can live and still be dead. You can live and carry the weight of a dead girl’s name on your tongue. You can live and have her limp, tangled body holed up in your ribcage. And you’re the one that killed her. Not Marco, not Polo, not Mr. Melcoholney. You killed her without even drawing blood, by denying her existence, by refusing to make room for her - make room for her? This is her home. It has always been her home. You’re the intruder. What do you call a haunting, when neither of you are ghosts? Is that not what this is? Are you not taking possession of a body that isn’t yours in the first place? Why are you holding onto something that never belonged to you? Bury it. Seal it in. Tight. Tighter than that. Come on, like you’re holding too much breath. Like you’re stuffing your shirt full of wads of tissue. Like you’re squeezing into a dress that was not made for you.
This isn’t you. Her memories are spilling over into yours, like a birthday cake with too many candles. Focus . It started in an empty cafeteria. The tables were upside down. The only light came from the vending machine selling overpriced gushers and capri-suns. Your mum was still alive, you could still feel the lingering warmth of her hand on the small of your back. She was always pushing you forward, towards what you’re not sure. You sometimes wonder if your life would’ve been different if she had lived and dad had died in her place. It’s a terrible thought, you know. It doesn’t stop you from thinking about it anyway. Once, after your mum had died, you caught him staring past you at a young boy and his father playing catch in the local park. The little boy had a backwards cap on and skinned knees, and a smile that was so wide it looked uncomfortable. You stared at your knees, clear of any cuts, scrapes, and grass stains.
Damn it, Isabel. You’re doing it again. I can’t think with all of this noise.
Sorry.
Stop saying sorry.
Sorry.
Start again. We were in a grocery store. We hadn’t seen each other for years.
I thought you were dead.
You thought I was dead. It was night. You were in the vegetable aisle. They were stacked neatly behind you, lined up like those plastic, green toy soldiers. They were larger than I remember. You threw yourself around me and it was the first time I had allowed myself to be touched in years. It felt like. Like. I don’t know. Right. I didn’t hug you back. I think I had forgotten how to. My arms hung uselessly at my sides. I said we needed to talk. You said okay. I said I know a place. You said okay. Wait, let me just - and you took your shopping trolley back. You always wanted to do the right thing. The correct thing. Even when no one was watching.
***
The bar was bleeding red and the bass was heavy around us. It was like being inside a still beating heart.
I’ll tell you everything. I need to ask you something first.
Does your mum know that you’re alive? (and would you replace her, if you could
I need to ask you something first.
Okay. Okay. What do you need to ask me?
Do you remember a TV show we used to watch together? It was called The Pink Opaque.
Of course I remember the pink opaque it’s my favourite TV show of all time. Always will be. That’s all you wanted to ask me
No. I guess what I mean is, when you think back on watching The Pink Opaque how do you remember it?
How do I… remember it?
Yeah. Do you remember it as just a TV show?
Yeah. I remember it as a TV show. The Pink Opaque was a TV show. We watched it in your basement on Saturday nights. Ten thirty to eleven PM. Remember? The last show before the young adult network switched to black-and-white reruns for the night.
Don’t stray from the script. Every word, every hitch of a breath, was word-for-word what she had said a decade ago, before he had broken his promise to her, before she had left, vowing to never come back again. And yet - and yet . Here she was. He didn’t know it at the time, but she was here for him - no, she was here for her.
Yeah… are you sure? Are you sure that’s all it was?
There’s that feeling again - a weight on his chest, slowly crushing him. He runs his tongue over the back of his front teeth. It tastes like dirt.
When you think of The Pink Opaque, do you ever get confused? Like, maybe the memory isn’t quite right. Like, does time ever feel like it’s not moving normally? Like it’s all out of whack. Like you’re narrating your own life, watching it in front of you, like an episode of television? Do you ever have a hard time distinguishing what happened in the show and what happened in real life?
Like somehow the memories got jumbled around?
The lights flicker from red to blue. The artist on the stage has painted their face white. Their hair is blacker than the night, standing up on the ends. It reminds you of thorns. Of something that catches.
You’re wrong.
What?
What.
You’re wrong about me. About who you think I am. I’m not - I’m.
You’re not what?
A Pink Opaque.
You can’t even say it.
I’m not one of them. I’m not you.
What am I?
You’re fucking wr—
The tape cassette chews out another scene: you’re bent over the bathtub. Your father’s hand is on the back of your neck. You barely make out the sound of your father’s voice over the shower head being turned on.
That stuff is for girls. You ain’t a girl, are ya? You ain’t some pansy.
Steam fills the room. You are baptised in water hotter than Hell’s larva.
When you look up, it isn’t your father standing there. It’s a black hole. The room is shaking, and you shake with it and the tiles are the first to go, clipped off of the floor like the ends of nails. Everything else follows, but not you. You kneel at his feet, staring into the black abyss. You wonder if this is the man your mum fell in love with. If she too had no other choice but to hold on to what was left and wait for him to take what little remained of her after the cancer had taken so much already. If maybe, your dad had mistaken what was inside of you for a tumour; something to be dissected and removed.
You didn’t say that to her - did you? No. You wouldn’t. Time is skipping ahead again, like a stone skimming across a river. You follow the ripples.
You’re in a bar - no, you’re on a football field. You’re clutching at an axe. You’re wearing a a silk, purple dress that kisses your knees, and do not blame you for not being skimmed. You’re barefooted. The grass is wet with dew drops. It is night. It is always night. You do not know where Tara is. You know she’s not far. She’s never far. You turn the axe’s handle in your hands. It is a comforting weight. You do not know what you’re looking for, but you’ll know when you see it.
You’ll know.
***
You’re outside of the bar. You’re staring at the back of Isabel, who had walked miles in the rain, at night to come to yours, under the guise that she was having a sleepover at her friend’s. At the time, your world consisted only of your mum, dad and your best friend Miranda. It was a small world but it was yours and you held on to it with bloody fists. Then came Isabel, soaked to the bone,
clutching her purple sleepover bag under her arm. She was so polite . Your mum would’ve loved her, if they ever met. She would’ve said, “and why can’t you be more like your friend?” and Isabel, God. Isabel . She would’ve been so pleased . You admit she irritated you at first. She was like a scratch that was always out of reach.
Then she sat down on the floor, her face blushing purple from the TV screen and you watched how she leaned in close, so close her nose was touching the open credits and you knew, then, that she was like you. Time was slower, then. We wasted our youth wishing to be adults, then when we are we wish to be young again; to know the slow, hazy Summer heat of the school holidays, and feel the burn of asphalt on the back of your knees from sitting on the sidewalk for too long, chasing ice-cream running down the sides of your cone and over your hands, to know the stickiness of child’s hands, to know ache of growing pains and the feeling of probing at the gap in your mouth where your tooth once was. You think you have all the time in the world, and then you don’t.
Then you’re taking your piercing out for a job you told yourself you could never see yourself doing and ironing your work uniform with the shower’s steam in a cheap hotel room with black mould in the corners and trying to sleep on the side with fewer strings poking up through the mattress. You’re still counting the days away, then, worrying about when your next payslip will come if you have enough food for the rest of the week and if it is healthy to cut the ugly, black blotches on the vegetables to make your third stir-fry that week because you promised yourself you’d try and eat healthier.
And still, still it’s better than that basement. Because here you can change your name however many times as you want, and no one will question it. Here you can cut your hair short with a pair of blunt kitchen scissors and your mum won’t cry about how you had such beautiful, long hair as a little girl. Here, people won’t call you girl. They’ll call your dyke and faggot and butch and battyboy and bulldagger but they won’t call you by your birth name. You raise your chin a little higher, you see above it all. And you see her. Isabel. Living in the same house, the house that she never called her home, the house where her mum died, where her dad died and you think: is she going to die in there too? And the thought stays with you like Hubba Bubba stuck to the roof of your mouth. You wait until it's the two of you. The sound of the fish tank’s filter dulls the frayed edges of your nerves, and you ask her what did she think of The Pink Opaque. You see how hard she is trying, the words aren’t quite right and she confuses the character’s names but she’s trying; she hasn’t got the language for it yet, but she still comes back the next Sunday and the next Sunday and the Sunday after that.
They blur together like a heat wave. One day you’re looking down at her, and the next she’s leaning awkwardly above you, like she’s not quite sure what to do with the rest of her body parts. She’s standing in your bedroom. She’s barefooted, after abandoning her shoes at the bottom of the basement so her movements are light, so as not to make a sound. Your dad isn’t home tonight, but habits are hard to kill and even harder to let go off, so the two of you tip-toe your way upstairs. By now she knows which of the floorboards are loose.
I have a dress like Isabel’s special dress, you tell her. You don’t question it when she follows you, almost tripping over the back of your heels. You don’t question it when she holds the silk, purple fabric in her hands and rubs her thumb over it in calming circles or when she touches it to her cheek.
It’d feel better if you shaved, you tell her. She doesn’t reply, only holds it to her cheek a little longer and nods - not enough for it to be called a nod, the act alone makes her feel like she was agreeing to more than this and she wasn’t ready, not yet.
There’s still time.
You can try it on, if you like, you tell her. You train your voice to sound casual. Not too eager. Not too pushy.
She nods, fully this time and retreats into the bathroom.
***
And you’re you again, Isabel. You’re you. Tara was infuriatingly right. She was born knowing you before you even knew yourself, and the thought terrifies you and excites you at the same time. You’re staring at yourself, and for the first time, you meet your gaze.
The cassette tape jutters. Spits. You’re standing in front of the mirror of your parent’s mirror. There are two toothbrushes in the holder, one pink and one blue. Dark, sunken circles hang below your eyes. Your lips are dry and chapped. You’ve missed a patch of hair when shaving this morning. You scratch it with your bitten-down nails. A piece of your cheek comes off. It is black and rotting.
“Owen?” Wife calls out from the hallway, “You’re going to be late for work.” Late. You can’t be late. You’ve never been late your entire life.
You open your mouth to call back and choke. Something is stuck in your throat. You cough, splutter and spit into the sink. Dirt. You’re coughing up dirt and something blue. You turn on the tap, watch the water turn blue then brown and swirl down the drain, swallowed and gulped.
You stumble out of the bathroom, and into the hallway. Wife is nowhere to be seen. You slowly make your way downstairs, holding the banister the entire time, scared that if you let go you’ll fall and keep falling. You enter the kitchen. Everything is the same as when you were little, only there is double the amount of cutlery and dishes and plastic cups with plastic lids on them.
“Daddy!” Child 2 cheerfully announces, turning in their high chair and raising their pudgy fists. They have no eyes. No nose. No mouth to speak from.
Wife turns to you. She is wearing a purple dress, only hers stops below her knees and is a button-up. It is partly hidden by an apron, tied tightly around her waist, so as not to lose it in all of that fabric.
She smiles - or, you think she’s smiling. There’s no face on her either, only an outline of a pair of bright pink lips.
She takes Child 2 from their high chair and rests them on her hip. “Have a good day at work, handsome,” she leans in and touches her face to his cheek. It is hard. It smells like varnish. Like the inside of a coffin.
“Say goodbye to your daddy!” she raises Child 2 to his face. Child 2 has a headful of golden locks. They look like a porcelain doll, their skin is pale and poreless. They’re dressed in frills and bows and bits of lace. They must be a girl.
“Bye daddy!” Girl shrieks obediently.
There’s a tug on your trousers. You look down and Child 1 is looking up at you expectedly. They are dressed in a blue blazer, a blue tie, blue shorts and white, knee-high socks and leather, pointed shoes.
“Father,” Boy says smartly, holding out his hand. You take it. His hand is lost in yours.
Wife sighs, licking the end of her thumb and cleaning off a bit of jam in the corner of Boy’s mouth.
“Always so messy,” she tuts. She looks at you and shrugs. “What can you do, hm? Boys will be boys.”
When you leave, the Family leaves with you. They stand in line on the outside porch, waving you goodbye. You look in the rear mirror of your car and see a black hole. You reverse back into the bins. You do not break. You keep driving until they’re a dot in the distance. Until they’re nothing.
Not for the first time, you think of Maddy. Not for the first time, you think about what would’ve happened if you had gone with her if you had followed her to Phoenix. What was there for you now that your mum was gone? You told yourself you were staying for your dad, that he needed you. That he needed his son ( he never had one in the first place ).
You think about how your life would’ve been different if you hadn’t stayed. Maddy and you would’ve been living out of vending machines, trading one cheap motel for another and finding work in even smaller towns than the ones you grew up in. You would’ve tried on different names to see which suited the other the most and pretend to be each other’s partner until it wasn’t pretending anymore. You would’ve been happy. You could’ve been happy.
The signs ahead say:
FIND HER.
You don’t how you know, but you know: it’s not talking about Maddy.
You clutch the wheel. You stare straight ahead. You do not think about the black hole in the back seat.
***
You’re being called into your boss’ office. He’s younger than you, you’re not sure by how much but you know it’s a lot because he’s still chipper. Still has that little bounce in his step and calls everyone pet names like amigo or buddy or pal.
“What’s this, bud?” he asks. It looked like your inventory for that week - same format, heading, and there was even your name signed at the bottom.
Only, it wasn’t inventory. It was a gargle of ink on cheap fax paper.
“I- I don’t know, the fax machine it. It must’ve-” you tried to explain, but couldn’t. They hadn’t been like that before when he retrieved them from his fax machine at home and double, triple checking that everything was in order before laying them down on his boss’ desk an hour before his shift started. He had even used the good paper - the kind that would bend and had a shine to them, not this thin, almost transparent sh- stuff.
He had always been so careful.
His whole life he had always been so careful.
“This isn’t the only one,” he says, turning and bringing over a stack of paper, each seeping in ink.
He spread them across his desk. “What is this, some kind of…tampon? Is this meant to be funny, Owen?”
“It’s not a tampon.” You whispered. “It’s a ghost.”
***
You’ve always liked the quiet, solitude of the dark room. The in-between place where you’ve taken something you’ve captured of the outside world and brought it into the darkness to be processed, developed and carefully crafted to narrate the story you want to tell. It must be done in the darkness. So much as a crack of light from a door, opening too soon will destroy everything.
***
You stand in the middle of the ball pit.
At first, you feel a little stupid. You’re a grown man lying at the bottom of a ball pit, when you should be home with your wife and kids and complaining about your aches and pains and the pot hills the council still hasn’t filled. But you’re not. You’re here instead. So you wait, and you wait, until it stops feeling stupid, and you swallow your pride and shame and fear and guilt. You wait, until the floor beneath you stops feeling like a floor, isn’t hard or concrete under the flat of your palm, until it feels like you’re floating, like you could be anywhere and the sound of the machines meld together to a consistent hum. Until it all turns to static. Until you are nothing but a body. But blood and meat. But a network of nerves and organs, cushioned in by muscles. But decay. But bones.
What if they bury me under the wrong name?
And the thought is so sudden, it jerks you like a fish on a hook and leaves you gasping for air.
But who’ll choose the clothes I’ll be buried in?
You push on the back of your elbows, ignoring the dull, fuzzy feeling in your legs and try and stand up but you can’t. The balls weigh heavy on your chest, and you're trying to grasp hold of them and your hand cramps and seizes.
You’re getting old, Isabel.
***
You were little the first time you sat under a parachute, stripped blue and pink. You stood up, reaching out to touch the ceiling. It was the closest you ever came to to feeling tall. You ran a hand over its sides, watching the colour of your skin change from blue to pink to blue again.
You were a teenager, still growing, when you sat under an inflatable planetarium. A room full of plastic and air. A fake space that will inevitably fall into themselves and suck the air in around them. Fake spaces kept standing by the pumping of air. Fake spaces with colours and stars and the strange feeling of being enclosed. You wonder if this is what it’s like having an idea for a box; a fake space, kept afloat by the air you don’t breathe when you don’t correct your name or pronouns.
***
You’re a boy with a loving wife and two children, one boy, one girl.
You’re a girl, suffocating in a box.
You’re confused.
You know. You’ve always known.
There’s a box inside the back of your closet with a purple dress inside. Wife, who, then was Girlfriend, found it when moving her clothes in. You laughed it off, saying it was an ex’s. She asked if she should be worried, in a way that knew she didn’t have to be. Not with you. You had never shown interest in other women, and when you were caught staring at their necklaces or the way their waist curved and yours didn’t, you told her the same thing your dad said to your mum: that there was nothing wrong with just looking.
Girlfriend surprised you by trying on the dress. You bit down on the inside of your cheek to keep from saying it had looked better on you.
***
It’s a little boy’s birthday. His parents bought him a cake shaped like a race car. There are eight candles on the bonnet of the car. You and your colleagues sing Happy Birthday, clapping out of time with the beat.
“ONE MORE TIME!” your boss laughs, and the clapping turns to the sound of a spade full of dirt landing heavily next to you.
You scream for your mummy. Everyone falls forward like marionettes with their strings cut short.
***
There’s a hole inside your chest where your heart is meant to be and it sings in static. You laugh, then cry. Then laugh some more. You leave the bathroom, muttering an apology over and over.
No one notices you leave.
***
You find all of the tapes and re-watch them. They’re not like how you remember them. The villains wear over-sized, silicone heads with exaggerated mean-looking faces and wave around padded weapons blowing smoke or bubbles. The children - there’s more than two - look younger too. They’re around your kid’s age. Maybe older. They’re still holding onto their puppy fat. There is still so many years left in them. So much time ahead. You feel something rotten, like a gnarled root take form in your stomach and stab at your intestines.
What you would give to have more time.
***
You’re not sure how old you are when your world ends. Sixteen, going on eighteen. You’ve broken up with your long-distance girlfriend. The word “broken” doesn’t feel strong enough for what you did. You clawed your way out, throat stuffed with soil and rot, teeth chipped with gemstones and false promises of Paradise. You’ve been living in a world no one could see, and you thought this made you special. You looked for signs in the patterns of your curtain and found faces looking back at you. You counted the crows and prayed for good fortune. You buried gemstones and teeth in your garden to ward off the evil, you played with tarot cards and made up their meanings, you opened too many doors and now you can’t shut them.
When she’s gone, so does her magic, so does yours. The world is dull. Sharper. Everything has teeth and claws and slinks into the shadows.
She told you, the shadows worship you. Now that’s all you’re left with. Shadows standing at the edge of your bed. Shadows in your hallways. Shadows in the corner of your eye, eating the light like moths to lace.
You think: she can’t of taken all of the magic, so you start to knick at your skin with your nails until it bleeds, and there’s a hiss of relief. It’s not enough. You store blunt kitchen knives under your pillow. You cut and cut, until there’s nothing but the dull throb of pain.
When your brother finds out he tells you next time to cut vertically.
***
You write fanfic about dark, messy haired boys not because you love them but because you love force-feeding them that love from an older man’s lips, you love how salty it tastes. You make them lick it clean, till the very last drop.
***
You’re 25 and you’re in a queer bookstore in London with your best friend. You’re in the zine and magazine section when you see it, the front of a glossy magazine of dark public hair, a hand resting comfortably over their hip bone. The hand. It’s the hand that makes you stop. It’s smooth of any hard, worn knots and the nails are clean and neatly cut, with a little bit of clear nail polish over the top. It’s amost feminine. Almost.
You buy it while your friend is busy in the fantasy section. The cashier senses the urgency, and quickly and discreetly places it inside a brown bag and seals it shut. They hand it to me. I don’t remember what they looked like, apart from a septum ring and dark, almost black, messy hair.
***
I do not look inside the magazine until weeks later. Apart from me know that when I do, a shaft of light will break open the box I’ve been resting in for so many years, telling myself that this is it. This is who I am. I like girls and boys and everyone in between. There’s no need to confuse it.
Then I see Them. They have the same broad, rounded shoulders as I do.
(Once, I sent a photo of myself in the middle of a river. I was wearing shorts, and you could see the pink of my knees peeking out and I had tied the front of my top together. My shoulders were and still are - wide. The magazines and online articles call it an Inverted Triangle. I’ve tried to dress for my shape and ended up emptying my entire wardrobe and donating it to charity.
When I showed a friend of mine, she said: You look strong .
Everything inside of me sang.)
And short hair shaved at the sides and brown, messy curls. An outline of a shark swims across the front of their chest, above their breast and their forearm has a - not a flower, but not a weed either, some kind of branch or leaf I couldn’t identify, but reminded me of a tail with how it curled up at the end. They’re wearing Doc Martins, with bright orange socks and green stars pressed down on their fingernails.
I cry. I cry for so many reasons, but mostly, it’s relief.
***
From: [email protected]
Hello !
I was researching cheap / free binders in the UK and came across your page. It said to email to look at the binder category and for further information, so this is me doing that !
I have a binder, borrowed from a friend that I can exchange. It’s a bit too small for me, which is why I am in search for a new one. It’s not in the best condition, but it’d do for someone who wants to dip their toes in the What-Is-Gender-???? pool.
Let me know if you’d like for me to send it!
Thank you !!
***
No response.
***
I dye my hair again. I get in touch with my ex, after seeing a TikTok they made about their journey in gender. I ask if we can meet up for coffee.
***
Another month goes by. I haven’t touched the magazine again. I re-download Tinder and change the preferences to Everyone. I only match with men.
I buy lingerie. I paint my nails. I fuck men who try and kiss my scars and call me beautiful and pretty and sexy.
I tell them to fuck me harder. It doesn’t matter about the blood.
***
I started reading horror books. Specifically, women becoming something unbecoming. I’ve always liked stories about werewolves and vampires. I thought it was because I had a body that I couldn’t fully control. That wasn’t fully mine. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s the attraction of something that isn’t quite-human, isn’t quite-alive either. Of something stuck in the in-between.
I watch YellowJackets and Hannibal and anything that knows what it is like to starve, to have a hunger so deep it can’t be filled.
***
I buy a binder.
When I look at myself in the mirror I can meet my gaze.
***
When Owen wears the silk, purple dress and looks inside the mirror and sees Isabel, I know that look.
Imagine if I didn’t.
Imagine if I hadn’t been brave enough to ask myself: why can’t you look at your reflection? Why do you press your breasts down, or call them accessories, like they’re something that can be taken off like they’re something that isn’t part of you? Why do you tense up when someone calls you she ? Or worry that something is too “girly”. Why do you want to be pretty, but in the way men are?
***
I cut my hair. It’s shorter now. It’s dark and messy.