Fishflies

by Lily Osler

I.

It began the summer I was ten. Four years before I shed that self. My soul had gone rancid over the winter. I wasn’t me. My blood had spoiled. It swelled my body with its rot. My mother said it was what happened to men in our family at the precipice of puberty. I would grow, then deflate, then grow tall and gaunt like my uncles. I would wake at three in the morning and shamble to the toilet to dry heave from my smell, the moldering blood coming too close to the surface of my skin. I pried each downy tuft of pre-hair off my face with my fingernails. I knew it would not keep the rest from growing in, but I had to have hope. Having read about sympathetic magic in a fantasy novel, I stapled the hairs to the faces of cloth dolls I stole from the toy store downtown, hoping to curse the mothers who now hesitated when I knocked on their doors and asked if their daughters were home. I failed math tests on purpose. I called Krista Cohen a dyke in front of the entire school during a debate for fifth grade treasurer because I liked the room they put you in for in-school suspension: the chipping popcorn ceiling, the slight waft of cedar chips from the cracked-open window, the hum of a wobbly fan, the solitude. It was the summer I was ten, and the fishflies were coming off Lake St. Clair in a chattering mass. They covered the windows of my grandparents’ house in a quivering, chitinous skin. I was living with my grandparents in Michigan for the summer. My parents had insisted. Maybe that’s what he needs, my mother had said on the phone in the kitchen one night when she didn’t know I was lingering in the den, watching the dark. Just some time away. I had heard that the fishflies had no mouths. They gorged themselves on lake scum as larvae, then hibernated, then died twenty-four hours after they hatched from a chrysalis. They did not live long enough to feel hunger. Their corpses littered the vinyl siding for weeks, held by hooked claws, until spiders and seagulls ate them off. The fishflies were coming off the lake, and I was biking back to my grandparents’ house in tears. Connor Hallahan had spoken to me while I was drying off in the locker room of the town pool, waiting for a stall to open up so I could change in peace. Connor asked if I wanted to ride bikes with him. I should not have said yes. I didn’t want to. None of the other boys went near Connor. He was less scorned than quarantined. But I was a coward; I said yes. We went from suburb to suburb under elm-drenched boulevards. The fecal breeze from the lake pushing us inland felt like flight. We stopped at a hilltop park far enough from my grandparents’ house that I could see Detroit in the distance. Connor liked the same books I did. The same movies. He asked me about my mother and my father. He asked me if I wished I was a girl. I said yes, of course I did, and I was polite enough to turn the question around. He said he didn’t know if he did, that he might have wanted to for some reasons but not others, that it was less about being in a girl’s body for him than about the freedom a girl might have, if that made sense. He said it like that: if that makes sense. I nodded and looked out at the lake. He said he wanted to tell me a secret and leaned in close to me, and then he grabbed the back of my head and brought me down in a swoon and put his lips atop mine. Riding home, his blood on my knuckles, I screamed: I’m not like you! I’m not like you! My grandparents volunteered at a shelter in the city during the day, so I went to the backyard and found a colony of fishflies on the lid of the barbecue. I pulled the wings off one, ignoring its frantic squirming, then set it back on the grill. Then another, and another. I mutilated dozens, then I lay down in the grass, a few wings clinging to my sticky fingers, and watched the clouds. I imagined Connor’s head exploding in the vacuum of space. A fishfly, a straggler from the lake, landed on my hand. My mother had told me that you should never crush ants because the scent of their corpses attracts even more ants, that they are drawn to death. I felt a prick on my hand as the fishfly latched its claws. And I looked at the fishfly, and the spoiled blood that swelled my body throbbed in and out of my hand, in and out, and I felt in my heart of hearts a momentary prophetic sense that all the loathing God had ever created was concentrated in the tip of my left index finger. I touched the fishfly very gently right between its complex eyes, muttering to it what I had said to Connor, imagining for a moment that it was him, a creature worthless to me, completely alien. The change swept through the fly quickly: first its head turned gray and ashen, then its thorax, its legs, its glassy wings, the twin filaments of its tail. I stared at what was once a fishfly. I wondered if the immolation had been figurative. It wasn’t: when I opened my eyes again, it was still there, a tiny statue of fragile charcoal. Of course this is my gift, I thought. It is how the universe works. I brushed the fishfly with the heel of my palm and it crumbled to ash. Its dusty remains swirled down the drain when I scrubbed my hands before supper. Once or twice a month for the next few years, I would test my finger on beetles, spiders, a mouse, a chipmunk, a handful of squirrels. I let my hatred toward them build and build, then watched each one thin and crumble at my soft, soft touch. I liked the mammals best. I could see their fear. At fourteen, I moved a thousand miles north to live with my aunt and uncle, who at last permitted me to drain the rot from my blood. I swore never to use my power again. After all: what use does a girl have for a cremated rat?

II.

And then I was twenty-two, a college graduate. In college, I had pursued radical openness as a hiding strategy. I could avoid the questions I dreaded by telling my friends other stories: the time my prom date punched me after I refused to sleep with him, the frank details of my first hookup with another girl. I could fool them into thinking I had nothing to hide. Sometimes all I needed was allusion. Simply saying I had a health condition that required me to have a single room was enough; no one thought to ask whether that condition involved the aftercare regimen from my vaginoplasty. I was on the chaster end of serial monogamy in college. I had three boyfriends and two girls I hooked up with. I was not the sort of girl to have a girlfriend. My boyfriends suspected nothing. My breasts were distraction enough from the breadth of my ribcage. One of the girls seemed to have a certain intuition. She insisted on bringing me as her date to a queer prom at an off-campus bar. I spent the night glancing over my shoulder at the colorful hair and bodies orthogonal to the norm. She kissed me under the pink-blue-white flag hung up on the wall, and then I excused myself to the bathroom to vomit up the meal we’d shared at the vegetarian restaurant on Chapel. I did not let myself cry until I was home. I stopped responding to her texts: I would not let her spoil my time in college. The second girl was completely unaware, even though she slept over the night I left my estradiol pills on the nightstand. At graduation, I wore a cream A-line dress that fluttered in layers. The wind blew my hair back, but my aunt, whose brow ridge was starker than mine, stood next to me in all the photos. I was twenty-two, and it was autumn, and I was working in publishing in a post-collegiate internship. My employer was a millionaire’s vanity imprint. I looked with envy and satisfaction at the Instagrams of my friends at large presses, in consulting, beginning law school. They worked until eight; I could spend most of my day online shopping. That day, I was looking through their Instagrams, and then through my roommate’s Twitter, and I saw the explainer she had posted from a news site. There was a girl, like me, who lived in Texas, like I had. She was young enough that her blood had not yet turned. With proper care it never would. Her mother loved her. Her father shaved off all her hair. She was so young. Ted Cruz was proposing this father be given a law in his name. It would ensure his daughter’s soul would wither and die. The legislature would take it up in the spring. Eight silent years tumbled down around me. Th is girl was like me. Just like me. She could avoid the poison. She could stay clean, never rot. And yet, and yet, and yet. I wanted to braid her hair on a screened-in porch and feel the sunset breeze on our skin and tell her everything would be all right. I wanted, so much, to hold her. I began to cry. An impulse seized me through the tears. I made a Twitter account. I called myself Willow and gave the profile a Buffy avatar. I put the flag from the queer prom in my bio. It felt like playing a role, but not an uncomfortable one. It felt like writing an autobiographical short story. I wrote a thread about what the poison had done to me, changing only identifying details. Then, another, and another. I did not interact much with other accounts, but this press had too much money, and I gave some of my salary to the crowdfunds desperate women put in my replies. In a month, I had a few thousand followers. I liked Willow. She was gentle and unyielding, like a tide. Her soul was porous. Each day, I checked over my shoulder, then opened a private tab on my browser and allowed her to write what she needed. In November, a writer I had long admired followed me. Her name was Kathryn. She was in her thirties. She had had, per an article she’d written in a major publication about her history, twenty-seven years of the poison before its removal. She was from Texas, like me. She had also watched Freaks and Geeks years before she removed the poison. She had found Lindsay Weir achingly appealing, expressing a very particular kind of femininity, something outside the category of butch but in the same taxonomy. She was the sort of woman this writer longed to be and the sort of woman I longed to be with; those feelings were neighbors. Kathryn lived in D.C. but longed for New York. She was putting in for a transfer at work. My boss caught me DM’ing her one day and asked if I had a new girlfriend. I began to spend my evenings in my room. There were cultures to women like me, or at least the ones on Twitter, fractal scenes, infinitely nested. Most of the popular ones cut a deep irony poisoning with utter sincerity. Most of the ones who followed Kathryn performed cringe as a sacrament. I found them in Kathryn’s replies and spent hours reading through their feeds. I tried to understand their values, dreams, petty semantic arguments. I felt like an adult learner of my own ancestral tongue, although I would never have said it like that. The ones my age seemed far too young for me to relate to; the ones in Kathryn’s replies were all older than me. Most had removed the poison in their late twenties or mid-thirties. I was not like them in most ways, but I found myself wondering if, perhaps, I wanted to be. I coveted their freedom, their careful gentleness with one another. I found myself joking with them about the personality test we had all found independently as teenagers when trying to diagnose our sickness on the internet, and the interviews an emo band’s singer kept giving about his desire for womanhood, and the way the pills tasted when they slipped out from under your tongue and down your throat. I loved the way they were jealous of me. I loved the envy of small differences. I loved having comparators. I loved having some company in my worries.

III.

That winter, Kathryn invited me to a chatroom. It was populated by the people I’d met in her Twitter replies. The chatroom, I quickly found, was a quicker-onset high than Twitter, and that high was utterly enveloping. I picked up the slang quickly. There was a channel for selfies; granted strict anonymity, I posted the photo I used on dating apps, me at a wedding in a low-cut green dress that shimmered like oil in rainwater. The women flirted with me. They reacted with heart emoticons. I did not flirt back, but I was flattered. I posted photos of my ski trip with my aunt and uncle, from the trip to California I took afterwards with my roommate. I posted a photo of me and my new boyfriend at a gala my work had sent me to. The gala was a fundraiser for a queer nonprofit press. The pink-blue-white flag fluttered in the rafters. I took a photo of it for the chatroom, hiding my phone in my purse before my boyfriend could see. He was not aware of my history. We had matched on a dating app, and then had gone to see Jennifer’s Body at Syndicated. I noticed as he brought his popcorn to his lips that his nails were painted black. Afterwards, having drinks at Abilene, he mentioned that he preferred to date bisexual women because he had also had a childhood crush on Kristen Stewart. I felt an immense wash of relief at this. I had not told him that I had been with women in college. If he’d intuited it, he would think he had found the root secret and go no further. He lived in Ridgewood, and I lived in Gowanus, and in the passageway between the G and the L I would sometimes imagine I was sinking through a portal between worlds. In the chatroom, I found myself becoming close with a woman named Alexandra. I liked that she was enough like me that I could feel a slight edge up on her at all times. She had switched over her freshman year of college. She was pretty, but I realized quickly that every photo she posted was from the same angle. She had a habit of pushing me just beyond the bounds of my comfort— wrapping me in archaic words I’d long found disgusting, daring me to tell my boyfriend my history, joking about showing her surgeon a photo of my breasts as a reference. She saw me as a challenge. She believed that, with a little effort, I could become more like her: femininity with a sharp blade, a leather purse and an energy drink, unafraid to pick fights, unafraid to dance on the limits of cruelty. She called me names on the days she wasn’t telling me childhood memories. It felt like an elementary school way to flirt, not far from pulling the hair of a girl you liked. It made my pulse go tremolo. I only masturbated while thinking of her a single time, just as I felt my crush on her beginning to fade into the vast horizon of girls I’d once thought I could love. In the fantasy, I imagined meeting her in college and helping her switch over. I would find her a doctor to prescribe estradiol, take her to Target and be the smiling face paying for her first bra, hold her head in my lap as she sobbed her mascara off about her parents. I would be the one molding her for once. A year passed. I stayed friends with Alexandra, even as I felt the fire dying beneath us. She would insult one of the women in the server in a way I’d heard too many times before, or would keep rambling about a high school crush on a gay boy even after I’d stopped responding. I was realizing I could not lust for someone I understood. I resorted to stock responses: huh, what?, lol. I allowed myself to finally see the beard shadow under the color corrector in her profile picture. A pandemic choked the color from the sky. My boyfriend moved in with me the day the Navy medical ship docked in Hell’s Kitchen. That day, I made him eggplant parmesan and gave him head. I did not lust for him, but that was not an issue. I liked understanding him. He was reliable, gentle, patient. On rainy days when I had errands, he waited for me at my train stop with an umbrella and a caprese sandwich. When he came out as bisexual to his mother down in San Antonio over video chat, she cried, and then he cried, and then I cried, too, even though I didn’t know what I was crying about. But I’m with a woman, see? he said, squeezing my hand, pulling me into frame. Nothing has to change. He annoyed my roommate by cutting her used blouses into masks instead of taking them to Housing Works like I’d said he would, then made it up to her by stocking the bathroom with expensive body wash. By April, we were having sex twice a day. Still: it was not an idyll. I was forced in those long creeping hours to confront the unfortunate and long-ignored facts of my selfhood. My womanhood was a relational concept, and now we all lived indoors. The faint white scars along the outward petals of my vulva shone in my compact under the fluorescent bathroom light. I worried that, one day, my boyfriend would come back from the Duane Reade with a sudden, inexplicable suspicion. In darker moments, I remembered the last time I had felt this yawning loneliness, the summer of the fishflies, the ashen destruction I wrought for years in what must have been a chain of false memories. I took solace in the fact that the recollections always felt like watching someone other family’s home videos. There was reassurance in the alien strangeness of the person I once apparently was, ripe with a violent imagination I could no longer access even if I wanted to. I thought about talking to Kathryn about my fear of being outed, my fear of myself, but I suspected from passing comments that she was sensitive about how late she had changed over, so, gritting my teeth, I confided in Alexandra. She was open about her change, but not by choice. She could understand in a way few others on the server did. Still, the flirtation returned unbidden. She talked about how she’d gotten drunk and made out with most of her friends, but she’d need me to complete the set, and I felt nothing but a thin, faint annoyance that I knew was unfair to her as I changed the subject. I wished she had thought to be this overt with me back when I yearned for her in my dreams. There was a vaccine. Suddenly, there was a vaccine, and it worked ninety-five percent of the time. Alexandra and I both had asthma. She insisted on FaceTiming as we got our shots. A band Alexandra had loved in undergrad was playing Brooklyn Steel in May, their first show in eighteen months. Capacity was limited, of course. She mentioned it to me, and I asked if she wanted to come see them. She could stay on my couch for the night. She countered with a full week in the city. I found this shockingly rude but did not know how to say no. We spoke on the phone as I walked to Whole Foods one day, and I told her she was not to mention our connection to one another to my boyfriend, no matt er what she thought about the ethics of my stealth. I met her at JFK and took her back to the living room I had filled with an air mattress. She was taller than I had imagined. Her voice was deeper without the mediation of a phone line. I reminded myself not to see the faults the poison had instilled in her face. After she went to bed, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, interrogating my bare shoulders, my ribcage, the slight ridge on my brow, the vague disproportion of my hands, the uncanniness of my womanhood. I told my boyfriend that she and I had gone to college together, but when he asked Alexandra whether she’d ever been to Toad’s, she just stared at him. He followed her on Twitter, laughed at a few of her more avant-garde jokes. I took her on the municipal ferry’s top deck, scarves against the lingering chill. I got drunk with her at a brass-glimmering bar in Cobble Hill. At the Battery, a busker called her sir. I ran all the way to the carousel. I was terrified her curse could reawaken mine. We took a selfie together in Brooklyn Bridge Park, her ponytail blocking the Statue of Liberty. Alexandra said that she couldn’t wait for the show. She ran her hand down my back at the Guggenheim. I said nothing even as I felt bile rise in my throat. We got tacos in Williamsburg and she would not stop staring at my breasts. I blamed myself for wearing a tight ribbed top, for the hunched, mannish way I sat when eating something sloppy. I asked if my lipstick had smeared on my mask, and she said yes and dabbed it with a makeup wipe from her purse. At the show, she made for the bar and ordered a Long Island iced tea, toasting to a slur I felt nauseous to hear. She had six drinks before the opener’s set was over. In the dark, her bulk made me far more aware of my own. Her sweat dripped onto me as she danced too close. I finally acknowledged my discomfort midway through the set, not at her but at myself, for having ever wanted to be anything like her. When she grabbed me tight and shoved a hand down my jeans, I didn’t even bother screaming.

IV.

The week after, I cast about for reasons. The usual ones: should not have worn a top that tight, I should not have let her have that much to drink, I should not have let her come on the trip when in my hindbrain there lurked that sense of this possibility, that she really did not understand that I was not like her. I should have taken her to a more sedate show where she would not have had that sort of cover. I should not have choked out I love you too when she slurred I love you to me moments before it happened. At the heart of it all: I was a fool to believe she was like me, even as I feared in the abyss of my soul that I was like her. I cut my bangs in the bathroom and couldn’t stand to get the result fixed at the salon. I wrote a memo full of unwarranted fury in response to a pitch I found misogynist. I called my aunt but told her a guy had done it to me. I made her swear up and down that she wouldn’t tell my mom. Kathryn convened the admins of the chatroom aft er I told her what had happened. Word spread from there. A dozen women reached out, asking if I wanted money, flowers, help with a security deposit on a new place with an address Alexandra did not know. I deleted all the messages. I hid myself in sweatshirts baggy enough to hide my shoulders. Kathryn sent me screenshots of her kicking Alexandra out of the groupchat. She thought I would want proof. Guilt welled up like digestive fluid in my throat as I read through them. Alexandra didn’t know why she was being banned. I’d let her stay on the air mattress the night after. I’d made her brunch when she woke up. I didn’t call it sexual assault to her in my texts when I finally broke off contact. I could not convince myself that it was, really, her fault. I told my boyfriend as I huddled under a blanket on the sofa four hours after her taxi had left for the airport. It took me that long to break my mutism. He held me the way I wished a mother would have, then asked why I hadn’t told him sooner. He bit his lip and trembled. He told me the ways he wished he could have meted out justice to Alexandra for what she had done to me. He offered to call the police. I drafted breakup texts in Notes in the bathroom at work and cursed myself for how prolix they were. I spent an entire evening looking up cosmetic surgeons in New Jersey who said that, for a year of private-school tuition, they could take the likeness of Alexandra away from my face. On a rainy evening in June, my boyfriend took me to the Thai place we loved on Court and asked if it was time to talk about marriage. I saw the life I could have with him as he went on about the beauty of synthetic diamonds these days: bright orange e-bikes with child seats on the back, tax breaks and homeownership, mom friends who had never been on Twitter. I deleted the entire Notes app from my phone as soon as I got home. Kathryn asked if we could talk about what had happened. I stopped responding to her messages. My performance review at work came in Needs Improvement. Not fully present in meetings, my supervisor wrote. Somewhat checked out. I got a push notification from the chatroom: the women were planning a meetup in Portland at the end of the summer. Someone had tagged me to ask if I was in. I posted a terse note explaining that I was not going to be active in the group for the foreseeable future, then deleted that app from my phone too. Kathryn emailed me to apologize for the way she’d handled Alexandra’s booting. She shouldn’t have sent me the screenshots, she said. She sent me a draft of a novel she was writing. It was about a group of women like the ones in the chatroom being brutally murdered on a vacation to the Midwest. The prose was lush. I could tell that Greta, the youngest and prettiest one, was based on me. She had the honor of dying first. I was flattered. She explained that she was renting an apartment just for herself and her husband for the Portland trip. I could sleep on their couch. I could stay there and explore the city on my own if I wanted. I could just be there to see her. The rain sputtered against my window, and I remembered the steadiness I had once felt among those women, the sense of writing myself into a stable identity. I had missed Kathryn very much. I told my boyfriend that I was going to a high school reunion. For once, he didn’t seem to believe me, but he left it at a sidewise glance as he stirred the butternut squash soup. On the plane, I felt the sudden urge to lock myself in the bathroom and stare at the contingency of my body. Falling asleep over the Rockies, I wondered if I had only come on this trip to hurt myself. In person, on the porch of a Craftsman house deep in a residential neighborhood, Kathryn was like me. You could never tell; she seemed to have had some congenital immunity to the poison. Her nails were painted in the flag’s colors. Maybe she thinks people will see her as an ally, I thought. We walked to a trail along the Willamette and talked about the rate of revelation in her novel. I like that it feels like nothing is hidden from us that isn’t hidden from the characters, I said. It feels less artificial. She laughed. It’s all artificial, she said. It’s fiction. That’s the point. It’s just about whether you can see the seams. When the clerk at the corner store complimented her nails, I excused myself to look at the canned goods. Passing the light rail on the way back, she asked if I would want to say hello to the other women in their shared apartment. Just for a second. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I could not bring myself to say no. I picked at my hangnails on the train. The warm air in the apartment smelled like the locker room at the town pool. I saw, for the first time, the women from the chatroom. Some bore surgical scars. Some were slight. Some were large. Some still swelled with poisoned blood. One had a beard. Four hung out in a corner, talking about baseball. Two were in footy pajamas. They greeted me one by one. No one had expected that I would be there. They found it a delightful surprise. A woman I had found witty and engaging in the chatroom shared with me her theories about a Hollywood actor who had said in an interview that he hoped he would be a woman in his next life. It was the sort of thing I would have nattered on about for hours two years before. I could barely eke out a response over the throbbing in my skull: I am not like this, I cannot be like this. The twitching in my eye would not stop. The one with the beard had a wife who had banned her from switching over on pain of never seeing her children again. The ones who loved sports had found gentleness in them. Everyone here was missing at least a part of their soul to the poison. We swam in the same pain. Still. Comparing myself to these women tasted sweet and overripe, sticky, disgusting, addictive. It was the only way I could keep from crying. One of the women mentioned the reservation she’d made for the group at a steakhouse downtown. We’ve got room for one more, she said. I felt as if my head was suspended in cold saltwater. I could not make a choice. I said yes. I looked up the menu on my phone and saw that the only vegetarian option was mashed potatoes. On the light rail, I noticed men staring. I looked at my phone, but my hands were too large, so I just closed my eyes. I pretended I was in the passage between the G and the L again, that I was a protagonist, chosen, female in the deepest literary sense. At the steakhouse, the server was too kind. She was my age and had an undercut. I tried to throw a barbed line from my eyes and reel her into my heart. When she took my order, she gave me the same tone of joyful pity, a glee at being able to demonstrate her allyship so concretely, that she had given the others. I ran my hand over my brow like a table saw aft er hearing the way she called me ma’am. A young guy at the bar was staring at us. He was unnaturally thin and wore a well-tailored suit. I would have been less afraid had he been burly. I knew from college that sickly white boys in old-fashioned clothes were the ones to fear. I barely spoke as the conversation drift ed from Twitter discourse to the excesses of red state legislatures. The thin man’s gaze turned from playful contempt to outright scorn as the appetizers, and then the steaks, arrived. I began to sweat when I realized he was gradually moving down the barstools, inching toward us. When he was at the end of the bar, he grabbed his martini glass between his fingers. As soon as our waitress had her back turned, he cast a look across our table and, loud enough for us to hear, murmured the slur Alexandra had tried to get me to reclaim at the show. The waitress heard. She grabbed his drink out of his hand and pulled him by the back of his collar. He gargled, choking a little. Get out, she purred to him as she handed him over to the beefy maître d’. We don’t tolerate bigots. With a swish of her dress, she was at our table. I’m so sorry about that, ladies. Your meal is on us. On the flight home, I would reflect, between sobs, on how I could remember nothing of what it sounded like when the man had slurred us but I could still hear the good liberal ladies clanging against the edge of my skull. I darted to the bathroom. I could not breathe. I had wanted to hurt myself, but not like this. I was like them, like all of them. He had not said except for the blonde one on the left. I was not sure if he had been making eye contact with me specifically. I could not rule it out. The bathroom was a single stall, and it locked, so I slid the deadbolt in before drilling my brow with every blow I could manage from my frail arms. I wanted to punish it. I assaulted the orbital rims that sunk my eyes deep into my skull like cankers. I shoved my shoulders together as hard as I could. I tried to push the fat that accumulated at my stomach down to my hips. Bruises bloomed. I savored their shimmer. My body deserved this for being so cruel. In between punches, I pulled out my phone and changed my flight. I could leave. I would be back in the city as the sun rose over the harbor. When the knock on the door came, I bolted for the exit.

V.

When I got home that dawn, my boyfriend was curled in our bed like an infant, dead asleep. I’d texted him that I was coming home early. He was a night owl; I wondered why he hadn’t thought to stay up for me. A note lay on the counter. Wake me up when you get home. There’s something we need to talk about in the morning. (Nothing bad, I promise!!) I could not sleep, so I made pancakes and woke him at eight. He kissed me with an unwashed mouth, then ate half a dozen before clearing his throat and pulling out his phone. He said he had logged into Twitter and didn’t realize he was still following Alexandra. She had posted the photo of her and I at Brooklyn Bridge Park. She had captioned it with that same slur and a couple heart emojis. She had tagged my account, which my boyfriend then read through. It’s not what you think, I said, picking up his plate with a trembling hand. He smiled and touched my hand, and I finally began to loathe him. He owed me his anger. I wanted him to hurt me the way my boyfriend had in high school when he finally realized why I wasn’t willing to put out. No, he said. It’s okay. I still love you. Obviously. I just—I wish you’d told me? Because there are feelings I’ve been having for—for a long time, you know? Feelings about my, uh, my gender, I guess. And I think maybe it might be time for me to do something—I saw a vision before me: my boyfriend after he changed over. The way his face would soften, but not enough. The narrowness of his hips in black skinny jeans. The smile nestled beneath eyes like Alexandra’s. I snatched the plate from his hand. I’m very sorry that you misunderstood a strange joke my former friend made. But I’m not interested in dating a woman. He cried as he packed his things: thin, unmanly tears. He apologized to me. He swore he hadn’t meant to reveal this truth. I knew I had torn the wings from his back. I said nothing. My roommate heard him. She asked if she needed to call the police. I explained that he would be out in a few minutes. She no longer spoke to me after that. It had been many years since I had needed electrolysis, but I spent the night in the bathroom, running a pair of tweezers over my cheek anyway, searching for something I could rip out hard enough to draw blood. The next morning, I quit my job. My supervisor asked if anything was wrong, and I laughed. I considered telling her about my history. I wanted her anger, too. I texted my dad: you were right. It was the first text I had sent him in six years, and it was true: he had warned me after I told him what I needed. He had taken me into Austin late at night and parked us outside a drag bar. You know that’s what you’re going to end up like, don’t you? My aunt got a call from my supervisor in her role as emergency contact. She left me dozens of voicemails. I had no money, but I called one of the surgeons in New Jersey anyway. The receptionist was so kind that I had to hang up on her. I spent five days in bed, stinking, putrefying. A week later, I did not sleep, and I needed coffee. I put on a sundress because it took the least effort. My legs were scraggly from days without shaving. The veins’ blue looked cadaverous against the blonde fluff. I’d run out of pills a few days before and could not bring myself to call the clinic for a refill. My blood rotted in my veins. Nili was a block and a half up Second. I caught a dad on an e-bike staring at me as I walked. The sidewalk was littered with insect wings, glistening like snowflakes. I wondered if fishflies lived this far east. In the café, the barista did not gender me when I asked for a large drip, black. Willow? called someone across the tables. Willow! I let my vision unfocus and prepared to make an escape. But then: Claire! I jolted. Kathryn was waving to me from a window seat where she nursed a latte. She was the only one left in the chatroom who knew my real name. I waved, weakly. She motioned for me to sit. The transfer had finally gone through. She was in Carroll Gardens, scoping out an apartment. We would be neighbors. Maybe this can be our usual spot, she said. I burned my tongue on the coffee. She told me that, aft er I’d left the restaurant in Portland, everyone had been worried sick about me. The only reason she hadn’t called the cops was because she could see my phone’s location once I landed back east. She understood, she said. It was rattling. But. You know Miranda deals with that every day, right? said Kathryn. She’s in construction. There’s no reprieve. She knows how tough it is. She was so worried about you after you left. She was only knocking on the bathroom door to try and comfort you. Did you see the message she wrote you? It’s really lovely. She mentioned how much the other women in the chatroom missed me. A few, she said, were starting to worry that I was a risk to myself. She took a long sip of her latte. I had said nothing. She was going to keep talking because she knew me and I knew her. She knew how to help. That was the terrifying thing. My blood ran rancid in thick pulses in my neck. You know, there are other ways, she said. It’s not all or nothing. You can be out to some people and not others. You don’t need to shut us all off. We’ve got you. We understand. My hand was sweaty when she took it because I knew what I was going to do. It was the only thing to be done. I wondered if I would still remember how to do it after this dream of a decade, this brief shimmer of lucidity, this sprawling delusion that I could ever be anything but that little boy trying to pedal fast enough to escape himself. I looked down at her nails and noticed they were still painted in the flag’s colors. Everyone was staring at us. Everyone could see the flag. They knew. They all knew, now. I stifled a sob. My shoes were covered in insect wings. I loved Kathryn, in a way, but there was no going back. It was over. Girls like us, she said, we’ve got to hold onto each other. No one else is going to.

But I’m not like you, I said as I as I slipped my hand out from hers and brought my left index finger to her forehead.

Lily Osler is a Minnesotan by way of Michigan. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She’s interested in character-driven speculative fiction and/or speculative character study. She is the managing editor of Episodes, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vulture, Reactor, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency; this is her fiction debut (yay!).