“That’s government for you; it committees you to death.”

—Bonnie Burstow

The cochlear implant was in the strictest sense voluntary, though obviously a medical necessity, and I wouldn’t be able to hear on the retail floor headset without a measure like the prosthesis in place (which of course made wearing the headset on the ‘correct’ ear impossible). I think he’d been looking to fire me over the usual union gurgle, or pronoun adherences, or his wife laughing at my jokes^[1] when I called her an aider and abettor of genocide, did a tight five crashing the corporate/local visit that, no, I had not been scheduled on the retail floor for; as everything I accused her of was technically true, I couldn’t be fired for having said any of it.

To him, his wife was a real woman and I was nothing; I was not a real woman; I was nothing more than a vector of transmission for dissent and unionthink and gender doubt and other unbridled thought crimes. I was a thing threatening everything he cared about.

And I wasn’t there for him to pull the trigger now, now was I?  Stranded as I was by the literary festival’s embezzlement scandal, the no one here can access the funds, and even if they could, there are no funds left to access of it all.

I shifted into 3rd with my right hand and plugged the braided USB cable into my vape with the left. My knees already knew the road and thus how the steering pulled; my spread legs had always been fast learners. The rental so minute I could bully the clutch and steer westerly with the same leg. The vape cable lay slack and lazed in the cupholder on its way to the FM-transmitter. Not much vape juice left; I am huffing pure Matrix screensaver at this point, born too late for hot knives and too early for the singularity. Things are good in the here and now. I can even see through a few wide swatches of the otherwise bebug-gutted windshield. The coffee is warm, the sun is out and crushing the tops of the cobblewobble streets that pipe tourists through the downtown to the harbor, and things are feeling inevitable in an ambivalent, un-annihilating way for once.

The French vanilla coffee creamer the festival chair bought me on the grocery run, perfumed as it was, steeled me against the unfamiliarnesses of the new world I was stranded in, psoriatic gauntlet nail to elbow; too, I slept shallow and coughed awake with reflux each night now. I was not waking at 3:45 AM for work, but I was instead staying up that late, chugging water to dilute the reflux and fall asleep finally at that time. I was waking up at noon, like other thirty-something underemployed writers of merit but no renown usually did. This new schedule had me playing Magic: The Gathering with people named after bugs who used It/Its and We/Many pronouns and the like, sharing nutritional yeast popcorn with paint-pocked artists twenty to a studio who were screen-printing shirts about my employer—who still would not fire me remotely—and how he and his wife personally killed kids. I was a shiny new toy in a lost-and-found bin frequented by punks and losers and pseuds and armchair philosophers; people in their mid to late twenties were fawning over me, so thickly that I had to learn how to politely and firmly indicate disinterest for the first time in my life. In innumerable ways, my thirties, though difficult and unrelenting, were feeling richer and full of more interesting sex and friendships than ever before.

A blind date I had not known I was set up with (assuming it was some meaningless networking ‘-do as the festival scrambled to right things, rehome me) had assumed I was a burn victim from that scaly reaction on my arm, asked about my graft. I told her it was from a pig’s ass, and laughed when she went bug-eyed about it, insisting that I meant a cop, not the animal. Then she laughed too, I think from shock more than the usual flirt flattery. She came, but, dissociated as I was, I did not consider what happened between us sex, and she said that was hot, and ‘taught’ me about stone sexualities, assuming that I was speaking to a dissociative experience of all sex and not just this one sec.

I didn’t correct her. Sometimes better to adhere to the letter than the spirit of things, mean-spirited as they often are; the ratchet garter that is ‘being honest’ does eventually tourniquet the limb.

She hadn’t read my book but had purchased it. Most of my new friends were of the same disposition. I was glad for the praise but longed for peership in lieu of flattery.

Was it that I wrote unfemininely as a trans person, or was it that women, like men, were disinterested in sororal sordidities, did not read ‘women’ as more than trite inheritor copycats; that gender was supposedly ‘dissolving’ was no longer exciting to us, subsumed in the gelatinous cube of unsift masculinity as we were.

I parked and unplugged the vape and cranked the steering wheel to the curb, so that if the parking brake failed, the rental would not roll into traffic. The chair of the festival buzzed me up to hers and I let myself into the hundred-year-old apartment, Chair throbbing red with sunburn on the bed.

The un-adhered, padded center of the small nude bandage arose as though from great slumber into an arched bridge between her shoulder blades, opposite the side of the body where the otherwise vergent clavibones made way for the thoroughfare of the throat, the great big gulpway with the tattoo that said JIZZ BIB. The bandaged bit: some manner of supposedly harmless laser-based quackery, she said, which had got her real good. A polyp removal.

“Why clip thine wings, good angel?”