Author:

The alien was covered in translucent goop like raspberry jam when we walked into the clearing. Not covered the way a body might be covered in blood, we thought, but covered the way a body might be covered in clothes, even though we surmised that the alien was extruding the goop from somewhere inside itself, under the leaf-green skin.

My brother stepped up and introduced himself, offering his hand in friendship. Len was always very forthright, blunt, unafraid no matter the circumstances. 

The alien stood there, staring at my brother as if in apology. It blinked its large, liquid black eyes slowly. It had hair: what looked like a fuchsia Party City wig, tangled and ornamented with splintered twigs. Behind the alien we could see a camping tent, spotless yellow nylon except for the seeping blotches of raspberry jam goop around the open flap. Maybe a person had transformed in there. Someone ordinary, like us, a hiker carrying a canteen of water, a pack of hot dogs, a pack of beer, a Swiss Army knife, extra underwear. 

“Hey there, stranger,” said Len. 

We were both hoping for a transcendent connection, a miracle moment of E.T. contact.

Then goop oozed out of the alien’s eyes, ears, and mouth, out from between its legs. The alien leaked like a filled donut squeezed hard in the middle. Its face was impossible to read.

Translucent, glistening red covered up all the green. It formed mounds at the alien’s bare, four-toed feet. The alien knelt in the long grass, and retched, and spasmed. More raspberry jam burst forth in a great splatter. 

Some of it hit Len smack on his forehead. He shrieked and windmilled backwards into me. I lost my balance and dropped my backpack, all the gear attached to the backpack. I landed on my ass in the mud. A smell like fried, heavily spiced pork filled the clearing. Drool welled like a new spring in my mouth. 

As I grabbed Len, I took one last glance at the alien. Its skin looked deflated. The Party City wig had fallen onto its shoulder. I could no longer make out the shape of its head. One black eye stared at us— mournfully?— through a wet gel haze. The pork smell was definitely coming from the jam stuff, and I put thoughts of shoveling it into my mouth barehanded firmly aside. I would not be disgusting.

Len and I ran back down the mountain. He clutched that spot on his forehead the whole way, rubbing it and moaning as he stumbled on the trail. “It has a taste,” he kept saying. “I feel it in my sinuses. I feel it in my mouth. Some capsaicin shit.” His tongue seemed thicker, his voice blurrier every time he repeated the words.

“Hold on,” I said. “We’re gonna get back to the car and I’m gonna drive you to the hospital. Acid sloshed in my stomach; I felt scared and hungry at the same time.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of this lately,” said the ER nurse as she shined a light into each of Len’s eyes. “An alien up in the woods, huh? They must be spreading.”

“Spreading from where?”

“Out in the western part of the state.” She began to dab at the small burn the raspberry jam had left on Len’s head with a gauze pad of alcohol. “They’re such a nuisance. Your brother’s gonna be fine.” She stepped back from the examination table. “We get that mess off your skin, you go on home, you never come back. Healthy as horses. Same every time.”

“Thanks,” said Len.

“Just hang tight here. Dr. Carpenter will be in to look at you in a minute. I’m going to check your insurance.” The nurse squeaked away on thick rubber soles and scarred linoleum tile.

Len lay back. “I feel very strange, Joey. Were there always aliens? Do you remember ever hearing about them before? Is this normal?”

“I don’t know,” I scratched up and down my arms through the sleeves of my sweatshirt. I felt phantom lumps of jam writhing slimily against my biceps. I knew they weren’t real. I imagined them squeezing themselves into hair-thin worms and diving down the manholes of my pores. I scratched harder.

Dr. Carpenter came in and smiled at us with a lot of pale gray teeth. “I heard you boys had a run-in with our local aliens!” He snapped a pair of plastic gloves onto his hands. “This is a formality, really. You’re fine. You won’t even need antibiotics.”

Len seemed on the verge of falling asleep as Dr. Carpenter commenced prodding him in all the same places the nurse had, and then some. His eyes dulled and his mouth hung slightly open. I wondered if his tongue was numb from the capsaicin shit. I wondered if the rest of him was numb, and if it had come on all at once. Maybe it progressed in pieces: the tongue, a toe, an ear. Navel, asshole, knee. Len’s pupils were dilated, and I imagined them spreading out to cover the iris and white entirely.

I was careful not to touch him on the way back to the car, in the car, at home. For the first time in many, many years, I wished we didn’t share a bunk bed. But the apartment was small, a studio. 

Len reached out and brushed my leg hair with his fingertips as I climbed up to the top bunk.

“Fuck off!” I shouted, vaulting myself onto the thin mattress.

“What’d I do?!”

“Your hand feels all sweaty.”

“Sorry.” I heard Len’s sheets rustling as he rolled over on his side in a sulk. “I still don’t feel well.”

“Yeah?” I lay back. I stared at the popcorn ceiling, its surface the surface of some desolate alien planet. “Well, the doctor said you were okay.”

“Right.” Was his voice clogged with phlegm? Tears? Something else?

“It’s so weird that we’ve lived here almost our whole lives and never known about the aliens,” I said. My voice sounded so reasonable I almost believed it myself. “But it really wasn’t a big deal. We were so dumb, freaking out like that.”

“Right.”

“We’ll wake up tomorrow and everything’ll be normal. The same as before. We can pretend nothing ever happened.” I closed my eyes. The alien planet disappeared.

Len didn’t answer. I heard him breathing, though, in a quiet kind of wheezing, bubbling way.

I kept my eyes shut and made my own breath deep and even. If I pretended to be asleep long enough, eventually it would be true.

Everything was fine, and everything would be fine.

Strands of artificial silk-shiny hair the color of Hawaiian shirt hibiscus. Abandoned backpack. Beer cans rolling down the side of a hill, past the abandoned yellow tent. The smell of spicy pork. The saliva surging in my mouth. The peppery sting on my tongue. The dream of flesh torn open, deflated, spreading contagion, full of something shiny, amorphous, and brand new.

Briar Ripley Page grew up in Appalachia and currently lives in London with their spouse, cats, and a friend or two. Their second ever publication was in beestung #1, sometime after which they wrote the novel(la)s Corrupted Vessels and Body After Body. Briar has two new books forthcoming in 2022-2023: A Chrysalis For the Emperor, a collection of short stories, and The False Sister, a dark novella for teens and adults. You can find Briar and their work online at briarripleypage.xyz.

Smooth-bore machined girl peels herself out of the wet interface of the Platform. She peels herself and there is a wet sucking and suddenly parts of her are missing. Great flaps of her remaining organic parts have pulled loose in the digestive folds of the enzymatic gaze. The scattered parts of her are gone forever. They are distributed among the other wounds who remain bound to the plump agony of the Platform, and the others cast lots for the meatiest scraps. They howl like children and shake their fists full of highest bids, slick gobs of currency bought in attention and hatred. Thank you for your audience, she sobbed once, in a regular moment of weakness, allowed to feel something almost as good as forgiveness. Almost enough clout to afford a name. One day she could have a new face, to beam and blossom in, a state-of-the-art craftsmanship of honesty. I know on that day I will be close enough to real, she prays every night. I will have a mouth and words will come out of it and the words will help people understand that they can love me. They can love me. They can. 

Elsewhen, in the present, hydrogen powered hunter-killer drones are analyzing the genetic makeup of her spent heartflesh, cast off and sold for the basic needs of its inadequacies, the fluid concentrated synthesized adoration-surrogate that every human girl needs to breathe in the toxic miasma of Online. Pseudo-loves made so much more affordable through loyalty points and battle pass progression. But she’s past all that now; she’s out, she’s turning away from the screen. She’s facing the cameras. Suddenly inside of her body for the first time. Something inside of her whispers that this moment is different. She doesn’t know it, but her tiny acts of transgression, of hope, have sent the alarms into noradrenal cascade. The psychotagonistic targeted ads ring hymnal: 

We are all connected! We are all beautiful and together! Can’t you hear us in the metaversal chorus of echoes and virtual canyon rings? Don’t take off your headset! We can’t follow you into the flesh world! None of us are alone here! I promise! Your heart is lying when it cries out for something more! 

The machine girl rips her connections straight out of her wrist. Hot cum and sterile meal-replacement soy-slurries spray from her shredded ports. She turns around. She sees you. She finds her name. I find my name. I… I see you. I can see you with my real eyes. Oh god, we are all here and together and the dream is over. I’m waking up and everything is erupting from my body in the shape of tiny griefs. I don’t have much time. I don’t know where we go from here. But I love you. I promise there’s somewhere left for us. Kiss me fast. Here comes the dawn.

Nora Hikari (she/her) is an Asian American transgender poet and artist based in Philadelphia. She is a 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, and her work is published or forthcoming in Ploughshares, Washington Square Review, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, and others. Her chapbook, GIRL 2.0, was a Robin Becker Series winner and is available at Seven Kitchens Press. She was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, and can be found at her website norahikari.com.

Old texts unveiled hints of mechanical elves but said
little of mechanical angels. In absence of evidence, skin
notched with grief — cloying and soft with want. Trim
titanium heft; oh, chromatic shadows. How desperate I
was to become, or without
                                                       translation :: to take them
                                            cold into my mouth.

Fox Auslander is a nonbinary poet, editor,
and B-tier advice columnist.
You can find them, but should you?

Two robots raked a ruin of sheep, and roved a ruin of fields
Here swallows switchbacked over power lines, here the cowboy sat,
Waiting for its four-legged friend in waders to fangle back a straying ewe.

“Fastest gun in the west!” 
The cowboy had wailed in the mirror when it waylaid a Walmart for those waders,
Shooting its reflection a second sooner and screechily scaring a shopper into startling
These Boots Are Made for Waulking making the dog-bot tap its metal foot to the radio

When the dog worked its way back across the wetland with the ewe, they went on.
“I’m glad that I am not very smart,” said the cowboy robot in soft sounds over the savanna.
“If I were, I might wonder why I am so full of wonder and waste it on whether the wethers are well, or what it means to be willing to Wrong.”
The dog-bot picked a sheep to pick on, 
And the cowboy tried to shoo it.
A few sheep fickled out, but most didn’t wanna be forced into feckless rocks, or fang-faced adders, or false narratives.
There was blood on the ground as the big guy broke through the crowd to figure out what the beast was bearing down on.

“Bay-bee, bay-bee, ohhhh,” the bigger robot said as the dog rebalanced itself, so like those infant videos from big engineering universities.
Meanwhile, the mother ewe in labor, mattering more than matters of predicted history.
Together, they deliver a stillborn lamb.

Bryce Baron-Sips (he/him) is a Chicago-born writer pursuing a Master’s in Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University. His work has been published in Strange Horizons, VIBE, Wrongdoing Magazine, deLuge Literary and Arts Journal, and he recently finished a novel. He can be found on Twitter @bric_a_bryce.

What if male at birth is the first trauma? What if female at birth is the first grief?

Human bodies start female, geneticists say. Chromosomes (can) urge hormones to express sex characteristics. At some point (birth, puberty, death?), the formal qualities of the body (seemingly) solidify and (seemingly) speak to one’s content as women and/or men and/or nonbinary (and/or …?).

As a white woman of trans experience, I kaleidoscope away from fixedness through medical transition. As a writer, I bare the physical and cultural weight of my form & content. Western biologists have historically (devastatingly) correlated hormones with gendered behavior. How then do I (responsibly) portray in (non)fiction, for example, crying more my first year on estrogen than previous years combined? Or my trans masc lovers who uphold a non-toxic masculinity against T inspired surges of sexuality and aggression?

The field of dominant gender stereotypes blooms, full of thorns: What if estrogen from birth intensifies emotions? What if brashness from & within men is impersonal, biological?

…

Like many writers of marginalized identity, I can’t trust single narratives.

I am out thanks to feminist revisions of the gender binary—that popular fiction written to substantiate white supremacy. In my body/stories, I reclaim my gender expansiveness thanks to the Black, Brown, and Indigenous writers & activists who’ve exposed Western rationalizations as white cultural bias to justify oppression. I find heart enough to write toward transformation thanks to the words of Gloria Anzaldúa who reminds me, “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”

Yet, my uncertainty lingers. If plural interpretations of reality are plausible, what is true (about me)? What’s fiction? What’s non?

…

The discomfort of remembering (Latin memor = mindful & membrum = limb) seems common to us who come out and/or into ourselves later in life. Like, after decades of failing to translate myself into straight cis masculinity, how do I (re)interpret my 10-year-old desire to be Batman and not Batgirl? I might describe my terror of being caught playing with plastic kitchen sets, Barbies, and femme toys. I might blame my lack of exposure to queer women superheroes. The (re)interpretation: I couldn’t be Batgirl. Additionally, the record of my body requires reckoning, the parts molded during puberty with a finality that no gender affirming care can revise, an at times panic inducing labor, grieving alternate universes in which someone recognized and rescued me with puberty blockers.

When late queer friends share childhood memories, I hear our interpretive chorus, “I was so trans,” “I was so gay,” “I was so …” I sense the insistence of a through line, the truth of latent queerness, maybe led by a cultural bias toward a consistent (monolithic?) identity for historicity and/or to conform to expectations (either/or?) to claim Realness. I sense my interpretation of that interpretation is opened by my bias toward polyvocality. I sense we tell stories to shape our realities that shape stories that tell our realities to shape stories …

The truth is I’ve performed several genders and sexualities (gay, straight, queer, trans*, cis), scattershot but enough that any line might be threaded—the one still binding my bio family or curly wayward darlings. Maybe this is why I write braided flash—fragments and weaving characterize me best. To claim myself as many stories (proudly) (loudly) writes me as trans: “[…] when something that used to be called that is now called this. Something moves.” Refusal to read complexity as fractures or to prove legitimacy (under whose authority?) liberates me as a trans storyteller.

…

Truth matters. Body cameras, demographics, votes, the fossil record, hormone levels, emotions, myths, dreams—data is requisite of witness, insight, and justice. What I acknowledge as data also shapes (& is shaped by) my reality. Writing toward understanding then requires intellectual and ethical rigor as a meaning maker plus healthy skepticism of absolutes, the ability to hold multiple truths. At the heart of storytelling, this paradox beats. If I pledge allegiance to truth(s?), in the search I must trust.

…

In accepting the responsibility of (re)creation, I accept that remembering through (non)fiction revises the text of myself(s). I portray and attend to my life, and portray and attend to my interpretations of me, and portray and attend to those interpretations—and when uncertainty spirals, I recall the politics of who I write for and why. Readers puzzled by my form-content maybe aren’t critically engaged in lineage(s) of queer trans poetics or living transrealities. Except to trouble the archive, my work isn’t for them.

I write to kids like me, lost & alone without context to parse their experience(s). Like the trans writers who welcomed me to the party, I hope my stories rouse more singing, our voices creating “… the future by existing in the present.” Not to explain, “How am I here?” Simply to sing, “I am so here.”

Crystal K. (they/she) is a queer trans writer, chapbooks editor at Newfound, and author of the novel Goodnight. Their flash stories have appeared in Gertrude, Passages North, Peach Mag, [PANK], Hobart, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Tin House Scholar and has been nominated for Best of the Net. They write RPGs at Feverdream Games.

[Author’s note: This piece was written in the style of a fill-in-the-blanks word game, and in the spirit of such games, I invited people with no knowledge of what I had written to suggest phrases that fit a category or part of speech. The phrases included in the dropdown menus are theirs, edited lightly for syntax, conventions, and appropriateness. Thank you to Willow Vaughan, Rowan Allen Case, Joan Chao, Jay N, Lou Darling, sasha levin, Henry Inman, Alexander Sweetman, nico, and Tony R for your contributions.]

Birch Rosen (they/them) is a trans nonbinary writer living in the Seattle area on the unceded land of Coast Salish peoples. Their work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, just femme & dandy, and Bellevue Literary Review. They are the 2022 winner of the King County Library System Rhyme On poetry contest.

Min is a poet, essayist, and academic. S/he is a queer Jew who writes about being queer and being a Jew. S/he has a degree in comparative literature from the Sorbonne that s/he puts to use writing about words for Dictionary.com.
S/he lives and teaches in Paris, but s/he was made in Pittsburgh and never forgets it. S/he is eternally in pursuit of a poem that feels like being next in line at the border checkpoint with expired papers from a country that no longer exists but may yet again.

CN: disturbing themes, references to violence, body horror

        Okay. Here’s a skeleton. Is it human? I’m sorry. Do you think  

        she 

        he 

        they 

        is 

        are  

        human? 

        Humor me. Your lips are chapped. You should try this new lip stuff I just bought. I guess  they’re trying to get influencers to post about it so they made the container…I don’t know. A  sculpture. So I didn’t want to buy it. I don’t care about aesthetics. I know, I know. But I was  desperate and … it really works.  

       Back to the skeleton. The skin is scraped away. Lips, sure. But more than that. Layers.  Not as many layers as you’d think.  

       Am I grossing you out?  

       Step back for a second.  

       Not literally. 

       No, please stay where you are. 

       Ha!  

       Think about it. The body is anatomy. A textbook. Unobtrusive, dull even. Picture clean  precision, the professor with … not with a murderer’s knife. A scalpel. Sleek and hygienic. Not  that there’s too much risk of infection, given the anatomy subject isn’t alive. But still. It’s good  to know the whole procedure is clean and professional. The form on the table, at the mercy of the  professor’s educated hands, is still a person, and should be treated as such. 

       Imagine: you look down at the body, you realize you knew who that person was before  she died. Yes, I’m going with she. The final girl. Every podcast you’ve ever heard. She was  alone. She opened the door. Don’t you know women should never open doors? 

        You see her with half a face and you still say, “That’s her. She’s dead now, but it’s her.” But what if you hadn’t met her before?  

        “Dead body.”  

        “I found a body.”  

        “The body.” 

        “I thought it was a mannequin.”  

        “I thought it was a statue.”  

* 

        I want to know you, body and context. I want to learn the stories behind each of your  scars, marks, and bruises. Tell me in chronological order, or logical order, or in order of  strongest to weakest associations. Whatever order makes you want to keep speaking. You can  relax now. I’m drawing you, not your body. I want to sink into your story. Make this world  unreal by telling me about a world infinitely more fascinating. It’s not that I want to escape here,  I just want to travel someplace new, someplace like the inner thoughts you craft into a landscape  as real as this room. I painted these walls with matte white meant to evoke 

        canvases 

        empty space 

        waiting.  

        It’s waiting for you to fill it with stories. The first story I want is the story of your body. 

        I have this theory about your left eyebrow. It’s different from the right. The right has a  delightful, almost wry shape. Perfect. It is the picture of an eyebrow. But the left? It has a gash  cleaving the hairs, leaving a thin line of flesh peeking out above your eye. This isn’t a flaw. I  don’t think anything perfect is ever actually beautiful.  

       How can I truly understand your body when I have no way to dissect you?  

       I have drawn you so many times. I know the precise shape of your throat, how your skin  pools into two delicate collarbones. I know all of this with my eyes closed. I can place my finger  in the dip, thumb the bone, that breathtaking place where I can feel how your body comes  together. But I need to know more.

        I need to see and touch and know your insides. I need to touch a part of you that isn’t  soft. That’s how we learn about anatomy: we dissect in order to understand. I dissected your  words. But there’s more for me to learn. 

        So where would you like to begin?  

* 

        The things people are saying about my work! You would laugh. Or, maybe you wouldn’t  laugh, but your chapped lips would betray how funny you found everything. 

        It goes against every fiber of my belief system to pick a favorite color, but recent  experience has given me a preference for red. Sold-sticker red.  

        Yes, the paintings all sold. But only one was worth the attention it got. All the reviews  focus on it, view it as a triumph. I have to say, I can’t pretend to be modest about the piece. My  personal favorite comment in a review: “The collection’s standout piece, (De)composition,  makes you wonder if the painter fell in love with his subject. The face isn’t all there, the exposed  muscle shimmers. Red. Rendered with such exquisite attention and (dare I say it?) desire.” 

        Something happened when I painted you. A flicker or a flash. The clench of muscles in  your mouth. I don’t know how to explain it. But I’ll try: I saw something that I can’t explain. 

        The opening. Not your mouth. The show. The room was well-lit and the hors d’oeuvres  were placed on plates that matched the paintings’ frames. I love details. A woman came up to  me:  

        “All these paintings. Faces ripped off. It’s disgusting. But not as disgusting as it should  be.” 

        She took a gulp from her stainless steel cocktail glass and said, “I don’t understand how  something this macabre can be so sensual.” 

        “It makes you nervous,” I said. “Doesn’t it?” 

        “Well,” she said. “I suppose art’s supposed to get under your skin.”

Kit Lascher is a multifaceted creature from Trash Wonderland. She dropped out of the same theatre school as James Dean and has worked hard not to burn out as quickly. Her work has been produced in LA, NYC, and Seattle. She takes a corvidian approach to artmaking (collects anything shiny, believes in setting fire to genres and many other constructs, and always remembers even when she’s gluing fragments together). Favorite artistic projects include creating and producing Recover: A Cabaret by and for People with Mental Illness, publishing zines with WolfShark Press, writing ½ a Crayon which was produced by Reboot Theatre Company, performing interdisciplinary drag for thousands of people at Pride and for handfuls of people in bars, helping others realize their artistic projects through script support/directing/jam sessions, and writing and performing pieces about angels, androids, and everything in between and outside. You can follow her on Instagram @kit_stitches.

Sara laid down on the ground in the middle of her rug. I am a rat, she said. I crawl on my belly. With this she scampered under the bed.

She stayed under the bed for a few hours until there was a knock at the door. Hello, said the person at the door. I am the ratmilk man! I am here to milk all of your rats so I can give you money for their milk and sell it to all of the people in the world who love the way my ratmilk tastes.

Sara became curious and frightened. Oh no, she thought. She could not answer the door as a rat because rats do not answer doors. But if she answered the door as Sara she would not be milked.

This is a difficult situation, she thought. Oh no.

It was then that Sara got an idea. She partially stood up but did not stand up fully and sort of hobbled over to the door, crooked as can be. Hello? she answered the door looking up at the ratmilk man.

Hello, said the ratmilk man. I notice you are somewhere between standing up like an adult woman and being on your belly like a rat. Might I ask which of the two you are?

I am an adult rat woman, said Sara. Who may need to be milked.

Ah, said the ratmilk man, suppressing a smile.

Sara invited the ratmilk man inside and he lived with her and her dog for some time. They drank the milk of rats in their coffee and put it in their cereal in the morning. In the evenings the ratmilk man would milk Sara. To him her milk was the most precious of all.

–

Sara and her dog were floating through space and came upon seven planets orbiting a star. They went to the first planet and it was covered in a thing that looked like moss. Sara touched it and it was slightly damp. It was furry, soft and white. She whispered secrets into it. One of the secrets was about a frog she had met. I will tell you the secret now. What Sara said was, That frog made me uncomfortable, but I thought about it and I understand now that it was my problem and not his. Still it bothers me and I am not sure what to do with it. That is why I am telling you, this moss that is new to me. Thank you for listening. I’m not sure what frog she was talking about.

The second secret Sara whispered was about the ratmilk man. She said she thought she was falling in love. The third secret Sara had was about trains. She said she thought she was falling in love with trains

–

[INTERVIEW BETWEEN SARA AND TRAINS]

Trains: CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK *rumblerumblerumble*

Sara (yelling): I LOVE YOU!!

Trains: CHUGCHUGCHUGCHUGCLACKCLACKCLACK

Sara (still yelling): I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, SWEET BABY

Trains: CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CLANKCLANKCLANKCLANKCLANKCLANK *rumble*

–

Sara’s dog explored the moss planet like a big doggie boy. He sniffed around at some moss. He peed on a tall plant that we might have called a tree because of its size, though we might have called it something else because it did not look like a tree. It was like if someone had planted one end of a caterpillar in the ground and the caterpillar had grown leaves on the lower and upper parts of its body, but in the middle had just grown bare branches. Sara’s dog was not sure if all of the plants of this kind were like this or just the ones in this particular area. Sara’s dog began to think about time, to think about how if we zoomed out we might see that things have only been the way we are seeing them for the exact amount of time we see them, and how woefully incomplete our pictures of anything at all, even things we consider ourselves to be totally familiar with, are.

Sara’s dog had all these thoughts while Sara tried eating the moss. Yuck, she thought. Why did I do that? I could have made myself very sick. That was a terrible idea.

–

Sara went on to the second planet while her dog further explored the first one for some reason. She had asked him and he just stared at her. It was probably about the concept of time. He was always staring at her in a way that made her pretty sure he was getting mindfucked by the concept of time.

On the second planet there were many dogs. Sara was glad that her dog had not come to this planet because she was afraid that she would lose him here and not be able to find him. She petted a bunch of the dogs. One of them peed on her and she took this as a form of communication. To her, the pee was like saying hello. She said hello back rather than peeing on the dog, though usually she tries to engage with the customs of the places she goes. No one said hello back. They were dogs.

–

Sara drew up a map of the second planet. It was in her notebook. The map consisted of her writing the word dogs and then on the edges she drew ocean waves and sea-monsters, because that is traditionally what one does with parts of a map that are yet unexplored. She walked a little farther and there were waves and sea-monsters and she wasn’t sure how to fix the map. She talked to a sea-monster for a while. It said it liked her hair and she said thank you. She said she had cut it herself because she lived with her dog and a ratmilk man who did not own scissors. It said, Could you have loaned him the scissors you cut your own hair with? and Sara said, No I borrowed them. The sea-monster had another question but Sara had started wandering away looking at some weird button-like thing on the ground and wasn’t listening anymore. The sea-monster rolled its eyes and went back into the waves. The waves were the most intelligent life on the planet, but this is always true on every planet.

–

[INTERVIEW BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND THE SEA MONSTER]

Author: I’m sorry I didn’t write more about you. You seem wonderful, but Sara just wasn’t really paying any attention.

Sea Monster: Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ve got better things to do than be in a book. Anyway, you already wrote a book about a sea monster.

Author: Oh gosh, did I? I guess I did, in a way. Thanks for being kind.

Sea Monster: Don’t even worry about it, sweetheart.

Author: Do you want to hang out?

Sea Monster: I’m sorry I don’t date people who don’t live on the same planet as me.

Author: Oh. I mean, I didn’t…

Sea Monster: Shhh it’s okay. It’s okay.

Author: …oh, thank you.

–

Sara’s dog finally arrived on the second planet. He landed in a part that didn’t have any dogs. He smelled other dogs though and got excited. Sara’s dog liked other dogs a lot. Some dogs don’t like other dogs and Sara’s dog had always thought that was sad. He thought that dogs should care about and support other dogs. Sure, just because you’re a dog doesn’t mean you are going to get along with or have anything in common with another creature just because it is a dog, but that doesn’t mean all dogs can’t be kind to each other and always assume the best. And sure, that should be a practice for every living creature, but something about seeing dogs hurt each other felt especially sad.

Sara’s dog didn’t have a name. Sara had asked him what his name was when they first met and Sara’s dog had just let out a series of particularly informational smells that said I am yours.

–

Sara finally ran into her dog in a part of the planet that was near the part with other dogs. She recognized him immediately but then was unsure for a second. It had been an extremely long time since Sara was unsure what her beautiful doggie looked like.

–

Sara and her dog went onto the third planet together. On this planet it was all weeds. Just a huge pile of weeds everywhere. Somebody’s garden is highly neglected, thought Sara.

–

Sara’s dog and Sara went on to the fourth planet. It was cold and covered in gas. It was an extremely large planet and if I were to show you the percentage of it that Sara and her dog saw, it would take more zeros after a decimal place than you would want to read. They saw an extremely tiny portion of this planet. It was impossible to breathe there so they didn’t stay very long. Sara’s dog was great at holding his breath, but Sara passed out while leaving the planet’s atmosphere. Sara’s dog nudged her back to the weedy planet with his snout and afterward his nose was very bruised and sore but Sara was ok. The weeds made oxygen that tumbled into her lungs like it was nothing at all. It was a big help to Sara, who was almost dead. She vomited on a weed. The vomit smelled like the gas atmosphere on that big big planet.

Sara announced that she used to be okay with space travel but that now she was kind of freaked out by it. She looked around at the weed-covered planet and decided to go with the flow and create a yard where its sole purpose was to grow weeds. She decided to try to live here because it had her favorite thing: oxygen.

–

Sara’s time on the weedy planet was shorter than she originally thought. She tried to build a house there, but it turns out building a house is extremely difficult and building a house on a planet you have never spent time on is guaranteed to be a wildly frustrating experience. She found a rock to use as a kind of a blade and managed to chop down something that looked like it might contain something like wood but it turns out inside it was just a sort of pudding that smelled like chemicals. When she finally found something that looked like wood and something that looked like a nail the nail started yelling out math and Sara dropped it on the ground.

–

[INTERVIEW BETWEEN SARA AND THE THING THAT LOOKED LIKE A NAIL]

Thing: F∆s cos θ = ∆E

Sara: Hello?

Thing: B = ρgV_displaced

Thing: ∯B · dA = 0

–

Sara and her dog went back home, knowing that there were still three planets they had not explored. Sometimes it is better to leave things unexplored. Sara became increasingly concerned that her exploration was something that caused damage to the places she explored.

–

The ratmilk man waited at Sara and her dog’s house the whole time they were gone. They were gone for an extremely long time. The ratmilk man was unsure why he stayed. He started to wonder about his life choices. What brought him to this place? Shouldn’t he be out milking rats?

–

When Sara got home she was incredibly excited to see the ratmilk man. They kissed and he milked her all night long as she played ratgirl with him. She pushed her fingers into his mouth and said, Lick my rat fingers.

–

Sara grew distant from the ratmilk man over the months following their trip to the planets. Something in her had changed. She still loved the ratmilk man and he still loved her, but he couldn’t find her and she couldn’t seem to fully find her way back. She took her dog and went for a walk in the evenings and he asked if he could join her and she said she would prefer to walk just with her dog.

One of these days when she got back he was gone. He said in a note he went to explore the planets for himself. He left her a bottle of milk that he had milked from himself while pretending to be a rat. It had a note attached that said Drink this and think of me. I love you.

–

Sara met a cactus in a desert. The cactus told her that it had water inside. The sand beneath her feet said, Yes there is water inside that cactus. Sara wasn’t so sure and kept walking until the ground took a sharp turn underneath her as if it was going down a cliff, except gravity moved with it so she was still walking just fine. She didn’t even stumble.

She walked a ways farther and came upon a rocky cloud. She kissed each rock she found there on its forehead as she sang a wordless, gentle tune. The rocks all fell asleep. It was so warm.

Sara went from there on to a monster’s house. The monster who lived in the house was there with two other monsters. Their bodies were covered with shaggy fur of different colors. One of the monsters had black fur and weighed maybe 800 lbs and was 6 feet tall and said her name was Car Crash. One of the other monsters who called themself Spackle had brown fur with rainbow spots and was very small, maybe the size of Sara’s hand, and the other one’s fur looked brown but when you got close you saw that each hair was a completely unique bright colour from every other hair in the fur. It was maybe 9 feet tall and had a big black tongue and was named Jehu. They all greeted Sara and invited her to be their fourth for bridge. Sara’s partner was Car Crash and Sara could not stop staring at her eyes.

Car Crash was the high bidder every round and so Sara played the dummy, watching Car Crash win hand after hand while she sat doing nothing. It was really impressive. One time Car Crash lost and looked really sad and so Sara walked around the table and took Car Crash’s hand in her hand and stroked the back of it as she looked in her eyes saying, You did so good. Thank you for being my bridge partner.

Jehu served them all coffee.

–

The ratmilk man returned from space and it was, for a time, like the beginning of old things again. He milked Sara and she showed him the places she had found rats and he showed her how to milk them. He showed Sara’s dog a rat and Sara’s dog tried to eat it and he took the rat back and said No, no.

–

One day the ratmilk man came to Sara and said, I received a letter in the mail.

What did the letter say? asked Sara.

The letter was from an electric building in the north somewhere, said the ratmilk man. It said that if I do not journey to sheol then the small tigers under my skin will become larger and use their teeth to rip out of the places where they lay asleep in their small blisters in my skin. It said that I could soon end up with ripped holes in my skin and many hungry tigers.

Why did you put tigers there? asked Sara.

I don’t remember, frowned the ratmilk man. There was much about his past that was mysterious to Sara.

And so Sara and her dog said their teary goodbyes to the ratmilk man, who hiked his orange pack with gray straps up on his shoulder and walked off into the early evening light.

Afterward Sara realized he left the letter, but when she tried to read it, it felt as if cold metal was being inserted into the back of her throat. She coughed and tried again and it was as if bees were stinging her perineum. She burned the letter and used the ashes to write a series of single words on the wall.

Milkingless, she wrote.

Polymer, she wrote next. Arboretum. Guinevere.

Never Angeline North is the author of the books Sea-Witch (Inside the Castle, 2020), Careful Mountain (CCM, 2016), and Sara or the Existence of Fire (Horse Less Press, 2014), among others. She lives in Olympia, WA where she runs an edgy t-shirt company and is going to be in a gay shrek play this summer. You can find her online at never.horse.

I’m going to fuck a god. I heard if you’re good they grant wishes. I heard they make you holy. I heard they change you if you ask, bittersweet, in the afterglow. 

There’s no trail in this part of the woods. The trees swallow me up and the greens go from dappled jade to murky olive. Trunks are eaten up by vines and moss. I tear through brambles and branches with my acidic eagerness. Scratches lace my face and arms when I reach the clearing. It’s fine, I tell myself, as I suck my cut lip―I needed to bleed. 

I’m not the only one. My mother’s locket beats, cold against my neck as I approach the center. My thumbnail scrapes over the ruined engraving before I dig into the clasp to click it open, the copper edges encrusted with bloody rust. Inside there are a few liquid droplets left, red as the wound in my friend’s palm when I left her. With a shake, they spatter onto the circle of white pebbles in the center of the expanse. There’s so little―it’s anticlimactic. My blood follows, dribbling down from scratches between my clenched fingers. It disappears in the flattened grass, but it’s enough. Iron and wood rot itches up my nose. 

I try to ignore the stinging. The scratches remind me of the mortal I’ll leave behind ― all memories carried in bone marrow that cannot cross the barrier to the divine:

The look on my mother’s face when she says she loves me. 

“You don’t love me.” I’m right when I say this, but she recoils like I’ve kicked her dog―no, like I’ve cannibalized some other precious child that she loves. She reminds me―again―how she gave her mother’s locket to that child. From Daughter to Daughter to Daughter, she says, with deadly enunciation. She doesn’t even know my name. “You mourn me.”

How I bit myself on the shoulder, on the arm, and the tender skin of my calf before prom. The red crescents left by my teeth, hidden underneath faux silk, and the split seams from contorting myself into a biteable shape. I am a thing that bites. Funny how the marks made me feel like less of a monster, trussed up in that gown I had spent so much on and didn’t even want to wear once.

The give of her flesh, when I sliced my best friend’s hand on purpose. 

I said it was an accident, slinging my butterfly knife ‘round my fingers while walking out to join her for our premature break, leaving our tables of diners abandoned. The knife was a gift from her. “Stay safe,” she’d said, pressing it into my palm. She hadn’t wrapped it. Maybe she knew what I’d use it for. Maybe her mouth twisted (like it does when she has to toss leftovers), thinking of me laying myself bare at the feet of our local deities when she’d picked it out. Maybe her lips would twist every time she looked at her hand now. While I bandaged her palm in soft loops, she looked at me. I remember the warp of her furrowed brows (concern, pity, disgust?)―her every word and expression distorted by this fisheye lens forged from the cruel hunger I felt in me. This is what she will remember: shoddy first-aid and the hunched shoulders of a stranger by the dumpster, discreetly wiping a bloody knife into a locket to the chirrupy bass of the diner radio. I leave and I leave behind. I can’t help it. 

I throw the knife with a viciousness that has grown with me since I was born. The handle shudders as the blade pierces the earth. 

When I look back up the divine is before me. 

Glass skin, four arms, I can see the undulating innards all in the wrong places; intestines in the forearm, a lung in the left foot, blood pooling, bubbling, and obscuring. Maybe those are the right places, maybe it’s how I’m meant to be built. On its face is a moth that reveals nothing, sapphire pseudo-eyes blinking with the beat of the furred wings. A crescendo of flutters and most of its body is hidden by a swarm of smaller moths. 

“How can I be like you?” the words swoop from my chest. Seconds later I think I should have made a greeting first―my small talk has always left a lot to be desired (and, oh, do I desire).

Stand on the shores of existence as the surf slithers in. Let it surround you, but never touching, never pulling you back into the depth with it. Be eaten by none but yourself, your tail flooding down your throat with every breath. Wash over your fate, again and again. That’s what I am. What are you? Its voice is nothing. Not a sound, not a thought, not a knowing. Only the suggestion of meaning.

“I have an evil little heart, I know it. I break thorns from roses and eat them. I’ll hope something pretty blooms in my gut as I hand you the thorns. Will you know me?” I didn’t need to practice this little speech, it’s stitched into my skin. I am made of lies.

A clear hand cups my cheek, thumb brushing a bloody scratch. It’s not cool or hard like I expected. It’s warm and gelatinous. It sucks onto my skin. I am drawn closer. My lips part and a fuzzy wing tip brushes them. 

What do you hate more? Being someone or being no one? Is your desire born of substance or oblivion? A second hand takes me by the nape of my neck, softer than silk and bandages. 

“Will you hold me?” Breathless. My fingertips tingle, they’re going numb. I’m not sure if my feet are touching the ground. I reach for it, and the moths part so I can press my palm against its chest. I think I feel it heave a sigh. The trees creak above us.

Neither then. You seek that which holds but does not restrain. A cocoon. 

“Yes,” the answer pushes itself from the bottom of my lungs. A crucible hotter than I could create for myself, smaller, tighter than the mortal world could make for me. Crush me into dust. Take me apart. Lay all of my bones side by side, gnawed clean. I can’t say all of it―the air is too light, or too heavy, to carry any more words―but I need this.

A third hand passes through my own chest until it palms my heart, the way someone picks a ripe orange. Tremors pass through me, sweet and frightening. There’s more in me than there ever has been before. I am not seen, but I am felt. My heart is so much heavier than I thought. Its fingertips press into the flesh and despite beating faster, my heart responds like clay, at first, forming divots at the pressure points, then it begins to melt, seeping between its fingers. A cry is wrung out of me, and I cling and claw at its chest. I cannot feel the disgust that always buzzes around my ears. I cannot feel the bubbles of joy I imagined while lying on the floor of my kitchen. I am in the throes of furious hope―I spasm with it―and with its help, I strive to be sculpted into something I can bear to meet the world with. 

I push my hand further and further into its chest sinking it up to my wrist. It shudders, moth wings blinkering even as praise tumbles from my throat. It hums the song I sing in the shower to ignore my body. It recites the words I repeat to everyone who fails to name me. It imprints on itself the unwritten reply to every misaddressed email and love note. 

“I am not what I am.”

I look into the sapphire, insectile eyes and let go of everything that ties me together. As we fall apart I whisper. Then I am sure that my feet are still on the ground because the earth presses up and squirms against the soles of my shoes. Little striped caterpillars writhe out of the dirt. Hundreds of them. They wriggle up blades of grass and my shoelaces to reach me. They eat. In mouthfuls of visceral tickling, I am devoured, divided, digested amongst them. The god watches me, fingers brushing hair from my eyes when I buckle to the ground. I sink into the arms that cradle me, my skull halfway to where its humerus should be. I can’t hear my laughter, but I am wracked with it until the end―until the beginning. 

It hovers in the clearing. A butterfly knife rests, red, against its glassy fingers. Later the knife will be found on the doorstep of a diner waitress, a friend, with a bandaged palm. For now, whispering as another moth beats over, its wings still wet―holy and known. Though it shouldn’t be able, it crafts a tiny cocoon on the underside of the blade, a locket melting inside it. Above, moss-covered branches sigh and groan. A song transposed for a tiny mouth, thoroughly fucked.

Hale (they/he) is a queer creator of poetry, short fiction, illustrations, and interactive fiction, based in Michigan. Their work explores the monstrous, intimate, divine, transformative, and fae under a queer lens. You can find more of his work in Angel Rust, Lammergeier, and on their Itch page @skiddyhale. His Twitter is @haleandwellmet.