1.
Their name is T. Their father had bad cancer. Their mother was a painter until she died, too. With father, the cause––the pancreas––was clear. With mother, the afflicted organ was the organ of dreams. They-everybody tried to figure out what it was but came up blank. The three of family also had four cats: two adults, two kittens.
Since then something has emptied out of T. T has begun to smell strange and speak stranger. T demands of the cats, What am I going to do? They ask again and again. Deadmother speaks back from noplace like, First, I need to improve my painting, finish my project. Then she grinds down her nose and says no more. Deadfather says nothing like livefather.
What are we going to do? T asks again. What are we going to do?
• • •
2.
T lived on the end of a far stretch of road, mostly flat, where there was more sky to see than ground. It was not the Midwest but T imagined it to be. It was not poverty but something other-bankrupt. Everything painted in solid blocks of color. Horrors were steady. T had shared the house with their parents for their whole life. Their whole life had been sharing; now they were a recluse.
They had once walked, glided, down the road, fed the horses, returned to find a cat’s fresh kill on their doorstep. Sometimes the bird’d still be hot. Sometimes T named the bird right as it croaked. Sometimes T reached for the killer cat and said good girl.
T had no friends, never did. T had no appearance because no one looked at them. They wore their privacy like a great gown.
• • •
3.
T opened their mouth and waited for food. T ate of the food like a hatchling. T had once been an optimist at heart. Livemother had once brought them pieces of felt glitter twine to wind into a tender nest. T made the nest at their own pace. T could not speed this pace, for fear of disappointment so severe it could kill. Severe like weathers, mothers, diseases. Severe like the first nestfallen bird. You can fly all over the world, but you can never go home.
• • •
4.
T eats their fair share of food. They weigh approximately eight times the weight of one adult cat. They eat eight times the kibble each adult gets. T has given up human food. T has given up humanity. T has given up on something, several somethings. T is Nobody, and Nobody eats cat food. T is for tuna.
• • •
5.
Someone makes a home in this inscrutable process. This radical wound. This opening before the name is the Name. This dark throat place. This barricade. This Someone is flat like an ironing board. This Someone eats mounds to round their weft.
• • •
6.
Someone wants to change the conversation on Mental Health. Mental Health has hitherto smelled of old dead fish. Someone would like to offer sushi-grade Mental Health.
• • •
7.
T knows that trans is the future. T knows the future is trans. T knows cis is a dead end. T knows their parents died long before they died, already dead ends. The future is a thing rushing toward all of us, the voice––the choice––is adapt or mute.
• • •
8.
What if Someone made to jump the floor to realize whither flight? T believed in being that someone. It wouldn’t fit them but it would be pretty cool. It wouldn’t be like dreaming but the underside of wake.
• • •
9.
T prepared the flying machine. First they dissected the dead wings of birds. Next they gathered their nesting materials. Next they wove. When their bare wings began to shine, they ate again, ate like the stomach of a horse.
Surely deadmothernfather’d be proud of their flying machine. The house was growing smaller by the day. Soon it would be mere as the two urns. Which parts of the body became inside the urn, T wondered. Cats, what is in the urn?
No reply. Inside the urn must be hostile, T figured. Fog knows this house is.
• • •
10.
(Someone says, The hostile is enclosure.)
• • •
11.
When they began to fly, T decided, they would first open the horse from its dirty pen.
• • •
12.
T wonderstands compliance. Wonderstands means you get something in theory, but in practice, you wonder how anyone could be stupid enough to believe it. T has been asked many times to comply. When the women shaped like Peeps came to their old house and carted them past the cats, the street horses, the urns of their mother and their father, they said, Comply urgently. Comply and no one gets hurt. And then a sharp fluid traveled through T’s bodymind. And T complied.
Another word for comply is adhere. And this is what T is: stuck.
• • •
13.
Imagine T has a friend. They are at school. They each find a seat in the classroom, in the dining hall, in the future. This is a beautiful blue world. It is still a flat world. It is a world where it is a little stupid to have faith. Where a little disingenuous is necessary for survival.
In this classroom world, frightening forces attack unobstructed. Every Someone’s got an erotic relationship with their panic button. They wear their panic on their breasts like votes. They make friends inside their house of shared panic. They clutch each other in the haywire. Needles poke their palms and they wash them in the pinkening water.
Friend sees T for the first time. Friend says, You look a little–– And then her voice garbles underwater. T tastes tuna behind their tongue. T acquires a glass of vodka and clinks Friend’s empty fist. They eat strawberries. T drinks to quell the tuna, which is a metaphor for dread.
• • •
14.
T wishes for a uvula, a demarcation line between swallowed and unswallowed. T believes the uvula to be a kind of Veil, that life is raw and death digestion.
On occasion, in the thick sick of evening, T makes their needing known. In this way, T makes themself known. T cracks their mouth like a cat food can and stinks up the place. What place? It is not a house. Not even a home. Here there is no horse’s paddock. Here, T is the broken horse.
• • •
15.
T and Friend dump strawberries into the sink. They plumb the dirty depths. Green hats into the garbage. Red bodies to the rag.
Friend stares T dead in the eye. Have you ever tasted anything so pink and beautiful as acquiescence?
I will never, says T. Never acquiesce.
You will never get the juice out of your hands, beloved.
The sinkwater’s reached a boil. T plunges in their hands.
Friend purrs.
• • •
16.
The house was brown, ranch-style. The picket fence, white. The trim, white too, white enough to hurt in the sun. There was the smell of horseshit, but the horseshit was someone else’s problem.
As T’s livefather, laid limply on the old sofa, eked out the last brutal gusts of life, T’s mother, not yet dead, painted him. She said, I know you will haunt this house. I know you love us enough for that.
The kittens, collectively named “Gemini” and indistinguishable by looks, jumped behind livefather’s pillows. They kneaded. Livefather had no hair of his own, but when they kneaded like this, it was as though the kittens grew wholesale from his head.
On the day he became deadfather, one Gemini brought home a sparrow.
• • •
17.
The painting sits unfinished in the house of deadmother and deadfather.
The painting contains a violent indent in the shape of a head.
The paint contains a raw pink hue.
Deadfather’s last words to T were, I don’t love her enough to haunt her.
• • •
18.
As Someone can see, T can’t. T is weak and confused absent sight. Someone believes that because T is sightless, T sees nothing. T squeezes their eyes until pink blooms beneath their lids.
Someone says: What are your goals.
I am trying to bring back livemother and livefather, says T.
Someone says: Livemother and livefather are not any longer.
I am trying to time like space, says T. I am trying to bring back home.
• • •
19.
An open urn is, for a cat, endless entertainment. Cats take pleasure in playing with death. Cats like shitting in the house. Cats like no one’s home.
Cats have no true names. Cats go everywhere. Gemini follow the smelltrace of tuna from the front stoop to the horse barn. A rottenman does rotten to his horse. The horse cannot see rottenman. The horse has dung beneath her shoes.
Not even able to clean herself. Mothers shutter their Geminis’ eyes. As night falls hot and violent, the horse licks sweatsalt from her bare aching body.
In the night humans realize they are mammals. In the night cats realize they are beasts. Horses maim best when frightened.
The horse is most dangerous when frightened. Do you believe you have frightened the horse? Do you believe you have frightened the horse to death?
The inmates run
the asylum.
• • •