The parade rolls by bearing bright flags, raised up high. Like little toy soldiers, proudly marching through the desecrated city streets. Litter is scattered across every concrete surface, garbage lined along the sidewalks and roadways. They have not cleared out a path for us, but we’ll clear out a path for ourselves. The city belongs to us, and only us, and we will do as we please.

In leather armor, stone butch soldiers parade past tent towns and homeless encampments. The city has painted the anti-homeless spikes rainbow in our honor. I pretend to be thankful for this small, however misplaced, gesture. People always fall between the cracks, and may some god help you if you turn out both homeless and queer. I hope some other god unleashes his vengeful wrath upon parents who are so unable to love their own queer children, even though I know this kind of justice will never happen.

Across the way, someone’s mother gasps, shielding her eyes, lest she see some freak on a leash strolling past. We know some wannabe woke will rampage, commenting online on some “no kink at pride!!!” discourse while talking about how they had to endure the absolute trauma of seeing an appropriately clothed adult in a leather pup mask. More nefarious things will happen, but no one will know, and maybe no one will hear or say it. Speak no evil. Hear no evil. See no evil. But I can almost see the future flash before my eyes. Tomorrow, they will tear down the kingdom we’ve built. Tomorrow, members of our own community will defile the so-called safe spaces. Tomorrow, they will completely destroy the only place our wandering youth can call home.

I remember times when things have been better in this city. It’s been on a steady decline for a while now, but I’m told that this is the case for nearly every city in this country. I’m told that many have it so much worse than us, so we should be grateful. Henry turns his phone screen towards me, the message flashing across reminds me that they still want us dead, as though I could ever let myself forget that. Missing Person’s Alert. William’s gone missing. He’s been missing for months now. 19 year old white male. 5’8”. Last seen wearing a blue baseball cap, red sneakers and a pair of black jeans. Last seen in the city’s historic district. I know that kid. He’s one of us. I knew him. He was like a brother to me. And soon he may very well be one more body for the mass grave. “I’m sorry.” Henry whispers. It’s okay. He’s been missing for a while now. They should have done this sooner. It almost feels too late for hope. The city is not what it used to be. Soaring towers and skyscrapers have long been abandoned. Every street you could possibly walk down has some unfinished construction project. The city’s become a hollow shell of its former self. Everyone is just trying to survive, inside this place where there is nothing.

I stand off to the side with Henry to watch the main event, waiting for something big to happen. Seeing all the little floats or cars go by. People waving, looking out into the crows as we watch them go by. I wonder what makes someone special enough, what gives a person that larger than life quality. That they deserve to be put on a pedestal. Could I ever be one of those queers? Could I ever stand up on one of those floats and look out into the crowd, knowing how high up I am above everyone else?

The last couple of parade floats are a theatrical display, four horse-trodden figures in cheap plastic armour, catching the light at just the right angle. They’ve decided to play Apocalypse. As though the end of the world isn’t already upon us. The weather channel warned me already. All the oceans are going to turn to blood. Giant locusts will appear and attack people on earth, but I’m sure I could just apply some extra bug spray. That’d keep them at bay.

The first horseman to ride down the road is a woman with a long white dress, tattered and blood-stained around the edges. She’s not wearing any makeup and she has bleach blonde hair and tired eyes. Chin up. She’s proud to be playing the personification of conquest, although I’m not too sure what she’s supposed to be conquering. Maybe everything? Maybe nothing? Maybe it’s just conquest in general that’s evil and will be the beginning of the end for us all.

On the next float, a woman with fiery red hair and a short red dress stands, holding a dagger in her right hand. She’s covered in fake blood. Great big flames almost engulf the entire thing. The flame throwers are a lavish touch and to be wasting them like this will surely cause some kind of controversy in the aftermath. War is always a pricey endeavor, so I’m not sure why I would expect the depiction of it to be any different. This part of the judgment day story always confused me just a little bit. Is conquest not the purpose for most wars?

Famine is next up. She seems to be holding a small scale up in her hand, letting it teeter-totter to either side as the float drives onwards. They didn’t cast someone overly thin in this role, but maybe that’s just because of the abundance of eating disorder imagery they’re providing. She wears a long black dress. She looks more like she’s meant to be holding the scales of Justice than any kind of proper scale meant for weighing food. The world is already filled with famine, though, so I don’t know what makes the Judgment Day type of famine any different.

The last person, lagging behind all the other grad floats, is intended to symbolize widespread death, although the message comes across a little bit campy if you ask me. Long cloaked figure holding a sickle, stereotypical grim reaper costume anyone could get from a halloween store. Maybe they used up most of the budget on the first three floats because the embodiment of death doesn’t get to ride one. Instead, they opt to just let her walk along, dragging fake chains behind her. A pale, sickly looking horse is being dragged along beside Grimm Reaper. Every once in a while, the two of them pause to throw glittery green confetti into the air.

I walk along behind them. Gabriel’s already blowing his half-dented horn on the sidewalk, and when he asks me to spare some change, I open up my wallet for the poor archangel. It’s not like I have much to spare, but on the fine hold that is Pride, I think everyone deserves to celebrate. Henry follows behind me like a lost dog. I pity him. I can see the look on his face. I can see that he doesn’t know himself yet. Former straight man, now teetering somewhere in between. Who knows when the period of questioning will finally come to an end.

Sometimes, I look around at all my fellow queers, and I think about what it’d be like to tell them everything. To actually tell someone about the graveyard, about my surgery, about how happy I’ve become. I want to know what they think of me and I’m horribly afraid of what they’ll say at the same time. If I gave out queer community my medical gift, would they be able to accept it? What would happen if I shared this, if I taught other people that they too could change themselves in the same way that I have? Would it bring a sense of power, or a sense of disruption? Would it help us or hurt us? Am I destroying everything we’ve built?

I can already imagine the fractions from the rest of the world. I can already imagine how the news broadcasts and online forums will describe me. Pervert transvestite. Predatory queer. Monster. As though our community has ever been truly sanitized enough for them? Whoever said that there isn’t such a thing as a bad gay?

As the parade makes it all the way to an arbitrary destination that they’ve decided is the end, and the crowd slowly dissipates, we decide to make a pit stop at Henry’s apartment before heading to a local bar. Not that I’m bothered much by his humble abode, but it’s not much better than mine, if he’s paying for this dump, I already know that it must cost him a small fortune, although this assumption is partially based on the fact that there’s a completely scarcity of furniture or other decor, perhaps a sign that money is tight at the moment. Despite the lack of actual furniture, the small studio apartment does not feel barren in the slightest.

In one corner, he’s got cardboard boxes piled up almost to the ceiling. Random patches of what could be dirt, but are more likely to be mold embellish the walls with their large, circular blooms. It looks like an accidental accent wall. I try not to breathe in too much, but given that my own home is almost certainly worse, I’m sure that I’ll survive the little bit of mold that I’m being exposed to here.

“Home sweet home.” He says, and gestures for me to take a seat on the mattress in the ground. It sure is cozy. I sit down beside him, stretching my legs out in front of me.

“All the walking’s definitely tired me out.”

“Me too.”

“Could I get you something to drink?”

Sure. Anything you have. You know I’m not picky.”

I watch him walk over to the makeshift kitchen area where there’s a small sink with exposed pipes, and the only actual cabinetry I can see.

His old laptop is sitting on a pile of wood palettes that he’s using as a coffee table. The laptop begins making enough noise that it sounds as though the poor thing is an airplane about to take off. It’s covered in branded sticks and duct tape that’s been drawn on with some sharpied in band logos and funny quotes.

Despite the fact that Henry is local, we met in an online chat room. I’m sure that somewhere, I still have the archive of our chats on my old laptop. I was the love of his life for a brief period (8 weeks). It was my fifteen minutes of fame. I’m not sure Henry’s fully recovered from it. He acts as though that moment only lasted because he was on a bender but I think he remembers it perfectly well. I offend his sense of manhood. It was some big fight about how he sees me, or how he sees the relationship, and what that says about us. Am I a man or a woman to him? Does that make him gay or straight? Not that it really matters all that much to me, but I think at the time it really mattered to him. Oh well, rest in peace, Henry’s big fat ego.

He hands me a cup of what I believe is either watered down coffee or dirty water and sits down beside me on the couch that is actually a mattress on the ground. He has a sad look in his eyes. The type of thing that lets me know that he’s about to go on spewing some pseudo-intellectual or fake deep stuff.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be capable of doing something worthwhile.”

I can only shrug at something so ridiculous. “Every human being wants to ‘leave their mark’ on the world.”

“Do you?”

“Why would I need to?”

He stares at me. It is uncomfortable. The moment stretches out longer than it should, before Henry finally gives me the grace of filling in the silence. But his words are empty: “I don’t know.”

I feel the dynamic shift between us. Something I didn’t feel before, when I was so certain that he must share all the same thoughts and opinions that I have. When I thought that we were morphing into each other, changing ourselves into something equally as horrible, I was only half right. We’re not morphing into each other, but we are still equally horrible as people.

“I just feel like I’m meant to do something special, you know?” He says.

I resist the urge to roll my eyes at him. “No one is any more special than the rest of us. If you’re lucky, you’ll manage to do something amazing and the whole world will clap and cheer. Do you want to do something important or good or do you just want the fame and notoriety that comes along with it?”

“I want to do something meaningful. I’m not saying that I’m somehow “special”. I’m just talking about the fact that I feel as though I’ve been wasting my life and I could be doing something to help people, or I could be doing something important, but I’m not. It’s different than believing I’m somehow special. It’s a different thing entirely.”

The shirt I’m wearing starts to cling to my back, wet and sticky with sweat. I realize I’ve been a complete asshole to him and I don’t know how to excuse myself. “I’m sorry. I see what you mean, I really wasn’t trying to frame it like that.” I sigh. “You know how I am.”

“I know. You’ve been really going through it.”

“No, it’s not like that.” I pause. “I’m sorry, I’m just an asshole.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I just wish you weren’t.”

I don’t know what kind of person Henry wants me to be. I want to shape myself in his image, but he wants to turn himself into me. We try and fail to mirror each other. In some ways, I’ve turned into a bastardized version of him. Our ages and identities meld together. Will we always be two parts of the same whole? Not even my name feels like my own. I am not myself. When I catch a glimpse of myself in the broken mirror shard that he’s decided to hang up on the wall, it feels as though I am watching myself through his eyes. I see me as he sees me. I see me. I stare back, but say nothing. My reflection does not speak either. Maybe they have nothing to say.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, “it’s fine,” he tells me. It is a long and silent walk over to the bar, but in a few moments, he’ll forget everything I’ve said.

It’s time to take my morning medication. The little vial resting precariously on the edge of the dresser is eyeing me down. The dresser’s a mess. Clothes and garbage spilling out of the drawers and threatening to fall down onto the floor. Sharpied graffiti’s written all over the side of it and it’s completely scratched up, but a piece of shit I found on the side of the road is better than nothing. My never ending laundry pile stares me down from the corner of the room. The trash bags I use as curtains flail a bit in the morning breeze. The faded, puke-green coloured carpet feels soft beneath my feet as I reach for one of the vials on top of the dresser.

I don’t need any kind of modern medical system. I think there’s a personal power in the Do-It-Yourself ethos. We find a way to help each other out. Someone sent me the link to the supplier and an at-home blood test kit, and since then, I’ve been my own doctor. I don’t need any kind of “specialist”. I don’t need any kind of gender clinic specialist. I don’t need anyone who thinks that going to school gives them the right to tell me that I’m just confused. I can’t be myself. I can’t exist in my vagueness. I can. I am.

The doctors are wrong about everything, and I’m going to stick this needle into my thigh as many times as I want to. I’m going to do it again and again and again and I’ll never get tired of injecting myself with cross-sex hormones. I can procure the drugs myself. I can do whatever I want to my body. I throw the needle into the trash afterwards and make sure to put the little vial back inside my dresser drawer, before lifting myself up off the bed again. My body feels heavy this morning.

The stench from the bathroom fills my nose, even before I get there. My legs shake, knees clanking together as I slowly close the short distance between me and the bathroom door. I’m scared to open it. It’s like Schrodinger’s cat. Are the bodies still dead, or have they come back to life? I can make an educated guess, but I can never truly be sure until I push open the door, revealing that not one, but two dead bodies are still in my bathroom.

I can tell they’re really beginning to decay because it seems as though no matter how many times I go out to fill the tub with ice, it’s never enough. On the 9th bag now, and it’s getting expensive. Within a couple of hours, I typically end up with a melted slop of mud and blood to clean up. Then, I have to drain the tub and start the whole process all over again. To top it all off, the summer’s heat is starting to attract all kinds of critters and bugs into the apartment. They don’t seem to mind helping themselves to what’s left of the bodies.

I have to do everything in my power to keep their skin feeling (and looking) as soft as possible before the surgery date. It seems as though no matter how much junk I rub on their skin, it won’t retain any of the moisture. All I can do is preserve what’s left. I keep piling on the Vaseline in hops that it would help keep their skin from becoming more fragile than it already is.

The pink linoleum tiles squeak beneath my feet. I draw back the shower curtain, which had once been clear but has since turned a dull yellow color. I’m able to fully see the two bodies laid out in front of me. I bend over to pick up the girl in the tub, laying my hands underneath her back and legs before trying to lift her up. The force of the movement is too rough on my body. Too rough on the injuries, and too rough on my chest. The skin and flesh from the last surgery is already beginning to rot and I know that I’ll have to operate sometime soon, within the next few days. If I don’t, it’ll get harder for me to move around, nearly impossible for me to go out in public, purely as a result of how obvious it’s becoming that something is incredibly wrong with me. I already reek of formaldehyde. I’m surprised nothing is maggot-infested yet. My body should be food for the worms by now.

Tending to the bodies feels careful and delicate. It’s a tender sort of care. The kind of care you want to give to things that are dying, or things you’ve otherwise found a way to love. I’m beginning to find a way to love the bodies, even if it is mostly for what I’m going to get from them. I’m beginning to learn more about them and finding ways to humanize them in my mind. Sometimes, I speak to them, describing everything I’m doing and what I plan to do. Sometimes, in my imagination, they speak back.

“We want this.”

The woman lays still in the bathtub. I pick up her arm and examine the skin; it has a cold, sort of dried out leathery texture. Somehow, she looks paler than she did yesterday, and when I pick up her wrist, I can see the purple veins poking through. I can’t stand to see something so beautiful turn ugly. The same could be said about the man, still tied up to the shower rail, arguably causing the most stench out of anything else in the apartment. His dark brown hair stands straight up, as though he has just a touch of bedhead. I take a few moments to run a brush through his matted hair. The least I could do is tidy him up a bit.

After that, we do face masks together and give each other makeovers. On the package, the masks are advertised as containing “highly moisturizing serum containing hyaluronic acid”. The whole makeovers thing makes me feel like I’m in grade school all over again. If it wasn’t for the man feeling left out, we could have gotten a braid train started. I realize I’ve been rude. A bad host. I should have introduced myself earlier.

But when I do finally tell them my name, the man sighs. “I hope you know you’ve been a terrible host.” He says in a half-joking tone. I hate it when he talks to me like that.

“If I’m a terrible host, then you’re certainly the worst guest I’ve entertained. You’re lucky I won’t throw you out.”

The woman pipes up. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she laughs, “you wouldn’t throw us out if your own life depended on it.”

I smile at the two of them. “You’re always right. I couldn’t do that to either of you.”

“You love us too much.”

“That’s exactly it.”

I pull both of them in for a group hug, and we stay there for a moment, before I push them back to either side of the tub. “Okay guys, enough with the mushy stuff. It’s supposed to be makeover time right now.” I think a part of feeling close to them is wanting to delay the operation. I feel as though I know who they are as people, and because of that, I don’t want to operate just yet. I don’t want to start cutting things open. I don’t want to lose my new friends. There’s no need to get ahead of ourselves here. I take the time to slowly run a brush through the woman’s hair now, getting stuck on a knot as I go. I try to do it up in a braid, but I end up tying her hair up in knots again.

“Sorry about that,” I mutter. She says it’s alright. I’m scared to hurt her. She’s become a good friend to me. “I hope it’s not too bad, I’m just trying to help you out here.” I add.

“No, of course not,” she pauses, “I’m well aware of the state of my hair. I know it’s bad.”

“I mean, you’re right about that, but I’ll see what I can do here.”

“Would you be able to cut my hair today too?”

“If that’s what you were wanting, I suppose I can cut a couple of inches off. I’m no hairdresser though, so you’ve been warned. I don’t have a single clue what I’m doing here.”

She laughs. “Don’t worry about it. I think you could trim it up alright. It’s just too long for my liking at the moment.”

I nod, and grab a pair of rusty scissors from the cabinet above the sink. I grab a lump of her knotted black hair in my hands and haphazardly chop away at it. I warned her. I never promised I’d be able to do a good job, but as I toss bunches of her hair away into the bathroom trash can, she’s absolutely beaming. Smiling cheek to cheek. I don’t let her see herself in the mirror, even though she’s beyond ecstatic about it.

“I can’t thank you enough.” She tells me. “I’ve been meaning to get it done for such a long time. It’s perfect.”

I give her an awkward smile. “I’m just glad you like it.

“Of course.”

I turn away from her to begin my work on the man. I untie his arms from the shower rail. It’s not like he could run off anywhere anyways. I try to sit the two of them up in the tub across from each other, but the man (whose name I’ve decided is Cedric), keeps slouching on me. All this flirtatious behaviour, and after saying I’m a bad host? Tsk tsk. I get into the bath beside him and turn on the water.

I carefully roll the girl over, up onto the ledge of the tub, then with a plop, she falls onto the floor. Maybe the bathmat cushioned her fall, if only slightly.

Suddenly the bathroom becomes the boys locker room, and Cedric is feeling more chatty than he’s been all day. I’ve already moved the towels well out of reach, lest I get my ass slapped with one of them. He’s a well built man, tall, probably taller than I’d realized when I first saw him, given that he’s towering almost a full foot above me, and is likely able to see the bald patch on the back of my head from where I, on occasion, compulsively rip my hair out.

Out of the two of them, he’s the one that’s got more of a distinct smell lingering on him. I don’t know that cleaning is going to do much good here, but I’m hoping for the best.

Water rushes down from the showerhead, onto where both of us are laying in the tub. My body is filthy and disgusting and this is going to make it clean. It will make both of us clean. Wash me wash me wash me. Scrub scrub scrub. I scrub away at Cedric with a little bar of soap until the skin on his back is raw and starts bleeding. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I hope it’s okay. I hope that you can forgive me for this. I look at him with a certain longing. Maybe it’s not too cruel to start the process of cutting him up. Maybe it will make me feel better. It’s been a long week, after all, and I deserve to enjoy myself.

When I do finally get them both dry and propped up, I decide that a full-on tea party isn’t worth the added effort. Cedric mutters something under his breath about the lack of refreshments. I intentionally ignore him, and carry on getting ready for the day. I haven’t checked the time at all, but I remember the pride parade is happening later in the day, and I’ve already promised my dear friend Henry I’d go with him, despite the fact that I typically hate this kind of thing. He’s concerned I’ve been “isolating myself”. I care about him too much to let him worry about me. I want him to know that I’m okay. That everything is going to be okay.

I like to doll myself up for the parade. Pride is no simple thing. Could there ever be a bigger holiday than the one they’ve decided to set aside just for us? I’m reminded that on this very day, our small community has decided to gather together in honour of a tradition that now feels worthless and arbitrary. A relic from a long-lost age, the meaning of which we no longer understand, because now the whole event is more focused on virtue signalling than anything else. If I become part of the parade, I become part of the performance, part of the spectacle. I pretend to be grateful for the small mercy that is their half assed tolerance. It’s people like us they’re celebrating, after all.

The preparation I have to go through for the event is no easy feat. The bodies stare at me from the other side of the bathroom. I lug out a tattered pink makeup bag from the cabinet above the sink. I get to have fun with this, I guess.

The thrill of the bathroom is that it’s also a place for transformation. The devious joy of a space where I’m able to paint on a whole new face and then take it off again. What a delight. The sink has a huge chip in it, which keeps on snagging on my shirt as I try to lean in closer to the mirror. I apply a bright blue shadow that feels like a little bit too much for this occasion.

Already, I don’t recognize myself. I remember when I’d first decided to make the changes to my face, hoping that I would become unrecognizable compared to the person I’d been before. I remember shaving off and carving up some of the features that had become my most obvious tells, that could have let you clock exactly who I am from a mile away. I don’t have the steadiest of hands. When I step back from the mirror for a moment, I can see that my makeup looks as though it was done by a blind pig. My eyeliner wings are sisters, not twins, but Henry’s probably out there waiting for me, so I don’t have time to wash it off and try again. I throw on a dirty t-shirt and an old pair of jeans from the growing pile of laundry on my bedroom floor.

When I do finally open the door to leave, a crinkled up piece of paper rolls like a tumble weed down the hallway until it finally reaches me. I poke my head out into the abyss (nothing is more liminal than a hallway), but see nothing else. The paper feels like a bad omen. I pick up the paper, but when I unfold it, it’s just a crossword puzzle. Only partially complete. The words spell out an ominous message that will likely leave me spiralling for days. Number one down: eye, number two across: seen, number three down: murderers. Eye seen murderers. It doesn’t feel like your average random note, but I get a chill down my spine just looking at the piece of paper in my hands. I hope it was never meant for me in the first place. I hope that it’s just a regular crossword puzzle. I lock the door to my apartment behind me. I hope my new friends will still be here waiting for me when I return.

I told Henry I would meet him outside the building. It’s his discovery of my secret that I fear most. Henry always waits for me outside the apartment. I told him some wildly tall tales about my gang member/gun loving/cannibalistic neighbours (who don’t actually exist). Suffice to say he hardly ever enters the building anymore. I don’t think he believes me, really. I think he probably thinks I’m acting paranoid and weird and isolating myself for no good reason. I think he just respects me enough to give me the added distance.

Leaving the building, I expect the worst, but as always, he’s standing outside the door. He looks like a walking train wreck. His sock pokes out from the hole that’s ripped between the upper and lower part of the sneaker on his left foot. His hair’s a mess I don’t think he’ll ever bother to fix, but maybe that’s just a part of his charm. It’s a mix between blonde and brown, half burned up on one side from an at home attempt at bleaching and split-dying his hair, which I refused to help him out with.

He insists on our city’s barely functioning public transit system as his preferred method of transportation. I want to walk, but because he hates me and feels the need to disagree with me about almost everything, we go to catch the bus. The fact that the transit system still exists, let alone is functioning well enough to take us from point A to point B, should be evidence in and of itself that miracles can happen. It’s one of the few public services that isn’t completely defunct yet, despite the city’s mismanaged budget leaving little to no money left for the buses.

We wait around awkwardly at the bus stop outside my building, when Henry tries to broach the question.

“Can I ask why you never let me up inside your apartment anymore?”

“I’ve already told you. You’re just going to have to believe me when I say that you don’t want to know the neighbours.”

“I’ve never seen anyone except you leave the building.”

“Since when have you been the observant type?” I snap back.

“Victor.”

I stare at him.

“You can’t keep pushing everyone away. I’m worried about you. William’s worried about you. Alphonse is practically losing his mind. Just tell me what’s going on, please.” He begs me. “Let me help you.”

I open up my mouth, but don’t get the chance to reply. The bus rattles and screeches to a halt in front of us.

When we get on the bus, I notice that the driver has the lower half of his face covered with a black bandana and a pair of bright red sunglasses perched on the tip of his nose. He says nothing, but nods to me as I throw a handful of coins into the slot. The rumour going around right now is that some kind of “grass roots” type of activist group have taken it over, stealing vehicles from the city’s half abandoned bus depot and running the routes themselves. I don’t know how it’s possible, but I guess even the protestors need a way to get around. Can’t have people showing up late to the revolution. Everybody’s got to make due somehow. I support it. I wouldn’t be able to get around without them.

The bus ride is dizzying. We sit near the back. I get the window seat. There’s a couple of inconspicuous white pills that are crushed underneath my feet, as I sit on the plush, faded, purplish gray seats. Henry talks my ear off the entire ride, despite the fact that I don’t give so much as the occasional nod in return. It’s the illusion of attentiveness. Sometimes I hate him with every fiber of my being, every word he says sounds grating to my ears, and yet he’s the only consistent thing in my life. He’s who I can count on, the person who will never leave no matter how hard I try to push him away, and I love him for that. He’ll always be my best friend, no matter how many times I try to ruin our friendship. He smiles at me, lopsidedly. He’s always hated his smile.

The scenery as we get off the bus is beautiful, hypnotic, almost. As though we’ve wandered into the Garden of Eden, a perfect paradise, right here in the middle of the city. I open my eyes wide, mesmerized by the fact that so many oddballs, weirdos, and complete fucking queers are all gathered in the same place.

That’s how I know I’m right where I belong.

Author’s note: This is the first chapter of the Frankenstein retelling that I’ve been working on. Just wanted to share something of it lol. Hope to have it actually published and in a paperback book format either late 2026 or early 2027, but it is what it is for now :)

They don’t know my secrets. They don’t know how I got this body I’m in. This chiseled chest isn’t my own, just one of the many skeletons of my closet. The parts of other people that I found in the graveyard are now pieces of myself. They are all parts of decaying men. I know that when their bodies are no longer of use, thrown away like garbage, I give them a new life and a new meaning.

I remember that the graveyard felt like a blessing in disguise. Something that is mine, and mine alone to enjoy. The bodies that are buried here have long been forgotten. No one wanders by anymore, no one is left alive to grieve. No one remembers them, and what a perfectly lovely tragedy that is for me. Either way, I only come in the dead of night, when not even the graveyard keeper will be around to notice me. I already know that they have no security system here. And why would they, when the dead do not rise from their graves? You would be surprised how many of them are already missing, already gone before I’ve had the chance to take them. I know I am not the only one doing this. The same body I saw today is gone tomorrow.

The rain is no longer beating down on me, but the ground is still wet. The mud squishes, and the dirt easily gives way to my shovel. The graveyard is a fucked up mud pie. One large loose hole, walls caving in on itself, a continuous grave, where nothing ends up being fully buried until enough new bodies are piled up on top to cover up the rotting ones. The bodies are almost unidentifiable, small bits of bone, limbs jutting out at odd angles, rocks and dirt. It’s a lot of smaller pieces of a person rather than the complete whole. I see a pair of arms raised high, as though reaching for me. I cannot make my way to them, and so they continue to stand at the center of the wreckage waiting for me. Other items inside the mass grave catch my eye: old tattered clothing, shoes, glasses, a used condom, a high heel, a string of pearls, a mallet, a flashlight, a camera, a hook, and a classic pride flag. This looks just as much junkyard as it does graveyard, but it’s the only place we have. There’s something beautiful about seeing all the memorabilia that their loved ones might have thrown into the hole in an effort to cope. It almost feels as though the dead never truly die, living on in this space where everyone is remembered and forgotten at the same time.

Despite the beauty of the grave site, there is evidently not enough space for our dead here. It is hard to tell where one body stops and another starts. They all go into the melting point, into the mass, molding the bodies together, one atop another, always throwing in more, mixing together a type of corpse soup. The ugliest and most conspicuous types of mass graves are the ones that get over filled. There is something more than rot, more than disease here, although I can’t put it into words for you.

Digging down, the further I go, the more the smell hits my nose. They should have buried them deeper, deep enough that no one could reach them.

“Victor.” He calls out to me. I can see his body, now in full view.

Dashing over to him, like a scene from a rom com movie, I wrap myself up in his arms. I feel more manly than I ever have before. I lay my head against his chest and pretend that he is my man. I don’t know if I love it or hate it. I continue to hold him against me, before holding him out, at arms length, to get a better view. He’s got dark brown hair, a hooked nose and the smoothest skin I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s like a piece of art. There is something terrifyingly beautiful about him that I just can’t put my finger on. I drag him back outside of the hole and lay him down on a small patch of grass while I dig through my bag for a roll of plastic wrap. I wouldn’t want him to get dirty.

There is a connection between us now. I feel it deeply as his pale blue eyes look up to meet mine. I imagine this body becoming like a mentor to me. He is teaching me what it means to be a man, and I’m a quick learner. He is whispering the secrets of masculinity into my ears. He is giving me the power to change. Maybe it’s the ghostly powers of my mother, buried somewhere in this very same mass grave. Perhaps she’s intervening from the afterlife to give me the gift of transformation. Perhaps the only gift she’s ever given me. I feel a divine connection to my own queerness, my own transness. I feel powerful within it, this ability to change myself. I have the ability to completely reinvent myself and the ability to change myself back again. I become fluid in my gender, switching in between and in or out of these different parts. Nothing is ever fixed. Nothing is ever normal about the experience and no matter how many times I may pray to some god to make me normal again, it never happens. I was given a gift— to delight in the act of creation.

I pack the man up, what’s left of him anyway. He’s almost too rotten to be useful to me and I know I can’t keep him with me for long. I do my best to mask the smell of him by vigorously spraying him with shitty men’s cologne, stolen from what once used to be a department store. This is significantly less suspicious than the smell of rotting meat, although you can definitely smell both from a mile away.

Leaving the graveyard is hard every time. I feel as though there is some more buried treasure there that I’m leaving behind. The gym bag I’ve stuffed the body into doesn’t look as inconspicuous as I would have liked, but it’ll have to do. The bag drags through the wet mud as I exit the graveyard. The walk back to my apartment stretches on ahead of me. It’s dark out already, and the night cloaks me. There’s no one around to see me, apart from a pair of raccoons wrestling over food scraps in the bush. The building is a couple blocks away and I let out a sigh of relief when it finally comes into view.

I’m told there’s something wrong with it, although I don’t quite know what. The building’s been mostly abandoned for a little over four months at this point. Old neighbours are nowhere in sight. I don’t see anyone poking their head out or walking around the hallways, but I haven’t gone looking. Several windows are broken (including the window to my own apartment), and there are cracks along the walls, but the dull, grey building stands tall. It’s funny, almost, the state of disrepair it’s in. The poor thing’s more of a wreck than I am.

I walk around to the back of the building and toss the body through the already broken window before following suit, carefully avoiding the glass shards. Home sweet home. It might not be pretty, but it’s as good a place to live as any other. The apartment is littered with bugs and maggots. They like to swarm around what used to be the sink, warping over one another over and over again, twisting and turning their bodies. They move as though they are all one thing together, melding into the mass. Sometimes, at night, I can feel them nibble on me too, trying to break through my stitches and crawl their way under my skin. I am a very good source of nutrients, I suppose. Keeping things clean is at the bottom of my list of priorities. Though, I like to pretend that it is clean. I like to pretend that this is a mansion, and that somehow, someday, I’ll walk in and everything will be magically clean and everything will be better. I would get better too, even though I never seem to. The thing I need most is some kind of professional help, an exterminator to come in and rid the apartment of all the little pests that are festering inside of it. Secretly, I’m scared that I might get swept away too, that some part of me would go missing in the cleanup process.

It’s time to transverse the mess: used needles (who would have thought that you could do HRT DIY style now), leftover take-out boxes, paper plates, bandages, mostly covered in yellowish pus, papers, various notebooks from my university days, and stacks of old textbooks. I step past it all, pushing my way through to the bathroom, dragging the body along with me.

When I open the bathroom door, she’s still there. She’s lying in the tub, which I’ve packed with ice to keep her cold. I like to pretend that this keeps her fresh, but I know it’s been too long since she died. The bugs that litter the apartment will get through to her soon. Her arm falls along the side of the white porcelain. She is beautiful, angelic even, but rest assured, she’s no angel. The edges of her white sun dress run ragged, revealing scraped-up knees. She has wild black hair, so matted that, even if she were still alive, you could tell that it hadn’t been brushed in over a decade. The shit she used to box-dye it stains the inside of the bathtub in dark gray splotches.

She does not talk softly, or whisper her secrets to me as the man from the graveyard did. Instead, she screams at the top of her lungs at an angry pitch, so loud that I can’t for the life of me make out what it means.The type of woman who would eat you alive as a form of twisted revenge. She’s girlish, but only in the most vile of ways. She’s the type of girl to curb stomp you, then tell you she did it out of love. Spoiler alert: she’s lying.

I hang the man out to dry like a shirt from the laundry pile. I tie him up by the arms to the railing that holds up the shower curtain, mud and water dripping down his body from the rain. Maybe I’ll wear him next. Maybe I’ll mix and match the bodies for a good blend of both. A body is an outfit I can take off and put on again. I’ve created a kind of medical miracle out of myself and now I need to keep up with it. When my favourite parts begin to rot and fall off, I’ve got to go to the graveyard to find a new one. I’m a gender performance perfectionist and this only feeds into the obsession.

I look at myself in the mirror and see that I’ve become Frankenstein’s monster. I am swollen, ugly, and bursting at the seams. But I already have new arms, new legs, new everything. My right leg is slightly shorter, and my left arm is slightly hairier. I know I can still take it off and make myself better. I’ve been torn apart and sewn together more times than I can count. My fingers trace over the surgery scars. I’ve realized what I am a long time ago: unnatural, disgusting, perverted, and far less than human. That’s the way they see us. Just take a look at my blood-curdling body, all a work of truly hair raising medical magic, you couldn’t even begin to imagine my ghoulish genitalia. Yes, there are oh, so many reasons to fear the queers.

But it is nothing. I am nothing. I need more than a makeover, I need a complete transformation. No matter how many times I change and rearrange my body, it’s never enough. It never works out the way I envisioned it. It’s an ugly, half-finished, sloppily stitched up thing, a continuous project I’m never completely satisfied with. Maybe this is more of a performance art piece or a science experiment. Avant-garde, experimental, or both?

Sometimes, it’s about more than just gender. Sometimes there are parts of myself that I need to remove for no sensible reason at all. Sometimes I just need to cut it all up. I used to imagine myself taking a butcher’s knife and simply hacking away, discarding everything that doesn’t fit. Now, I don’t have to imagine anymore.

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