sherlywrites

[sherlywrites]

Float

I am floating between the clouds and the sky. Beneath me is Venus, my spiritual home, a planet I’ve never set foot on but am always approaching. Above me, the sun, pricking at my skin with its fiery lashes. I feel it, on my stomach, my thighs, my breasts, my cheeks, my neck, the lids of my eyes. I can see the clouds swirling around me, spirits in a cauldron, coming together and pulling apart in the primordial heat like lovers in the notes of heaven. Below me, starting from my back, comes my shadow. It shrinks the farther it gets from me, until it reaches the planet’s surface, where it can hardly be said to exist at all.

Part One- The Unique

Back then, my job was to monitor drones and droids, to make sure that if they broke and caused some catastrophic error, some human being would be there to text everyone

“The world is ending.” I fantasized.

“Darn.” they’d send back.

It’s not a popular job, but I loved it. The pay was mediocre, but easily worth it to avoid talking to anyone. To be able to stand, more or less alone, on the rails of the dome, taking a break from the artificial sunlight and fake blue sky, turn off my augmented reality glasses, and watch the universe born anew as swirling orange clouds combined and eliminated in the Venus atmosphere, each time sewing a new thread in a rich living tapestry. I thanked the stars I would be dead before terraforming was completed.

It wouldn’t have stopped without me, but nonetheless I played some part in that slow moving murder, as well as in that ornate blindfold over the eyes of the city’s citizens. I, in some bulky protection suit sporting a large bug eyed helmet, crawled like a cockroach across my colony, despising the terraformers even as I dutifully made sure they continued sucking in gas, burning it, and dropping sludge to the ground below.

Despite how much I loved the job, nothing can stop routine from its slow march into monotony, and so in the moments before I witnessed a person I would later describe as the most beautiful woman who ever lived with half her body stuck in a terraformer, I wasn’t really on my toes. I think I may have looked at her without even registering what was happening, actually, and just looked away-- only for my adrenal gland to save the day and send panic screaming up into my head as I quickly processed the sure fate of a soft biological life form if it the terraformer sucked her in-- my muscles responded to some deep apeish instinct and propelled me forward across the walkway as if they belonged to someone else-- grabbed her by the straps on her protective suit-- cranked my magnetic boots up to their highest setting-- and struggled with a terraformer. It would have sucked us both in if I did not succeed in frantically inputting the emergency shutoff command through my AR glasses.

I helped her out of the chute with shaking hands. I told myself to breathe. She still had her helmet on. Good. As she emerged, I noticed she was holding something in her hands.

A little droid, no bigger than a bread box, half burned but repairable.

I started yelling about how foolish it was to risk her life for such a thing. I won’t make excuses for myself, but I couldn’t have in that moment understood why anyone would stare directly into the face of death in the name of protecting a small robot. Why didn’t she issue the cut off command? Why was this particular droid so important to her? Why did she seem so unnervingly calm even after skirting the veil between life and cold dark oblivion? Why did she just stare at me quietly as I yelled at her and flailed my arms? When I later broached the topic again, she stated she did not want to discuss it. Needless to say, though, I’m sure she had her reasons, I’m sure she had good ones, and so I’ll say I’m embarrassed by, and ashamed of, how I acted in the aftermath and leave it at that.

After I was through yelling, she just looked at me in silence, hugged the half baked toaster close to her chest, and said “Thank you.” before walking away.

When one walks the streets of Atlas, even when one looks up at the glimmering statue of that muscular greek myth, the old obsolete earth dumped like so much human garbage beside him, that adorns the spectacular city center, one is bombarded with a series of advertisements for various products and the associated promises of happiness packaged with them. I have neither seen nor been in a swamp, but if advertisements be sludge and slime, then I am a magpie, treading water and trying not to get my feet stuck. At some point, you learn to just ignore it.

Yet suddenly, after that encounter, I took notice once again of how much of my net time being alive was spent having people try to sell me stuff, like a tax on my lifespan.

Was it the moment itself? Usually, death is such a far away, impossible thing. Our lifespans are so long now, it seems like the oldest members of our society-- some in excess of 200 years old-- will never die. Certainly I, a mere infant of twenty-eight, felt as though my time was infinite, and that nothing of worth would be lost by watching it drip down the drain.

Or was it her?

Her simple action, insane, but deprived of personal gain, a glistening gem of selfless self sacrifice, distracted me from swamp treading and bid me dip my beak down to grab it. No facsimile was this, only something very real, human, of the heart, could ever prompt some mad urge to brave the ever churning gears of the terraforming machine.

Two weeks later, I was on my way out of work when I noticed her. She was sitting on a bench, her eyes performing the telltale motion of someone reading off their AR lenses. In the spectacular sunlight, surrounded by people with flawless faces, I felt it had to be her. She had blonde hair. It came down to her chin, and framed a face with features unheard of in the era of body modification. She had a scar, and a broken, non functional eye.

I saw the steel in her eyes, in her face, and I thought it must be her. Each step I took towards her represented increased anxiety, but I knew in my gut that I was already past the chains of doubt. I walked up at her, stopped,

She looked up at me without moving her head, “I don’t feel like talking.” she stated without qualification, her eyes returning to reading instantly. I recognized the voice, but still felt the biting chains of doubt begging me to run.

“Were you the woman I pulled out of the terraformer?”

She paused. Her head gradually raised, tilted, her bright eye sharp with scrutiny.

“You.” she stated. In that moment she stared at me, atomized me, picked me apart string by string. I knew, then, she would not be the type to mistake gratitude for obligation.

“Yea, I just wanted to apologize for how I acted, I have no excuse. I am Cheyenne.”

Her eye searched for my hand as she tentatively replied “Sophia.”

On Venus, apologizing is something you do for superiors because you screwed up at work. When you offended a friend, you bought them something nice like a necklace, or alcohol. If she had asked for something I probably would have bought it for her, but I was overcome with the immediate impression that she did not want to be bought at all.

“No gift,” I lied, “just me.”

How do I describe the process of falling in love? I wracked my brain for a long time over that, for several days, with Sophia always reading what I wrote and insisting it was good, before I felt ultimately compelled to delete it and begin all over again.

I could tell you about her eyes, would that make it seem authentic? To me, they are gleaming jewels, they see into me and through me. They see into the future, past the market, past the companies, past Atlas. Her personality? Formidable, she enjoys her athleticism and practices it with grace and power. When she finally gets so frustrated with the constant bombardment of advertisements, takes her glasses off, and says “They task me” my heart soars. I could tell you her hair is like shining waves, gold sheets of clouds ill fitted with the artificial sun of Atlas, and that when I bury my face in it I finally know what the real sun feels like.

It’s frustrating, because as many words as I gift to her, whether to see her smile or to prompt a new kiss, none of them feel like they truly grasp the depth of my love. Staring into my love is like staring into the void, just as infinite, just as terrifying, but warm, and certainly impossible to actually describe. It’s like an eldritch monster inside you giving you a hug.

There have, of course, been moments. When we were eating at a restaurant on our first week together, and I asked her about her wooden rosary, she smiled in her elusive way and told me it reminds her that God and wealth are two separate things, no matter what they tell you. Another time, when we were being served dinner by a droid, and she thanked it. When we were walking through the streets of Atlas one day, she glared up at the statue of the man himself as if she would, and could, impale him on a spike and chuck him into the clouds. She stood there for at least a full minute before shaking her head and walking on.

By then, I would have followed her anywhere, even through the burning atmosphere.

What I never understood was why she liked me. I am not very attractive,  nor am I particularly tough. But sometimes when I’m doing something, like I’m trying on a dress and laughing at how I look in it, or when I’m swaying my hips to some rhythm, I find her looking at me, looking content to watch what I figured was nothing interesting at all.

“I’m not alone, either.” she told me, one morning, when we were outside the dome together, taking our time to watch the new patterns weaving and forming before they were consumed by the terraformers. “Many women in this city are just as sick of this shit as I am.”

“I wouldn’t know.” I said, my fingers deftly typing in codes and reports, “I don’t really participate in the network forums.”

“That’s a good thing,” she sighed, “But I don’t think there’s been this much powerful female energy in the entire history of humankind. They say they abolished sexism for good in 2114, but, you know, we still have way more expectations placed on us. They turn our bodies into commodities, and sell them to a presumed male audience, because of course most women do not feel particularly compelled to consume pornography.”

“Yea, even the stuff with only women in them are clearly made for men.”

“Right, the market assumes everything is for them, or for women to aid themselves in becoming their ornaments.”

“That’s pretty true to what it’s like to date one, too.”

I saw her helmet turn toward me suddenly, silent for a moment. “You dated a man?”

“Once.”

She laughed “Well, no one’s perfect.”

I laughed too, because I thought it was a joke.

My first and only man had been an ambitious one, although it seems to me nearly all men have ambition on Atlas, named Mark. I found him through a dating service, shortly after I underwent my massive body modification. I had thought, and been told, that I would walk into the clinic a man and walk out a woman, simple as that, but of course when I walked out I had no idea what I was doing, and the only instruction manual I had was the market.

And the market always advertised men, and so I thought that came with the role.

He made his expectations pretty clear the moment we sat down, and I was attracted to him at the time so even though I was uncomfortable with the seemingly personal act of being fucked by a man, I allowed him to fuck me anyway. I had been told by the market that sex was free, pleasurable, and fun. I had watched some videos as well, in my curious moments, and it seemed the act was very controlled, and clean.

In reality, it was nothing like this, and nothing prepared me for what to do or how. It was a very bodily, manual act, and if I were in a position he found inconvenient, he simply repositioned me, kicked my legs apart, pushed my back down with his hand. If he felt like trying something new, he tried it. At first, if I gagged, he choked me, or hurt me, he’d ask if I was okay, but eventually he became comfortable enough that he stopped asking.

He fucked me four times before he stopped bothering to talk to me beforehand, and then three times after that. The last time, I learned how truly professional those actresses were, as I spent the next hour washing his climax out of my eye before it stopped burning. I looked at myself in the mirror, at my smeared makeup and eyes I couldn’t even open all the way, and this is what it took before I finally realized something was wrong and never saw a man again.

So when Sophia told me this was because men still felt women were objects to be consumed, like any other commodity, it lit my mind ablaze. It made so much sense; it was an earth shattering revelation with continuous aftershocks each time I saw more and more evidence she was right. I wanted to scream, a lot.

“So in that way, being a lesbian is a kind of boycott of men. It’s an act of rebellion.” she told me. We were sitting on her couch, my head in her lap, as she fed me soy puffs.

“Good, I don’t find men attractive anymore anyway.” I laughed.

She nodded, “I’m glad to have escaped that, I’m still completely pure.”

“Yes if you have any flaw it’s that you’re too perfect.”

With a shrug, she said “It’s a challenge to maintain, so I understand. Our culture is constantly telling you that you are for men.”

I reached up and cupped the side of her face “Now I’m a lesbian, too, in love with a lesbian.”

She smiled down at me and kissed me. Then she paused, looking thoughtfully. “There is one thing of which you must be careful. Sometimes, men will modify their bodies to look like women, to trick us into sleeping with them.”

I made a face “Really? That’s pretty fucked up.”

With a nod, she continued “It is. There are ways you can always tell, of course, by how they act, how they look, how their hair grows--”

My arms curled around her, I pulled her in tight.

“Well, I’m safe, because I only have eyes for you.”

It occured to me only on the lowest level she might have been talking about me, at first. With time, however, the infiltrators took up more and more of our conversation time. I went about my days largely oblivious, but looking back she had painted a black streak on my heart that boiled my blood into self doubt. I hadn’t asked myself if I was a woman or not, but I did find myself checking to make sure I was one. I checked my body, my personality, my behavior, I scanned myself to make sure all my female parts were working, and that my chromosomes were still modified to support my full anatomy.

I was assured, but sometimes I’d say something and wonder if it was too mannish. Some mornings, I’d look in the mirror, and poke at my bones, my breasts. I’d look at myself, and at that altar I’d ask myself what a woman is, and how I know if I really am one.

Then I’d remember that I am loved by Sophia, and got myself out of that room.

When she was undressing me for the first time, I was shaking. I felt her soft lips kissing me in her usual places, her skin white as light along my brown cheek, down the crook of my neck to the crest of my chest. When my shirt was off, her hands worked her way around to my bare back.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered suddenly.

“I am ugly.” I responded, sinking down to the bed.

“No.” she repeated, as she had many times before.

“Do I even look like a woman?

She comforted me with kisses on the cheek. “You are the most womanly looking person I have ever met.”

That threw me. “Huh?”

She pulled back, her face flushed, but her eyes that same steely blue. “Most women, myself included, have come to think of being women as a burden. Some become complacent, try to get by with pleasing men, and others rebel. But you, it seems like you truly think of womanhood as a gift. I’d never met someone who actually liked being one, before you.”

I stared into her eyes for a quiet moment.

I kissed her, she crawled onto the bed with me.

The trouble with gestures of love, even simple pure words like “You’re beautiful” and “I love you,” is that in our culture we hear them so much as a matter of marketing, that they seem like practiced lies coming from the mouth of the city. “I love you” says the man selling you a cup of coffee, “You’re beautiful” says the man to the woman who buys our moisturizer.

Sophia found a way through those barriers. She repeated her words, over and over, looking into my eyes, until they lost their previous meaning and built new ones in my heart, until I could finally walk outside the dome, float between the clouds, and feel her-- the sun-- kissing my skin. Until at last, the sun is my body, and my body the sun, and the sun is love.

It became the happiest month of my life, so happy I ignored the growing undertow of darkness beneath. I was in her room, the artificial sun low enough in the dome to elongate the apartment’s shadows across its length, when she walked in with a look in her eyes I did not recognize. Her face was as cold as the dark side of Venus, her gaze as implacable and consuming as the terraformers, her voice a razor thin wire around my throat.

“Sophia?”

Silence.

My hands started shaking.

“Put on your glasses.” she ordered me. I did.

Our AR glasses between us, now I see what she brought me. My medical report, from the transitory modification. How did she get this?

“Is it real?” she asked, as if she knew.

“Y-yes, but”

She ran to the bathroom, and I shortly heard the sound of vomiting coming from within. I quickly assembled myself into a passable state of dress, and crept around to see what was happening in the bathroom. It felt like the city itself was tilting underneath me, and my soul was outside the dome-- eyes pressed to the glass-- watching, unable to act.

“Soph…” and I saw her, bent over the waste tube, her fingers down her throat as if she needed to get the poison out. She was hurting herself.

“Sophia!” I cried, trying to pull her away from her altar of viscera.

“Get away!” she screamed, swatting at me “Get away from me.” she glared at me, pure hatred in her eyes, hatred for me. I still didn’t understand, I backed away from her.

“You did this to me.” she stepped toward me, I stepped back. “You tricked me, you raped me. How? How could you? You soulless bastard. You fucking filth.”

I could hear her anger rising, but I wasn’t prepared for any kind of scenario in which I had to flee from her apartment, so I cowered, I cowered until she towered over me.

“I don’t-- I don’t understand Sophie, I don--”

She grabbed me by my shoulders and shoved me, shoved me out, towards the door, I scrambled to grab for the handle, to pull it, to get an opening, and she shoved me out, screaming at me until she could no longer see me, and I had gone.

What no one tells you about trauma is the horrendously painful adjustment period your mind takes to accept its new reality. For the next few days, I still expected Sophia to message me, to knock on my apartment door, and I looked for her. I never saw her, not there, not on the streets, not at work, not at restaurants, not in the city square, at the statue of Atlas. I sat down in the city square, still numb, still failing to understand, and I looked at that statue.

Had I become him? Had I become an object of marketing myself, deluded by my desire to occupy a role in society to which I did not belong, and enabled by the ever eager engines of consumption to chew my own body and spit it out in the form of a woman, for the sole purpose of an attack on womanhood itself? I had done everything to my body I thought I needed to do, I had the breasts, the vagina, the skin, the face, the hair, the womb and the chromosomes. But they were all the result of body modification, the product, the market, Atlas itself, shifting and breaking down my body into its idea of a woman, for no reason other than that I paid it to.

If that was all true, then how should I become a woman, then? What did I need to do, where did I need to go, who did I need to talk to. I needed to be a woman, to be back with the person who loved me as a woman loves another. But there is no one, no one to tell me the path, no one but Sophia.

Cheyenne:

So, even though I should have left her alone, I messaged her.

Sophie?

Sophie? Please talk to me.

Sophie…

Please. Sophie, I’m sorry.

I should have told you.

But I didn’t mean to take something away from you.

You know I’d never do that.

Sophie?

Sophie, just tell me, what… what do I need to do? How can I be a woman, then?

I just want to be a girl, I just want to see you again.

Sophie.

I saved your life, Sophia.

I saved your life. The terraformer.

The terraformer.

You owe me an answer. Please.

Sophia:

Nothing

Cheyenne:

What?

Sophia:

There is nothing you can do. You will always be a man. You were born that way, you will die that way. Good bye.

I spent the next few days sobbing into the mirror, my body and face now the mutilated corpse of a delusional man. It had become apart from me, something I controlled like a twisted puppet on the strings of a pervert’s sick joke. I punched my mirror, I shattered its glass, I let it fall about my bathroom, I watched it sit on my floor, specked with my blood.

When I first stepped outside the dome, in my suit, I looked over the edge, and I was afraid of falling, falling to my death. I was worried Venus would swallow me whole, but I should have been afraid it would spit me back out, out into the vacuum, into the darkness, the abyss.

If those old gods wanted my blood, they could have it. I dragged that broken glass across my wrist, and the sting-- the pain-- gave me a rush, filled me with adrenaline. It was like an old friend, one I hadn’t seen since the days of my boyhood, since Mark. His shadow welcomed me back, with open arms, he caressed me, he fondled me. I gave him more blood, I squeezed my hand and watched it slowly drip down onto the sink like the sands of time, forming stalagmites, pointing up at me out of my twisted altar. Did it want my heart, then? It could have it, I could rip it out of my chest and throw it down to those old gods, they could drag it screaming before the squirming waves of viscera and vile sludge, and I would just look down at it, watch it sink and beg me to save it until I was free of it, and could see it no longer.

I looked down at my arm. It would be that easy, I had already done it twice. I needed only do it down my vein instead of across, a longer cut, but the last one I would need to do.

I put the glass back down. I turned around and walked into my kitchen, squirting some healing sealant on my cuts.

I guess I am stuck being alive.

God damn it.

Part 2- Sophia of the Spectacle

I am Sophia.

What is intelligence? How does one define self awareness? It is the year 2321 and still artists have had much more luck defining this than scientists.

It’s okay, because scientists have yet to even make any more significant progress on technology since 2200, when a high efficiency fusion drive was invented to take us to Jupiter. We started a colony there, but turns out Jupiter’s resources didn’t justify the cost of shipping, and it was shuttered, with a hundred thousand souls still aboard to attempt to solve the problem of keeping themselves alive without inner planet support, and failing. Ah, progress.

The earth, meanwhile, has been recovering. They constructed great big nuclear powered hydroponic carbon dioxide scrubbers, which is to say massive amounts of algae. It’s the biggest construction project humanity has ever taken besides Atlas itself, and it was prompted by the leavings of the very people who live on this planet with me right now. Conveniently, they forgot to take a headcount of the people who died during the climate collapse of the 22nd century, so no one knows how many died during the ensuing refugee crises and desertification.

Puts our problems into perspective, doesn’t it? Atlas values empathy as much as it values obstinate women. Simple feminine compassion, the compassion of the life giver, is not just useless feelings we abandoned when we became enlightened. It is revolutionary.

That’s why I dived into the terraformer after that droid. It’s the closest thing to an animal we’ve got here, it’s the other, and they are programmed to want to live. Don’t they have the right, then? And if we can’t even define our own self awareness, what right do we have to assume it is lacking in the intelligences we’ve created. It’s doing okay now, by the way. I fixed it.

I never told Cheyenne I acquired my facial scars the same way.

I guess I am brave, but really I mostly did not care if I lived or died. I’m not depressed, necessarily, but life is such a burden. Atlas is so large, so strong, and it seems like nothing I do can even free me from his influence, let alone kill him.

I once told Cheyenne that God and wealth are two separate things. I said this because on Atlas, religion is not all that uncommon, but what they preach is that wealth is a sign of how blessed God has made you. Ancillary is the assumption that if you do not have wealth, you are not blessed, with the unspoken conclusion being that Atlas is the most holy city of God ever built. A utopia, a paradise.

They don’t enforce our standards of wealth through taxes, however. That would be oppressive government overreach. Rather, everyone pays rent to the company which built Atlas, the company in which my father is the Chief Technology Officer, and those who can’t afford their rent are shipped off world. This is different from taxes, somehow. Naturally, this isn’t true of top corporate officials of companies throughout Atlas. They own shares in the company, and those shares represent their private property, so far as one can own slices of air on a slowly falling city of garbage. It makes as much sense as them owning the ground we’ll be landing on.

When I was a little girl, I told my father I couldn’t wait to see the world outside the dome. He patted my head, smiled, and said me neither. The first terraforming project ever completed, and certainly the most impressive. Who else but the geniuses of Atlas could achieve such a thing? Could they have with the burden of Earth on their shoulders?

As I got older, I discovered that I am not attracted to men. Never have been, never will be, ever. Men do not disgust me, but the thought of fucking one did. I thought of it as an inherently undignified act, where your body yields and is spread by some force, to feed the pleasure of a man who sweats and labors over you. I found it unappealing.

This never deterred men, though, they always tried to fuck me regardless. If I said no, it took some time for them to respond and stop trying. Somehow, even though homophobia was abolished, men still have trouble accepting that a woman may not be attracted to them, and they act with accorded offense and entitlement if you try to tell them.

My first partner and I bonded over this. We were together until we started working. Then she was shipped off world for refusing to sleep with her employer.

I responded with a deep and terrible rage. I responded with lies, and slander, and manipulation, and I got that employer fired and shipped off world too. It didn’t mean my partner could come back, no one evicted from Atlas can ever find a job here again. I turned my eyes to the patriarchy instead, I fought sexist employers wherever I could find them, I joined with like minded women, I communicated with them constantly. My father seemed perfectly willing to help, but then I learned he was getting them new jobs in other parts of Atlas, so I started to hate him too, and I was thrust from power, working outside the dome as an engineer.

People like me have existed throughout history, I realized, and never succeeded in destroying the patriarchy. Why? I searched for answers, and Atlas happily obliged.

They gave me transsexuals.

Infiltrators, who degenerate feminism by entering into it and replacing women with men. Atlas was pumping out women in the image of men’s imaginations, perfectly servile, willing, baby making sluts, and the women who weren’t keeping up had a few options.

Become feminine and submissive, become men, or die.

Everything made sense, then. The patriarchy was inside feminism, and that is where it needed to be hunted first, and so I did, I tracked them down where I could and exposed them, I attempted to insight rage against the clinics, and I once again found the ears of my father listening and nodding. He said he didn’t like it either, but they were reliable consumers of body modification, and so we would need to wait for the company to go under before we could do anything about the degeneracy on Atlas.

So I spread my message, and waited, and hoped.

Then I met Cheyenne.

I had spent so much time hating people like her, I hadn’t really met one, which is how I became convinced with time of her authenticity. That attracted me to her in the first place; sure I dived in after a droid, but she dived in after a person, and I came to saw her ensuing rage as a concern for the safety of others, not as concern for herself. Most people would have let me get sucked in, after all.

I later learned that she is a massive dork, and that she truly loves Venus. No one loves Venus, people “love” Atlas, but Cheyenne loves Venus. The planet as it is now, with all its inhabitability and dangerous temperature shifts. She loves it. She also loves being a woman, which should have given me a clue because most women definitely do not love it-- it comes with so many burdens to bear-- but it seemed like she could shrug those off.

After I threw her out of my home, I cried for the lost idea of my virginity, and I tried to go to bed, but sleep eluded me. What I had done haunted me, not because I thought it was wrong, but because I felt pity for the pain and fear I had seen on her face. No one had ever been personally, physically afraid of me before, but I saw it in her eyes.

She was afraid I might beat her.

I steeled myself. My identity was under attack, after all, and I might need to do some unfortunate things to protect it. I was not going to let her erase me.

She had seemed like a woman to me, though. I was well and truly convinced. What the fuck? But that didn’t matter. I told myself of course the patriarchy would send its greatest trickster after its most dangerous foe.

Then she messaged me, asking what she needed to do in order to become a woman. I just stared at that message for a few minutes. This creature was seriously deluded. Again I felt the sting of pity, and if I had thought there was some way, in that moment, then I would have told her, but I knew there wasn’t. So I told myself I would help her by mercifully rescuing her from her own delusions.

The question stuck in my mind. What is a woman, anyway? How does one become female? Was I a woman when I was born, or did I become one by being born a female baby? The sensible answer is that I was just an infant, unless I had some female soul in my body which made me a woman even when I had none of the traits. But if I had a female soul, then couldn’t Cheyenne have one? I rejected this explanation, I had tread too far into nonsense. Why would God make a male baby and put a female soul inside it?

Then was her need to be a woman some kind of disease? An illness, which needed to be cured but which Atlas had turned into a consumer category for its commodities?

I wracked my brain, I researched, I found so many people offering explanations but none of them agreed, none of them had all the answers. I learned one man suggested they had some sort of sexual fetish which drove the transition. I found this compelling, and then learned that after the transition this fetish nearly disappeared, and that the way they think about their own body nearly precisely mirrors the way I think about mine. Some people suggested that human genes become broken and useless when mixed with the blood of different races. What the fuck?

I needed answers, I chomped through volumes, I chewed them up, I spit them out like sludge onto the floor. In my hatred, I burned through the knowledge of mankind, all its garbage science, and found nothing. I stood at my window, pounding my hand against the glass in frustration, when I realized something. I looked out at the dome and realized what I had lost.

My ability to accept the unexplained. Yes, my ability to dwell in and appreciate inhospitable knowledge was gone, I had lost it, and in its wake I had left a great deal of absolute junk, and the more I burned through the more junk I would accumulate.

I had become Atlas, I had become the city, consuming womanhood, consuming the very mother of women, in my ever expanding need to dominate the universe, to be the captain and steer the ship. When I reach the surface, finding nothing, finding no explanation, no meaning, no God, I will move on, I will go to a different planet and consume it instead, just like I consumed Mother Earth, for I am Atlas, eater of worlds, and breaker of women.

Part 3: Why Eve Ate the Apple

I woke out of my stupor one morning to see Sophia had messaged me.

Let’s talk.

I rolled out of bed and into the shower. As the warm water cascaded down my body, I looked down at scabs and scars on my wrists. I wore long sleeves to cover them. I had put in the code to buy a new mirror by then, and a droid had come in and installed it. I thanked it on its way out without thinking, and stood there at the mirror staring at myself. I didn’t feel as in touch with my body as I did before, but sheer inertia had left self loathing too boring of an exercise, so our relationship could be strictly professional.

I looked fine. I shrugged, and walked out the door.

As I tread down the streets, I started thinking. You know, I’ve attempted to describe these streets in as much poetic language as I could in this work, but the truth is most of the time they aren’t oppressive, or like a swamp, or even like so much garbage. The truth is, most of the time they’re boring. Because I grew up here, I really am used to them, and the insidious thing about alienation is you just get used to it. You get accustomed to feeling you don’t belong, because you forget what belonging feels like, if you ever even knew.

And as I walked to the bench to meet her, I thought of all of these supposedly faceless people, with their perfectly constructed faces. Previously, on some level, in my mind, I had sorted them into some hierarchy beneath me. I thought of them as robots, all the same, with Sophia and I the unique, the special among them. I thought we were better than them.

We weren’t. And I looked at them then, on these streets, and realized they must feel the same thing I did, but in a different way. Or maybe they have different ways of coping, maybe their manufactured faces are necessary for their survival. Maybe to not feel alienated from the spectacle, they must allow it to enter into their minds, and change their bodies.

Maybe that’s what I did, to an extent. My change was the expression of an inner truth, something that came from inside, but the reason the inside and the outside are so difficult to separate is because they aren’t so different. The people around us shape who we are, and we shape them in return. People could have perceived me as a woman when I had my male body, but they weren’t going to do that, so I responded to the situation I was in.

I walked into the restaurant, with my epiphany less like a light and more like sobriety.

I navigated the tables toward Sophia, feeling weird. She had a look on her face, mostly confusion. But maybe it’s a good thing to be confused.

I sat down the table beside her, letting the ambiance of the restaurant drift between us.

Each tick of the clock meets the air like lithium; it combusts and turns to smoke, slipping through your fingers, irretrievable. If I could catch one, I could have done something differently, and repair this distance between us, between me and a woman I used to love.

Instead, she slowly extended her hand across the table.

And I took it.

[sherlywrites]

How to Survive Prison (For Kids)

One day your parents, or perhaps the police, may take you to prison. They have done this for reasons only you can ever understand. Perhaps they just don’t know what to do with you, perhaps it is what they do instead of hitting you, perhaps they never really wanted you in the first place and now want to take a break. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that now you have to survive.

As you are arriving, they will tell you that this place is called a “mental hospital.” It is fine if you call it that as well, but you must never forget what it truly is, for it is the prison’s lies that allow it to sneak its way into your ears. When you arrive, you will be taken to a small room. It will look like a doctor’s office, with a bed that looks like your doctor’s bed but is not quite as soft. Rarely, the doctors and nurses will be kind to you, but you still must not allow yourself to forget. Whether they are kind or not, they will inspect you for cuts and bruises. If you have any, they will ask you where they came from. Usually, you will tell them they came from roughhousing, or from falling, or from bumping your head on a table. If you tell them this they will believe you, whether it is the truth or not. If you are a brave soul, wise beyond your years, you may tell them it was your mommy, or daddy, or uncle. If you tell them this, they will usually not believe you, whether it is the truth or not.

For your first day you will most likely cry the entire time. No matter how manly you are, or how much you try not to, you will still cry. You may try to force yourself to calm down for when you meet the next doctor, because he will decide whether you should stay or go. You will fail, and you will cry through the meeting, and when he says you must stay, you will blame yourself for not being able to stop crying. Don’t. He was going to make you stay no matter what.

You will also have to take tests, much like the kind you have to take at school, except these are about you. They will ask you questions about how sad you are, how mad you are, whether you want to hurt others because you’re just so sad and mad. At first, you will want to tell them you are fine, in the hopes that they will let you go. They will not, they have already decided you must stay. If you tell them you are fine, they will say you are lying. Instead, if they ask how bad you feel, say you feel pretty bad, but not horrible. If they ask you how mad you are, say you are pretty mad, but you don’t want to hurt anyone. They will see this as honesty.

By the next day you will feel as if you have no more tears to cry. It isn’t true, but it’s okay if you feel like that. Perhaps they will give you some medicine, some pills to swallow. You will not want to, but you must, for if you do not they will keep you even longer. No matter how many other boys or girls are there, they will tell you not to become overly familiar with the others. They will tell you to focus on yourself. Do not mistake these for suggestions, they are orders, orders you must follow, designed to carve out a place for you to be lonely in. When you talk to the others, try to make sure no one notices, so that they do not become concerned. Do not ask anyone else why they are there, if they wish to tell you they will do so freely.

They may also take you outside to exercise, and tell you they are doing you a favor. You will be allowed to run, climb, jump, perhaps even swim. You must do your best to seem grateful. During these times, you may pretend to be better, you may laugh and play, even if your heart still feels so dark you want to scream. If you pretend to feel better during these times, however, they will believe you. They will believe that anything they do is working, as long as they are doing it.

Sometimes they may explain to you that what you did was a crime, for which you might be sent to “real prison” when you are older. What they call “real prison” is worse, but you must remind yourself that this does not mean their place is not a prison. Once or twice, your parents may visit. They will cry a great deal, and they may explain to you that your parents love you. You must appear ashamed to have not known this, because that is what they want to see. They want to see you changing, they want to believe that their treatment is working.

But you must never forget that you are in a prison. If you feel safe enough, for a moment, to let your real pain out, maybe to scream, maybe to shout, maybe to slap your “assistants” or throw your food on the floor, maybe to throw your pills back in their face, maybe to shove a kid who’s been picking on you, then they will remind you of your place. You will be taken to a small room they may call “the quiet area” or QA for short. This small room will be covered in mats, and will be soft but not too soft, and you will have no one to talk to, and no one to yell at.

You must avoid this, no matter what.

Because the QA is where the ghosts are. Beings of darkness, swirling darkness, surrounding you, looking back at you with their many eyes. If you are there long enough, they will begin to form shapes, shadows, places you knew before you went to prison. They will begin to speak voices, sing songs which remind you of your friends and family. At first this may frighten you. You will get scared, and ask to be let out, but they will take this to mean that you are learning your lesson. Maybe you will ask them to turn the light off, so you can sleep, when really you are trying to make yourself unable to see the shadows-- but in the darkness-- in the night-- they will come closer-- they will peer into your eyes with theirs-- you will scream and cry-- but they won’t come-- they have gone home to their own families-- and left you here with the shadows-- so you will learn to like the shadows-- you will think of them as your only friends-- and they will gently-- so gently-- lead you out of your body. You will join them, then, in that darkness, you will become one of the shadows, and you will watch your body walk out of that room without you, finally the docile corpse they wanted all along.

So to survive prison, you must avoid this little room at all costs. You must smile, and eat, and take your pills, and even thank them for bringing you to prison. You must nod gratefully, and tell them this was just what you needed. They won’t respect you, but they’ll like you enough. If they do decide to take you there, they probably won’t change their minds, so fight, beg, scream, cry, plead for their mercy, say your name, look into their eyes, and hope that just for a moment, even a brief moment, they remember you are a child, and give you another chance.

If not, close your eyes and sing yourself a lullaby from me. Maybe they won’t miss you when you’re gone, but I promise I will.

[sherlywrites]

“A Very Young Girl With Enormous Wings”

I first met Julie when she was six years old, but it didn’t occur to me there could be anything wrong with her. She seemed very much like any other young girl; effervescent, bouncy, full of life and energy. The messy mop on her head swung and bobbed with her motions as she ran through the library, and seemed to sag with guilt whenever I stopped her and wagged my finger. No Running Allowed. It wasn’t until she reached the age of twelve, that she, and the people around her, began exhibiting strange behavior.

I was reshelving books, the soft hum of the air conditioner echoing in the smothering silence of absent readers, when it occurred to me I hadn’t seen Julie for some time. I asked around the town for information, and their mouths sprinkled the saccharine sugar of obligatory community concern. Julie’s parents were worried that she could “end the world,” and were keeping her isolated for our safety. When I asked how exactly a teenage girl could bring about the apocalypse, they shook their heads, leaving me a place in their condescension to be lonely, and remarked that they hoped we’d never have to find out, as if I couldn’t possibly be skeptical of the impending apocalypse itself.

I started watching the door obsessively, hoping to see Julie come in, so I could inappropriately pry her about her personal affairs. When she finally did, I could tell the difference-- her hair had lost a bit of its bounce, her smile had lost a bit of its light, and the telltale uneven growth of puberty had given her the proportions of a baby giraffe. When she smiled at me again, though, I knew without a doubt that this was the same little angel who brightened my day when she came to hear me read. How could she possibly end the world?

So I sat down to talk to her for a moment.

Hey Julie, it’s been a while. I asked, offering her my practiced librarian smile.

Yea. She replied, with the smoke of melancholy on her breath.

I folded my hands in my lap and told her. I’ve missed having you here.

I’ve missed being here. She smiled at me again, more sadly, and without meeting my eyes.

Do you mind if I ask what’s going on?

She scratched her head, and said, I don’t mind, but I’m not supposed to talk about it.

Your secret’s safe with me. I promised, and I meant it at the time.

She admitted, with a venomous sting of self loathing in her voice. I’m becoming a monster.  

When I asked her to explain, she just said she didn’t really want to talk about it. I felt sorry for her, so I left her alone, but her sentence burrowed under my skin and laid eggs in my flesh, and those eggs itched to crawl out.

I asked my usual sources about Julie’s impending transformation, and they laughed at me, and shook their heads as if I were the insane one. No, they said, she thinks she’s becoming a monster, she’ll just bring about the apocalypse if she doesn’t stop. Okay.

In the long hours between closing and opening, when I sat alone in my house eating frozen dinners or oatmeal, or in the even longer hours when my dying library was empty of even the people who just come in to use the internet-- for porn-- the town swept me up in its fear of armageddon. The conversations about her began to eclipse her in my mind. When people came in, I asked where she’d gone, what she did, if she was safe. I asked a different parent every day, so no one would think I’m crazy. I never bothered her when she came into the library again, though. She had learned the hard way that one can not communicate their inner pain to others-- merely gesture at its shadow-- else they would respond with horror, and not help.

She turned to indirect forms of expression-- poetry, writing, music. She could never get all her pain out through them, or even most of it, because she didn’t have the words yet, and her parents strictly forbade her from getting them. These words, they felt, were too powerful, and she may end the world if she gets them. And at least this way she could get attention, if not help.

She was fourteen years old when she came into the library for the last time, with exuberance in her steps once again and a bright secret in her smile.

Do your parents know you’re here? I asked, in my practiced librarian voice.

With a fae giggle, she said, I finally told them if I couldn’t have my books then I really would end the world, and they gave up because they have no idea what they’re doing.

She sat down at her usual table, and seeing no one else in the library, looked at me like I was her last chance to be loved, her only friend, and asked, Will you read to me again?

I read several passages from A Wizard of Earthsea, and she listened to me quietly until she wore my voice out. I joked with her, Are you sure you didn’t learn any dangerous words?

She shook her head, No, I don’t need the words any more. I don’t need anything.

The next day I heard a shrill screech coming from outside. I bolted out, and saw her wearing a forbidden dress, standing in the middle of the street. She was looking up at the sky, as if she knew where she was going. The wind blew past her, holding her dress to her skin like a warm embrace, as she opened her arms to the sun. Her family stood on the side of the road, sobbing, pleading. Now it seemed they truly loved her, but she was past listening to their mewling. As they began to start towards her, she formed a ring with her fingers, and placed it on the top of her head. From her fingers grew a flaming tiara of brilliant gold. Her hair turned red, and flared out behind her in the wind, leaving trails of smoke in its wake. She was too bright now, too brilliant to approach, and so they shut their eyes and fell to their knees in horror. Then, from her back, emerged great and radiant ruby wings. They shone, not with the reflection of the sun, but with their own light, and only her silhouette as their shadow. She must have been in terrible pain, as acrid burns crept across her scalp and back, but she never wavered. The wings encompassed the length of the road and the sidewalks combined. They extended upwards, reaching for heaven, almost getting there, before they gave one great, mighty beat, and she was gone.

[sherlywrites]

Rose

Each shaking stroke upon my keyboard brings

A brand new lick from sorrow’s carping tongue;

Each echoes from an oft forgotten ring.

I’m haunted by the ghosts of memories

Of brothers and sisters whose skin I shed,

And left to rot in Eastern Kentucky.

I feel the blood of hillsides deep and dark,

Within my ragged veins they still find room.

So to my quaking heart you better hark,

For from these spectres music I will hear,

Of ancient forests where comes the fire,

To roots that reach so deep they turn to tears.

But how can I, for aid of my kin go,

Without so casting wide my own shadow?