You’re muttering something when I wake up in your bed, the words leaking out from inside you with sticky strands of drool. You sleep with your mouth open; I think it’s cute. Your bleached, dyed hair stands up in crazy tufts of faded green and straw yellow. Your eyebrows are drawn together into one long, severe black line. A frown.
I reach out and try to smooth it away with my hand. You roll away from me, pulling the stained, cartoon-print bedsheets with you.
“No,” you say in your sleep-voice. “Don’t touch me. You can’t steal my bones. You fucking freak.”
I sigh and try not to feel hurt. I am pretty successful. I know this is, as my previous partner Zee would have said, a “you” thing. It’s not really about what I am at all. You don’t even know what I am, not all of it. You don’t know what I was before I was human. No, it’s about what you’re afraid you are.
Little slices from a razor blade streak through the beautiful constellations of acne on your shoulders. I inflicted some of them last night; you told me to do it. You wanted me to call you mean names while I did it, but that was hard. I don’t want to call you mean names. And I got distracted by the blood, how it welled up from the thin cuts in sticky beads. Like jewels, or lava.
Fuck,” you growl. “I’m fucking lost. Ian. Where’s Ian? A witch is trying to steal my bones.”
I have no idea who Ian is. I tentatively touch your shoulder, avoiding the cuts. I shake you a little. “Andy,” I whisper. “Andy, stop it. You’re dreaming.”
It takes more shaking and whispering, but finally your long eyelashes flutter on your cheeks, then rise. Your open eyes are swimming pool blue and bloodshot at the corners. Your frown gets deeper.
Boyd,” you say. “Boyd, you’re still here?”
“Of course I’m still here.” There’s an uncomfortably long pause, and I worry I’ve misread your tone. “You said I could stay,” I add. “You told me last night. I mean, I can leave now if you—”
“Nah.” You grunt as you sit up and swing your feet over the side of the bed. Your toes are long and hairy. I gaze at them with some envy. My feet look like a bird’s feet. Deformed. I never let anyone see them.
“I’ll make coffee,” you say as you stand and stretch. “Want some?”
“No thanks. I’m hungry, though.”
“I got cereal. Cocoa Puffs, Cheerios, or some kind of generic bran flakes shit.”
“Cheerios!” I get up myself and only wince a little as my legs take the full weight of my body. The pain will recede to a dull background hum I barely notice as the day moves on. “I can get them myself. You don’t have to.”
“You’ve never even been in my kitchen before, Boyd.” A trace of amusement enters your voice. My whole body thrills.
“I bet I can figure it out,” I say, putting my hands on the fleshy part of your hips, nuzzling the downy back of your neck. You tense under my touch, but you don’t pull away. “I bet you a dollar.”
“I don’t think I’ll take that bet,” you say, and I’m already walking through the bedroom door, across the living room, and into your apartment’s kitchenette. I open the cabinet to the right of the sink, below the silverware drawer, and pull out a bright yellow box of cereal. It makes a dry rustling noise when I shake it triumphantly above my head. I grin at you. I am delighted with my primate’s capacity for grinning. I am delighted by the stubble on your upper lip and the cleft in your chin and the red bumps all over your shoulders and jawline and chest.
“Fuck, that’s exactly why I won’t make bets with you,” you tell me. Your half-smile is narrow and pointed. “You’re psychic or something, I swear to God. What the hell is your secret?” You lurch to the coffeemaker and start measuring out your daily dose of ground up caffeine beans from the dented can beside it.
“I’m not psychic. Just observant. Good at deductive reasoning.”
“Sure, a regular Columbo. Bet you are psychic, Boyd. You always have that damned glowy look about you, you know what I mean. Big, sparkly eyes. Floating around at your crap job like the customer service smile comes totally natural. Why are you so happy?”
I shrug as I pour an avalanche of Cheerios into one of your bowls.
“Seriously. It’s gotta be either supernatural powers or phenomenally good drugs. Hey, maybe you could hook me up. My SSRI don’t do shit but make it almost impossible for me to cum.”
“It didn’t seem that way last night.”
You laugh. You swat at me playfully from across the narrow, tiled space. I dodge.
“And I don’t do drugs,” I say.
“Not even coffee?”
“Not even coffee.” It’s bitter, and it makes my nerves feel like I’m flying too fast and too low above an angry river. “Not even antidepressants. Just T. Herbal and the other kind.”
You laugh again. “Goddamn it, Boyd.”
* * *
If you asked me the right question, I’d have to tell you this is the only thing I've wanted since the first time I saw one of us on the sidewalk, not passing, wearing a baseball cap back-wards and chains on his pants like he was a prisoner of something. I saw him smoke mentholated cigarettes at a bus stop while meticulously blacking out little squares in his shoelaces with a permanent marker. I remember the toxic smell of the cigarettes and the toxic smell of the permanent marker mingling inside my beak. (This is when I was all bird.) I held them there like I was savoring perfume.
I wanted to be one of us, and I wanted to be with one of us. Not women. Not the other kind of men. Us.
The boy at the bus stop was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen. I’d been content with my life before; he planted a yearning in my breast. It spread through all my feathers, all the hollows of my bones. Through the twisted bubblegum of my feet, which had fractured and healed crooked several times over the course of my brief life. (I was a pigeon, then.)
The city looked new. I thought about how the breeze would feel on soft skin scattered with soft hair. I thought about what neon lights might be like to human eyes. I thought about having lips, and teeth. Opposable thumbs.
I found a bunch of crumbs outside a donut shop and swallowed most of them before bigger, meaner pigeons chased me away. I spread my wings and soared through the thick, oily city air until I was so high up the people and vehicles below me were just a bunch of anonymous moving dots. My feathers flashed in vivid colors only pigeons can see— I didn’t know yet that we all look grayish to humans.
I went and I found the witch who lives at the top of the abandoned train station.
She looks like a mass of twigs and mold, if you’re not looking carefully. Her joints are gnarled and swollen and her teeth are made of iron. She smiled when she saw me. Tried to grab me from the air.
I darted out of her reach. “I’ve come to ask for help!” I shouted.
Her laugh sent flakes of rust spewing across the dirty windowsill where she sat. “What will you give me if I help you, sky rat?”
“Anything. Anything!” I flapped to keep aloft a safe distance away from the witch, just in case.
“Anything, eh? And what could a creature like you want so badly?”
I told her.
She laughed so hard I thought she’d tumble from her windowsill and break into pieces on the old train tracks. She told me to get lost before she ate me. She told me she wasn’t in the business of making freaks.
So I flew away, into a sky growing dark, and I sought out the witch who lives inside the river.
It took me a while to find her because the river is always moving and the water isn’t clean at all. I was so obsessed with my search I barely ate for days. When I finally found her I was, at least, too thin to make a tempting meal for anyone.
“River witch,” I called to her from the muddy bank. “Please come out. I’ll give you anything I can if you grant me my heart’s desire.”
The witch rose slowly from the water. She was greenish-brown and rippling with foam. Her hair was very long, and I could see her skull through it. Her eyes shone like pennies at the bottom of a well. “Little pigeon,” she said, “I am not in the business of granting heart’s desires.”
“I haven’t even told you what I want yet!” I protested, stamping my twisted feet in frustration though it hurt.
She shook her head slowly and sadly. “You don’t have to, bird-child. I can see it burning inside you. It’s nothing I can give. Accept what you are— that’s my advice.”
“I have,” I said. “I do. My heart’s desire is myself.”
“Then,” said the river witch in her soft voice, “you should seek out my sibling. The witch with no name and no home. I believe ey operates a hot dog cart outside of the public library during the summer arts festival. I can’t promise ey’ll help you. But ey might.”
I looked for the nameless, homeless witch everywhere. I didn’t find em…or, I didn’t think I did. It was so hard to tell. The only clue I had was what the river witch had told me.
I kept my eyes peeled for hot dog carts, but the only ones I saw clearly weren’t witch-run. Their human proprietors chased me away with curses when I landed on their relish trays and tried to start a conversation.
A week went by, and another, and more. Finally, the summer arts festival came around. As soon as I saw the streets filling up with stalls and tourists and stilt walkers and living statues, I went straight to the public library. Just outside its front walkway, there was a small hot dog cart with a red and white striped umbrella on top. Behind the cart stood a small person in a rumpled suit.
I flew over and perched on the cart’s push-handle. My claws scrabbled against the worn metal. My heart fluttered warm in my chest. “Please, nameless witch,” I began.
Ey turned to me with a face so unremarkably human that even while I was looking at it, I wouldn’t have been able to describe it. “Hey, birdie,” ey said in a voice like the sound lightbulbs make, “no need to be so formal. Around here, I’m just another hot dog man.”
I opened my beak and started over. “Please, hot dog man. I want…”
Ey smiled with teeth made of bone and shadow. “I already know what you want. My sisters wouldn’t help you, eh? They’re so stodgy.”
“Will you? Help me. Can you?”
Ey offered me a piece of stale hot dog bun. I pecked at it greedily.
“Of course I can,” ey said. “Of course I will. Everyone should be allowed to choose what they want to be, the way I chose to be a hot dog vendor. But I must warn you, it comes at a price. Not that I’ll ask you to pay me, mind.”
I must have looked very confused. Ey rolled eir eyes, took a deep breath, and continued.
“The price is in the self you lose. You won’t be able to fly anymore. You’ll never lay an egg. You’ll have to worry about clothes and jobs and housing and medicine.” Ey glanced at my feet. “You might not be able to walk well, or fast. Or it might hurt you to walk very far.”
“You can turn me into a human boy, but you can’t fix my feet?” I tried not to sound disappointed.
“Sorry, kid.” The hot dog man shrugged. “I’ve never been good at feet.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I stood as straight as I could and looked em in the eye. “I’m ready. Do it now.”
The hot dog man grunted, stretched eir arms out, cracked each of eir knuckles, and grabbed me firmly by the throat. Ey stripped my feathers off and stretched out my muscles. Ey added matter to my bones until I screamed from the weight of them. Ey bent and twisted my wings into hands and arms. Ey reached into the currents that flow behind the world and pulled at them until the shape of my life was entirely different.
I fell to the sidewalk and blacked out.
* * *
I woke in a studio apartment— my studio apartment, now. I remembered I had lived here for nearly a year, although I also remembered being a pigeon scant moments before.
I remembered my days as a hatchling, and I remembered a whole human childhood and young adulthood that had never really happened. Or, had never happened before the hot dog man granted my wish. I supposed they had happened, now. I wondered whether the human parents and brother I remembered had been previously existing people whose family the hot dog man inserted me into, or whether ey’d created them from nothing, just for me.
I peeled the bedsheet from my body and looked at it for a long time. I ran my new hands over the hair on my head, my belly, my legs. I touched my mammalian nipples. I touched the swollen thing between my thighs, and the wet hole behind it. A new voice came stumbling out from the red chasm behind my new teeth. Eyelashes fluttered on my soft, featherless cheeks.
When I was done, a shiny rectangle buzzed at me from the floorboards beside the mattress where I lay. A phone.
I picked it up and answered. It was a girl who said she’d been covering my shifts at the coffee place, asking me if I felt well enough to come in today.
I remembered the job slowly. The memories floated into me one by one as I talked to the girl, stalling until I remembered her, too.
“Sure thing, Stacey,” I said, standing on awkward, aching feet to dress myself and leave the apartment to be a person. To go to work.
Where I met my co-workers, Stacey and the rest. Where I met Dorian, and Chris, and Zee. And, eventually, you.
* * *
Late morning light cascades over the kitchen tile in dusty triangles. I’m really enjoying this time with you. It’s my day off; later, maybe, we can go out together. To a movie, to walk by the river or through the twisting dirt pathways of the park. We could go to the club you said you liked, although of course I won’t drink anything. I like to dance, even if it makes my feet scream. Pain is part of being alive, I always remind myself. You have to love it as much as you love everything else.
I pick at my Cheerios, pinching them up with my fingers to eat by ones and twos. You laugh at me. I do it partly because I want you to laugh. It’s going well until I hear the tinny techno sound of your phone going off in the bedroom. Your face goes bright with expectant hope, bright in a way that makes it suddenly clear you weren’t actually happy before.
“Shit,” you say, already moving away from the kitchenette. “Hang tight, Boyd. I gotta get that.”
I nod, even though you’ve turned your back to me. Your butt bounces as you run for the phone. Your coffee sits abandoned on top of the stove in a ceramic mug with WORLD’S BEST GRANDPA on it in Comic Sans. (You are not a grandpa, or even a parent.)
I think of the razor blade last night, and I think of you talking in your sleep. I already know it won’t last, even before I hear your voice in the other room. (“Ian!!! Hi! Really? Oh, no, nothing much…”)
This is the fastest I’ve ever known it.
It took three months with Dorian, five weeks with Chris. Eleven months with Zee, and we’d probably still be together if she hadn’t realized she was asexual and also (sort of) a girl. I didn’t begrudge her the change; how could I? She detransitioned, converted to Buddhism, and moved across the country. Sometimes we still write each other letters. More and more, I think we both forget.
I’m used to breakups by now. There are so many people in the world. So many boys like us to love. Men like us, I mentally amend, remembering how yesterday you kept telling me “boy” used for adults is infantilizing. I learn something new from everyone I fuck.
It still hurts, every time, when I realize it won’t turn out the way I want it to, that I’m about to be alone again. A lonely awkward barista who doesn’t even like coffee. Former bird with a fake life.
But, like, what am I gonna do, throw myself into the river and die about it? Find the hot dog vendor and ask to be a pigeon again? No way. Not getting everything you want doesn’t mean it was wrong to want it. Doesn’t mean what you’re left with isn’t still good.
I wipe a few snotty tears off my face as you dash back into the room, flushed and grinning, your hair sticking out in all directions.
“Hey, Boyd! Uh…a really good friend of mine is coming over soon. We haven’t seen each other in weeks, there was this whole fight, and…well, I don’t wanna kick you out or anything, but like, you know, if you could—”
I respect that you’re trying to sound apologetic. “Sure,” I say. “I’ll get my stuff. Don’t worry about it.”
We’ll see each other at the coffee place, around town, and so on. We’ll be friendly to each other when we do. We probably won’t meet up on purpose ever again.
“Thanks for understanding! You’re a real one.” Your grin grows wider. It’s heart-annihilating. You’re so cute. You’ve never looked happier with me.
I go back to the bedroom. I find my pants and jacket and shoes on the floor. I put them on. I’m already wearing socks. I always wear socks. They’re the color of a summer sky and very soft.
“Goodbye, Andy,” I say as I let myself out the door.
“Bye,” you say. I hear the sound of you sucking coffee into your mouth. I wait a second, but you don’t have anything else to tell me.
My feet hurt going down the stairs, so I focus on them. I decide not to wonder who Ian is, what makes him so much better than me. The human heart and its ways are mysterious.
I see a tall cis man with arms covered by tattoos in the foyer of your apartment building. Maybe he’s Ian. He looks through me like I’m made of air. He’s tall and muscular, wearing a thin tank top to show himself off, but I don’t think he’s as young as us. There are lines on his forehead, like you’ll have in ten or twelve years.
I walk outside and into a day so perfectly temperate it feels like nothing at all. The sounds of people and traffic swirl around on the breeze with bits of trash. There’s a man about our age, also cis, walking on the same sidewalk as me in the opposite direction. This one’s shorter, though still taller than you or I, a little plump, with an earring and over-gelled hair. He’s carrying a jelly jar filled with cut roses. Carefully, with both hands. Maybe he’s going to your apartment building. Maybe he’s going to your apartment. Maybe this is Ian.
I smile at maybe-Ian. His eyes skip off me and he makes a disturbed face. I can’t decide whether the face makes it more likely he is Ian, or that he isn’t. We both continue on our separate ways.
I reach the crosswalk and press the button. I shift impatiently on my throbbing feet. I miss flying in a wistful sort of way, without real regret. There’s another man across the street from me. I have no idea how old this one is, although I think he’s pretty young. I think he’s cis, but I can’t be sure. He looks about my height, and he’s much thinner than I am at present. Prominent Adam’s apple. Huge eyes. Hipster clothes that don’t quite fit him, and a hipster mustache. He shifts from foot to foot too, like he’s my reflection. Maybe I was wrong about the other two guys. Maybe I’m looking at Ian now.
The light beeps and changes color. The man across the street smiles at me. I smile back at him. I have no animosity towards any of the Ians. I hope you get what you want.
I decide to stop speculating on possible Ians, for real this time. There’s a hot dog cart on the corner near the library, but its umbrella is striped blue and yellow. The smell of slightly charred meat and sharp mustard makes my stomach growl.
A privilege of being human: I can have a hot dog any time I want one and am able to afford it.
Today I can’t afford it. Still, I have the smell. I have the feeling of my heart cracking open inside me.