Most of my creative energies in 2023 went to my fiction debut, Girlfriends, which came out in October from LittlePuss Press. The title for the collection was suggested by the publisher of LittlePuss, Cat Fitzpatrick, who also had a hand in editing the book. One of the working titles for the project was “First Stories” — a reference to Michael Hurley’s album First Songs, and because these are the first stories I ever wrote. I was fresh out of college, writing stories in my free time and posting them on this newsletter for my Twitter followers. When LittlePuss got started in 2021, some people I knew on the internet nudged me to submit what I had written so far as a “partial manuscript.” I didn’t really expect it to go anywhere, but they accepted it. Internet writing is ephemeral by design (I was thinking of these stories as practice for the “real” fiction I would write later), but suddenly I was publishing a book, with all that entailed.
People expect a lot from trans writing. I’ve met young trans people at the readings I gave since Girlfriends came out who express not just appreciation, but gratitude. This is jarring, but understandable. There’s something comforting in realizing that this weird, isolating, difficult experience you’re going through has not just a community of fellow sufferers, but a history and a culture to it. Books like Nevada and A Safe Girl to Love provided this for me when I was transitioning in college, and they ultimately inspired me to start writing about my own milieu.
I came to believe, as I was working on the book, that trans fiction has a different relationship to the people it depicts than other fiction does — the experience of writing into literature what has historically been marginalized or erased carries with it a greater degree of responsibility. This has been articulated before. It implies a program for social realism — a mandate to tell the truth, with the implication of a certain epistemic command of the terrain on the part of the writer.
Later I realized that social realism isn’t really a useful way to think about trans literature — or at least it’s harder, more fraught. I know a lot of trans people in New York, where I live, and I’ve started to see what gets earnestly or derisively called “the community” as an archipelago of interlocking friendships and communities of practice/pleasure scattered across the boroughs. It’s hard to depict this milieu “realistically” because you end up being simply the historian of your own small part of it. What you can do instead is depict the structure of it by showing someone with a limited vantage point, with varying degrees of acquaintance with different groups of people.
That was what I tried to do in “Means to an End,” which was my initial attempt to cram all of the loud, colorful, tight-knit, petty gorgeousness of Trans New York into a single frame. The original idea was to depict Leonora, the central character, as a sort of trans everywoman, beset with bickering roommates, a situationship with multiple older trans women, and a trans guy ex with unclear intentions who’s still in the picture. This story went through several versions before I realized it was simply too unwieldy. I ended up splitting the original idea into three separate short stories: “Means to an End,” in which I preserved the character of Leonora and the bickering roommates; “Ponytail,” in which I kept the ex-boyfriend and added more characters; and this third untitled fragment, which didn’t make it into Girlfriends but was published in one of the zines LittlePuss press puts out at each of their quarterly-ish parties in Brooklyn.
* * *
A sunbeam from an open window lay in a warm square at the head of Katie’s bed. Katie blinked, stretched, and nudged the covers off her body, swiveling herself slowly around so her feet landed on the floor.
She looked over at the lump under the covers on the other side of the bed. Impulsively, she reached over and pulled a corner of the comforter away from Leonora’s head and stroked her wavy brown hair. She stirred and murmured softly in complaint.
“My head hurts,” Katie said. “I’m gonna go get breakfast.”
“Mmh.”
Katie cleared her throat and coughed, which more thoroughly woke Leonora, who pulled the covers over her head and groaned.
“Sorry, I’m leaving,” Katie said.
She gathered up the clothes that she had worn the previous day from the floor and slipped quietly out.
In the shallow pool of late-morning sleep, Leonora had a short, vivid dream, the same one she’d been having for years: reverted to a child of seven or eight, she walked around a familiar house in suburban New Jersey.
She felt no premonitions, no dread, no sadness. No one ever came impatiently ringing the doorbell or creaking down the carpeted stairs, the phone never rang. Sometimes, her mother was there and seemed not to see Leonora’s dream-self, and sometimes the house was empty and quiet, peaceful but dead, like a photograph. Dust hovered in the path of the sunbeams from the window.
She knew she was dreaming, and that made the dream fragile. All the details that she could still remember so clearly — the beige couches, the crystal ashtrays on glass-topped side tables, the heavy curtains — couldn’t be questioned or disturbed. If she were to look out a window, or shout a question into the empty house, or open the front door, or turn on the TV, the dream would waver and break like a soap bubble.
Leonora’s dream-self discovered her mother in the kitchen. She was wearing some kind of nightgown, and her hair was running stringy down the sides of her narrow face, which was obscured a bit by the light coming in from the window. The perpetually furrowed brow. The version of Leonora who lived in the dream still trusted her mother, but somewhere, she knew it was a lie, suspended just a little further beyond her comprehension.
She stood there for a little while. Her mother never turned to face her. With a small effort of concentration, she woke herself up.
Gradually, she became aware of Katie’s bed, the comforter and quilt piled around her, the weight of her body making an impression in the mattress.
From the open window, a few birds talked to each other over the distant groan of the the M train. An unobtrusive warm breeze drifted in, and the sunbeam that woke them an hour ago had glided down to the foot of the bed, starting to overflow onto the floor.
Leonora lay there for longer than she needed to, stretching her long body and running her hands along her chest, her waist, her hips. Katie’s bed smelled faintly and pleasantly like her peculiar scent, mixed with an undertone of sweat and cum.
The sounds of Katie’s roommates chatting to one another and dislodging pans and plates from their cabinets filtered in as Leonora sat up. Katie’s bedroom was teenage-girl inflected: polaroids, cutesy little knicknacks on her dresser, band posters on the walls. One window had the trans flag hanging in it, which was a predictable enough thing to see in a high window on a Brooklyn side street. Leonora secretly wondered if Katie’s lack of taste was intentional — she wanted to be ordinary as possible, given the massive handicap of her transness in that direction. It was the same impulse that led her to hide her money — she wanted to be ordinary as a trans woman, which meant the tiny apartment and the underemployed roommates, and now it meant a trans girlfriend.
She walked across the room to the mirror and sat down in front of it. She lay her head on her knees. A stray sunbeam rested on the upturned side of her face, making her brown hair glow gold and wreathing the rest of her face in purple shadow.
“Hi mom,” she mumbled to the mirror.
The big eyes, the hooked nose, the high aristocratic cheekbones. She remembered how everyone had commented on the resemblance. Somewhere she had heard that recurring dreams represent problems, unresolved issues, the loose ends of life. This one just kept telling her what she already knew.
“Fuck you,” she said softly to the mirror, and then she stood up.
In the main area of the apartment Katie’s two roommates Rowan and Seth were putting together breakfast in the kitchen.
“Oh, hi Leo,” Seth called out. “Didn’t know you were here.”
Leo got a glass of water from the sink and leaned on the counter, looking at her phone, tuning out the conversation. These two supplied most of the queer visual flair of the apartment, as well as the two worn, comfortable couches found on the street corner. The lesbian pulp-style drawings on the wall, the Bikini Kill poster, the clothesline of zines were all theirs. Testosterone 101, What Can I Do About Gentrification?, Not Your Mother’s Guide to Giving Head, Past Presence: A Zine About Baltimore. That last one was actually Katie’s, Leo remembered, from when Leo had dragged her to the “trans art fair” in the backyard of some bar in Crown Heights.
“So I was saying,” Seth said, “she was on a lot of something. Some stimulants, you know. You know how she gets, and anyway we’re usually on pretty good terms, like you just sort of have to tiptoe around some subjects.”
“Like, you can’t talk to her about Katie, or the Art Center,” Rowan said.
“Yeh,” Seth said. “Anyway, when we got back, she was like, bad, or manic or something. And before I could really do anything, she just walks into Katie’s bedroom and she’s like, rummaging through stuff, saying how Katie had stolen stuff from her when she moved out.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Yeah. I don’t know, I wish I could have stopped her, but like, she’s kind of scary when she gets like that.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Leo said.
“Oh, you haven’t heard about this?” Seth said, rolling his eyes.
“Oh my God, Katie didn’t tell you?” Rowan said. “Sophia stole a bunch of stuff from Katie last Thursday after we all got back from going out.”
“She is not allowed in this apartment anymore,” Seth said. “Like, I’ll listen to her problems, I’ll help her, but I have to set a boundary if it’s gonna be like this.”
“I just don’t know what Katie ever saw in her,” Rowan said. “Possessive, jealous, petty, cruel, vindictive.” While he listed Sophia’s traits he fanned out the fingers of the hand that wasn’t occupied with the eggs.
“What did she steal?” Leo said.
Seth rolled his eyes. “Kind of nothing important. Like, some books, a poster, some makeup?”
“The plant.” Rowan added.
“The plant, right. That was the only thing that Katie was mad about. She’s being a saint about this, honestly.”
She pictured that long, spindly thing with leaves the color of a bruise, bending its long neck at the top of Katie’s window. “Got it,” she said.
“Katie was worried that she had stolen her hormones or her meds or something. That would have been it. But no.”
Just then Katie turned the lock in the door and pushed it open with her elbow.
“We were just talking about you,” Seth said.
“Good things, I hope,” Katie said, setting the paper bags down on the counter.
“I was catching Leo up about the thing with Sophia,” Seth said.
“Ah,” Katie said. “Leo, here, let’s sit down.”
They kissed briefly and went to the other side of the room to the two armchairs by tall windows. Katie lived in a long railroad apartment and this part was almost out of earshot of the kitchen.
“I’m sorry about Sophia,” Leo said.
“It’s ok,” Katie said. “I’m glad it’s like, a joke now,” she said, inclining her head toward Rowan standing on the tips of his toes to fish a French press out of a high cabinet. “I didn’t want to talk about it with you because I’m so tired of it,” she said.
“It sounds exhausting,” Leo said through a bite of bagel.
“Yeah. I mean, I want her to stay very far away from me, but you know, I’m concerned. And it doesn’t help that all the other girls think that it’s my fault. Like, the other night I was over at Violet’s with, y’know, her friends, and the conversation was all about how Soph is a chaser.”
“What does that have to do with her stealing stuff?”
Katie rolled her eyes. “You’re asking me. Like, I guess they were saying that all the crazy stuff she’s been saying about me online is just the other side of ‘fetishization.’” She made big, dismissive air-quotes. “That this is the ‘disposability’ stage. They want everything to be about gender. As if Soph would still be doing this if she, y’know, actually had a consistent script for lithium.”
“It sounds like you feel sorry for her,” Leo said, already finished with her bagel. Katie hadn’t started yet.
“She’ll apologize to me,” Katie said firmly. “I don’t think she should be shunned.”
“Shunned by like, twelve trans girls,” Leo said dismissively. “It won’t make a difference.”
“You’re right,” Katie said.
Sometime in the middle of this conversation, Rebecca came out of one of the back bedrooms, wearing an oversize T-shirt as a dress. Leonora struggled to remember which of Katie’s roommates she was dating. She hugged Rowan from behind while he was scratching at the pan with the spatula, which clarified things.
They all joined Katie and Leo by the window. Rebecca drew her knees up to her chest and typed continuously on her phone. Leonora noticed that the shirt Rebecca had borrowed from Rowan had “T4T” screen-pinted on it in big block letters and suppressed a laugh.
“And it’s like,” Rowan said, continuing an earlier conversational thread, “I think I’d rather be ‘the trans one’ in the group of writers doing interesting things stylistically than ‘the weird one’ in the group of trans writers.”
“I feel like Leo disagrees with you,” Seth said.
“Like, you’re still making art under capitalism,” Rowan went on, “so you have to brand yourself. And I don’t want ‘trans man’ to be my brand as a writer, you know?” He looked expectantly at Leo.
“People are going to do that anyway,” Leo said. “I figure you might as well get out in front of them and talk about it on your own terms.”
“Totally, totally,” Seth said.
Leo had realized quickly that Seth had this idea that Rowan and Leo were serious intellectual people who spent their time solving the problems of the world, or at least those of the ‘trans community,’ at least on paper. He never seemed to notice how reluctantly Leo participated in Rowan’s continual monologues.
“I still just sort of feel like it’s like being clocked,” Rowan said. “Like, to be a ‘trans writer,’ everyone has to know you’re trans before they even read your stuff.”
“Everyone does know you’re trans,” Leo said. “No offense. You don’t keep it a secret.”
Rebecca, still looking at her phone, had reached out a hand to stroke the bristly short hair on the back of Rowan’s neck. It seemed to embolden him.
“Yes, but I don’t open the door to cis understandings of transness,” Rowan said. “They have to treat me like they’d treat any other person, because I don’t talk about it in my work.”
“It’s like what you said the other night,” Seth said. “About, you know, opacity. That theory thing that you showed me.”
“Like, Glissant?” Leo said.
“Yeah,” Rowan said.
“Huh. Yeah. I’ve heard of him,” Leo said.
“You should read it,” Seth said.
“You mean, read him.” Rowan said.
“Huh?”
Leo explained what ‘read him’ means to Seth. Meanwhile Rebecca leaned over to kiss Rowan on the mouth. They kept at it for a little while.
“I should probably go,” Leo said. “I have to, like, do laundry.”
“The last time I went to one of his poetry readings, half the crowd was trans women,” Katie said, careful to keep her voice down, when they were by the door. “The other half was like, other writers he knows. I think he imagines his audience as, like, his straight classmates from school.”
“Bye,” Leo said. She drew Katie in for a hug.
During the conversation with her roommates, Katie had misread the annoyance that crept into Leonora’s expression as an anxiety to leave. When they hugged, Katie couldn’t resist slipping her hand down to Leonora’s waist, then let her hands drift a little lower down to the soft pillow of her ass.
“I’ll miss you,” Katie said.
“I’ll see you so soon,” Leo murmured. She sounded impatient. Katie wanted to keep her there as long as she could. She closed her eyes and nestled her face deeper into the hollow of Leo’s neck.
They drew slightly apart and kissed lingeringly. Behind closed lids Katie’s eyes rolled back in her head and tension drained from her neck and shoulders.
Katie’s hand on her ass had made Leonora think suddenly of the first time she had put anything inside her. She was maybe fifteen, and it was the weighty metal handle of her sister’s hairbrush in the shower one morning. The memory lurched forward in her like nausea. The waves of dirty shame that followed. Suddenly, being in Katie’s apartment felt intolerable. She had to go be alone with these thoughts if this was what was going to occupy her today. For the kiss’s duration she was entirely somewhere else, barely feeling what Katie was experiencing with a passion bordering on surrender.
“Bye,” Leo said. She had pulled away from Katie, who held onto her arms for a moment longer, and turned around to open the door.
“Wait, are you leaving?” Rebecca called out from the other room. “Wait for me, actually. I need to go home and, like, shower.”
~ ~ ~
A few minutes later, Leonora and Rebecca were standing at an intersection, waiting for the light to turn.
“You should, like, never give him that shirt back,” Leo said.
Rebecca looked down at her jacket partly obscuring the big letters. She was still a little dazed and absentminded from sleep and sex.
“Oh. No, I think he handmade this one,” Rebecca said.
“It’s so funny though. It’s like a trophy.”
“I talked to him about this, actually,” Rebecca said carefully. “He says that T4T is less a sexuality and more of an ethical code. Like, trans people supporting other trans people.”
Leo suppressed laughter. “Yeah I mean, sure. That’s very Torrey Peters.”
“Who?” Rebecca said absentmindedly.
“Never mind. Are you like, officially dating him?”
“Soooorta,” Rebecca said, staring at her shoes and grinning. “Here, I parked my bike over here. Hold that thought.”
The ‘bike’ was actually a compact little moped, parked in a little gap between two buildings that was just wide enough for it. Leonora watched Rebecca undo the chains around the front and rear spokes. This was her latest weird fascination in a long string of them. She rode it everywhere and took scrupulous good care of it. It was bright orange.
Leo found Rebecca easy to talk to. She had, at some point, just appeared in Leonora’s life, showing up to every party serially attached to a different trans woman. (Rowan was a bit of an anomaly.) It was easy to see why they were all interested in her — she was fascinating, seemed to operate on her own frequency, and she was unashamed of her unusual, insistent taste in romantic partners. She had made several passes at Leonora but hadn’t been a sore loser about being carefully turned down, and eventually they had become friends, or at least friendly.
Rebecca freed the bike of its chains and tarp and pushed it out onto the wide sidewalk. She sat for a moment on the seat and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her tote bag. It was a warm day, with no threat of the last few weeks of rain. Daffodils crowded up next to the street trees swayed in the wind.
“Where were we?” she said.
“You’re sorta dating Rowan,” Leo said.
“No, I revise that, actually,” Rebecca said, handing the pack of cigarettes unprompted to Leo, who took one and handed it back. “We’re hooking up, and, like, his attention is divided between like six other people, so it’s low-stakes.”
“Six,” Leonora said.
“Yes, six,” Rebecca said. “Don’t make me list them to you. It feels, like, undignified. But, like, if I stopped texting him he would just move on to the next girlfriend.”
“So you’re fighting for his attention,” Leonora said.
“No, he’s honestly just starting to bore me,” Rebecca said. She squinted up at the brilliant, dazzling blue sky overhead. “Do you want to ride somewhere? I don’t really have anywhere to be,” she said.
“Yeah, sure,” Leonora said.
Rebecca was good at driving the moped, and she liked going fast. Leonora clung to her waist as she swerved around corners. It became quickly apparent that she was aiming further into Queens — she crossed Myrtle, then Forest, then Fresh Pond Road. More American flags in front of houses, more garages, more open space between buildings. Eventually they crossed Metropolitan Avenue and sailed down a deserted four-lane road between two enormous cemeteries. Forests of tombstones packed closely together, stretching out and out. Midtown Manhattan loomed on the horizon through a veil of chalky haze.
“I love it out here,” Rebecca said when they were stopped at a light. “It’s so nice to see, like, the entire sky.”
They rode around a bit more, eventually stopping at an unmarked entrance to one of the huge cemeteries. Rebecca dismounted the moped and Leonora, who had no idea where they were, followed suit.
She pushed the bike up the path.
“I like that you and Katie are sort of a thing now,” she said, as if continuing the conversation from earlier. “It means I get to see you more.”
“For now,” Leo said.
“She likes you, you know.”
“Yeah,” Leo said.
Leo looked at the rows of headstones. She wondered how it was possible that they were so close together — you’d have to practically bury people standing up. The rows and rows and rows of them had a superficial resemblance to the Manhattan skyline in the distance. Someone had made that comparison before, she thought.
“I mean, the thing about Katie is that she’s a complete serial monogamist,” Rebecca said. “After what happened with Sophia, I’m sure she was desperate to be with someone who’s like, normal.”
“Mm,” Leo said.
“She’s told me before that she, like, doesn’t want you to think of yourself as a rebound.”
“I don’t,” Leo said, still looking at the headstones, reading the names. A sense of her own insignificance was setting in.
“Do you have a good relationship with your mom?” Leo said after some more silence.
Rebecca knew that Leonora was estranged from her family, so she was wary and she made her voice gentle. “Mm, not awful. I see her at Christmas,” she said. “And sometimes she visits me here. I’m not, like, tight with her. Why do you ask?”
“I was thinking that I had a theory, but it’s just, like, stupidly obvious,” Leo said. “About lesbians and their moms.”
“What is it?”
“Never mind,” she said.
“I think I can imagine what it is,” Rebecca said. “You wanna head back?”
“I wanna walk back, I think,” Leonora said.
“Suit yourself. It’ll take you forty minutes,” Rebecca said.
“That sounds really nice, actually.”
“It could be,” Rebecca said. “Cya then.”
“Cya.”
She cruised down the paved path on the moped. From where she was standing, Leo could watch her little outline veer down the hill, through the gap in the black iron fence, and rejoin the street, by then in miniature form.
It was the early afternoon in the middle of nowhere, and she didn’t have anywhere to be.
She walked the rest of the way up the hill, found a big maple tree on top of it, with little buds on the end of the branches. She lay down in the shadow of the tree’s slowly wavering branches and watched them swaying in the cold breeze, each branch partly in shadow, partly in light.
mopeds mentioned :0