I was birthed alongside a digested McMuffin evacuated from a parallel pipe—my mother’s last pre-labor meal. She opted for a natural birth, taking only an aspirin, never uttering a complaint.

I lift my knees to walk in flippers, grab a glass of water in the kitchen before high-stepping my way back to the living room where Joe and I have dinner in front of the television.

It’s getting harder and harder to shave my pussy, let alone the tight star of my asshole.

You would be forgiven for thinking Vegas is not the place for you. 

The first thing you need to know about being a Disney is that you should avoid letting anyone know that you are one.

You gather one brush, one can of paint, one room, and one hand tethered to attention.

I began my life in a trailer. A black and white shaky construction plunked on a corner some farmer had carved out of an old cow pasture. One silver maple with a rotten core clung to life. I watched the world outside through drafty windows and remember the shade slapping the sash when the wind picked up. 

I used to think my father was a baseball card.

In the afternoons, I stripped off my boyish clothing and watched back to back episodes of Saved by the Bell, feeding my unhealthy obsession for Kelly KAPOWski. The perky brunette with her slim ankles and come-hither hair tosses was the ultimate teenage bombshell. 

When we first met in the early ‘90s, we had stage names. She went by Kali and I went by Olivia. 

For the third time in as many months, I received an automated email from ebay, stating, “An item you’ve been watching has been relisted.” 

What can be said about this game that hasn’t already been said about Christmas morning? Better than that. The first day of a summer break. Better than that. Evening fireworks on the 4th of July. That, too. Better than all. A graduation, an engagement, a marriage, a festival, a celebration. An outdoor fete to anything.

Vin Scully alone in a broadcast booth, talking by himself, talking to us. Assuring the world that all’s well in Dodgeralia. Calm. Composed. At home, in a park he’ll depart at season’s end. Handpicking his words, off endless branches, branches’ branches, in a deep memory he builds, maintains over many years, keeps polished like a jewel.

It is a game of beautiful pauses, pauses that take up so much of the game’s duration that calling them “pauses” seems inaccurate; the moments of action, rather, are what interrupt the long stretches of inaction.

Ten years removed from my youth baseball experience, I find myself in a car with four baseball-obsessed college buddies, headed toward the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome to see the Minnesota Twins play a mid-September game against the Detroit Tigers. I have no idea why I’m here.

I wanted to focus on the real victims, unthinkable crimes against them, but I kept coming back to those batting cages, to that uniform in Coach B's house.

I wanted to quit, and was too young to realize that I could just quit anything.

The trees all richly clad, yet devoid of pride, fat with birds and the season, have called back days and years for the history they are giving me. 

Now Dad would have to drive us to Mom’s in the shit-mobile, which probably wouldn’t start even if he could get the car doors open. Cows were standing pinned between the car and the wall and the doors had been frozen shut since the storm even without all the extra ice and frozen manure. Dad had tried pouring boiling water over the handles days ago, but the doors only worked while the handle was still too hot then froze solid again, worse than before. 

He could kill me right now. I’m rail-thin, depression rotting the muscle off me since I got here. He’s big and strong and calls himself Faheem.

There are meetings in places that come disguised as something else.

It's the middle of winter. My last submission was rejected with good cause. It went a little off the deep end.

Congratulations! Your employer is an open-minded, inclusive institution that has discovered a method to ensure the comfort of their gender non-conforming employees, and that method is buttons.

A woman waited in line in front of me, anxiously watching the television behind the plexiglass partition. The gas station attendant broke rolls of quarters in half and dropped them into the register. A second woman spoke on screen, dressed in an orange pant suit, matching neon lipstick and a gold crescent moon pinned to her lapel below her microphone. I imagined the petroleum-wax scent her breath might leave as she spoke.          

Can imagine it: black vans with windows tinted green like bug eyes, all those bodies stolen away like women in wartime.