[Issue 2024.70]

‘Transmogrification’, R.M. Pérez-Padilla

Art © 2024 Joel Bisaillon

---

“You tried to finger yourself and had a panic attack,” my girlfriend concludes. Not unkindly, but not with much gentleness, either, like I’m the dumbass for not realizing what I experienced. Which, generally speaking, is the issue with us.

At least her explanation is plausible this time. Even before I understood dysphoria, before I started testosterone, I knew I didn’t want anything inside me and that was that. I don’t know why I tried to reach inside myself rather than just rubbing one out. Boredom, maybe, or a kind of curiosity. It’s like hating broccoli as a kid, and still hating broccoli as an adult, but trying it again periodically because you think eventually your taste buds will get over it. The difference is that I can’t get my daily vitamins and minerals from penetration.

I’ve already finished eating my lunch. I could exit stage left anytime. Frankly, I’m not sure why I brought it up in the first place. Ever since Cecilia’s occasional psychoanalyses stopped being right, these conversations always end with our kitchen table feeling like a cage. At least she hasn’t made this about our stalled sex life. Yet.

“If it was a panic attack,” I tell her, “my reaction would’ve been, ‘hm, must be Tuesday,’ and I wouldn’t bother bringing it up.” At this, Cece flinches, but I don’t pause. “This was something else. I felt something.”

One of Cecilia’s brows lifts into a suspicious arch. I know what she’s thinking: I hope you felt something while you were jerking off. Then she reads me reading her, and the eyebrow returns to its neutral position.

“I know the dysphoria is hard on you sometimes,” she says.

A new and improved response, now with hints of compassion.

“It wasn’t dysphoria,” I repeat. I know what that feels like. I don’t need her to point it out for me. While masturbating in the shower earlier, I touched something inside me—something physical—something cold and sharp, where there should’ve been only warm, soft flesh.

Cecilia watches me a moment longer, maybe waiting for some further explanation. Lately, I’ve been noticing the femininity of her features more. Her nose is small, wide nostrils with a near-flat bridge, not unlike mine; her eyes are big, soft-looking. I used to love staring into those eyes.

Six months on T doesn’t change a lot, but it’s starting to show. Sometimes when I stare at photos of myself for long enough, I can see tiny signs of its magic in my jaw and my cheeks. One night I caught my silhouette in the window and realized my shoulders seemed wider. My favorite pair of jeans doesn’t fit the same way anymore; everything else is great, but that one is a net loss.

I wonder if Cecilia’s noticed any of it, and what she thinks of it if she has.

It speaks to how freaked out I am that I told her about it at all. From the calculating look on her face, I think she realizes that.

With a near-silent sigh, she pushes her empty plate away. “Do you want me to take a look?”

---

While I strip off my clothes, Cecilia waits at the door, her arms crossed and hip cocked, staring at the walls until I’m ready. I know my clit has gotten bigger since the last time she was down there. I’ve felt it. I don’t know how visible that change is, though. Every time I think about looking, I get nauseous.

I am on my back. My shirt is on. My pants are not. My legs are spread. Cecilia, my partner of three years, is on her knees and elbows between my thighs, her hands cold on my skin.

I stare at an old water stain in the corner of the ceiling.

“I don’t see anything out of the ordinary,” she declares.

I can feel the pinch. Something pointed that should be round.

When she doesn’t say anything else, I make myself look at her. Cecilia is watching my face, not my crotch. I want to tell her to check again; I want to reach into myself and yank out whatever sharp edges have grown in there; I want to rip myself open to prove to her some piece of my flesh is rotting or frozen or wrong.

I close my legs and roll off the bed to start dressing again.

“Listen, Max… Maybe it’s just, you know, psychological.”

Anger rolls over me in the form of sudden heat. I snatch my jeans up from the floor. I’ve been waiting for this argument like an Evangelist waiting for Judgment Day. “Why is it every time I tell you about an issue with my body, you tell me it’s imaginary?”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Cece snaps back. “And you shouldn’t yell at me. You might have too much going on to notice, but I am still trying to help.”

I finish pulling on my boxer briefs and my jeans. When I turn back around, Cecilia is not Cecilia.

Her face immediately registers as wrong, like the fucked up AI artbot version of a human, so subtly I can’t pinpoint the details right away. Her cheeks are higher, I think. Her nose and mouth are smaller. Her jaw ends in a more pointed chin.

“What is it?” she says. Spoken with a distant sweetness, like Siri’s voice. I keep staring to track the changes in her face.

“This isn’t a funny joke,” I say, because what the fuck else am I supposed to say? Honey, why do you look like you’re from The Mandela Catalogue?

“I’m not joking, Max.”

I rub my eyes and look at her again. Her face is still changing. The cupid’s bow of her upper lip is more defined. Her eyes are getting bigger—not wider, not more open—bigger.

My prom photo looked like that. Some dolled-up stranger with my eyes giving the camera a terrified, lopsided smile. When I showed it to Cecilia, she said I looked pretty. I tried to tell her how much I hated it, but that was before I understood why. She didn’t listen then.

“Cece,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I don’t know.” She blinks and she’s wearing blue eyeshadow. Was she wearing blue eyeshadow a second ago? I didn’t even know she owned blue eyeshadow. “You tell me. I can’t help you if you don’t cooperate.”

The anger is surging again. I step past her to pick up a light jacket lying by the bed. “I need some air.”

“You’re leaving?”

Her voice is higher. I can’t read her tone. She seems further and further away.

“Not leaving. Just a walk. I can’t be here right now.”

I crouch to shove on a pair of boots. When I stand, something in the mirror glints. A flicker of pale light shines from the gap between the sleeve of my loose hoodie and sleeve of my shirt.

I let the jacket fall lower. The upper half of my arm shines with a glistening, reflective film, shaped from flat surfaces like I’m made from polygon graphics. The surface is so bright, my eyes sting, but it’s mesmerizing; I can’t look away. My shoulders are wider and squarer. The line along my bicep looks the sharpest. Little rainbows ripple across it like gasoline. When I turn, the colors dance and blend, following the contours of my arm. I test it with my fingertips. It feels smooth as glass. The edge leaves a lingering indent in the pad of my finger.

In the mirror, I see Cecilia coming closer. She moves with an alien grace, her limbs curving as they swing, leaving behind a thin wisp of smoke trailing from her wrists.

“Please, Max.” Her eyes are so huge she looks like the live-action Alita. “I’m trying to understand.”

“Look at yourself!” I snap, waving a hand at the mirror. “Look at me! Can’t you see this?”

The pain returns and jolts me out of the haze. Like needles in my fucking genitals. I gasp, fall against the mirror, and grab at my crotch, as if that’s going to make any difference. I’m certain it’ll get worse if Cecilia’s squiggle arms touch me.

Her hand gets closer.

She doesn’t even look like a fucked up version of Cecilia anymore. If I saw her on the street, I wouldn’t recognize her.

I run for the door.

---

I walk around the block a few times. It’s a bit chilly for early evening in the summer, a light breeze sending goosebumps up my arms. The pain from earlier, the cold pinching feeling inside me, comes and goes in waves. I find a bench in a small park and sit, watching people pass by. They all look normal.

Maybe what I saw on Cece was a trick of the light, or the lack of it; the room was mostly dark, lamp off, curtains drawn. The shower masturbation thing scared me. Maybe some of my other fears caught a ride with it. Fear of things emerging from the dark; fear of loved ones replaced by uncanny clones; fear of warped, wrong faces.

As for the Siri-speak—well, sometimes Cece is a bit direct, and that’s something I would’ve admitted semi-fondly before we started fighting. You read people differently when you’re angry. She has been trying to explain things to me with increasing condescension recently.

I fell in love with her once. I can’t always say why anymore.

I take out my phone and text her: “I’ll be back sometime tomorrow, just need the night to think.” I type a “sorry,” then delete it and type “love you,” then delete that, stare at it for another few minutes, and mute my notifications before hitting send.

---

Most of my close friends are Cece’s friends too. I don’t want her to be able to find me. The only person I can think to go to is Daniel Hassan, a friend from college. “Friend” is maybe too strong a term; I mostly think of him by his full name. We met at a queer event during orientation week and bonded by complaining about there being too many white people. He’s met Cece, but he doesn’t know her well—she doesn’t really socialize with cis men, and I don’t think Daniel’s femme energy would exempt him from that.

I trust Daniel Hassan. He’s reasonable in a way most people aren’t. He looks at things in a clear, simple way, without scrutiny.

I text him that I need a place to stay for the night, and he responds right away. I have his address saved from when he invited me to a birthday party I didn’t attend. On the train over, I keep my hoodie up around my shoulders, afraid someone else will see.

Daniel is thin and wiry, with black hair cropped around the sides and floppy over his forehead, his long nose pointing toward a hairless, pleasantly angular jawline. He was always attractive, if not really my type.

When he opens the door, he sweeps a concerned look over me before guiding me to a worn blue couch he’s had since college. I’m planning to just tell him that I’ve had a bad fight with my partner. I don’t think he’d pry or ask much more, but he’s got one of those faces that makes you confess, and I blurt out, “My girlfriend’s been sort of weird since I started getting more masc.”

Daniel makes an “oof” face. “Cecilia, right? That’s what you fought about?”

I nod. He stands and moves to the kitchenette. “I talked with my roommates. You’re welcome to stay a couple nights,” he says, opening the fridge and pulling out a box of pizza. “Have you eaten yet?”

Not since I was with Cece, but that was early afternoon, and it’s well past dark now. “I wasn’t expecting room and board, man.”

Daniel waves the comment away. He reheats half of the pizza and insists I eat it like he’s my grandmother, sitting with me and catching up in the meantime. He doesn’t ask anything else about Cece. I’m relieved not to have to explain. Testosterone has inflated my appetite. I don’t even realize I’ve finished it until I go for another piece and find an empty box, and then I’m so exhausted I could drop.

I’m left on the couch with a Scooby Doo fleece (“don’t judge me,” he says handing it to me, as if I’d judge anyone for Scooby merch) and a well-loved throw pillow with a twinky anime boy making a kissy face (“this, you can judge me for,” he says shyly). He offers me a change of clothes, but I’d rather sleep in jeans than see my fluorescent skin again.

As soon as I’m alone, I’m wide awake again.

I was out as nonbinary when I met Cece. I don’t think I’ve changed much since then, as a person. I know I’m starting to look different. I understand if her attraction to me changes. But when I said I wanted to start testosterone, she told me that she was a lesbian—as if this was news to me—as if she couldn’t date a masc-leaning nonbinary person—as if she wasn’t already dating a masc-leaning nonbinary person.

I knew butches were her type, but I thought that was part of why she was interested in my masculine side. I thought she knew who I was. I didn’t even think it’d be a big deal when I told her I wanted to take hormones.

Before we started dating, I worried—judged her and myself, more out of caution than judgment—about things that I thought could break a relationship: whether we could talk to each other about our feelings; whether we had the same picture of what a relationship was; whether she’d be weird about me being darker skinned than her; whether I’d be unintentionally weird about her family being undocumented; whether we knew how to check ourselves and each other. She passed every test.

I never thought to worry about gender. We had a conversation once, early on, about what it meant to be raised a girl. We were both lesbian-adjacent, with only a vague conception of our genders; queer in a way that meant gender didn’t matter, I thought. I’ve stopped measuring queerness like that now, but I never thought to revise my judgment of her. Sometimes she acts like Man = Spawn of Evil, but she knows me. She knows I’m not a man, and she knows I’m not a Spawn of Evil. Doesn’t she?

I lie on the couch, between Scooby Doo and the anime twink, and try to figure out how many warning signs I missed.

---

Daniel emerges from his room an hour after dawn. He sets about making coffee. Nikki, one of his roommates, appears a bit later. She pours herself a cup, then folds her thin limbs into the armchair, puts headphones in, and starts reading, with only a shy smile of a greeting to me. Daniel offers a selection of breakfast options and again insists I eat something. I just take coffee and toast. I sit with him at the kitchen table for long enough that Cecilia mostly fades from my thoughts. My eyes keep drifting to his Adam’s apple. I hope he doesn’t think I’m watching his mouth or something. I’m not into him. Just somewhere between jealous and fascinated with how naturally masculine he looks. Particularly given he’s barely masculine at all.

Around mid-morning, his other roommate Lila comes into the room wearing a loose t-shirt and sweatpants and declares to the public, “Alright, which one of you is bleeding? I’m three days early and I stained my favorite underwear.”

Nikki only looks up for long enough to shake her head and go back to her book, one hand rising to idly play with her hair. Lila turns to me.

“I don’t talk about that.” The answer’s no, but she’s not entitled to that information.

She makes a face like she thinks I’m a prude, which is funny. “I think our society has a long way to go in destigmatizing normal functions of women’s bodies.”

“I’m not a woman.” She knows this. We’ve met before.

“But you have a woman’s body. You have the natural functions of that anatomy.”

Natural, she says. Like it’s my God-given right to feel like shit once a month.

I told Cece I was thinking about bottom surgery once. She was quiet for a beat. Then she said, “You know I don’t want a dick inside me,” to which I replied, “That’s alright, the dick is for me, and I might not be able to get hard anyway.” She apologized, but it was the kind of apology a politician gives when his affair gets publicized. “I’m sorry I got caught with my pants down”—in Cece’s case, very much not literally.

It’s happening again. There’s a black aura like a drop shadow around Lila. Her eyes have gone big and blank and hollow. Panic rises in my throat and shoves the question out: “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Nothing is wrong with me,” she says, her eyes still growing. “Why would you say that?”

I turn to Daniel, but he’s frowning at me, not her.

“Are you not seeing this?” I ask, gesturing toward Lila. As the words leave my mouth, I see his face start changing, too, his cheeks flatter, jaw wider and lower, forehead growing, his face elongated, elongating—and wasn’t I staring at the hard line of his jaw earlier? Was it hypermasculine then too?

“Let’s not fight about this,” he says. His voice has dropped octaves deeper, making him sound like the voice in dramatic movie trailers. I startle at the change and nearly fall off the chair.

“What are you doing, Max?” Lila says.

Which is apparently the last thing I can handle, because I spit out, “What am I doing? What are you doing? Your—”

I stop because my voice has gone higher than I’m used to hearing these days. The same sharp edge I felt while masturbating is now against my neck, so sudden that I raise a hand to my collar and expect to find a knife there.

Daniel stands and his torso is wrong like my shoulders were, shiny and angular and growing fast. He’s always been twinky. Now he’s morphing into the Chris-Evans-Dorito meme, shoulders twice the width of his waist. I glance back at Nikki, hoping—but she’s surrounded by the same soft gray circling Lila, both their faces shifting, eyes huge, and their limbs are starting to turn to smoke while Daniel turns prismatic.

“I have to go,” I announce.

“Calm down, Max. Don’t leave.” He sounds threatening. He doesn’t sound like himself at all.

I pick up my phone from where it’s nestled between Scooby and the anime boy on the couch and pocket it without looking at the screen. Then I stare at Daniel, willing myself not to watch Lila’s arms noodling like Cece’s. His face is so warped I don’t know if he’s mad or if he just looks like that now, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move toward me, and isn’t standing in the way of the door.

I book it out of the apartment before they can turn into anything worse.

---

I wander back home, taking the long way around. Cecilia isn’t around. I shower and avoid looking down while I’m naked. I dress hazily in my softest pajama pants and my most oversized sweater so I feel like I’m swimming, a tactic I used to hide my shape before I started binding. I make myself tea and sit in bed, silent. When I realize the tea has gone ice cold, I realize it’s evening. The bathroom light casts a too-white glow from the side of the room. From bed, I catch a glimpse of someone, something in the mirror above the sink, and realize a beat later it must be me.

Mesmerized, I move into the light and stand close enough that my vision blurs. I search for the familiar feminine features I spent so long glaring at—my cheekbones, my small nose—and the budding masculine features of the past few months—the hair on my cheeks and lip, the shape of my jaw. I search for the things I’d come to appreciate regardless—my eyes, my thick brows. None of it registers. I couldn’t pick the reflection out of a lineup if it emerged from the mirror and left me bloody on the tile floor. It’s all just mismatched parts, lines and artificial shadows, a Picasso subject with gray smoke swarming around the edges.

I touch the flesh around my temples, trying to feel the contours of my skull. My skin feels cold, not quite solid, even though I know my hand is moving along the curve of my cheek and the rounded edge of my jaw. I turn to the side, hoping my profile might be more normal. But the shading shifts as I turn, like the artist is still running a pencil over and over the same lines, trying to correct a mistake by sketching heavier lines on top of it.

I hear jangling keys by the front door. Cece. Before she can come in, I get into bed and pretend to sleep. She flicks the lights on. Her footsteps stop. For a few seconds, there’s only stillness.

Then she shuts the lights off and takes the couch.

---

I move through the world knowing I am incomprehensible.

People stare—at least I think they do—but as the days pass, strangers start changing, too, their faces warping or vanishing altogether, men sharpening into angles and women softening into clouds. It becomes harder and harder to look straight at them. No one else ever seems to notice. I keep deciding I’ll ignore it, and then I see another distorted bastard and start overanalyzing again.

I spent Monday night at Daniel’s; my weekly testosterone shots are on Fridays. I weigh the needle and syringe in my palm for a long time, alone in an apartment that no longer feels like mine. My hands have turned angular like my shoulders. The cloud of twisting shadow that surrounds me drifts around my iridescent open palm, curling around the syringe like a ribbon.

For a flash, I see the dose disappear behind the smoke.

I close my fist tight around it and stab it into my thigh. It isn’t until the syringe is halfway empty that I realize I should have been worried about if it’d be impossible to inject, given most of my flesh is either hard as glass or immaterial. My thigh looks like normal flesh, aside from a few shiny patches. Will it become impossible, eventually? Will it just disappear into the smoke?

Will I?

---

I avoid Cecilia; I wash my face without looking in the mirror; I stop planning my outfits; I shower in the dark, avoiding the sharp edges on my body; I keep a blanket or my arm or the pillow half over my face when I sleep, hiding from the darkness more than from Cece; I wonder how long I can keep this up.

---

I’m walking home when I hear someone call my name. These days, I keep my head down and my shoulders hunched. I’m two blocks from Cece’s apartment, next to the bar we used to frequent. Max is a common enough name. I don’t assume it to mean me. I keep walking.

The same voice calls again. I’m surprised to be spoken to at all, let alone recognized, and that surprise is enough to stop me against my better judgment.

I glance over my shoulder. A man has appeared by the door to the bar. He is short and sturdy-looking, with a thin beard darkening the bottom half of his face. He looks vaguely familiar. It takes me a second to place why. I knew him, or a version of him, with a softer face, slimmer shoulders, not a trace of beard at all. Last I heard, that person had moved to the west coast.

We were… close. Sort of. The butterflies-and-batting-eyelashes kind of close. Then I met Cecilia.

I’ve stopped walking. He takes the last few steps toward me. I don’t want to say his old name. “Hey,” I say instead, trailing off.

He smiles a little and says, “Gerard. He/him.”

I remember a photo he’d shown me of a high school Halloween costume, full head of hair straightened and dyed bright red, wearing a blue jacket and washed-out white jeans. “Did you name yourself after Gerard Way?”

He laughs shamelessly. The answer is obviously yes. “And you? Still Max?”

“Still Max.” Sometimes the syllable feels wrong in my mouth. I can’t tell whether that’s from wanting to change my name or from my tongue turning to smoke.

“I just moved back last month,” he—Gerard—offers. I repeat his name internally a few times, trying to write over the old name in my memory.

“It suits you. Uh, the name. Not the city. Or, that too, I guess.”

Despite my eloquence, he’s smiling at his feet. “Thanks. Still they/them for you?”

“Yeah.” There’s still a flash of anxiety mixed with relief whenever someone asks. I don’t want to have to bring it up. I don’t really want to have to answer the question, either. But Gerard is standing there, still smiling, and I hear myself say, “They/he,” and he smiles a little more.

Gerard wavers for a bit, taking a half-step back like he can’t decide how to end the conversation. I have the urge to apologize and run. Then he squints at me. I brace for something along the lines of, “what the fuck is up with your face?”

But he surprises me. “Come in for a drink? On me.”

---

The bar is half empty, quiet in a gentle-coffee-shop-chatter kind of way, the music low. Gerard taps the barstool next to his, at the far end. If I start drinking, I don’t think I’ll stop. I order a coke. Gerard does the same. I tell him I don’t mind if he has something stronger, but he waves me off.

“I’d rather have all my faculties intact anyway,” he says, slanting a glance at me. “What’ve you been up to lately?”

Oh, just waiting for the inevitable end where I’m made of more shadow than substance and fade away in a light breeze.

I tell him about my latest writing project, although I haven’t even thought about it in weeks. He tells me he’s working an office job in programming—stressful, but it pays well enough to be worth it. He can work from home whenever he wants. It sounds like most of what he does is work, from home or elsewhere; he hasn’t had time to socialize. Hence—

“It’s really great to see you,” he says, with more sincerity than I know how to hold right now. Then we change the subject.

Gradually, I forget that I look fucking horrifying. It isn’t until we’re about to leave that the dread comes surging back. I don’t want to go back to the apartment to spend another night alone on a bed made for two or on a couch too small for one, wishing I could sleep without feeling the wrongness of my body.

As Gerard is closing the tab, the bartender thanks him and adds a miss to the end of the sentence. With the s, his voice turns to a hiss, and thick, black smoke emerges from between his teeth, followed by a hollow silence, like the whole bar has stopped to hear. Gerard becomes extremely attentive to putting on his jacket. The bartender turns away, a trail of something like smog around his head, the edges of his face turning into clean angles and straight lines. I watch Gerard, but he’s only reacting like he just got misgendered, shame and disappointment and weariness wrapped in one.

When we step outside, he looks unusually grim. It’s starting again: I catch a glimpse of smoke curling from his neck to his mouth, hiding patches of his facial hair. I’m torn between staring and making a quick exit.

“You saw it, didn’t you,” he murmurs.

“The smoke?” I ask, before realizing I’ll sound insane for it.

But Gerard doesn’t seem surprised or skeptical. “Smoke,” he says, like he’s tasting the word. “For me it’s these…” His mouth turns to a scowl. “Weird white blobs. Like tumors, but sort of slimy-looking.”

“That’s—” I snap my mouth shut.

Gerard smirks. “Gross?” He shrugs.

The street seems hollow, even with passing cars and a faint siren. I wonder how amorphous everyone looks for him. Through my eyes, it isn’t too severe right now—some shadowy women, some squarish men, but at least everyone is roughly anthropomorphic tonight.

“I didn’t know anyone else could see it,” I say.

He’s quiet for a moment. “Not everyone does. It’s how I started realizing…” He gestures at his torso. “The masc stuff.” Masc, instead of something like guy, makes me wonder if he’s nonbinary too, or how much he’s still questioning. “It started slowly for me. I met a trans girl who sees men like spiky knives, or something? She didn’t understand what was happening until a few years into—”

“Years?”

“How long has it been for you?”

“I don’t know. Weeks, maybe. I thought I was losing my fucking mind.”

For that, I get a bitter smile. “You get used to it.”

I have no idea how. Did I expect the horror to just disappear someday? No. Not specifically. But I guess I still believed it’d get better. After starting T, I felt more like myself. I looked more like myself. It felt right. Now I’m not even sure what I look like, with or without the shadows and the polygon graphics. And it’ll be like this for—years? Longer? Is it permanent?

Apropos of I have no fucking idea what, Gerard perks up and turns to me. “Did I tell you I was an extra in a movie, back in LA?”

“What? No. What movie was it?”

“Do you want to come watch it at my place?”

---

His apartment is a couple blocks down from the bar. The trails of black smog around him grow thicker and more opaque while we walk; his shoulders shrink and his arms thin; while he shows me around his apartment, a gray aura starts to envelop him, not quite as dark as I’m used to. I can’t always tell if he’s acting weird or if he’s just tired, maybe.

We settle onto his couch and talk over the first few minutes of the movie. I try to focus on his voice, on how casual he’s being, how easy it is to talk to him. I try to pretend the shadows were never there at all.

The movie is an exceptionally average apocalyptic action film: women in short shorts with huge tits, guys in tank tops with massive biceps, and blazing explosions every ten seconds. Gerard’s cameo is half an hour in, during a car chase scene in a city. When he’s pointing at the screen to show where he is, blurry and far in the background, he leans into me. I feel the sharpness of my shoulder pressing against his. He doesn’t react. A shadow crosses his face, his features warping, and I avert my eyes.

Because I’m worrying about Gerard turning monstrous, it isn’t until several scenes later that I feel his arm on the couch behind me.

I stare at his hand near my shoulder. His knuckles each have a tiny, gleaming point on them. I stare at him: the smoke framing his face, obscuring most of his beard, and the iridescence tinting his brow.

“That was smooth.”

He smirks but keeps his eyes on the screen. “Main reason I suggested this. It’s not a great movie. Besides my appearance, obviously.”

He finally turns his head. His gaze flits around my face until he meets my eyes. I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled that he planned this. Can’t he see the Picasso bullshit all over my face? Am I turning into the amorphous lumps he described?

I flounder for words. “Does this not bother you?”

Gerard watches me. The aura around him grows, the angles on his face getting sharper, his eyes bigger—

“None of this is bothering me,” he says softly, his voice falling a touch deeper. His face stills, save for a wisp of gray caressing his ear. As long as he hasn’t turned into a hellspawn, I’m good, even if he looks a little weird. Everyone does, these days.

When he asks if he can kiss me, I say yes.

We make out for a good chunk of the rest of the movie. I lose myself in it—his hands sliding under my shirt, his breath on my neck, his tongue in my mouth. His touch alternates between pleasantly sharp and soft like cotton. He feels solid. I feel him present with me, my palms on his arms, his waist, his hips. He nudges me onto my back and shifts so he’s on top of me, moves his knee between my legs, not even touching my crotch yet but—

The pinching cold is back and demands all my attention. I gasp for breath. “Wait, Gerard, I can’t—”

Immediately, his knee is gone, and he backs off. “Sorry. It’s okay. I—”

But while we moved, one of us ended up on top of the remote, and suddenly the explosive apocalypse on the TV is very loud. We startle and scramble and toss or shove cushions until Gerard fishes it out and turns the off TV.

My breath is still coming hard.

I keep my eyes on the remote in his hand. It’s already being eaten by the smoke. I’m about to lose him. He’ll become as shapeless as everyone else.

Gerard breathes a laugh. “Sorry. That was a lot at once. Are you alright?”

His voice resonates in the quiet. I barely process what he actually said—I register only that he sounds normal.

He looks normal, if a bit gray around the edges, but the grayness isn’t spreading. I can still see the person I used to know in his features—a delicate nose, a softer face—but the smoke clears from around his face and I can see short, dark hairs peppering his jawline.

“You’re… not horrifying,” I say.

He blinks at me, then laughs. “Thank you?”

Miraculously, he doesn’t sound offended. “Sorry, I meant—I just thought—”

Gerard puts a hand on my arm. “I know what you meant. You’re fine, Max. It’s okay.”

“But I’m—”

Gently, he turns my chin so I can see our reflection in the black screen of the TV. In the reflection, Gerard looks like Gerard, more so than he does in the flesh. And I—

I’m on my side. My shoulders look solid, a bit wide, but not unnaturally so. My limbs are all intact, no smoke or shadow curling around me, no pale pink-and-green surfaces forming. My hair’s sticking up at a thousand angles, fault of Gerard’s fingers against my scalp. And my face is a face, not at all abstract, with eyes and a nose and a mouth and an uneven teenage-boy beard, a face that’s feminine in some places and masculine in others, a face that’s curved and sharp and gleaming and obscured with smoke all at once, a face I recognize, and—for the first time in weeks, or maybe in much, much longer—a face I know is mine.

© 2024 R.M. Pérez-Padilla

[Issue 2024.70]

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