“She came in to see the apartment, and she stood out on the back steps and said to me:

You trans, you make the mirror see its error.

You take the shame, cast it out.

You husk nuts waiting for your return and there it comes,

Curling over the fields as serpent’s love.

I bow to your truth.

“And she bowed, asked me about the dimensions of her bedroom and the dryness of the kitchen, and left. I didn’t know if she was making fun of me or not, and I would never have asked her to move in if the perfect ceramicist hadn’t backed out at the last minute.”

Sophie was trying really hard not to laugh.

“Oh yes, the mythical ceramicist. Okay, so that’s how the Witch would phrase it. What about you?”

“Well, when you’re trans you can look back and see how every gut sensation that told you something was off, too tight, wrong, airless, and incongruent was a beautiful curling script toward the future.”

“I bow to your truth,” she said.

Sophie was wearing a clingy T-shirt, and I could see the rather large breasts she must have demanded.

The surgeon probably said something like, Are you sure you want grapefruit-sized breasts? For your body type?

And she knew exactly the contour she wanted.

“Hey, are we having another Unfuneral next week?” she asked before I left.

God, I always blocked out the anniversary of the avalanche.

For the last few years, Sophie and I had been holding an Unfuneral for my parents. We went to the park at night with trowels, buried a handful of the stones they left me, lit a ritual candle, circled the burial ground twice, and then dug them back up. Their dewy, nerdy, quiet-but-full-of-love presence came back to me; I swore; we opened a door with a gesture. After that, they visited me at night, in waves of remembrance, and I knew that the flat world where they were truly dead was not the real one.

“Yah, let’s do it.”

I usually sent Margot a postcard invite with the Unfuneral date and time on it, in case she wanted to join. She never acknowledged receipt.

Aiden was meeting with another trans Gram influencer in our backyard, and I went down the street to the bookstore to avoid them.

An embroidered sign on the Chronos door warned, NO ADV-TECH ALLOWED.

The old red-cheeked bookseller waited for me to enter with arms crossed. In another era, he would have been the type of professor to give wild talks under trees and sexually harass female students, universally beloved by all who had agreed to overlook his faults.

“Magic words?”

I mumbled, “Kant, Hegel, Goethe.”

Flanking him were two or three young disciples who smoked herbal cigarettes and longed desperately for a father figure.