The Root of Echoes
Few questions in the English language can truly end the world as you know it. “Do you love me?” he asked, not knowing the answer—unsure if he even wanted to know. “Is that your son?” they gasped, as their forks and knives fell from their hands to the table and floor. “Where is he?” she screamed; she shouldn’t have waited so long to ask. Each question is the origin point of vastly different diverging parallel universes, is a forked path in the woods with a multiplicity of exits: I love you. He’s wearing a dress. He’s gone home. You repulse me. Yes that’s him, why is he wearing a dress.…
Scheherazadenfreude
If she had parked closer, she would have seen that the front door — wood dull and damp — hung half-open, swung inward as if on some slant. Sarah had parked around the bend at the bottom of the driveway, her view of the house blocked by the trunks of two Douglas firs. She couldn’t see the details of the house, but she could imagine them. She could imagine shadows slipping and crawling from every orifice of the structure, slinking up the doorframe to obscure the house number, and covering up the small square window off to the side. Unnatural, more-than-dark darkness clinging to the undersides of the faded russet…
Into the Black Hole
In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the event horizon is the region in space around a black hole—the “point of no return” beyond which nothing can escape the gravitational pull, not even light. If you were to watch someone fall into a black hole, as they crossed the event horizon their body would seem to slow down, then stop and float, frozen in the void. This phenomenon occurs exactly because light cannot escape from a black hole: as an object gets closer and closer to the event horizon, the light particles that convey its image have to struggle harder and harder to reach you. Eventually, even they cannot move. Once…
Hello World, Redux (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Gender)
As I progress through my third decade of being alive, I gradually come to a realization—gender is a strange thing. It doesn’t work quite the way I thought it did. This story is an attempt to articulate what I understand about my gender, and what I instinctively know.
The Heels
A short essay imitating the style of “The Knife” by Richard Selzer. Buying high-heeled shoes from the Women’s department can be an arduous and challenging task. The difficulty increases when you are a masculine-presenting person experimenting with androgynous dress for the first time.
I love my hair / I hate my hair
My hair has always been coarse—sand and salt and pine needles bound into black keratinous strands. It sprouts and surfaces, growing not just from my scalp, but everywhere I have skin. My hair has always been with me. Even in my earliest years it was there, a seed waiting for spring, a line of chemical code waiting for puberty.
