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this post’s featured image is by Dusty Ray (@sloppjockey on Twitter)

CONTENT WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF BODY HORROR & GORE

Your body is on loan let me remind you. This time last year you were in the hospital too. Better circumstances. Better view. You went under one way and came out different. Everyone said you had a glow. New beauty unearthed. Flat chest tall posture. The threads you weave your future out of turned from silver to gold to copper. Electric. Where are you now? Who’s that in the mirror?

Last night you stood up on your strong legs and went to daub your eyes. Your flesh came away in sheafs of pulp fiction and you laughed. You laughed. A few days back, your mother said [] and you went quiet. You’re vain, too. Mirror mirror on the wall.

The place where your skin sloughed off shined at you in the barren light of the bathroom. A red lake. You tilted your face from side to side and did not touch. Your face a map of Mars in less than a week. You eroticize the grotesque and it keeps you sane. Remember your first Clive Barker story? Nightbreed? Objectively a bad film but you love it. Same with Tarsem Singh’s the Cell. There’s a handful of bad movies you live and die by. It makes you the kind of person who can survive the terrible split second when you realize you are alone in a room. By your own hand you are.

Anyways, Nightbreed. Boone with his sexual dysfunction and his girlfriend who pinned him to the hetero-nightmare future she thought she needed. How instead of just trying men he let himself be torn apart by his shrink and annihilated by mounties. In the hospital scene he pulls back the curtain on Narcisse, a paranoid dirtbag with lank, greasy curls who seems to oscillate between seduction and repulsion.

“They’re coming for me,” says Narcisse. “I need my true face to be ready.”

Boone and the audience know and fear what Narcisse intends to do. The scene ends with Narcisse tearing his face open along the jawline. He demands Boone look at him, his voice a twisted maze of orgasmic ecstasy and abject terror.

You look at the pitted red mask in the mirror and remember that. When you sleep you dream of the subaltern made literal. Rachel and her daughter in the dark. Baphomet reaches for you and you pull away.

You’re not mine, you say.

Nor are you mine, it says, and reaches for you again.

The original plan had been to drive down from Cranberry Lake Biological Station and make an appointment with an auto shop in Saratoga Springs. Your car’s been crying around lately and you’re worried about its capacity for yet another long haul cross-country odyssey.

When you got to Skidmore College, you hung up your closing night outfit, the one you couldn’t wait to show Samara and the others at the Flaherty. The one that preceded all saints. You imagined iridescent whorls across your eyelids and meridian points highlighted in white ink down your body. You imagined your crush would be there by some miracle. You hadn’t imagined prom or homecoming as a teenager so this was your adolescent gift to yourself. A golden petticoat. A gossamer body. When you first got sick, you paced back and forth in front of the outfit like a villain, your thumb and forefinger in your inflamed, bloody mouth.

People keep asking you what happened and you don’t know. You cast a wide net of blame but nothing catches. Just like the lake you’re on leave from. You plumb the depths of the past six days and find nothing.

Instead they ask what you do for a living.

I’m an independent researcher, you say.

Oh, so you’re like, legit, said one of the E.R. doctors when you told them this.

You didn’t say anything, which was fine, because at that moment, another bit of rot slipped off and they called an ambulance to transfer you here.

En route to Albany your paramedic asked better questions than anyone had or has since. You rattled off your answers in a cheerful monotone and he looked down at you in your stretcher all cocooned with magnanimous detachment.

Maybe you’re Patient Zero, he said. Maybe when all this is over you can write your next book about it.

Your nurse this morning asks you to call her the Asshole. She’s middle-aged with an adorable lisp so it comes out “ash-ole.” She says the infectious disease expert will come in. The crazy doctor, she says. You try to say you prefer crazy doctors but your lips crack open and you just smile.

In your private moments you think about Hell Followed With Us. How strange it is to have finished that book only to embody Benji mere hours later. You can’t decide whether or not it’s a good book, but on more than one occasion, you want to reach out to Andrew Joseph White and thank him for killing Kalvin Garrah–sorry, “Calvin”–in the funniest possible way. Non-climactic and self-fulfilled. Maybe the hospital has you on enough substances to make you message him. Maybe they don’t. Either way your dreams are desolate and terrible and when people ask you how you’re feeling you keep saying “grateful.”

There’s a few passages in Hell Followed With Us where Benji wonders about the distance between himself and other trans men. It was a prayer answered. You’d texted your aunt about a week before you bought that book: I need another trans masculine person who isn’t a total sycophant to talk to about why I regard most other “tboys” with either distance or derision. Benji isn’t real but he’s enough for now. And when your face falls off you hear his little voice saying it’s nice that people need a moment to categorize him as human before they decide “boy” or “girl.”

Your grown-up brain knows better than to think there’s an angel under your hardened shell. The child within isn’t so sure. Your dreams give no affirmative. You’ve been in what you call “problem-solving mode” all week and every quiet moment shows you the thoroughfare of the not-quite-there. At one point you prop yourself up in bed and see a hollow creature drag itself across your room’s speckled floor. It looks like a desiccated monkey wearing a hazmat suit shellacked to its pruny skin. You’ve seen something like it before. September of 2018. Toronto.

You blink at it and it hisses at you through the hole in its throat. You bring your hand to your own neck and squeeze. A few lesions here but not enough to panic over. When you’re between waking and sleep it feels like there are teeth in your throat. Or a lightbulb in your soft palate. The truest is when you’re roused by a nurse with an insistent “Francis! FRANCIS!” and the silhouette of your body becomes a tangle of roots for some great tree.

Partway through your second day at the hospital, you throw runes on your situation. One of the oldest nurses comes in and asks what you’re doing. You tell her. Everyone wears full PPE around you so her expression is totally unreadable.

Very good sir, she finally says.

You cannot stop thinking about this.

The infectious disease expert gets into a childish spat with the Asshole in front of you.

I’m not the Crazy Doctor, he says. That’s the psychiatrist. I am the infectious disease specialist. Don’t listen to her.

I’m just giving him shit, says the Asshole. He’s still crazy though.

You look at the infectious disease expert and decide he’s probably very normal. The realization disappoints you.

I have to take all her twisted words, says the infectious disease expert, I have to take all her twisted words and spin them back around on her. Anyways, let’s have a look at you.

You ask him about the cultures the ophthalmologists took from your lesions and swollen-shut eyes yesterday. Did they say anything? He shakes his head. We must wait.

Are you sexually active? asks the infectious disease expert.

You nod.

Males or females?

You nod.

But you have normal sex with males? he asks. Because you are biologically female?

You try not to bust out laughing as your brain gives you a quick montage of your deviant behavior to the soundtrack of Samia’s “Limbo.” You nod because it’s easier than explaining anything and he needs all the leads he can get. He asks about the abnormal, non-productive world of lesbian sex and you do try to enlighten him until he clenches his fists in demure discomfort and backs off.

You have had surgery on your breasts? he asks. He points at one of your white-haloed nipples. I thought this was another lesion. A big one.

I had top surgery last year exactly, you say. Nothing bothers you anymore.

He asks you if you’ve been tested for HIV yet. You tell him they gave you a full panel at Urgent Care two days ago and he tells you to call them to fax the results over. When you call them, they tell you to tell him to call them, or otherwise they probably already have the results. You roll your eyes and fall asleep.

You wake up in Midian. Boone-as-Cabal sits across from you with his hands on a decanter of ambrosia. Your father is on a plane to you on the longest day of the year and your brain is ruthless with love for everyone who ever had a hand in creating you. You try to imagine what you’ll become next and your brain turns to television static. Cabal opens the decanter and offers it to you. You hear the steady drip of water from stalactites and see the vast shape of the elder god he’s supplicant to behind him. You take the decanter in your hands. What the Asshole called “those perfect hands.”

They never gave you a sequel, you say to Cabal. Rachel stares into the camera at the end of your movie and says tomorrow or the next and then the credits roll.

Cabal does his little non-smile and tilts his head.

What happens to you? you ask. What comes next?

Live your life and die your death, says Cabal. You’ll get your answer when you resurrect.