My wife and I were in bed, her mouth near my shoulder, when she noticed my top surgery scar had changed. “Are you hurt?” she asked, pressing both thumbs against the spider-silk scar, as if it were a crease in my brow. I looked down. The scar had once been the milky color of congealed albumin. Now, it had split and widened. The skin was translucent, a gossamer film shielding a vicious pink line, which rose smoothly and painlessly from each side of my ribcage.

I fled to the bathroom, a tiny cubicle at the rear of our houseboat, and consulted the gold-trimmed medicine cabinet, donated by my wife’s wealthy parents. It was true. The top layer of skin along my sternum was now malleable: a thick, spongy, ruler-shaped window. Underneath the skin, a fleshy expanse of coral and cream muscle was segmented into centimeter-long sections by white, fleshy threads, a pattern not dissimilar to the magnified ridges of a thumbprint. The change (or the translucence, as I later called it) blended seamlessly into my skin, retaining the same silvery border where my surgeon had stitched me back together. An aberrant lateral line, smiling grimly beneath my pecs. How had I not noticed?

“Sage, this is why you wear sunscreen,” my wife declared as I crawled into bed. A sunburn, yes, I thought. My wife had the unique ability of noticing only what she thought she could handle. If she thought it was a sunburn, it was; if she felt the scar could be fixed, it would be. Within minutes, she was asleep, her sinewy bicep curved across my chest.

I gazed at the dark ceiling, listening to the low hum of motorboats, punctuated by our daughter’s snores. Tears pricked my eyes. My nose burned. I wished, if I woke my wife, her eyes would grow sharp with understanding, and she would know she had done something wrong. She would say, “Are you hurt?” and I would be ready with an answer. 

***

The next day, I picked my daughter up from school and drove our golf cart to Charter Boat Row, where my wife was pressure washing her sportfishing boat. The Bertram Bear, a 1998 Bertram Convertible 54, had been a baby shower gift from my wife’s parents, along with the board book it was named after. My wife’s parents were new-money Delray Beach lawyers who liked to remind us we were 100% on our own. “Don’t call us in an emergency,” my father-in-law once said, tapping a fountain pen against his black trimmed mustache, seconds after signing a check to his newest philanthropy. 

Amelia and I waited on the boardwalk in a merciful slice of shade. It was August in Key West, and hotter than usual, so I removed my shirt. Amelia was exceptionally curious about the difference between our bodies. She pointed her handheld plastic fan at my chest. “What’s that?” she asked.

In daylight, the skin of my scar looked even more translucent, the lateral line even more red. I had spent the morning convincing myself it was a sunburn. For hours, I checked my guilt in the mirror. I rubbed aloe and cold cream into my chest. I poked the translucence with a needle and determined it did not hurt. I exfoliated the area with my wife’s pumice stone, her dermabrader, her extra-strength chemical peel. I scanned my limbs, ribs, navel, nostrils, ears, and then noticed a strange loss of color around my eyes. The closer I looked at my eyelashes, the more I was convinced I could see behind where the hairs entered the lid, the black follicles glistening like caviar. In a panic, I’d pulled up my father’s contact profile, an image of Amelia and him hose-feeding a manatee, but I couldn’t press call.

“It’s a sunburn,” I told Amelia. I didn’t like to lie to my daughter. My wife loved a white lie, a candy-spun story, and I felt we should equip Amelia with information to subjugate the spoiled children at her Montessori school. But it felt private, the translucence, a silent thread between my wife and me. 

My wife approached, one hand wrapped around the day’s tips, the other holding a microfiber cloth stained with fish guts. “How was school?” she asked.

“Kelsey didn’t invite me to play mermaids,” Amelia said, which was news to me. “I’ll talk to Kelsey’s dad,” said my wife.

“How was your day?” I asked.

“My mom called. They’re visiting this weekend.”

“This weekend!” 

“For Labor Day.” 

I said, “You know how I feel about your parents.”

She said, “You know how much they love you.” 

“Can we talk about this?”

“Later.”

My wife folded the cash into her bra and called out to her partner, a middle-aged man named Denny with skin the color of a roast pig. Denny cleaned the livewell, and my wife prepared the next day’s tackle. She rigged the poles, brined the ballyhoo, took out the trash, cracked a Modelo with a squeeze of lime. Amelia and I watched pelicans poke around the boat’s glistening white hull. The birds gurgled gray scraps of skinned fish. We pretended they were Olympic divers, rating them out of ten for their audacity. 

Then it was time to go. My wife took a swig of beer and slung my daughter’s backpack over her tattooed shoulder. I watched them walk hand-in-hand toward the Garrison Bight underpass and city marina, where we’d purchased our houseboat slip ten years ago. My daughter’s curls were finer and redder than my wife’s. I imagined the pair would later be twins; Amelia, her morbid curiosity crushed by the middle school vultures, would don her mother’s armor, an armor that allowed her to see only what she wanted to. If Amelia assimilated to my wife’s habits, I wouldn’t mind. I would never expect Amelia to witness me.

I waved at Denny and drove our golf cart in the opposite direction, heading for Duval.

***

I found comfort in the cramped, heavy air by the fryers, the damp blast from the walk-in cooler, and the strawberry crate perpetually stacked above the lemons that ran low. I checked counts on the oysters, the wagyu cuts, the sourdough loaves; I marinated chicken breasts in allspice and scotch bonnet; I date-stickered capers, two dozen lobster egg rolls, five pints of jalapeño chutney, six pints of tarragon rémoulade. My fingers, prone to moving, danced with knives and measuring spoons.

I’d been a prep cook the majority of my life. My father, the general manager of a Minnesota franchise, taught me fry side before I tasted my first beer. Dad was the only child of a blue-collar family, the last man of the Anderson line. Despite hundreds of earnest dates with impassive women, my father had failed to sire a son, and I was his compensation. He had me memorize the family tree. He quizzed me, “What’s in a name?” and taught me to reply, “Everything.” He set me up with line cooks and family friends and made me promise to get married in the United Methodist Church. He hoped if I liked any man, any at all, I might hyphenate my surname, a simple dash to show the Andersons could survive modernization.

When I came out as gay, Dad called it a miracle. He unearthed a secondary ambition, one that had not yet occurred to him: achieving grandchildren. “The technology these days,” he said. “You could pick a son!” Dad formulated a six-step plan to get me a wife, culminating in a fly-fishing symposium, a plan so brutal in its execution I’m sure he wrote it all down beforehand:

1. Learn fishing. 

2. Take Sage fishing. (Forced family fun!)

3. Enroll Sage in Trout Tactics.

4. Last minute switcheroo to Saltwater Moon Phases. (Optimal lesbian dating pool.)

5. Vet fisherwoman on Sage’s behalf.

6. Child.

I met my wife after her hour-long presentation on tidal fluctuations in the Gulf of Mexico, her hair haloed around the microphone, her words magnetic, frenzied, lustrous, like she held the solution to all my problems. As I waited for Dad outside the public restrooms, my wife walked up and introduced herself. “I couldn’t help but watch you watching me.”

“Great presentation,” I said. I couldn’t remember a single word. 

“What’s your name?”  

I gave her my deadname. Sage is not much better, but at least I didn’t name myself Surf-N-Turf like the other he/they on the PTA board. 

She invited me to IPAs at the Bass Pro Shop bar, where I told her about Dad. Dad wanted me out of the basement and off his health insurance plan. He wanted me to apply to be kitchen manager. He wanted me to get married. I was in a sorry state: scrawny, ambitionless, hopelessly addicted to ZingPacs and TastyBight YouTube. I hadn’t left him because I wanted to feel like leaving was my choice, and not his.

She said, “Treat him like a bandage. Rip it off.” 

My wife and I were civilly unioned in six months. We settled in Key West, its cramped, busy lifestyle the best way to drown out my uncertainties. I went panhandling for jobs down Duval, paper resume in hand, each step defining the delicious distance between my father and me.

We fell out of touch. I had fulfilled my duty, found a wife, and transitioned into his son. He didn’t know what he wanted from me anymore. I wanted him to give up on our name. Names change, people change. Dad was stuck in his blissful dream, always wanting.

My manager hoisted a plastic crate onto the worktable. “Catch o’day.”

“Flounder,” I said, admiring the wet carcasses. 

The first fish, its calico skin mottled with silver, was open-mouthed and waiting for communion. My knife wedged into its gills. I drew a clean line down its vertebrae, angling into its flesh, skimming along the ribs. As I skinned, I imagined my surgeon as she severed my breasts and nipples in the operating room, opening the flaps, scooping yellow mounds of fibrous tissue with a serving spoon, holding the spoon with a limp wrist like she was planning to take a bite. I peeled back the scales and froze.

The flounder cutlet was thin and moist, the color of a fingernail; its flesh stained yellow around the pin bone line. The fat patterns were familiar, the same as any other whitefish - sea bass, whiting, pollock, cod - ridged and segmented like window blinds. These blinds revealed an underwater world, a world full of sensation, the sloshing of fat and muscle on bone. The press of a belly on the ocean floor. A floor constructed with particles of dead things. 

I wish I could say I dropped the knife, or called Dad, or took a cig break. I’d always hoped if some strange thing happened to me, it would be a product of my queerness. An epiphany. Another development in a long line of developments, another crisis to be resolved. Instead, I prepared a saltwater ice bath, flipped the flounder on its snow-white stomach, and waited for my shift to end.

***

In bed, I told my wife I was turning into a fish. 

She let out a startled laugh before noticing my expression. “You’re serious.”

“Very serious.”

She moved behind me and laced her capable fingers around my ribs. Out of habit, I leaned into her touch.

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

Part of me wanted her to say it was a sunburn. Another part begged her to pull away, assess the translucence, and determine it was part of me. 

She tugged my bare chest closer. “I barely see a difference.”

“There is a difference.”

“Then, how are you feeling?”

For years, I had repeatedly failed to explain dysphoria to my wife. My body wasn’t mine. I was in the wrong vessel. How could I admit I carved away at myself every month since my first period because I thought bleeding should be more painful than it was, without hurting her, invalidating her own experience of my body? She accepted it, but I wanted her to get it. I tried again.

“Dad had a lake house when I was a kid,” I said. “We were only allowed to swim when the UV was below three, and my cousin Pat, you know Pat? Fucker woke me up at five a.m.”

Her forehead fell against the nape of my neck.

“I followed Pat to the dock. The water was so black, I saw his reflection crouched behind me. Pat said I was scared of the water. I said I wasn’t.”

“But you were scared.”

“Yup.”

“Why? You couldn’t tell what was underneath?” 

“I was scared of not being in it. I saw Pat looming behind me, and I thought, what if I have to watch us on this dock forever?”

“So Pat pushed you in.” 

“Yup.”

“He didn’t do anything else?”

It was a natural conclusion, but it made me angry. This wasn’t about Pat. It was about gender, about a fixed cycle of coming out forever.

“Nothing.”

My wife turned me around, full-sweeping me with her eyes. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“I’ve told you everything.”

“But you’re mad at me,” she said. “You’ve got the furrow.”

“Sure, I’m mad. Your mother invited herself over.”

“Why do I need your permission to invite my parents over?”

“It’s my home!” 

“It’s our home,” said my wife. “It’s for two nights. You’re blowing this out of proportion. What are you really upset about?”

“I already told you—” 

“How do we fix this?” 

I took a deep breath.

“Do you want to fix this?” she asked. This was her way of asking for sex, of channeling my anger into something good.

I often wondered if our relationship was founded on one singular moment of connection - confessing my grievances over craft beer - and the next ten years were a high-chasing extravaganza where I hated myself for disrupting her perfectly rational life, and she didn’t know me, but she had me tethered to the ocean with my last name and my child. I badly wanted to connect. For her to fill me up.

The lights dimmed, and the sheets pooled against our teardrop heels. Her speckled skin was honey-warm, expansive, saturated like tea leaves. The present stretched on before us. The rocking boat and the sputtering AC and the night air packed with wanting. Her blue nails snapped my waistband, painted rivers down my calves. I shut my eyes, trying on the body of someone else named Sage, a cloaked figure in an apothecary bottling three wishes, a strung-out sea monster in a hot tub, his head submerged, his second skin. Her fingers tucked into my ribs. My fingers tangled in her hair. She dragged her tongue past my navel. Paused. Shrieked. Recoiled. Naked, she scuttled out of bed and hit her head on the closet door. 

We were at a standstill, eyes locked, bated breath, waiting for Amelia to shuffle into our bedroom and find us compromised. 

At last, my daughter snored. My wife’s shoulders sank into her wetsuit collection. Exposed, I learned what aliens feel like in the movies when they cut into their first proper stack of pancakes: silent, curious, heartbroken they aren’t home. I cupped a shaking hand between my legs, expecting a mess of wires around my vulva. Instead, the space was cool and smooth, greased with a film like discharge, and textured with undulating ridges. I searched for flaps of muscle I could fold and stretch and scavenge, but there was only a closed line: a line, I envisioned, red as my wife’s lower lip against her teeth. No hole to press into. No hole to piss out of. No clit to suck on. No sensation, pain or otherwise, when I pressed the whole of my palm to my genitals. I should have felt shock, horror, but I wasn’t surprised.

For minutes, I explored the translucence. My wife shivered, haunted by her decision to leave the bed, yet unwilling to get back under the covers.

“You should go to the hospital.”

Fear laced her voice, a cadence I’d heard before. The week of Amelia’s second birthday, my wife invited all the daycare families to our houseboat except for the Morenos, who lived on Stock Island and didn’t have a car. My wife wore a white bow in her red curls. She baked Amelia a Barbie princess cake and piped rosettes of fuchsia buttercream around the corset. When she was finished, she stepped back and said, “Isn’t Amelia lucky?” Like a gender-conforming cake was a full-ride to Dartmouth. Like we were hosting ten wealthy married couples in a mansion, and not our tiny, dingy houseboat.

I’d recently sustained a crippling fear that my wife would someday realize she didn’t love me. I was looking at that Barbie cake, running my hand over my buzzed head and thinking about lesbians, when I blurted out, “I’m trans.”

My wife had made an expression like she was watching Amelia fall off the deck. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. She thought I had been living a lie and I knew it, because when she lied, she knew it, and thought it for the best.

My wife was afraid for me, of me. I felt an uncanny burst of joy, a euphoria I’d experienced after top surgery, recovering from anesthesia, running my hands over the bandages encasing my rubber-band wound, pressing that leaf of time into a moment. I hadn’t known the translucence could be something I wanted until now. It was my fear to wield. Mine. 

“I’m not going to the hospital.” 

“You need help. There’s something…” she trailed off, unsure what was wrong with me. 

My wife said we could go to the hospital when I was ready. She retreated to the pull-out couch. This betrayal gave me a chance to explore my changing body. In the dark, my anger trickled out of me like a stream. I stroked the delicate sponginess of my eyelids. My eyelids, my top scar, my genitals were fish filets. White-webbed cuttings with red centers. What, then, of the other orifices? Were they next? Would I be able to urinate? Speak? Breathe? Would I die? I did not fear dying, or heights, or monsters in the dark. What, then, was I afraid of?

I pinched the outer edge of my scar, pulled the muscle from the bone until small shocks of pain reverberated through the tissue. My skin was a gulf that concealed a vast fluctuating biome. Bizarrely, I thought of each creature on a menu, grouper and conch and pig, subjected to an irreversible chemical change. Of myself, labeled at the bottom. Roast Human: The Hemingway Cut, extra-generous thick prime rib, tender, juicy, flavorful, paired with brie, Brussels sprouts, and Pinot Noir.

I would be isolated on a plate, divorced from the need of a name.

It didn’t sound so bad. 

***

Amelia had been born early, small and jaundiced. I smiled at the seaside doula, an ancient woman wearing a bobbed wig, and said, “She’s perfect.”

My wife, beautiful and frustrated in her delirium, said, “Her feet are yellow.”

This was easily fixed. Amelia was placed in a blue phototherapy tank, her fingers curling toward her palms like roots. I asked my wife if I could join her in bed, but my wife did not want to be held. She had three aims: push out the placenta, drink a café con leche, and call her parents. I picked up lunch at Paradise Café. When I returned, I felt I should somehow bridge the gap between us, that our daughter would irrevocably change our poor communication. 

My wife must have felt this too. “I should tell you something.”

“Yes?” 

“I don’t like fishing.

Fishing, for her, was a means to an end: leaving Delray Beach, gaining autonomy from her overbearing parents, funding IVF, saving for retirement. My wife hated waking up at five-thirty to join Denny on the boat. She hated watching pinfish circle the livewell, knowing they spent their lives surrounded by ocean and their last minutes in fruitless revolutions. Hated polarized glasses, the ability to see everything beneath the surface.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “When we first met -” 

“It’s okay.”

“I lied to you about the fishing.”

“It’s okay!” We never went fishing. The only thing we did that was particularly Floridian was use pellet guns to shoot iguanas out of Denny’s trees. 

“You just get me.” Her voice was small and vulnerable.

I wondered if I did.

***

Like my father, my mother and father-in-law loved lists. Unlike my father, their lists were imbued with the same pressure that had propelled them through law school and formed diamonds in their wallets. As they sat on our houseboat’s screened-in patio, I imagined their joint brain plugging each observation into a teleprompter feed, which they would consult during future lulls in conversation:

1. Tell $age buy renter’s insurance.

2. Tell $age repaint deck. (Beige is best.)

3. Give $age landscaper’s contact info.

4. Buy daughter Pilates season pass.

5. Plan Amelia’s first grade graduation party! (Write check?)

6. Send $age snickerdoodle recipe.

The lull of Mr. and Mrs.’ voices drifted through the sliding door, snippets of would you look at that and bilge pump. My wife retrieved goat cheese and multi-grain crackers from the kitchen, which occupied the left side of our living room. She poured three generous glasses of sauvignon blanc, kissed Amelia’s forehead, and rejoined her parents. I minced garlic, unnerved by her scattered behavior. Amelia snapped the heads off green beans. 

“Dad, how come no one wants to be friends with me?” she asked.

“Where is this coming from?”

“Kelsey says I’m bossy.”

“Are you bossy?”

“I’m assertive.”

“You tell Kelsey that. Tell her you don’t need to be everyone’s cup of tea.”

“Okay.” 

“You’re my cup of tea.”

Amelia snapped a green bean, and it went flying across the room. We laughed. I felt a tugging at my lip.

I washed my hands of garlic and drifted to the bathroom. In the medicine cabinet mirror, I found the right corner of my upper and lower lips stitched together. The translucence burst forth like a silver cold sore. I felt unresponsible. I felt a semblance of peace. Then I imagined a world where I could not tell Amelia I loved her.

Panic flew through my body, compressed itself into something I could hold. Back in the kitchen, Mr. and Mrs. were on the pull-out couch, watching Amelia open a Labor Day present, a doll with red yarn hair. Whether Amelia liked it or not, she was well-trained, grateful. Kelsey’s dad arrived, and Amelia left to play mermaids at their saltwater pool. I went back to preparing dinner, soaking the thawed tilapia filets in brine. 

Mr. had told me, many times, he did not like Floridian seafood, particularly the oysters (I didn’t blame him, those summer gulf oysters!) and ahi tuna (imbecile). Mr. believed cold-water fish were more nutritious, and after watching a TastyBight segment on Mozambique tilapia, he would have nothing else. Mozambique tilapia, he said, was the pinnacle of fish: low mercury, high selenium, reasonable price, delicate flavor, pollutant-resistant and protein-rich and anti-aging. 

“I hope you got the good stuff,” said Mr. from the couch. 

“Yup.” The tilapia came frozen from Winn Dixie. FARM FRESH, the package said.

“My dear Sage,” said Mrs. “Have you been promoted?”

“Mom,” said my wife.

“Honey, you work too hard on that fishing boat. Tourists six days a week!”

“Sage and I love our jobs.”

“We’re so proud, chica. You made this happen 100% on your own,” said Mr.

“We’re glad you invited us over for the holiday,” said Mrs.

“Glad Sage is preparing this lovely meal.”

“Sage, are you still on the house hunt?” 

This again. “Yup.” I strained to speak. 

“I must connect you with my friend Annie,” said Mrs. “She bikes eighteen miles a day.”

“Best realtor in South Florida,” said Mr.

“She’s Brazilian.”

“We really think you’ve outgrown the boats.”

My wife stood. “Speaking of boats… how about we go see Bertram!”

Mr. and Mrs. said, in more words, how thoughtful, what an opportunity, thank you very much, we love adventures, and they were off, marching across the rickety metal plank, clutching their wine glass stems for balance. 

Water simmered on the stovetop; olive oil warmed in the pan. I stared at the black rings of the stove, and something, nothing, slid past my peripheral vision. I thought of Pat and his ghostly leer; my tethered reflection. I thought of my wife getting up for water in the night, lifting her arm, heavy as a small marlin. No longer suffocated. 

Struck with a frenzied idea, I thrust open the silverware drawer, retrieved the cutting board, and guided off my shirt. I held the filet knife in my left fist. Pointed the tip at my flesh, where my scar had become the translucence. The knife slid in painlessly, with no resistance, crafting a two-inch tunnel to my ribs. It was as easy as skimming butter from whey. At one point, a nerve fired in the flesh of my stomach. I corrected myself, moved the knife upward, and outlined the full perimeter of the window. Then I dug the knife underneath one corner of the rectangular cutting and pulled. The connective tissues stretched and popped as the solid brick of flesh was removed, leaving behind an empty cavity. Blood welled over the shelf. I weighed the muscle in my hand, pallid pink, lined with blood and fat and slicked with fluid, and dunked the filet in the salt water mixture with the rest. The filets were the same color, and the same pattern, and the same texture. All dead things in a contained sea. 

I blanched the green beans, cooked orzo in broth; I grated Parmesan, zested a lemon, chopped basil and mint. Time expanded, contracted, each task taking eight seconds and eight years, but I was happy to cook. I cut the largest filet into three rectangular offspring. All seven filets were towel-dried, coated in flour and salt and paprika, and dropped in the spitting pan. Fragrant steam hissed outward and filled the boat.

Footsteps on the plank. The rosy-cheeked trio filed in. “It smells delicious!”

We sat on the pull-out couch, me next to my wife, next to her mother, next to her husband. Each plate sported mounds of creamed orzo, garlic-lemon green beans, and pesto-glazed, pan-seared tilapia. For myself, I spared one filet, and for my wife and in-laws, there were two, browned to perfection, juices pooling against the blue-patterned rims of our fine china. 

Mr. dug in with his fork. The fish flaked beautifully, the inside white as an eggshell. He took a bite.

“Now that is tilapia.” He took another. “I’ve never tried tilapia so fresh!”

Mrs. nibbled delicately. “You would never know this was imported from Mozambique.”

My wife tried it for herself. “My compliments to the chef.”

“Thank you.”

For a moment, the sound of their chewing was a triumph, a warm heavy liquor, a knowledge that maybe, yes, maybe, this was mine.

Mrs. said, “You know what would be delightful?”

Mr. said, “I was thinking the same thing.”

“A gluten-free tilapia.”

“A dairy-free-tilapia.”

“A cruelty-free tilapia!”

“A vegan tilapia!”

“Honestly, Sage, you should take a class with a proper chef.”

I stood. The wine glasses clattered off the coffee table. The floor was wet and the boat rocked and I could barely move my lips. “You people treat me like shit.”

Mrs. gasped.

“Look at the happy family! Look how much we love our granddaughter! Look how much I love fishing! Let me write you a check!” 

“Hey now—” said Mr.

“Look at me,” I begged my wife. “Look at what’s wrong with me.”

She stared at my mouth in horror. “Sage.”

“Tell me you love me right now.”

“Let’s go to the hospital.”

“No.”

“No? What do you want me to do then? Watch you suffer?”

“I want you to listen to me.” I reached into my pocket, the keys forming a weapon in my fingers. I thought about how easy it would be to hurt her, and how it would feel like hurting myself. 

“I’m listening,” she said.

“You think I lied before I came out. You think dysphoria is something I’ve created.” 

“Don’t do this in front of my family.”

“I’m tired of explaining how I need to be loved.”

My mouth sealed shut. I could only breathe through my nose.

“Just because your issues are too big for you to handle doesn’t mean they are my issues to handle,” she said. “I love you, and I don’t give a fuck about your body.”

She’d just eaten my body and loved it.

I fled the houseboat, leaped over the bike rack, and fired up the golf cart. Sped down the pavement and through the underpass, past a dozen slips in Charter Boat Row, and stopped at Bertram Bear, my dress shirt drenched in sweat. Denny was drinking Moscato and twiddling his hairy toes all over BB’s stern. I cussed him out and maneuvered Bertram out of the slip, away from civilization, to where the mother-mangroves reach out their arms, and where, at low tide, the water is clear enough to view crabs and lionfish and jellies and cucumbers, minnows and nurse sharks and crumbling coral.

Out here on the ocean, I desperately wanted two things: ZingPacs, and to hear Dad’s voice. I thought of him in our huge suburban house, jabbing the remote at the TV, saying, “Every time I come home from work, you’re asleep. It says Are you still watching? and you have no fucking clue what you’re watching.”

I pulled up Dad’s contact profile on my phone. I pressed call and held the phone between my shoulder and ear.

No service. Just a black screen, and the stories I told myself. 

I laughed.

I could laugh!

I stared over the side of the boat and pressed my fingertips to my doughy mouth, wet and forgiving as a rosebud in rain. My lips were soft and ridged, just as human lips are soft and ridged. I stripped off my clothes. Apart from brownish blood stains, there was nothing remarkable about my skin: just the jagged worm of top scar, and below that, the vulva I was cursed with. My body was mine; I was free, and warm, and dry; and I didn’t give a flying fuck if I got stuck looking.