Cynda bleached her tight, black ringlets when she was fifteen because she was tired of all the small-town folks in Appalachia Kentucky calling her an Indian. Pejoratively, of course. Her hair turned an odd ocher shade, but anything was preferable to the contention that she was somehow racially ambiguous. Or rather, not ambiguous at all but dark.
She had a guitar that her mother left behind in the soot of their family house—seven girls and one boy shared the one-room home with their parents prior to her mother being committed. That’s what all the town folks said, that Cynda’s mother had been committed. The stringed instrument left behind was the only talisman Cynda had of her mother. At fifteen, she couldn’t even remember her mother’s name. Mary, was it? It couldn’t have been, because she was dark-skinned and not at all Christian.
That’s all Cynda remembered of her mother— her darkness. That, and the sneaking suspicion that her white father had committed her mother on purpose, on account of whatever ethnicity her mother had been. Or rather, was. Cynda often caught herself thinking about her mother in the past tense.
She is alive, Cynda thought. And I will find her.
William Head was her father—a stout, strong man who smoked the very tobacco he grew and sold. His sausage-like fingers were always stained in ash and tar.
When she was a child, Cynda witnessed her father beat a puppy to death with a hammer. At least, she thought it had been a puppy, on account of its size. Apparently, the little thing had bothered her father into a fit with its incessant yapping. Mostly everyone in town agreed that the murder had been justified. William was a decent man, after all, and not at all cantankerous. The dog must’ve been especially annoying, everyone agreed. And in some cases, the violence made William even more attractive.
Days after she bleached her hair, Cynda’s father caught her kissing another girl, both of them in their finest-- yet overly burdensome—dresses. They’d sewn the dresses themselves. And so, William cut off all of Cynda’s freshly oranged and yellowed ringlets in the house with dirt for floors.
He’d just returned from The Dew Drop Inn, the local watering hole for working men.
You want to act like a boy? He said, not as a question. Then you’ll look like one, too.
It wasn’t the first time the girls had kissed. In fact, they made a rather sinful habit of it, aroused by both the secrecy of their endeavors and the truth of one other.
Cynda mourned her curls, however crispy, dropping to the ground in the same way she mourned the impeding snowstorm—slow and unavoidable. Necessary, perhaps, but chilly and lonesome.
She left that night, holes in her second-hand Keds, hanging on tight to the neck of her mother’s guitar.
She hitchhiked her way to the nearest bus station, only once providing a blow job in exchange for safe passage. There was nowhere in particular she craved, but she knew there was work to be had on farms in Nebraska and the fare was cheap. She could detassel corn or hang baccy on a lath in her sleep and, well, anywhere was preferable to here.
Cynda couldn’t remember her old friend’s name, now. It had been so many years. She couldn’t even see her face in her mind’s eye, but she certainly remembered the touching of lips amongst frozen, tall grasses all those lifetimes ago when frostbite found her toes and truckers mostly took pity on her and her little instrument she didn’t yet know how to play.
She barely thought of her old life—not of her friend or of her father. To boot, she scarcely remembered that she had indeed had a mother, once. Or even siblings.
She had her own family now. A husband, who was dead. And a child. A child she’d name something, but later forgot. The child named themself Sagan, eventually, because of their fascination with the stars.
Cynda’s dead husband had been named Chris, she thought. Or maybe it was Kevin. Or John.
No, it had been Rick. And Rick had irrefutably died under the weight of steel and within the locomotion of diecast metals. He had been high on meth when he chased that train.
It was getting harder and harder for Cynda to know the difference between her dream world and the waking one.
Rick had had such bright white hair when she’d fallen in love with him, just like David Byrne. And sometimes, Cynda became quite convinced that she had, after all, been married to the rock star.
Sagan brought her back to The Rational in these moments. No, no mom. They said. David Byrne is still alive and yet, my father is not. See? Here’s the theme park David Byrne opened in Denver.
There was something wrong with her memory. Cynda’s, that is. Sometimes, she told Sagan that they were allowed to open one present from Santa before Christmas came.
Mom, I’m thirteen and it’s July, Sagan said, tired.
Oh. Right. Cynda replied.
Sagan was born to Cynda when Cynda was just seventeen. In the two years between Appalachia and Nebraska, Cynda—at the encouragement of another farmhand—began dating a decent man who knocked her up and subsequently died. To her knowledge, he’d never used drugs prior to that infamous night, though they had occasionally enjoyed train hopping together. It was romantic, at first—the train hopping, that is. The notion that you could fling yourself onto something already in motion and create an entirely new life out of it.
The first time the two hopped a train together, Cynda had been in heels. The finest heels she ever seen, as far as she was concerned— purple and velvet, purchased from the local Goodwill. She once prided herself in this knowledge—that she could catch a train in heels.
But David Byrne, or rather Rick, had been playing around with both stimulants and trains without her knowing that one night. She hadn’t yet told him of the pregnancy. Maybe things would have been different if she had.
When Sagan came into the world, Cynda held the babe without smiling. She looked at her newborn and wondered Now, what to call you?
It’s a girl! The doctor proclaimed. And Cynda, reaching into the depth of her newfound anger and awakening, said, You don’t actually know that, now do you?
While pregnant, she purchased a used book called Radical Parenting and learned, in quite an overwhelming sense, that children get to decide their own gender. She’d never once thought of this before, but it made sense.
Now leave us, Cynda demanded of the medical staff. She had no idea that she’d been on suicide watch the whole time.
Sagan was a precocious child and Cynda feared that it was out of a desire to be accepted or loved. Sagan, she reasoned, could have no idea how profoundly they were loved by her, even when the boundaries of her sleep life folded into her very real soup bowl or on top of her steering wheel.
But actually, Sagan did know. And they loved their mother in return.
At nineteen, Cynda earned her GED—having left Kentucky with only a seventh-grade education—and then enrolled in community college. It was there where she fell in love with her professor—a middle-aged, silver-haired woman who crossed her legs on tabletops when lecturing and appeared to have an infinite supply of vests. Cynda obsessed over how her professor looked in scarves in the winter months, the slowness and the seductive falling of it all.
Professor Simon was flattered by Cynda’s approaches and returned her flirtations with offers to hold Sagan during class— the babe now a toddler with round, milky wrists and a temper to boot.
In most cultures, mothers nurse their babies well into their child’s teenage years, Professor Simon, the anthropologist, said to the class when Cynda nonchalantly breastfed in front of her peers. This was always much to the chagrin of classmates who inquired, But doesn’t the babe have teeth, now?
In most cultures, breasts are not sexual, Professor Simon said.
Professor Simon had not aged well, which is why she found herself perplexed by the advances of college girls. Or rather, women, she reminded herself. She knew at her core—and as a scholar of gender and sexuality, of course— that it was about power, that these girls had been conditioned to revere authority in spite of its ugliness. For the most part, though, the back-and-forth of her day-to-day was harmless enough. She could scarcely muster tangible interests in girls—er, women— who’d never even attempted Hegel. It’s not that she had necessarily attempted Hegel, to be fair. But she had watched a YouTube video explaining his most important works and, well, it had mostly made sense to her.
Some of her students were, moreover, embarrassing in— and awkward with— their forwardness; one girl, one semester, presented Professor Simon with a hand drawn self-portrait in the nude, as just one example.
Professor Simon was the daughter of professors, and she secretly considered herself a kind of philanthropist on account of both wearing her natural hair—grey and stringy, like a good feminist— and because she taught at a community college. The truth, she knew, was that she was unable to secure employment elsewhere, but she still considered herself saintly in her sacrifices, nevertheless.
She preferred wearing vests to any other stylized top, and she paired them with both slacks and skirts. Often quilted and colorful, she imagined that the hideousness of her appearance made her more, well, approachable as a bonified Doctor.
A Doctor of Philosophy, she heard the white man in her head say with dissatisfaction, the voice of which had become her Generalized Other. If you were to be quoted by The New York Times, for example, they would call you Ms. The voice lingered on the sss, drawing itself out as if hissing.
Hush, she said out loud, dipping her herbal, non-caffeinated teabag into her lukewarm cup.
Behind her back, her colleagues at the community college called her Sir Chicks-a-Lot because of her overt flirtations with female students. All of the academics who mocked her were white, and so the added dog whistle of implying that a gay woman had a Black man’s imagined libido was, in their minds, a nice touch. They fancied themselves clever.
Had she even been confronted with this unsavory nickname, she would have armed herself with theories about masculine dominated spaces and the devaluation of women who love women. She would have never even considered the possibility that the insult was also racist.
Breasts and their ostensible non-sexiness where what Cynda thought most about when she found herself splayed on Professor Simon’s couch for the first time, getting fucked with a cheap strap-on while her child played in a portable play pin in the other room. Professor Simon kept pawing at her tits in a manner that felt very much sexual to her, and so Cynda decided then and there that her interests in gender and sexuality—interests spawned by Professor Simon’s— would be strictly academic. At least when living inside of theories one could hold hefty convictions.
At thirty, Cynda’s proverbial bedpost displayed only two notches—the decent man and the professor. And she was remarkably OK with that.
Sagan, on the other hand, took many lovers. They were only thirteen but found the affection they desperately needed outside of the 900 square foot home they shared with their mother by serenading people of all genders. They were savvy enough not to confuse affection with love; the former being the only variable absent in their life with Cynda.
Their favorite lover was Raven—another poly enby in middle school who lived in the trailer park just down the road from Sagan and their mother. It was always awkward for Sagan to drive them home, quite honestly; they felt distinctly privileged in these moments despite their connection with their lover on so many different planes of marginalization.
Raven, riding in the passenger seat, smoked cigarettes out the window of Sagan’s 1994 Ford Probe. It was a stick shift that Sagan had purchased for $200 while studying at a coffee shop. A disheveled man had run into the shop, then, speaking strange antics about getting away, and gave the car to Sagan for the cash they had in their pocket.
In Nebraska, it was quite common for young people to have licenses—an old law codified when parents had litters of children for the sole necessity of working on farms.
Sagan rarely had cash on hand but on this particular day, their mother had given them an heirloom of sorts—a crocodile bag that had, somehow, made the rounds in their family. Their mother was all but comatose that day, so it was unclear as to whether she had willingly given up the bag, but the words Love Bag Money C-Sharp had been uttered in a fever dream, so Sagan knew their mother wouldn’t miss it.
Someone must’ve stolen it along the line.
Sagan promptly sold it at the pawn shop to a lupus-looking man who had, for minutes on end, accused them of stealing it. The man kept misgendering them.
I thought a place like this wouldn’t care about such things, they said. And the man, scarlet, reluctantly agreed and handed over the money.
That’s how they came into possession of a car. Their mother didn’t even ask questions, sick as she was with fantasies of the past, present, and future.
You have it good, Raven said in the passenger seat, piercing their lips so their cigarette smoke slunk through the car window in one fell swoop. There are quilts masquerading as window dressings in my house, for Christ’s sake.
It’s not even a house, it’s a trailer, Sagan said and regretted it immediately. Raven ignored them.
Sagan hated cigarettes. They reminded them of their mother.
The curving road to Raven’s house was unsettling—off a major road in Omaha that suddenly turned into dirt and gravel. Sagan knew the way because it was almost exactly how they’d learn to tie shoelaces—up and over the hill, bunny ears and through the hole. Or something like that. Raven’s house was the last stich through the endless cavity of the city.
It was a nice, secretive place, though, in a Gothic sort of way. Shrouded in forest and wild prairie, there were often deer and other wildlife mulling about the grounds. Men who looked particularly out of place in the city were like tinsel on the tree of country here, christening the perennial plumes of grimy earth with their silver teeth and crimson cheeks.
Hi, darlin’, Raven’s father always said to his child when Sagan and Raven pulled up the drive. And despite the implicit gendering of the pet name, it was still affectionate and innocent. Y’all ready for sum dinner?
Sagan ate dinner with Raven and their father almost every night—usually some semblance of noodles and canned paste. Raven’s mother was always out at dinner time. That’s all anyone ever said. Out.
It was for the best, Sagan reasoned. Raven’s mother always asked Sagan obnoxious questions about their mother’s condition, anyway, and the weirdly obfuscated phrasing of it always pissed them off. Condition. It rolled off the tongue in a meaningfully judgey way.
It’s not really a condition, Mrs. Rowe. Sagan would say. She has a medical diagnosis. It’s a disease like cancer or anything else.
Sagan never grew tired of defending their mother. She’d brought them into this world, after all.
No one who loves you will ever talk shit about your mother, Sagan told Raven often. And Raven secretly thought, It is not my mother’s job to love you.
*
If this is love, then it is actually true love, the man with a cowboy hat says on Love is Blind.
Our television is so cheap it’s always humming, ever so slightly, in the background of whatever drama plays out before us.
Oh my god, I say. There’s been three UFO sightings in a week!
Oh? my daughter says, absorbed in her iPad and the trash TV show simultaneously.
Tomato, she says into her screen. No. Teal!
It’s octagonal with strings coming out of it!
Is octagonal a word, mama? she asks. Paris! she yells into her game.
With strings, I say again.
I go outside to smoke. I lie to my daughter. I tell her that I’m letting the dog out.
The wind blows extra hard in working class neighborhoods because there’s more sadness.
Actually, that’s not fair. There is sadness everywhere, I suppose. It’s just that in working-class neighborhoods, the space between people and thoughts are so robust that it all gets lost in translation.
I drink until I pass out and think, There is a girl who undoes her coat of mourning. She places five dollars in quarters on the felt table, all stacked in neat towers.
In the morning, I ask my daughter what she dreamed of.
A spaceship on its way to Mars, she says. And Sky.
Sky is the open world video game she loves.
*
Cynda has a hole in the top-right roof of her mouth. Lately, a tree has started growing there, lacing its roots along the corridor of her esophagus. No one knows of its presence, except for her, and she secretly waters the sapling every night when she dreams of guns.
She has memorized the road to The Nameless. It is several folds of space and about 3.5 dimensions beyond The Event, give or take a decimal, existing on a plane made almost entirely of light, save for prairie flowers, fertile soil, and The Hog House Ranch—a 19th century brothel that once straddled the Potawatomi county line in Iowa.
The House is always in the background of Cynda’s experience with The Nameless. But even a cameo is remarkable in this plane, and so Cynda feels the sway of the old place and smells its rotting Cyprus. She sees its numbered limbs, fading now, on account of the Missouri River’s overabundance, which not only brings floods of muddy waters to the house’s pixelated shores but also torrents of albino rats.
*
What if we make augmented reality for the very people who are harming us. What if, in this particular society, there is nothing to be done except something that makes money.
What if there is an alternative reality wherein white boys in America get to play out the fantasy of being the hero.
My daughter makes an AR for the men who harm and even its great its still centering men
What if our only way of surviving is to think creatively about what we must do.
You are in a room that’s getting shot up and perhaps your only way of surviving is to think creatively.
Get on top of the picture frame, my child says.
Hide in the freezer, like the kids in jurrasic park.
*
Cynda never understood why Sagan gave up swimming and she often spent her time inside The Event contemplating this. Sagan had been so talented and so fast. They had been fearless, for a time, jumping off of ledges, never considering the potential harm and never imagining their body as fallible or mortal in the least. When her Cherished One sailed through the sky and swan-dived into the deep end, Cynda held her breath, never revealing her paralyzing terror to Sagan. Sagan was strong in the ways that Cynda was not, and Cynda was determined to keep it that way.
Sagan was still mostly unafraid, even during and after The Event. Except for two things—winter and swimsuits.
Winter, to Sagan, seemed on the one hand to cause a kind of collective and welcomed lethargy, which they could arguably appreciate, being anti-capitalist and having, of course, read Halberstam and his reframing of the constitution of failure. On the other hand, however, said mutual drowsiness was revered as sublimely remarkable, a delicacy even, rather than what it actually was—an incredibly dangerous, incredibly fatal situation.
When Sagan had been a child, their mother Cynda developed a highly charged, yet reciprocally loving friendship with the neighbor. Sagan couldn’t remember the details of the neighbor necessarily, save for her eternally-trailing-behind familiar, a little white dog named Poo-Poo.
In their young adulthood, Sagan pondered the lifespan of the little canine and determined it must’ve been a composite of many, identical white dogs, strung together and named the same name so as to appear, rather hilariously, as the longest living mongrel in existence. Old photographs, as an example, showed the neighbor with Poo-Poo—the same dog, ostensibly, in her presence thirty years after the photo had been taken.
Cynda and the neighbor often spent the winter moths drinking wine together in the evenings and discussing war, white supremacy, and the latest celebrity gossip. Even in their youth, Sagan found the swiftness with which the two went from conversing about systemic racism to so-and-so’s ass reduction—or ass expansion, depending on what bodies were “in” in any particular season— to be rather, well, revolting. The whiplashed conversations tended to turn important issues into the same paltry blubber of any other stupid spectacle, Sagan thought. Nevertheless, it was during these late-night conversations in the dead of winter where Sagan began thinking about things they hadn’t previously thought about, and for that reason alone they were rarely hard on their mother for being shallow and crass.
On one of these winterous occasions, the neighbor buttoned up her Army surplus pea coat, covering, as was omnipresent on her, a constellation of red wine stains on her thrifted sweatshirt.
Be careful, it’s icy! Cynda said to the neighbor.
Eh, these slippers got traction. See look, I’ll throw ‘em into four-wheel drive! The neighbor laughed at her own joke in her distinctly hoars kind of way.
Poo-Poo in tow, she had hardly brushed the skin of the icy porch step before she realized she was already entirely on top of the little white dog, thus extinguishing the Poo-Poo lineage once and for all.
It was the beginning of Sagan’s wild and explicable aversion to winter.
Swimsuits were another matter entirely.
For quite some time, Sagan wore what could only be described as “girl swimsuits” to their lessons. It was humiliating, first of all, and not because Sagan found femininity to be inherently humiliating but rather because they did not see themselves as feminine in the least. It would be like putting a tutu on a Pitbull—endearing and perhaps campy, but not at all congruent.
To boot, the suit their mother had purchased this particular season was too large and so when Sagan swam the day’s first, gleaming lap, their bathing suit fell below their chest and exposed their young breasts to the rest of the pool’s occupants.
For Sagan’s 132 years of life, they would point to this moment as their most bone chilling experience with gender dysphoria. Even after a car accident in middle-age that severely rattled their sense of self and even after a diagnosis of dementia at 91, Sagan continued to tell the story of that one time, yes that one time, in the pool.
*