Category: Genderwild

They wore pronouns like they wore their clothes, but that was okay. My wife Daisy had come round to it. In fact, Elena gave Daisy the job to organize the house party. Daisy was ecstatic. Elena asked her which pronouns they should wear with their dress. It was a sexy, meshy red number. Not they, my wife said, but I think Daisy is still a little Queer-phobic.

I looked on, a little bored. Moments ago, my brother-in-law (husband of my sister) had been doing an 8000 piece puzzle on the floor. I wondered around the communal living room, stopping in front of the fishtank filled with goldfish. There was something unusual about the fish. They were somewhat out of shape, as if they had been forced into moulds too small for them when they were made.

A little like all of us.

Somewhere in the Southwest of the Fragmented States, our 4 by 4 broke down. We scratched around in the desert dirt, looking for Roman coins. But every coin we thought we found, turned out to be a Coca-Cola bottle top, printed as a Roman coin. Coke knew their time was nearly up; they wanted their remains to be rediscovered as greatness.

It was a hot day. Not bleak as it should have been, but orange, fiery, with a sense of adventure. The adventure came from the sky, a genderwild vulture which I knew to be me, wearing frilly skirts, leggings, talons, wings, and barbs on long threads shooting out from its head, like a cat o’ nine tails, but made of softer material, like a spider`s web, with tiny soft spheres along the lengths of the threads, like knots. It somersaulted in the air, neither male nor female, it was clearly both joyous and dangerous, but without a clear head.

The genderwild vulture was a sign. A sign for my wife, who appeared next to me in the desert. She said This is for you, at which the vulture took me through a void in the desert to a completely different world. From unconsciousness I descended down into a system of deep caves, thrilled. Finally, amongst a procession of others, I was led into a cavern, where our hosts sung a choral piece, the purpose of which was to remind us to hang up our coats. Someone mentioned Jane Eyre, which I have never read. At this point, the dream dissolved…I wonder what clues Jane could have for the genderwild?

It screamed with rage. A scream from one who’d been mortally betrayed; fooled into tortuous existence, as all of us have been.

It cried ‘Forged!’ for instantly it knew what it was. Like a wild boar in human form, and the parody of a girl, dwarfish with a plait, but more genderwild than girl. They had been conjured into pain by distant men.

This was in the remains of a corporate training room or a bar, or one inside the other.

This being was me but not me, recalling the shy boy I always was, the boy that some thought to touch, with only my confused consent. Expressing the anger I never could.

As a boy, I took solace away in nature where I wore clothes thought to be women’s. Separately. Genderwild the monster, to others. Genderwild, the skillful fighter against the trauma of split family.

I now approached this lashing thing, trying to contain it, and could not, and felt compassion. Another deader me sat against the wall, and I fought him too, and so did the beast that was flesh forged with suffering.

Called into existence by others’ projections of us, by horrific privilege, by past abuse.

We’ll only be done, together, in massive heat. The end approaches.

Falsified and half-formed. Frightened, fireful, forged in dream.