![Nurselog
I take my shot in the Hoh rainforest, making sure B gets a good angle with the little disposable camera I’d bought at CVS. I’m always forgetting at home, letting days go by before realizing I missed a dose, but here I’m buzzing for it.
My hiking bag is a temporary med kit: alcohol swabs, syringes, bandaids, two gauges of needles. I’m used to injections. Pinching the fat of my stomach, angling the needle, the one-two-three-go before the puncture. I rotate hormone days with monoclonal antibody ones.
I forget about those shots, too.
The Hall of Mosses loop is short, but we spend hours on it anyway. The air is damp in my lungs, spiked with licorice fern. Lichen overwhelms the landscape. The branches of douglas-firs and Sitka spruces hang heavy a fur of algaes. Signs along the path are lyrical and strangely charged:
[ moldering logs, trunks shaggy with moss ]
[ plant on plant ]
[ lush beards of clubmoss ]
And it’s true, the lush shag of it all is romantic, bacteria and fungi fucking all around us. Lichens like leaves, like cracked paint, like gunpowder. B bends their head to inspect the composite, and their hair sheeted over their face looks like a red shrub of fruticose anchored to the bark.
I pick a spot just off the trail and lay out my supplies on a log, the glass vial of T nestled into decaying wood. I swab a spot just below my belly button while a family snakes down the path. I slide the needle into the vial and invert it, pulling thick liquid into the syringe, flicking out pockets of air. B is kneeling in the moss with the camera raised. I can hear the many small voices of the family. The point of the needle lingers over my stomach. There’s murmuring, a shower of boot disturbed dirt. I try not to notice them noticing me; I’ve spent years practicing, but I’m not very good at it. When I finally inject, B peaks around the camera to say I look metal as hell.
The needle draws out a coin of blood as it exits my body. It sits there, tense, a blot of red amongst a stream of freckles. N, the first trans man I ever knew, taught me to hold the used syringe over my finger and squeeze the plunger one last time, swiping those precious drops across my upper lip and jaw. It helps the hair grow, he said. I have no idea if this is true. I do it anyway, always, and it is the anointment that makes me whole.
The family is gone, maybe not knowing what they saw. B embraces me, and I forget it all. I love how they witness me. I love that they know which mountains are which. I love the sound they make when they are surprised. I love how they love the forest. I love that they stopped the car the moment we saw elk. I love when they lean their head into my hand. I love that they refuse to eat anything I can’t. For a few minutes, there is only this.
Trans Fear
When is the right time to leave? [ always ]
Is there ever a right time? [ never ]
What does that mean? [ agony ]
Where would we go? [ together ]
Who would take us? [ arms outstretched ]
Do we wait until the killings? [ it’s too late ]
Do we wait until it’s one of our friends? [ no ]
Could we live through that vigil? [ no ]
Which of us might bury ourselves preemptively? [ yes ]
Do we count ourselves lucky? [ … ]
How could we leave, knowing who can’t? [ ]
We spend a long time in the trees, on a tree, by the river. We kiss, for lack of answers. I use their knife to carve FAG4DYKE into the wood. Which of us is which is a matter of opinion.
&on
Much, much later, a man—a coworker of mine, my building opposite his—will tell the audience at a work event that trans people are pedophiles. He doesn’t say it like that exactly, but we all know what he means. I will feel rattled, sick, jaded. I will file complaints both alone and as a group. I will despair. I will consider quitting all of the time. I will look up the cost of my prescriptions without insurance. Later.
Still in the forest, B and I stand in front of a plaque telling us that we are looking at a nurselog. The massive trunk lays prone on the floor. Nooks of its body collect detritus. Moss, needles, leaf litter and squirrel shit—a mattress of lush humus for sprouting seedlings. A colonnade of mature hemlocks straddle the log from which they grew. In another spot, the nurselog has rotted away completely. Nutrients cycle, burls break down. Its children stand on tented roots, hollow air where their parent used to be, not able to let go of the shape.
A nurselog is like a whale fall. A nurselog is like a transsexual living past their life expectancy.
Have I ever told N that he made my life possible? That I’m still on stilts, alive over the space he made?
Image Description 1:
A trail map of the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park.
Image Description 2:
A black and white illustration of several trees.](https://alocasia.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Nurselog_Alocasia-1-2-1.png)
Luke Sutherland is a trans writer and librarian. His work has appeared in smoke and mold, ANMLY, Bright Wall/Dark Room, MQR: Mixtape, and more. His chapbook Distance Sequence (Neon Hemlock, 2024) won the OutWrite 2023 Chapbook Contest in Nonfiction. He was a finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction in 2022, and the Larry Neal Writers’ Award in 2023. Luke also helps run a DC-based trans writing group and micropress, Lilac Peril. You can find him online as @lukejsuth.