“You’ll come back not wanting me.”
We let the words hang on their meathooks as I threw the last of my shit in the Yukon. Eric’s voice was wet and hollow in my ear, his breath ragged. Desperation sharpened the soft tunnel of his throat until I swore I heard teeth clicks all the way down. I cleared my own, eyes on the gorge, skin burning. I rubbed more of Mom’s plantain poultice into the crooks of my elbows and tightened my bandages.
“No,” I said. My voice had jumped two octaves, the way it always jumps when I lie, but I either don’t know it yet, or I do, and I wish I didn’t. I couldn’t tell in the moment which one it was, only that Eric sensed the untruth and ran with it, his French-educated Lebanese accent all spittle and hysteria as he tore me apart over the phone. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do.
No, I was, but the thought of it, his principle or lack thereof, tried to push me over an edge I’d teetered on since the moment we met in person, so I held the thought at bay. I drowned his latest tirade out with a slow, hazy inhale, an artificial languor. Flakes of plantain dried up on my flesh in the midsummer sun and fell at my feet, fish food for the Cambrian spirits always swimming around my ankles.
Ithaca breathed with me, its summertime pollen a gauze on my already wrapped body, every seed a stitch in the wool over my eyes. Whenever Eric was finished, he’d draw himself up with a haughty breath and pooch out his full, pink lips. His thick eyelashes fanned across his high cheekbones and he’d soften, imperceptibly at first, then all at once, before he’d release a torrential downpour of platitudes and pet names. Apologies only on special occasions. And I’d hear “I love you” and say it back, my tongue held captive by the blade he’d press against his own pretty neck.
We’d met, as with my last partner, over Instagram. I had cheated on them with him, beaten down by the previous love’s sudden assumption of a black identity and Southern drawl after their long-awaited release from a mental institution. Where the partner I’d carried over from my teenage years had been two years my junior, Eric was two years my senior.
You can’t understand the second without the first. Both curated their appearances based on a particular kind of Tumblr niche: that of the raceless, curly-haired androgyne, mouth always parted in expectation, light eyes blank with innocence. Both had formidable Tumblr presences, their posts’ notes in the hundreds of thousands. Both had been canceled multiple times, but maintained an aura of moral authority that rendered them untouchable, superior.
My internet addiction was such that our matriarch sent me out into the yard often to harvest plantain. Not the kind you fry up, but plantain leaves, which you dry on racks and make into tea or, while there’s still life in them, grind with oils into a poultice. It treated skin conditions and autoimmune flares. I was sullen and ungrateful, but my eczema had teamed up with my gender dysphoria to force me indoors, where the internet was, so the task meant to treat both ills at once.
Kneeling in the grass, my phone vibrated nonstop. Eric was angry again.
I didn’t text him back. I dug my fingers into the dirt and wondered how much tobacco or sundance it would take to make up for my lack of gratitude. For the un-sacred, yellow stain of me on this stretch of pristine green.
The lure of the abuser is the absolute certainty they offer. This has been my experience. In love, healthy love, there’s this risk of abject loss. Your root system intertwines with another’s. Should they leave you, you’re torn apart from the base upwards, left to fill the space with yourself. An abusive partner is a covenant. They will never leave you alone. Eric would never leave me.
Two weeks into our online courtship, I tried to set a boundary. I said “you’re moving too fast.” It was the first of many blowouts we had. I still remember how offended and horrified he was by my concern. His response: “I don’t want to wake up in bed two years from now and have you look at me and say we moved too fast.”
The Great Plains didn’t have much in the way of cellular coverage back then, which was good. The Yukon was jam-packed with our luggage and stuff for giveaway, plus our matriarch, our father, and all of their adult children, myself included. I’d wrap my arms around the back of my car seat and sleep with the sun in my face as the sky spread open around us. One long road, endless flatland then mountains, the Rockies in the distance. Every day the sun glowed a rosy gold through enormous, broken clouds, and every night the road would narrow to a single pinprick illuminated by our headlights.
We made for Browning, Montana, and the closer we drew to our destination, the more we stopped to pick woman sage. I held back. Something had happened between Eric and I in the months prior that rendered me incapable of engaging with our sacreds. Everybody knew about it. The event clung to my slender frame like mold, intelligent, hungry. Its irreversibility drove a pin through my spirit and into his. I would not be allowed to leave him, so long as this event was remembered, and he reminded me about it often.
“If you leave me,” he said, “I’ll tell everyone what you did. You’ll be finished.”
We pulled over again. Mom handed me a pair of pruning shears and a tobacco tie. There would be no argument. I had to pray over and clip the sage. I had to make my own bundle, no matter how sick I was, no matter how evil I felt.
I did as I was told.
Our online relationship was entirely sex-based. I’d stay up until dawn with him on Skype, my unshaved pussy in the foreground as we jerked off together. We sexted nonstop and I preferred it that way, because any conversation beyond sex proved impossible. Our pornographic obsession with each other was exactly what I wanted, for a time, because my testosterone rendered me uncontrollably horny, but my dysphoria prevented my peers from touching me. I moved through the world covered in a prickly shell to protect my trembling, slimy core.
I didn’t know he was a virgin. He preferred to imagine I was. Where I projected filth and experience onto him for his beauty and age, he projected purity and innocence on me. I was his “baby boy,” and he was my man.
Our first night together was incomprehensible. We smashed into each other without any penetration. We grappled, tumbled, and kissed in religious ecstasy, though my stomach knotted and darkness blossomed within my unmapped heart. I couldn’t understand how, after months of purely sexual discourse, we’d end up here, dry-humping like teenagers. When I finally got my pants off, his eyes flashed with something like hatred, and he dove for my pussy, a disgusted curl to his mouth and furrow in his brow.
We played like that for the rest of our offline relationship. I begged him to fuck me, he found new reasons not to. Eventually we landed on a compromise: I would mount his cock like a balance beam until he grew bored, then he’d jerk off and drag me by the hair to finish on my face.
A rash began to spread everywhere his fluids touched me. Mom sent me out into the yard more and more. Sometimes she’d sit out on our covered porch and light a cigarette, her eyes set on some distant, unseeable future, her hair unbraided. Sometimes she’d just watch me from the kitchen window, hands occupied as she heated up the oil. We converted a muffin tin so the pucks could settle easier. Often she’d have to wash it twice a week.
Eric was seldom invited to our farmhouse. My parents despised him, but they loved me, and they’d rather have had me home with my abuser than out in the world, where they could not mend my flesh. He lived three hours southeast of us. I can imagine them undergoing one of their Serious Discussions about whether they’d let him in or let me out.
On one of the rare occasions he came up to visit, we performed the compromise, me on top, as usual, him beneath me with his hands on my biceps. Lately, he’d given up any pretense of calling me a man. Early on, he’d said he would pay for my top surgery, but now he was begging me to keep my tits, to keep everything. His hands moved from my biceps to my breasts, my waist. I saw myself from outside of myself. Not a man, not a boy, but a girl, inflamed.
Because I had to be the girl, I moaned like a girl. He pushed up, I pushed down, and in one cataclysmic second, the tip of his cock slipped into my pussy. We both froze.
“Did it…” he began, face buried in my armpit, so I couldn’t see his expression.
I tried to find my voice. It came out ragged and raspy as the panic calcified. “Yeah.”
His eyes flashed up to meet mine, then darted away. They were venomous. His face contorted in hatred and resolve as he pushed the rest of the way into me, unprotected. My heart hammered. I decided to be happy about it. After all, wasn’t this what I wanted? Hadn’t I begged for it? Begged for him? I put on a smile and let him leave his cock in me, but he wouldn’t move. I didn’t move, either.
“Do you want me to,” I started, but he cut me off with one sudden, graceless thrust. Then another. He began a series of arrhythmic movements, but he was flaccid. He turned away and pulled out. I hovered above him, stunned.
Hours later, I shyly tried to discuss what had happened. He pretended not to hear me, then looked out the window, over my patch of plantain. I pressed him again, avoiding the word “sex.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked primly.
“You know, earlier,” I said. “In bed, with you.”
He tilted his head, eyes wide and unblinking. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”
I furrowed my brow. Dread, hard and small and frigid, pierced my heart. “The,” my voice diminished as I shrank in on myself, “we were… intimate.”
He stared at me blankly a minute longer, his perfect features placid, before a low, cruel snicker escaped his barely parted lips. It grew to a raucous hyena’s cackle as he threw his head back and pointed at me. His black ringlets bounced around his shoulders. Tears pinpricked his almond-shaped eyes and he wiped them away swiftly. The cackle subsided into a giggle, then silence.
“God,” he said, “you should see your face. You look so scared right now.”
I hugged myself. “That’s not… that’s not very nice.”
He avoided me for the rest of the day, except to smirk at my every shattered look. My father drove him to the Green Street bus stop. I stayed behind to dress my wounds.
On the bus home, he texted me I that had taken something “very precious” from him.
And I’d taken it by force.
I curled in the armchair overlooking the plantain. That’s how our matriarch found me, my bare arms covered in lesions, my neck a topography of pink and red, streaked with deep scratches. She asked careful questions. She did not accuse anyone of anything. I broke down and told her what Eric had told me. He’d already begun to leverage the encounter as insurance against my leaving him. Simultaneously, he clarified that under no uncertain terms would we engage in intimacy, ever again. I would be his trophy, his parasite. His pure and untouchable prize. Our matriarch bristled with barely concealed rage. Her face flushed. She spoke through gritted teeth.
“You have done,” she said, tension heavy on every syllable, “nothing wrong.”
“I have,” I whimpered, “he says I have.”
“You,” she started, then stopped. “You are in a consensual relationship. With this person.”
“These things happen in, in consensual relationships.”
“You think I don’t know that?” She hardly blinked. “Listen. Listen to me. If he hurts you…”
My next words were mere wisps. “I hurt him. He says I hurt him.”
Her nostrils flared and she stood. Despite my being a whole head taller than her, she filled the room, and I cowered. She handed me a pinch of tobacco and sent me out.
You’ll come back not wanting me.
I slept in the Yukon for privacy. The rest of our sundance family peopled the new house and its backyard, sleeping bags huddled beneath the kitchen table, tents pitched around the trampoline, fenced so the rez dogs couldn’t get in. The stars glimmered across the night sky, crystalline shards of glass in sticky pitch. Inside the car, cooled by the prairie dusk, smelled of cedar, sweetgrass, woman sage, and sap. For some reason, I never held a human stench during ceremony. My sweat was the scent of loam and hyacinth, of summertime breezes and salt.
The rash went away. There, in the Yukon, I tossed from side to side. Two futures unfurled before me. In one, Eric’s dorm room became the tableau for the conception and eventual upbringing of our first and only child. I detransitioned for her sake and his. Bruises latticed my arms and legs, an escalation of what had already begun in our current dynamic, his hands on my neck or open-palmed against my arms as he’d stare at me, baffled, and ask, “Why am I hitting you?” As if I knew the answer.
In the other future, I left him. I left him the following morning. My lovers were numerous and myriad, their faces illuminated by the molten forsythia of the onset Ithaca autumn or cast in a cold wintery glow. I’d take all genders to bed, it didn’t seem to matter who. I still detransitioned, but for myself, this time, until I changed my mind again, ran headlong into manhood. I’d walk in Mulholland Wildflower Preserve during ghost pipe season and manhandle whoever was with me, tell them ghost pipes only emerge to fuck, and wouldn’t it be lovely to join them. This future self with all his brashness, his unfettered lust, he terrified me.
The young mother scared me even more.
Eric was right. I’d gone to that sacred place, and I no longer wanted him.
When I told him, that next morning, the sound he let out was unlike anything I’d ever heard before or since. Thousands of voices overlapped in that yowl, in his repeated no, no, no, no, no and my own cold silence. There were no threats, no reminders of the pendulum he held over my head, only shrieks and plaintive, wheedling promises—we’d have sex again, for real this time, he would treat me better, he’d really prove how much he couldn’t live without me—and one long, sustained scream. After I hung up, my phone let me know it had gone on for twenty-two minutes.
I crumpled up a ball of woman sage and rubbed it furiously all over myself, letting the pieces feed the fish, before I went inside for breakfast.
Summer’s end, and we returned to a house bereft. Our matriarch had passed away very suddenly. She’d been the first I’d told about Eric and the breakup. I was grateful for that, for the way she wrapped me in her arms, no longer afraid for my life.
Out in the yard, the plantain proliferated, their leaves supernaturally large. I let them be. Apparently, our mother had frozen about a hundred poultice pucks for me. They sat at the bottom of the upstairs freezer in a Ziploc gallon bag.
As the August sun cut its last orange rays through our home, I took one of her poultices out and set it on the counter to thaw.
Shaawan Francis Keahna (he/him) is a screenwriter for the Baltimore Cinematic Universe and lapsed poet. His work has earned him a Ruby award in literary arts from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, a handful of fellowships, and publication in Never Whistle at Night Part II: Back for Blood. He’s getting his degree in philosophy, law, and ethics, with a special focus on history. He splits his time between Baltimore, Minneapolis, Brooklyn and Seattle.