Page 44 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
“Good.”
Levi comes over, pushes aside a bottle on the coffee table so he can sit, and leans on his knees so they’re about even.
“You get one slipup,” he says. “Okay? One. I’m only giving you this because I know you’re stubborn and slow, which is a bad combination. And after that first slipup—”
He puts a hand on Crane’s shin.
“Every mistake after that is a broken bone.”
A bone. A finger, an arm, an ankle, a leg.
Crane recoils, tucking his hands to his chest. Can already feel the creak and the snap of a metacarpal.
“Any questions?”
Yes, actually. He goes for his phone to type it out in his Notes, but Levi took it. His mind stalls. Can’t think further than that, can’t put together the pieces it takes to find a piece of paper and a pen. His hands flap helplessly, then beat together.
“What?” Levi says. “Shit.” He casts around the living room and comes up with the instruction manual for a DVD player they’ve never used. “Spell it.”
A single trembling finger, a tiny speck of black polish still settled near the nailbed, fumbles for three letters:W, H, Y.
If this is what’s going to happen, he deserves an answer. Hedeserves to understand. And yes, there are so many things that one-word question could be asking, but he’d take any of the responses, no matter what. Why did the hive choose him. Why does it want this baby so bad. Why is Levi doing this to him.
He’d never thought that the two of them loved each other, but he didn’t think Levi hated him enough to do this.
All Levi does is snort. “Why? That ain’t my business, and it certainly ain’t yours.”
There’s a cluster of Sharpie tally marks counting weeks on the wall beside the gun safe. When Tammy saw it for the first time, she mumbled, “Lord above.” Crane stood apart from her awkwardly. Her visits to the apartment used to be a moment of peace, a chance to lean his head against her, her hair and skin smelling like lavender shampoo and baby powder. These days he can barely look at her. “Twenty already.”
Now it’s twenty-two. Almost twenty-three. The end of September means the weather is halfway decent and the HVAC failures aren’t as noticeable as they used to be. It never rains and the days are long. They drag on. Crane sleeps, checks Stagger’s faint but present pulse, eats the same thing every day, watches reruns of the Discovery Channel. He asks Levi for a book of crossword puzzles from the grocery store, then a blank notepad. He tries to teach himself to draw again, but the only things he remembers how to draw are dragons and horses. All his people come out looking stupid.
According to the calendar, if Crane remembers correctly, today is Luna’s fourth birthday.
Without his phone, he tries to imagine the kind of photos Birdie is posting on social media, the sorts of things she’s posted before.Pancakes with whipped-cream smiles; a trip to the local bookstore to wander through the picture books and plushies. In each one, Luna’s face will be artfully obscured from the camera lens, every identifying mark of the neighborhood scrubbed. The heart emoji covering the house number will look cute instead of rightfully paranoid.
The caption will be plain,my little girl, with an unironic#blessedbecause she is. And the photo will have a lot of likes. They always do. Crane has no idea who those people are, if they’re Birdie’s actual friends, if she knows them, or if there’re just a few hundred queers latching on to a trans woman in some version of domestic happiness.
That sort of thing always pissed him off. Those random people don’t know her like he does. They haven’t helped her make dinner or put Luna down to bed. They haven’t showed up on her doorstep, slept in her bed, played cards with her spouse. Not like him.
What gives him the right to be so upset about any of it, though? There aren’t even any pictures for him to look at—maybe she didn’t post anything at all this year. And it’s not like he was ever supposed to be a part of their life, not really.
When Tammy knocks for the second of her twice-weekly check-ins, Crane doesn’t get up from the couch and Levi isn’t home, so Stagger opens the door to let her inside.
Jess comes in too. Apparently, she’s also here.
“Right,” Tammy mutters, stepping around Stagger so she doesn’t have to get too close. “Sweetheart, when’s the last time you took the trash out?”
“I can wait in the car,” Jess says.
“Nope. Find the garbage bags and go take everything out to the dumpster.”
Jess, still in her summer hand-me-downs supplemented with more seasonally appropriate thrift store finds, wrinkles her nose butdoes as she’s told, disappearing into the kitchen and thumping around in the cabinets. Stagger keeps an eye on her—she even puts her hair the way Sophie used to, twisted up and pinned to the head with that claw clip—while Tammy comes over to the couch, sits stiffly, slaps her arthritic hands in her lap.
“Belly,” she says. “Let’s see it.”
Crane uncurls.
His tits are fatter and heavier, crammed into the same shitty sports bra he’s been wearing for years, and his stomach is impossible to ignore now. It encroaches into his lap, demands ever more space from his bladder and lungs, stretches the skin until lines dig across his hips. It doesn’t feel like his body anymore.
