Page 58 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Tammy crosses the sparse room to throw open the blackoutcurtains. Mid-November in Washville ushers in the first real snowstorms of the season, blizzards that bring the county up to that annual one hundred inches of snow. Fat wet flakes drift down between bare branches and the sky is white. It’s bright outside. Crane blinks—he isn’t used to it.
“Get some light in here,” Tammy says, having some difficulty with the window. “And some fresh air.”
The latches in this apartment are bullshit. Crane slides out of bed the best he can, steadying himself on the bedframe to do it for her.
As soon as the windows slip open, frigid air eddies into the bedroom. Crane props it ajar with a broken paint stirrer.
Neither of them looks quite right here. Tammy’s huddled into a hand-knit sweater that brutally contrasts with the corporate landlord feel of the barely decorated walls. Crane’s worst blown-out tattoos have more thoughtful details than this place.
“How much thought have you given it?” Tammy asks. “The baby?”
Crane grunts.None.
“You don’t got that much time,” she chides. He fucking knows that. “Figure we ain’t going to a hospital. I was thinking my house. My tub is deeper, if you wanted a water birth. Helps with the—” She motions like she’s shooing something out of her stomach. “Makes it hurt a little less, I think. S’what I did.”
Tammy doesn’t talk about her daughter. If it weren’t for the letters in the trash, Crane wouldn’t have known. Every time he dug them out from underneath food wrappers and napkins, they were unopened.
“I know you don’t want this,” Tammy says. “But that baby don’t care. It’s coming whether you’re ready or not.”
As if it knows it’s being discussed, the baby jams itself right into Crane’s lung. He grunts, loses his breath for a second. Sometimes whenit does that, he can see the movement under the skin. The chestburster analogy is particularly apt.
Tammy asks, “How are you feeling?”
He feels like he’s doing what needs to be done.
It is relatively important to note that, at this point in time, Crane has not had a testosterone injection in three months.
He tried to convince himself that it was just because it was too hard to continue the shots with his belly in the way; no more soft fat above the waistband of his boxers to push the needle into. If he really wanted to, though, he could have easily moved to another injection spot. Taken up a location in the arm or thigh, followed the intramuscular instructions listed on the booklet.
But truly, genuinely, what would be the point? It’s not like there’s anybody he needs to convince anymore, and it won’t be his problem for much longer.
While Levi sleeps one afternoon, Crane plods into the living room and slips Levi’s phone from the charger. The passcode is 3232, because Levi can’t be assed to think of anything better, and also because what’s on there that Crane could care about?
In the cheap armchair across from the couch, Crane finds articles—it’s hard to hold a phone with a fucked-up hand, he learns—and reads.
What it looks like to be a pregnant trans man.
My Brother’s Pregnancy.
Seahorse Dad: What I wish I knew during my transmasculine pregnancy journey.
They’re all old pieces. This is the sort of shit that can’t get run in any major publications anymore. And they’re infuriating. He understands, on a technical level, the need to provide an image to the public of a good, all-American father who just happens to be the one, you know, having the baby. It was an old survival tactic in the name of recognition and safety. Dreamy photos of fathers with their children in pastel nurseries. The insistence that they just wanted a baby so, so badly.
The articles go in depth with the struggles; everything these men fought for in order to have their children. Pushing back against bigoted doctors and misinformed midwives.
It all makes him want to speed up the wholekilling himselfthing.
The only thing that feels right is the slew of articles from years and years ago, whenRoe v. Wadefell—shit, when? 2022? He was little then. The forums and micro-press news stories about queers talking abortion. “The dysphoria made me suicidal.” “I couldn’t carry my rapist’s baby.” “I was seventeen.” “Birth would’ve killed me.” “I can only conceive of pregnancy as forced detransition—and, death before detransition, you know? It was abortion or a noose. Sorry, that’s dark. You don’t have to print that.”
He can’t bring himself to watch human childbirth videos, so he pulls up YouTube and searchesdog whelping, andcat queening, andhorse foaling.Lots of wet membranes and amniotic fluid. Lots of tiny animals with their eyes squinched shut. It doesn’t look like it hurts much at all—lucky motherfuckers.
Once his stomach feels too sick to continue, he searchesthirty-three weeks pregnant.According to an adorable maternity health website, the baby is the size of a pineapple. It can blink, and dream, and make faces. In comparison to that baby horse struggling to its feet within the hour, this thing is practically a slug.
Then he clears the day’s search history and puts Levi’s phone back up to charge.
The next time Stagger comes into the room to check on him, Crane makes the same fist that Stagger had made months ago. Presses it to his own chest in a shaky circle, and then Stagger’s.I’m sorry.
Stagger blinks.
