Trans

Mika thought the hardest hurdle would be the surgery. But the truth was that the post-partum hump, when you were still navigating gauze and getting to know your body again--getting to understand the indents, the silicone or lack thereof, the shifting fabric of your own organs--the sagging flesh and stolen body parts, in truth, was by far the worse part. 

When Mika looked at herself in the mirror, she was not like she once was. Her skin was different--the stitches and incisions made her look like a practice medical dummy--perfectly threaded and reassembled like Frankenstein’s monster. She looked for the millionth time, at the body that had been--folded and unfolded like a pellucid flower since she returned home last month. Still, she could not readily recognize herself or the taut film that gathered around her flaccid stomach.

She thought after everything, she would at least be happier but she wasn't. She prophesied that as the owner of this new body--with this cobweb or uncertainty dangling over her head--she would disappear simply--fading like an exploding star into nothingness. 

One odd day, last week or so, she watched the shape of her arm--spoon inward and begin to melt away like ice. Mika found herself in a state of transparency and since then had been exploring her home in secret. She was like a ghost, trapped in a haunted space--trying to figure out how to reassemble atoms and organize particles. But it was no use. She was invisible--both to the naked eye, and to the clothed, closed one as well. The only good thing to come out of her invisibility--was the lack of obsessive need to look in at and examine herself. 

When it first happened, she was carefully assessing her unsheathed body in the full-length mirror. She cried ink-black tears unto the chiffon of her blouse, drenching the feathery breastbone of the veiled garment. She was dressed in a school uniform, for an organization in which she was forced to wear clothes assigned to the body she had before her surgery. While scrutinizing her own distorted figure, her elbow--upper forearm--then her entire left torso went impossibly see-through. Through sheer will, her body became a sheet of uncolored gelatin--she could see through to what she was standing in front of and what was mounted behind her. Mika's reflection went turbid. 

She disappeared like this, on and off in the following days--sometimes at alarming moments like while undressing at school in the corner of the locker room. On another occasion, she went phantom when she found a boy watching her while swimming naked in the lakeside woods, behind the house. In a recent incident, she went limpid, after engaging in an argument with her older sister, Cassie who said she’d wish Mika had never been born. 

Presently she had been transparent for two whole weeks--unable to change back, powerless to regain a state of opaqueness. All the while, her mind was crystal-clear. Mika still slept in her own bed with night sheets floating around and above her head and with her goose-feather pillow suspended in mid-air. In the mornings, she brushed her teeth with her toothbrush sticking up sideways--haphazardly floating and in the afternoons, Mika ate quietly like a mouse when no one was in the kitchen. Doubly, she showered in secret when everyone was away at work or school. She did all this while camouflaged among lint, casually transshape and florally vanishing. At first, her abstract body frightened her but now it was an eerie comfort; Mika’s only desire was to control the newfound ability and morph into something more.

Though her parents worried themselves sick and had already alerted the authorities; it was to no immediate avail. No one knew where she was or where to even begin to search. But she was always nearby, hovering in an invisible cloud of stealth. With bated breath, she watched them and at times, protected them--like when Cassie sleepwalked herself outside or when Luca had nightmares in the middle of the night--she was there, safeguarding.

Mika observed her little brother, Luca first. It was on a particular rainy-filled day when the house was full and the whole litter of family was home. A storm drew close to the nearby woods and everything seemed to have a melancholy echo. Mika was walking in her bedroom--tracking false topaz footprints on the oatmeal-colored carpet when she heard slight, palish knocking. 

It was the anemic Luca, who was a spitting image of Mika's pre-surgery proportions. He had come in to stare directly through Mika, out to the open, crystalline window. The wind was blowing harshly--knocking off all of Mika’s belongings of her wooden stool and desk and her egg-shell painted bedroom walls stood frightened. His eyes were like rock crystals, assumingly because he was holding in tears or was about to release them. He reached out to shut the window when suddenly, Mika left a foggy, liquid handprint on the glass. The hair on his small bird-back stood erect. In a moment of closeness, he shyly put his hand over the outline on the glass to match and cover hers. The light illuminated his face and revealed a shimmer of what was left of Mika.

Luca whispered, “Mika, is that you?” so softly, he almost could not hear the question, himself. He was so frightened and so well convinced of his hallucinations in the past week, that he ran feet-first out of her bedroom, scampering and leaving the door to slam shut on its own.

Behind him, Mika walked slowly in chase of the fleeing boy. Mika remembered holding him when he was born. Luca was premature and fragile and Mika was afraid to hold him, in fear she would drop him by accident. He called her 'Meeks' when he couldn't pronounce her name properly and Mika called him 'Lucie' because his features were so cherub and porcelain and he looked more like a vintage doll than a boy.

The house creaked with a heaviness that was not present when Mika was solid. With her parents in their room and Cassie downstairs, filling out college applications--Mika felt the presence of her home--heavy and lived in as if suspended like gel in a pill capsule. The pitter-patter of rain befell the ceiling roof and Mika walked in silence--an invisible bubble. Mika pushed open the ajar door to Luca’s room and saw him trembling under the frame of his childhood bed.

A foil of ice decorated the window and Luca closed his eyes--breathing and counting calmly to ten. Mika was suddenly under the bed with him, although he did not realize at first. He lay perfectly still when Mika touched his face with a shapeless finger--grazing his wet, moist skin and petting his nose to comfort him. He calmed and looked forward, leaving his lace lips to peel open. He spoke out into the air--aware that he was there with someone--if not, Mika then someone else.

“Mika?” He asked in a quivering jellyfish voice. 

There was no answer and he buried his head in shivering shoulders--returning to counting when he heard a noise--like the clicking footfall of steps. He found the courage to resurface from the frame of his bed and found nothing and no one. Mika had vanished but not before leaving a plain message on the fog-induced varnish of the dripping window. It was crystalline and written with precision: “MEEKS ♡'s LUCIE”, an exact sentence that cut straight through his heart, disemboweling tissue and sedating him. It was Mika, Luca more than knew now--more than that, he was sure of it.

Smiling, he wiped away a resin of latent orb tears and knelt down to draw on the white paper that was spread out on the floor before him. He depicted--two figures--one small and one gypsum. Like a benevolent ghost, it stood androgynous, lacking opacity and was objectively tall. The shape towered over the other figure like a guardian angel. It had no genitals but had very long hair. With two legs, two arms, and a large head; it looked alien.

Walking slowly as if in rough, choppy water, Mika walked the length to her parent’s bedroom. She slipped through the door--hand and feet first and felt a tug like an organ was stuck. She pulled and nearly slammed into her mother, Rebekka who was pacing like a madwoman. Her hair was tied back in her ritual morning pony-tail and her pajama dress was trailing behind her like tentacles as she walked--back and forth--forth and back. She was speaking to Mika’s father, Dexter, who was in the bathroom with the door, partially shut. 

Mika sat on the bed, not noticing the imprint of her buttocks that was indented deeply in the mattress, carelessly left. She listened and watched her mother--as fine lines decorated her matronly face.

“Did they look for a Micah too--did you give them both pictures and names--both birth and post-change?” Rebekka’s agile voice floated from between her lips and echoed under the slits of the bathroom door. Dexter walked out in a robe and towel. Shaving cream still careening his uncut face.

“I did. But they still haven’t heard anything.” He sighed. “And I looked at all the usual spots--the Miller’s boy’s place, the coffee place downtown, the conservatory alcove in the old mall, that lake in the woods where she goes swimming sometimes--I looked everywhere I could think of.”

Mika trembled and went limp--her mother’s face too was like a thin sheet of linen. A tear dropped from Rebekka’s left pupil and she began shaking. Her peignoir shadowed the hood of her toes like wet tissue paper. 

“Rib, it’s okay. We’ll find her.” Dexter encircled his wife--touching her chin, with somber movement.

“Promise?” Rebekka groaned with the aching pain of loss and buried her face into his flat dull shoulders. It was at that moment that she realized she had been grieving Mika even before she had gone missing. Probably even much before her bodily transition.

“Yes, I promise.” 

Dexter looked forward, careful not to meet eyes with Rebekka and looked towards instead, the windowsill. It was wide open like a blooming cut and Mika was sitting on the roof--jelly-like and downpoured upon, by spiky, wet particles. Rain fell in every spot except for where she was crouching and like a gargoyle statue, water slipped off of her amorphous body and cascaded down the shingles into the metal gutters. Mika sighed and jumped off just as Dexter approached the window--lingering for a minute then locking it and walking away in silence.

Mika stepped through translucent puddles and submerged her hazy, sap feet in a mudslide pool. There was only a footprint--and no other evidence of a human trek. She stood there and tried really hard to transform and sculpt back--to be more membrane than cellophane but, still, she remained a blob of milky hourglass--incapable of shape, of figure and of change. After a couple of minutes, she gave in. Mika was more gelatinous and sheer as she walked toward the closed front door, which was more of a two-way mirror than a solid entryway. She glumly stepped through the frame, just as the doorbell rang.

A mass of light came through and she swirled--ungracefully bending and deforming like vitreous plastic. Cassie walked past her and opened the terrarium door. Curious to see who had come to the home--uninvited no less, Mika stepped halfway through the malleable doorknob, momentarily losing her figure as she came face to face with Beau, Cassie’s high school boyfriend. That's what Mika called him because she knew once Cassie went to college--they'd break up.

The storm picked up and blew Cassie’s flimsy hair. She and Beau stared at one another like that without saying a word, for what seemed like a long time. Mika cocked her head to the side and slipped in between them, standing partly behind Beau, and beside Cassie. The two could not see her but they could feel her--or what they mistook for tense, frozen air.

“Have they found Mika yet?” Dean asked. Cassie shook her head. Her diaphanous lashes were fluttering like the wings of butterflies. Between the two, Mika was a shifting orb, floating--a trans shape of optic fiber lens. 

“Why don’t they send her away, already--I mean for god's sake, she can’t keep putting you guys through this.”

“Beau, she’s my sister.”

“I know, but it doesn’t seem fair.” Beau raised a finger to his temple, massaging an apparent, bulging vein. “Every time, she pulls these stunts--she leaves you and your family like this--with this invisible hole. It’s not fair.”

“She’s probably just hurt.” Beau shook his head in turn and Mika shifted--almost touching a finger to Cassie’s organdy cheek.

“I’m sorry."

“For what?”

“For everything."

"It's not your fault. You don't have to keep protecting her--she has to take some responsibility."

"I meant to call you last night. But my folks were horrified and needed consoling; especially my mother. You know, they haven’t found anything.” Cassie held back a sob. “And Luca keeps saying Mika’s dead and that he saw her ghost, roaming around in the house.”

“Caz..it’s okay.” Beau brought Cassie airlessly close and felt her tremble beneath the silk of his touch. 

Mika watched the two of them mold into one co-dependent creature and began to envy their closeness; a closeness she herself had never really felt before. She wondered what it would feel like to love someone else completely and truly--and not be so selfish, loving only herself. It was unimaginable--unfathomable, even.

“She’s never been gone this long.” Cassie sniffled.

“She’ll come back.”

“Do you know what the last thing I said to her was?” Cassie muffled into Beau’s damp sweater, pulling away--her face still an indent on his collar. 

“I told her that I wish she was never born. What kind of person says such a thing?”

“I’m sure she doesn’t believe that.”

“But what if she does?”

“She doesn’t,” Beau told hold of her shuddering shoulders. “Let’s go inside, it's cold.”

Mika retreated this time--hyaline and crouching on all fours. She perched on her knees and watched Beau and her sister withdraw into the vivarium house. Her family was grieving and she wasn't even dead. Mika thought of all the times she caused them pain but felt this time--was something different and more complex. She felt that their feeling--both hers and theirs--was not a feeling of loss but of understanding. Perhaps, for once they understood her--and she, them.

Looking down at her shapechanging hands, Mika began to see a visible form. The structural layer of her very being, organized from threadlike hyaloid to plasma infused skin. Particles of color replaced bloodlessness and she felt her long hair, regrow and fall back against her body with a dull pat. She was naked, genderless, and titan-like in stance. Her bare feet and nipples hardened in the spun air. She was flesh now--formalized in curves and encased in a warp of lymph and mineral. She looked at her ribboning, pliable body in amazement, seeing it as though she had never looked upon herself before. Mika saw herself, at last for the first time.

As she became gestalt in her bodily transformation, finally--she turned to look at the opening mouth of the lakeside woods. She thought to herself, "If I could disappear one last time, for once and for all--would I do it?” Mika answered her own question as she walked--fully seen for the first time--to the front door of the house. She opened the bronze case that hid the lacquered nexus of the doorbell and rang it with an unshaken, steady finger.

The acrylic door swung open and Mika stepped inside the dome of her home, leaving no footprints this time--invisible, no more.