Artist: Kae Ranck
“Fucking seagulls,” says Mum, by way of greeting. She does an impression, a good one, of the gulls nesting in our neighbours’ chimneys, so loud and sudden it makes me jump: “EEEEE-ee-ee-ee!”
“Jesus.”
I ask her how the newspaper is while I wait for the kettle to boil for my instant coffee. She exhales wearily, starts to read the headlines aloud: Adolescent gender service to be dissolved… Updated guidance causes division…
I shake my head. That’s enough.
“It’s mad,” I say, which is what I always say when I don’t want to think about it. Instead, I focus on choosing a nice mug to cheer myself up. I ought to stop asking her about the paper.
She lifts her head to appraise my outfit. “You look nice today, honey. Are you going out?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, there’s another weather warning. More thunderstorms.”
“For fuck’s sake.”
“Lightning struck a farmer’s field out in Comber last night. Ten of his cows were killed.”
“Ten?”
“He probably had them insured,” she licks her index finger, turns the page, “But the smell of barbeque alone would haunt you, wouldn’t it?”
I sit at the edge of my bed and bite and pull a hangnail ‘til it bleeds. Dysphoria itches in the forefront of my mind: Binders haven’t been fitting right recently. The thought that my tits might be getting even bigger, somehow, is fucking haunting me. Though I know it won’t help, might even make it worse, I allow myself five minutes to check everything in the mirror. I pinch my hips (too curvy), flatten my shirt against my chest and scowl at my reflection. If only I could afford top surgery or lipo – but phalloplasty? That’s a pipe dream. No pun intended.
I change my shirt, scrutinise, change back, scrutinise, change again. I have to open a window, despite the rain, because my bedroom smells like ripe bananas. It looks like most of the seagulls are gone for the day, probably finding shelter somewhere before the rain comes.
I message Ruby. I don’t want to be alone right now.
Up to much?
Ruby, immediately, as if waiting for me: Yep. It’s ready. Come over.
The blanket of clouds thickens, the sky darkens, but still no rain.
I bang on Ruby’s door a little too hard. She’s drawn my blood, snipped my hair, even asked me to miss a couple T shots so she could use the little 1ml ampules in her experiments. God knows what else she’s been doing. I, the guilty nonbeliever, didn’t think it would ever be ready. Not that I know much about pharmaceuticals, or alchemy, or whatever it is Ruby does. I was kind of just humouring her because she’s my bestie.
She grins at the meal deals I brought with me. I figured she hadn’t eaten yet. “They had egg and cress sandwiches,” I tell her.
“Hell yeah, man,” she says.
The stairs are covered in crumbs, dust bunnies, discarded plastic packages that crinkle under our feet. I’m used to Ruby’s house looking like this; she’s too busy with homebrew to clean anywhere but her “lab”. When she first built her high-speed centrifuge—it took her weeks to source the parts—everyone told her it was going to, quite literally, blow up in her face. But it didn’t.
Ruby dons her raggedy computer chair. She tears into her egg and cress sandwich, speaks through wet mouthfuls: “Okay, so, I just kind of need to prepare you for this.”
“Sure,” I say, patient as ever. Her bed frame creaks under my weight.
“You know how I said it was a pill?”
I nod. She looked into producing subcutaneous pellets, then suppositories, then got totally preoccupied with the idea of oral administration: A testosterone pill that doesn’t get digested as a protein in the stomach, another viable alternative for trypanophobic trans men. Kind of impossible, I thought, but Ruby believed she could do it. She wanted to make it widely available, make a real name for herself. She even got some funding from a few crackpots online.
“Well, that wasn’t working.”
I’m not surprised. Talk about pipe dreams.
“So, it’s not ready,” I say.
“Oh, no, it’s ready.” The rain starts, thick droplets ramming up against her bedroom window. “It’s just different. It’s better. Absorbs through the skin, or… something like that.”
My brow furrows.
Ruby waves a hand at me to dissipate my doubts. She takes another huge bite of her sandwich and chews just enough to speak: “Not like T-gel. You’ll see.”
Despite the bloodletting and the sacrifices of medication, I’ve never been invited into Ruby’s lab before. I watch her open her attic door with a hook and climb up a creaky old ladder before she beckons me to follow.
I can make out the silhouette of… a blow-up swimming pool? I think.
“Okay,” she whispers, “Ready?”
She flicks the lights on, and I realise it’s a fucking hot tub. “How did you get a hot tub up here?”
She waves her hand again, irritated. “Why are you focusing on that? Look.” She points to a little glass jar on a worktop. “They’re bath salts!”
“What?”
“Bath salts.” She says it slowly, like speaking to a child.
I get closer and stare down at her mad-scientist bath salts. They’re strawberry coloured, like something you’d buy from Lush, in a recycled onion relish jar. She has to be taking the piss.
“They’re not literally salts,” she clarifies.
“Right,” is all I can think to say.
“That’s just what I’m calling them. Sounds better, doesn’t it?”
“Better than what?”
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you, bro. As far as you’re concerned, it’s magic.”
“Fair enough.” I straighten, nervously pull at the front of my t-shirt. Thunder rumbles outside, rain batters the roof. I’m glad I got here before the storm really kicked off.
Ruby scoffs at my hesitation. “Like, seriously, this is so cool. You’ll love it.”
“Do I have to be naked?”
“Unless you want your clothes to get wet and, like, explode.”
“Explode?”
“Joking.”
Ruby turns her back to me so I can strip. I steel myself and tuck into a ball in the cold water of the hot tub, legs pressed against my chest to stop my tits from floating. I just hope this’ll be over quickly, whatever it is, and I really hope it isn’t a prank. I look so stupid right now.
“So, what’s the dosage, then? How often would I have to do this?” I ask, starting to shiver.
“Emmm…” Ruby continues to keep her eyes off my body as she scoops some of the little pinkish-red crystals into the tub with a measuring spoon. “I don’t know how often, actually. I think you’ll only have to do it once.”
“Once?”
“We’ll see,” she says.
I trust Ruby, I really do, but I remember the time she caught a mouse just to inject it with an experimental breast growth serum, some kind of modified progesterone, and she never told me what happened to that mouse.
“You have to put your head under.”
The water begins to heat rapidly. It’s warm, really warm. Then it’s hot, so hot I’m sweating. Blisteringly hot. It’s starting to hurt. “I can’t.”
“No, you have to.”
I suck air in through my teeth. “Fine!” I dunk my head into the water, quickly, and I have every intention of lifting it back out before—
CRASH—I’m thrown around like a foetus in utero, toes curled in agony.
The pain is terrible, unique. My muscles stiffen like rigor mortis. I’m sure I’m dying. I fall deeper into the water, face-first, my legs still pressed up tight against my chest. My eyes sting, but I don’t dare close them. I gasp in pain, get a lungful of chemicals and scorching-hot water. I’m being boiled like a lobster.
Like a super-rapid fourth-degree sunburn, great big bubbles form under my skin, fill with fluid, burst, and slough away; raw flesh is exposed to the salts, the chemicals, the searing heat. I seize and vomit into the tub. My eyes are cooking in their sockets, melting, I can’t see. There’s nothing but this unbearable—
Finally, I can’t feel the pain anymore. I float, limp in the cooling water.
I’m not prepared to explain this to St. Peter.
But it’s Ruby who grabs me by the hair and hoists me out of the water so I can breathe again. I take big gulps of air, gag and splutter. I realise my eyes are, actually, still there, and I open them.
“You’re alive?”
Her face is covered in blood, her bangs wet, a wide gash on her forehead. I look up at the rain falling from a new hole in the roof.
My mouth waters. I barf again, all over myself: pink sludge. Tubby custard.
“What?” is all I can manage at first. I’m surprised I still have lips. I reach up to touch my face and it is smooth, waxy, free of blemish, like I’ve just had the world’s most traumatic chemical peel.
“Dude, you got struck by lightning just now,” says Ruby, “But you look great. I think it worked.”
I look at my hands, turn them this way and that. My nails are long, healthy, stronger than ever; the little stumps and hangnail from two decades of biting are nowhere to be seen.
Ruby starts to drag me out of the tub and the water hisses around my ankles like it doesn’t want me to leave. I fall to the floor like a wet and heavy fish, clamp my hands over my tits defensively—only to realise they aren’t there.
They’re gone. The ring of fat that made up my hips and ass is gone, too, all fallen away in the hot tub. I’m straight-up-and-down, hard and slender. I look back at the tub—the water is now a deep, impenetrable red. A foam of pink vomit sits on top.
Ruby has a wild grin on her face. “Isn’t that insane?” She blinks blood from her eyes. “I can’t believe it actually worked.”
I ignore her admission, the obvious fact that I was a guinea pig (or, a mouse) for something she wasn’t sure was safe, and I throw my arms around her, laughing.
She squeezes me joyously. “Look at you, look at you,” she sings. Blood falls from her chin to my shoulder, trickles down my acne-free back. The sweet stench of it makes my head swim. My already empty stomach contracts again, forces me to pull away to dry heave. I hang my head between my knees, heart hammering in my (flat!) chest.
I’m eye-to-eye with my pussy, which seems to have survived the whole ordeal unscathed.
Ruby pushes her bloodied glasses up the bridge of her nose. “We missed a spot.”
I heave again, managing this time to get up some slimy, yellow stomach lining that burns my throat.
“How do we do it?” I ask. I believe Ruby can do it, now.
She helps me back down to her room and tells me to sleep for as long as I want; she’ll have it all figured out. I text Mum that I can’t get home in the storm. I’m not sure how I’m going to explain this to her when I do go home, but I don’t spend much time thinking about it. I pass out as soon as my head hits the pillow.
When I wake up, it’s still raining. The streets are flooded.
Ruby spins around in her chair, smiles at me fondly like I’m a newborn baby. She cleaned and dressed her head wound while I was sleeping, but I can still smell the blood.
“Hungry?” she asks.
“I’m starving.”
We order Chinese, Ruby’s treat: Salt and chilli chicken, egg fried rice, spring rolls, sweet ‘n’ sour, prawn crackers, the whole shebang. I eat like I’ve never eaten before.
“So, about your cock,” says Ruby.
“Yeah, my cock,” says me, scarfing down the last of five spring rolls. I can’t keep my greasy hands away from my gorgeous, sculpted chest.
“To be honest, I don’t know how predictable the results are, but I think I know what was missing. I used a lot of, uh… synthetic T for that batch.”
I try my best to understand. “You need a different kind of T? You’re the hormone-monger. Can you get it online?”
Ruby wiggles her head from side to side. “Ehh… It’d be hard. I need it, like, straight from the source. If you know what I mean.”
“Like, balls?”
Ruby laughs. “Not a bad idea. Plain old blood might do the trick, though.”
“Are you serious?”
“I got a liiiittle bit last time,” she admits. “A cis guy on a kink site who was really into vampires. Total chaser, too. He mailed it to me in a vial, and it took a while to get here, so… I’m not sure how good it was.”
“Ew,” I say. I blow my nose and more of the thick, pink sludge flies out into the tissue.
“Well,” says Ruby, sweeping her hand at my new body. “It clearly worked. I think we just need better quality blood for your cock.”
“Like, how much?”
Ruby pierces a hunk of sweet ‘n’ sour chicken. She shrugs. “As much as we can get.”
I exhale, run my hand again over the hard chest. I want my dick. I want the complete set. Badly. But how do we get as much blood as we can get?
“You think anyone’s going to die in this storm?” I ask her.
“Only if they’re stupid enough to go outside.”
#
The pavement is drowning. Plastic bottles rush past our feet in the stream of rainwater. Ruby wears her welly boots and a shiny yellow raincoat that makes her look like a little duck. She complains that she can’t see because her glasses keep getting wet.
I catch glimpses of myself in puddles and car windows, marvelling at how handsome and strong I look. I could kiss myself. I smile—my teeth are glimmering, pearl-white, perfect.
“This could double as a youth serum,” I tell Ruby. I poke at my canines, thinking Mum shouldn’t have bothered paying for all that orthodontic work.
“You were already young.”
“A health hack, then.”
Ruby looks me up and down. I’m a little taller than her now, despite still hunching over like I’m trying to hide double-Ds. My socks are wet, my t-shirt soaking through, but I don’t care. Not at all. She smiles proudly. “You do look healthy. Like a healthy young stallion.”
“I feel, like, better than ever,” I tell her. I laugh. My laughter is loud, clear, masculine.
Suddenly, Ruby SHHHs me and grabs my shoulder to stop me at a junction. “Look,” she whispers.
Two young men on bikes, hooting and hollering, are coming down from the end of the street to our left. Ruby lifts her coat: Tubes, syringes, vials, little blue surgical gloves, a scalpel. She’s looking at me expectantly.
With much sarcasm, I ask “Just grab them off the bikes, will I?”
But before Ruby has a chance to answer, before I have a chance to think, the boys are flying past us and I reach out (with a beautiful, muscular arm) to catch one of them like a bear sniping a salmon. He’s heavy as he falls from his bike, my hand clasping his shirt collar. I almost go down with him.
“Shit!” Ruby cries, but I hold myself strong. Another euphoric laugh bubbles up out of my throat. I feel like a cat, slender and agile.
The boy claws and smacks at my arm. He wants me to let go of his shirt, I think, so I do. I shove him hard. His head smacks against the wet pavement—thunk—and he grunts, whines, blubbers like he’s going to cry. The base of his skull is bleeding. He touches it, pulls his hand away, groans at the sight of the blood. He looks up at me, terrified. My mouth waters. I take him by the shirt and push, shove, throw him down again. Double thunk.
The other boy, Boy #2, does a U-turn on his bike and comes right at us, cursing and yelling. He sees Ruby and blurts “TRANNY!” like he can’t believe it, like he’s trying to warn someone, but I don’t think his friend can hear him anymore.
I kick at the front wheel of his bike, and he goes over—“FUCK”—lands on his back.
Ruby is perched on the kerb, pushing wet hair out of her face. I turn to her as Boy #2 starts to pick himself up. “What now?”
She shrugs, gestures at Boy #2 like you started it. I stomp on him until he stops moving. Drool runs rivers down my chin, drips onto the flooded pavement: thick, pink, antacid, Pepto-Bismol.
Ruby starts her make-shift phlebotomy service on Boy #1, who is seemingly no longer conscious but continues to mumble and twitch. I stand over Boy #2 and take a look at what I was able to do to him. He’s probably dead. The concave cavity of his chest is a mess of bumps and lumps, fresh red blood seeping through his football top.
I check to see if Ruby is watching—she isn’t—and pull his top over his head. I take another moment to admire my work before I shove my face in the gaping blunt force wound. I gnaw at Boy #2’s snapped ribs and mangled, squashed organs. I lap like a thirsty dog after a long walk. I catch his slick liver in my jaw, snap my head back to free it. He stinks.
When I reemerge from my stupor, Ruby is standing over me with three vials of blood in her hand. I shrink a little, ashamed, though my heart is pumping so fast it feels like it’s going to pop. My pupils are dilated, my hands trembling with the excitement of it all.
“Need his balls?” I ask.
The tent in my jeans catches her eye, and she suddenly laughs.
“I guess not,” she says.
L. Sanguine is a trans writer and artist from Belfast, N. Ireland. Butch by day and tboy by night, he prowls the local queer scene for inspiration. He enjoys writing short stories about disagreeable trans people for his friends.
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