Witness

Everyone is alive somehow mowing dead grass and fighting pizza boxes into a recycling bin. Things don’t fit right or is that me descending a staircase, splintering apart beneath the morning’s blowtorch sun. Bare feet on rough concrete, a parade of black ants crawling through the cracks. Oak trees thrash and sigh—their gorgeous heads on fire.

Over the years, my wife developed peculiar habits. The strangest, my favorite, is the way she will, on occasion, scrunch up her face and give birth to fruit. The first time she did it we were at the zoo. We’d spent the day wandering along the gravel paths, pointing at elephants and tigers and spitting camels, sharing an ice cream cone. We were standing by the perching birds exhibit, peeking through the iron cage, when it happened. Abel began heavy breathing. I hardly noticed— she simply exhaled a small oh, reached into her pants, and pulled them from her: a handful of little red buds. They were coated in a thin layer of mucus and glinted, ravishingly, in the sun. “I wonder?” Abel said, holding the slick red things in her palm. “Strawberries!” I said, amazed. She was a woman of wonders.

When I return home at night, I’m careful not to kiss my wife. It’s by mutual agreement. It was a routine we had before COVID, when all we had to worry about was MRSA, C-diff, and any human fluids that might get on my scrubs. In lieu of kisses, I strip my clothes off in the laundry room and walk naked through our apartment to the shower. Even our dog knows he will have to wait to be petted. The shower is when I return to myself. As a trans healthcare provider, I leave half myself in the parking lot when I go to work at the hospital. I’m supposed to be calm and professional, so good at my job that they keep me around in spite of what I am. But at home I get to be me. I use body wash called Dragon’s Roar. It comes in a giant orange bottle and has a studly knight on the front wearing chain-mail with the sleeves cut off. It’s the kind of oppressively masculine scent high school boys prefer, and that I always wanted to smell like when I was a teenager.

After wading through the Seoulite crowds with their iPhone screens blazing tiny future K-pop stars into the night, Dee and I hit up a convenient store for snacks and beer before settling onto a bench in one of the many hangout areas. There was something so relaxed about my newfound friend nearly half my age, with her unbelievably long hair tied up in a high, scrunchied ponytail, her oversized pink T-shirt tucked into her mom jeans, and her silver glitterbomb backpack shimmering like a disco ball in the open September air. “How was your meeting at the adoption agency?” I asked. “I didn’t find out much.” She cracked open a beer. “I just went in. Didn’t even schedule an appointment. Did you find out anything?” “Yeah, they found my mom,” I said, as I offered her some chips. “She doesn’t want to meet me.”