By Ambrose J. Clark
“You never know,” she says.
Unsure who she’s speaking to—no one, maybe, or everyone—I glance over.
She does not look back, but it’s clear from the empty seats immediately around us that
she can only be speaking to me.
“What?” I say.
Her eyebrows furrow; I follow the line of her gaze, and find her staring at a white, skinny
20-something with scuffed up Dr Martens and a sleepy glaze to his eyes.
“It’s just,” she says, this woman with her smooth brown hair and understated lipstick, a
pretty blue leather purse on her lap. “You never know anymore.”
With a prickle of presentiment, I say, “Never know what?”
The woman looks at me, and I know before she says it that she’s going to say it. I am
sinking already.
“Trans,” she says, dropping her voice like she’s saying something worse. Faggot, maybe,
or pedophile. “They could be anyone. The surgeries have gotten that good.”
I am on the train. It’s the same train I take every day, 26th and Broad to Harrison, and I
am used to the third-space of it. The brakes whine as the recorded message plays to let us know
we’re at 18th and Vine. I am three stops away, but the third-space has become just a space.
I’ve never known how to have these conversations. I wish I did. I wish I could keep my
head, so I could keep my words—but I never can. The whatness of me sort of… smears, like soft
graphite beneath a forgetful hand.
I am on the train, and the woman has turned back to her aspersions and the stranger she
has cast as the Christ to her doubting Thomas, and I cannot tell her that, in deciding to keep her
seat after the car cleared out at the stop before last, she has put herself with one of these stealthy
transes. The surgery was too good. The hormones, a decade on: Too good. Rarely am I
second-guessed anymore. Rarely does anyone look past the well-maintained beard and the
gracefully receding hairline. The apple-less throat goes unnoticed, the small, dimpled hands
unstudied. They are folded primly in my lap right now, an unconscious habit that is part and
parcel of the thing sunk into the indelible weft of me that I fear will still be telling me I must be
small when I’m already in the ground. The damage of policed girlhood, which this woman would
never admit to bearing, too.
What’s funny is I can tell that the weary, booted stranger she’s fixated on isn’t trans, in
the same way I can tell when someone is. It’s a radio frequency or something, like my
stepmother tuning and tuning and tuning on long drives when she got tired of dad’s endless cycle
of Neil Young, Tom Waits, the era of the Beatles that sounded to me more like loneliness than
the sort of music that would get teenage girls boy-band-hot, even in childhood. Radio static, the
sudden hellfire and brimstone baritone of Christian talk radio, static, the high whine from a
station where the DJ has fallen asleep with the record skipping through the final five seconds of
the LP over and over again, static—and then, like fogged-in northern California dawn, Nina
Simone rising through the noise. It’s a symptom of the unkillable nature of human gentleness that
even my storybook wicked stepmother would always stop for Nina Simone.
There’s no frequency clicking in here, though, as I look at the stranger who’s been
singled out for… gosh, I can’t even tell what’s made this woman hate him for the crime of
existing. Is it the graceful arch of his wrists before the hands with the kind of knobby, jutting
thumb knuckle that makes my mouth water? Is it the way his plain black t-shirt hugs his slim
torso? The artful shagginess of his hair?
I can’t find the note here that soured the song for the nice-looking lady. It’s a matter of
taste. I’ve never understood it.
She has started talking again, her undertone giving way to a stridency that I suspect is her
norm. The stranger looks up when my seat-mate says something to the tune of, How am I
supposed to feel safe taking my daughter to a public bathroom now?
He frowns, and then his gaze flickers to me, where I’m stuck against the window with
this woman in the aisle seat. I blink at him, and it feels slow. Everything feels slow when I’m like
this, including the heavy, gruesome beating of my heart.
He looks at me—his eyes are pale, gray or blue, I can’t tell from here—and as he does
something subtle but sympathetic with his eyebrows, the static does clear a little, and I hear
singing. It’s not the tune I was looking for, but it’s pretty all the same.
“You just never know anymore!”
I unclench my hands. My palms are hot on my thighs through the fabric of my slacks.
“Don’t you think life’s too short for stuff like this?” I say, and I don’t look at her, but she
looks at me. I wonder what she sees now.
“Excuse me?” she says.
“Like,” I say, unsure if I’ll be able to make sense to her but desirous of besting the
hot-washing fear anyway. The woman’s fingers are tight on her bag, with their French tips and
the flash of an engagement ring dripping with diamonds, overshadowing the wedding band
cozied against it. “Making up things to be scared of, when there’s so much that’s actually scary?
Inland hurricanes and long-COVID and that little girl who got bombed in the car with the bodies
of her family while waiting for an ambulance in Gaza—isn’t that enough? Why do you need
more to worry about?”
The woman scoffs.
“Trans people are real,” she says.
“I know,” I say. I look at her. “And we’re scared, too.”
The brakes whine, and the recorded announcement calls out my stop. The woman stares
at me, her expression undecided, which is to say, shocked.
From the small-stock store down in the soft depths of me, I summon a smile that is no
less sincere for its tremulousness.
“This is my stop,” I say, and stand. She recoils, but I think—I really do—that it’s not
about me. It’s just the muscle memory of public transit. You make space for people.
Ambrose J. Clark is a trans disabled author working out of Virginia. With a Bachelor’s of
Music from the UNC School of the Arts and a lifelong habit of markmaking, his work lives in
interdisciplinary space even—especially—when the medium purports to be only one form. He
has self-published two chapbooks of transformative poetry and illustration, and lives with his
rude cat, Bat, in a home whose windows he tries to never close.
Hot Pot Magazine 