Page 34 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human
Twenty-Four
Tammy presses cool washcloths to Crane’s face, googling home remedies for scalds. She tells Levi to get hand soap, instructs Stagger to fetch bandages, lets out a shuddering sigh at this complete nightmare of a situation.
“Now, what’d you go and do this for,” she murmurs.
Crane whimpers at her touch. He can’t open his eyes and he wants to know what he looks like, he wants to know so badly.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m here. We’re all here now.”
“Nah, I ain’t worried,” Levi says the next day. Presumably over the phone. Crane didn’t hear anyone come into the apartment, and Stagger is sleeping at the foot of the bed. “It’s not like he hurt the baby, so. Might as well just let him have it.”
Levi sniffs.
“The recovery’s consequence enough.”
After days spent crusted shut with discharge, Crane’s eyes blink open.
It takes a minute for the blurry forms around him, Stagger by the side of the bed and Levi folding laundry, to solidify into recognizable things.
But there they are, and then the rest of the bedroom too: the nightstand, the alarm clock, the American flag tacked to the wall, the trees beyond the window.
The scalding water, at least, did its job. When Crane makes it to the mirror and he sees not Sophie but himself—the first time he leans into his reflection, bright red burns and yellow crusts and peeling skin splashed across his nose, his cheeks, his mouth—he laughs.
It’s so bad.
It’s perfect.
It’s him.
The outside matches the inside. Something’s wrong here , it says, tread with caution, I beg you.
Crane’s stomach has swollen enough that his navel has popped into an outie. The start of stretch marks climb up from his hips to cradle the swell of his belly. Some of them cut through a tattoo, but he doesn’t mind. They look like claw marks, and they’re deep and scored.
However, he’d forgotten to take out his piercings before pushing his face into the water, and now that the skin is healing in a mess of crusts and pus, they’ve gotten disgusting.
They need to be removed. But they’re stuck, melted into the skin, and Crane can’t do it himself with two of his fingers still out of commission.
Levi has things to do, he says, so Stagger takes Crane into the bathroom and pins him down while he wrestles every piece of metal out of the red, raw skin.
One at a time. Septum, lip stud, a pair of eyebrow rings on the same side. All sitting on a paper towel on the edge of the sink, shiny with blister fluid.
How many weeks pregnant now? Crane stares at the calendar in the kitchen and struggles to do the math.
Thirty-two?
Stagger eases lotion across the stretch marks that have now started to itch and carefully cleans the holes the piercings left behind.
The scald has begun to peel, skin sloughing away in layers as it heals badly.
His face is new and shiny, uneven. He’ll be scarred for the rest of his life. Thank god, thank god.
His fingers are healing badly too. Tammy takes off the splint during one visit and finds she hadn’t set the fingers as well as she’d thought. They don’t move the way they used to. Crane tries to bend them and can’t quite get it.
Tammy tries to ignore it, just counts the baby’s movements as she stares at her watch. “You can hear the heartbeat,” she says to Levi. “If you get close enough.”
Levi doesn’t.
And sometimes there are contractions. Tammy says they aren’t the real ones, not yet. They’re called Braxton-Hicks. Sometimes Crane sits on the edge of the bed, holding his belly, eyes squeezed shut as he waits for it to pass.
Thirty-three marks on the living room wall. It’s hard to sleep with a tiny foot in his ribs. He’s tired, all the time.
Through the haze of cotton in his head, the fog in his brain, he thinks he hears Tammy yelling at Levi.
“I don’t give a shit what he did to his face,” she snarls. “You got him pregnant, you take care of him, you hear me? You HEAR me, boy?”
Then Tammy is coming into the bedroom, knocking on the doorframe with her gnarled hands.
Crane thinks it’s kind of funny, that some of his fingers look like hers now.
For a moment he feels bad that he hasn’t been paying attention to how far along her arthritis was getting, but it’s difficult to muster sympathy for her.
She still hasn’t said anything about Jess.
“Hey, sweetheart,” she says gently, like this isn’t partially her fault. She nudges Stagger, sitting on the floor with his back against the bedframe, with her foot. “Give us some privacy, will you.”
Stagger looks to Crane.
“I won’t let him do nothing,” Tammy says.
Crane nods that it’s okay, and Stagger leaves.
Tammy crosses the sparse room to throw open the blackout curtains.
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 when it 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 whole killing himself thing.
The only thing that feels right is the slew of articles from years and years ago, when Roe v.
Wade fell—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 searches dog whelping , and cat queening , and horse 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 searches thirty-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.
“It is—” He tries, so hard, putting a knuckle to Crane’s cheek. “Okay. It is.”
Crane shakes his head. No, he’s not talking about his face. That’s not what he’s apologizing for. But there’s no other way to get the point across. He could finger spell the words, but he can’t figure out what words to use.