Body by Franz Kafka

 My story "Body by Franz Kafka" is now available for free in the latest issue of Mirror Dance!

It's a body horror story about gender dysphoria and transphobia in society, told through a Twilight Zone lens.

Trans people aren't any more dangerous than anyone else, yet there is so much fear surrounding us, so many people trying to legislate us out of existence and stir up hysteria. They want people to believe we are going to turn your kids trans, or that it is something that happens overnight and needs to be fixed because it isn't really us.

So I wrote a story about pod people and gender and messed up butterflies.

When I was three or four, my dad found a monarch butterfly chrysalis on the garbage can outside our trailer and brought it in. The butterfly hatched when I was looking down at a coloring book, and I'm still a little bit upset about that 30 years later.

I named him Cooey, after a character on Eureka's Castle. Somewhere in my boxes of photo albums in the basement, I have pictures of him crawling on me and "playing" with my Littlest Pet Shop toys.

I still think about him surprisingly often, even though he only lived with us for maybe a day or two in the chrysalis and an hour or so as an adult butterfly. He was my first real introduction to how beautiful and weird nature can be.