February 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 1

All around me, snow shoulders crested with glittering crust ignite in the rising Arctic sun. The horizon is blanched of any discernible shapes and surrounds me like a blank page. Deep in the bush behind the beige trailer that is my temporary home, something is always watching me: giant ravens, tufted grouse, or starving mutts. I have not yet encountered a bear, but I have spent a lot of time deciding what I will do when I finally do run into one.

If a hungry bear charges, I have two options: Either I play dead, or I throw up my arms pretending to be a bigger animal. If I choose wrong, I die. I think about dead women often, particularly on my daily solo walks on the Eastern tip of Marten Lake in the Canadian North. Snow is a good listener. It doesn’t judge me or talk back. I can dictate anything I please onto its crystalline scrolls, and the words, like the dead women, simply disappear into obscurity.

My breast-

              bone drifts

                            like an unmoored

              boat floating down-

I’ve held Pain at bay like a former lover,

pretending I never cared for her stiff

joints, her sour breath. But how intimately

I’ve studied her, running my fingers

over her crooked spine, the hollow

of her knees. A body

so like a father’s. She felt comfortable

letting me sleep against her, the warm,

round loaf of her weight

stinking of menthol and sweat—

Third summer of fizzing white

Popping candy all up in my jaw (keep your mouth closed and no one can hear it)

Like a secret tucked high in the pouch of your cheek

Her unfurling of wings gave me some saline drops.

Hit the gate post until she remained steady and flew up to the mountain cap.

I tended to her and now she is home.

I travel my path to a steady foot tap; and, below me the swollen rivers flow.

With the cherry blossom alive and the warm bird breeze, I sigh a happy notion

That soon my special mountain will be bigger than the universe itself with a plethora

of everything of rainbow delight.

The velvet box on Risa’s dresser sat open in a tiny scream. Makoto, at least, had had the decency to take the ring with him. “My parents…they wouldn’t understand,” he’d stammered, his eyes darting away from hers. “I need something…simpler. Real.”

Real. The word ricocheted around her quiet Tokyo apartment, amplified by his cowardice. Risa traced the faint indentation on her finger. She was real. The hormones that softened her jawline were real. The slow, painful, beautiful alignment of her body with her soul was the realest thing she had ever known. Makoto had only loved the blueprint, not the woman being built.

It happens all the time. I’m at a party, let’s say, and there’s a lull in the conversation. Someone turns to me and asks, casually, “So, what do you do?”

As an autistic woman, I’d been all too happy to quit my job as an attorney when my daughter was born. It was an easy out. I never had to explain my chronic burn-out, my persistent difficulties adjusting to the expectations and structure of a traditional 9-to-5. I was becoming a mother, and that was all the justification I needed.

Still, I used to cringe inwardly when people would ask what I did for work. I was embarrassed to utter the words “stay-at-home mom.” It felt like I had failed feminism, fallen short of some ineffable standard.  I spent many years trying to evade such inquiries.

The pamphlet of my past reappears & I know there is no time like the present to ponder if my own family is no longer composed of flesh & bone. We have this urge to turn away from comfort. I swear, the imagery of how hardship holds us with its metal hands is so vivid; I can't bear to tell it all. All I can tell is a sound coming out of the flute, speaking of both love & life. I swear, I am not willing to dance to the sound coming out of the gun, played by the trigger. I swear, I still love music, but I am still quavering on which will be played during my own absence.

Dr. Natalia Bondarkeno woke up in her astro-pod on the planet Bahazar. Her nightmare still lingered—a vivid memory of the events that rendered her home planet Earth nearly uninhabitable. The food shortages and environmental crises had only been accelerated by the global conflict, which led to nuclear warfare. For the survivors, Earth was a ticking clock running out of time.

Natalia pressed the air lock that opened her astro-pod and went to the bathroom to pour cold water over her face.

Jesus Christ, Natalia, get control of your mind. Stay focused. Do your job.

If her mission fails, Bahazar would become a social dystopia.

In a basement in Ohio, I sat dissecting fish. An eight year old girl, slicing and dicing the casualties of my father’s aquarium keeping hobby. Each thin slice was carefully placed on a glass slide for viewing under my older brother’s microscope. No squeamishness, no apprehension. Precision manufacturing of microscope slides that my brother and I would spend hours viewing ; comparing, detailing, categorizing. Yet at school, I was failing miserably.

I could see Anne and her mother out of the corner of my eye. Heads together, they whispered and snickered. From time to time, their eyes would slide over me like hard grease. I scrunch down, try to make myself small. It’s late. Maybe they’ll give up and leave me alone tonight, I thought. I don’t want to sleep outside in March. It’s too cold. No luck. The crazy old lady giggled and pushed her daughter towards me. She has four or five inches and thirty pounds on me.

Before I could run, she was on me. Fists pounding across my head and back. I dodge, but she’s got a hold of my neck. My dog Skipper bites at her leg. She screamed and turned to kick her, but I twisted around, sheltering Skipper with my body and taking the kick.

In 2012, when I was 41 years old I was in the best shape of my life. I was a competitive CrossFit athlete and a professional dancer. I was a masters-level pole dancer, an aerialist, and competed in obstacle course races and mountain foot races. Within five years, everything changed.

I still trained regularly, attended dance intensives, and went to aerial silks classes. I wasn’t doing well. I got fatigued quickly. My hearing vanished into a boiling kettle screech of tinnitus. My vision faded and I had to grab onto something lest I collapse. One day I went to a dance workshop and didn’t even make it through the warm-up.

No one really knows when my seizures began. I was in foster care, then I lived with my maternal grandmother, and then I lived with my biological mother. When I was about eight years old and my parents got back together, they started doing things like taking me to the doctor.

I was diagnosed with absence seizures. I was having about 100 a day, according to the EEG results. My mom had a hard time accepting it. She kept saying “but that doesn’t run in our family.” I don’t really remember what my dad said about it. I remember he apologized at one point for punishing me for “not paying attention” and that was about it.

your brain is in orbit

your brain cannot find quiet without movement

your brain’s wanderings test the boundaries

                                            of your equilibrium

setting your limbs into motion

I was that mentally ill, trans, neurodivergent, confused kid in my perfect suburban family.

After two humiliating forced institutionalizations as a young teen, I internalized that (1) I must be self-sufficient/abled/competent to be free from the horrors of institutionalization (2) if I am abled/competent/normal I will finally have friends.

A lot of autistic kids, especially the masc or white (white-passing, white-adjacent) ones that get seen as smart, channel our social shame into a giant ego about our technical abilities (see for example “Elon Musk’s Autistic Anti-Patterns” by Fergus Murray). With that background already built during childhood, I dedicated my post-institutionalization teenage years to a hardcore all-in project of being 100% abled. That meant cis female, self-sufficient, neurotypical, athletic, stable, and accomplished.

From r/MermaidProgram

Should I ask my supervisor if she’s in the program?

u/fish_ez • 1d

I (23F) just started working here and my supervisor is gorgeous. I know it’s a stereotype but she has the look. She’s super friendly and told me I can come to her about anything so I feel like it wouldn’t be totally out of line. Do I ask her?

I don’t remember the first time I experienced a tic, but my family’s reaction will always be ingrained in my mind.

“Stop doing that.”

“Just a habit.”

“Try harder!”

“One of these days, you’re gonna jerk your head right off those shoulders, plum over to the other side of the room.” The others laughed.

I didn’t know I had Tourette’s at the time, but it was made quite clear early on that these tics were something to be ashamed of and embarrassed by. It was always made known to me that I had complete control over my tics if only I tried hard enough. And when I didn’t, I simply didn’t want it badly enough.