He would sit in his apartment in the nights of heat and rain and weave, or fold paper, or sew; and as he carefully and drunkenly constructed these illusory selves, he thought of the person who he wanted to be, and he thought of a feminist class he had taken in college, and it was one thought rolling thru his head in time to the music and the wheels and the dawn that would come and pass once more: “Biology is no longer destiny.”

***

“When I was a little kid, I would sit in the bath tub and play with all the shampoos and bubble baths that were sitting around the rim of the tub. I would mix them together in a little plastic cup, and think that if I mixed them just right, and drank it, I would be transformed into Bowser, and I could romp around the town, breathing fire and destroying stuff.”