Working on what might become a novella. There are days when the writing comes easy and other days it’s real a struggle because I want to get this right.
This story is about a trangender woman living in Fairbanks, Alaska in the late eighties. If this story were a dive or a ice skating routine the degree of difficulty would be a nine.
Here’s a little snippet from the opening section:
Her first trip to Anchorage since everything changed: the divorce and the surgery, the pinch of her name into a different shape and then all those old friendships falling away behind her as she moved into a new life.
Looking back it seemed as if a great wave had lifted her up in an explosion of force and then thrown her down, crash, in a strange part of the beach. But it was all her choice, every bit of it. The wave was just her saying, I don’t want to live like this anymore late one night once the boys had been put to bed.
Funny that Anna should take the children to that counterfeit city considering what she had said in the heat of argument: that it was Erica who was inauthentic, a deceiver and cheat. Fake. That was one of the words thrown around in their argument, whisper-screamed so as not to wake the kids.
But they did wake the kids. They appeared in the doorway, one holding the other by the shoulder, and then Erica turned to them and said, “Hey, hey, what’s going on?” and Anna smiled and they were united in their parenthood again and both fakes, smiling deceivers shepherding the kids back to sleep.
david nikki crouse 