It feels like swimming up from the bottom of a deep lake. Light. Faint light, then brighter and brighter. I break the surface and still cannot breathe.

“I think the surgery was a complete success,” I hear a man’s voice say. I feel nothing but a faraway ache that I cannot place.

“Success?” I hear someone squawk. I think it is my mother. She’s angry.

“Your daughter was very badly injured,” he says. Daughter? I’m an only child. My tongue feels huge in my mouth, like a too-big bite of food.

“Daughter? This is my son, Doctor. My son.”

“Not any longer. The damage from the crash was very extensive. The transition will allow her to have some semblance of a normal romantic life.”

The crash? I grunt, trying to talk. Why can’t I move? Why can’t I open my eyes?

“Doctor?” Another voice. “Doctor, the patient seems to be awake.”

“Oh, we can’t have that. She needs sleep, a deep healing sleep.”

She? I grunt again.

“Up the sedative,” the doctor says.

“This is my son,” my mother says. She’s crying.

“The hormone injections will take care of all that. They change the mind as well as the body,” the doctor says before the black hammer of sleep falls on me.

—–

I can feel what has been done to me. The absence. There is a void now. A hollowness. A wound where my penis and testicles were. I just stare at the wall when they try to show me how to use the dilators.

—–

“I’m going to sue the living fucking shit out of them!” I say loudly, knowing my voice carries down to the nurses’ station.

“They said you were mashed down there,” my mother says. “That’s the word they used. Mashed. There was nothing left.”

“I’d rather be nothing than this,” I say. “Smooth. Tell them to make me smooth.”

“You know you can’t have children,” my mother says. “They told you that, right? That you can’t give birth?” Her eyes are brimming with tears.

“Of course, I can’t give birth. I’M A MAN!”

She runs from the room, crying. And I’m crying. Fucking hormones.

—–

“The feminizing hormones are part of the anti-rejection protocol. Your body will reject the Alloderm canal otherwise,” the doctor says. I’m going to sue him for everything he has. He’s going to have to sell his wife to afford the settlement I’m going to have laid on his ass.

“Alloderm?” I ask. This is all going into the lawsuit. I’ll play along to get information out of him. I’m seething and my wound aches.

“Donor skin, harvested and sterilized,” he says.

“Donor skin? Who donates their skin?”

“Total body donation, like organ donation. The skin is the largest organ, you know.”

“I have a dead person’s skin inside of me?” I feel sick. “You stitched someone’s skin into a vagina and implanted it in me?”

“Of course,” he says. “Your genitals were too badly damaged to be saved.”

“You could have just done nothing.” I breathe. I am not calm.

“And leave you a eunuch? Nonsense. I made you a beautiful vagina. Sculpted a labia minora from the less damaged area of your scrotum, used what remained of the glans to create a clitoris.”

My face feels hot. My bowels are loose.

“But my real work of art is your neovagina. The Alloderm is wonderful to work with. Flexible and strong. Much stronger than the delicate tissue Mother Nature provides.”

I see edges of my vision narrowing to a point as the void cramps violently. It knows we are talking about it, I think crazily. It knows.

“Young lady,” the doctor says, “I am happy to say that you will have a very rugged vagina.”

—–

Dreams come in the hospital night, drawing labyrinths I cannot escape. An endless loop of the minutes before the crash, my mind noting all the points I could have avoided it entirely, mocking me, mocking itself, I guess. Dreams about girls and erections I’ll never have again. A real doozy where I open my legs and they just keep going, wider and wider until I split in half up to my neck. I woke up screaming from that, thrashing so much I pulled the drain out of my
 wound.

—–

Knowing the answer, I finally ask my mother anyway, for the anger I will get to feel. “Mom, why hasn’t Sarah been to visit me?”

“She was here the night of your accident,” Mom says. She’s holding her purse in her lap and wringing the strap back and forth.

“Why haven’t I seen her?” I ask, dropping my voice a few degrees.

“After they explained the nature of your injury
”

“Yes
”

“And the repair
 work
 they performed on you.”

“Just tell me,” I say.

“She’s gone. Just gone. She said college was long behind her. That she didn’t want to be in another lesbian relationship.”

She is crying, bawling, really. I feel a hot flush of shame run down my body.

“Fuck her, then,” I say.

Mom looks up, startled. I hold up my hand, bruised black by IVs, “I don’t want to hear it. You tell her to stay away from me. Far away. I don’t want her showing up after I get home.”

“You’ve gotten so bitchy,” she says faintly. The patient-controlled analgesia pump beside me beeps and I set a burning dose of Demerol to coursing through my veins.

—–

Most of the bandages are off and the dilator placed during surgery has been removed. In the middle of the night, I begin to explore what has been done to me.

The glans of my penis, sewn on to simulate a clitoris, has no feeling and is cold. It feels huge to my fingers, a squatting fungus. Below it, I feel the catheter tube sprouting from my urethra. The doctor had darkly hinted at bladder troubles in the future. I’ll be one of those old ladies that pee when they laugh. No, that’s not right. I’ll be a mutilated man that pee when he laughs. The labia minora are ridges of numb scar tissue, dry, like strips of jerky. I gag and pull away. But I go back to explore the hole, the void, my void. The walls of the Alloderm tube are unnaturally smooth and it reacts to my invasion by clamping down on my finger. My lower stomach cramps painfully and I take my finger out quickly. It smells like shit and death and I gag again. I wet a hand towel and wash my finger off as best I can. The towel smells so terrible, I ball it up and throw it across the room.

—–

The first lawyer I speak to, talking quietly because I think the nurses might be listening, doesn’t want to take my case.

“Unwinnable,” he calls it. “No judge is going to want to set this as a precedent. What if detransitioners followed your lead? There would be lawsuits all over the place.”

“Detransitioners?” I ask.

“People who went through hormones replacement and surgery to change their sex and are not happy with the results.”

“What does that have to do with me?” I ask hotly. A nurse walking by stares at me briefly but keeps moving.

“Well, you clearly regret your surgery.”

“I didn’t want this surgery.”

“That’s what all detransitioners argue. And it is being rejected in most cases.”

“I’m not trans,” I say, gripping the phone so hard it creaks.

“Also what all the detransitioners say. Your words are digging your own grave here, legally speaking. “

I hang up and spend the rest of the day watching soap operas.

—–

They are tapering me off pain meds in advance of finally letting me out of the hospital. It hurts so much I can’t sleep, and in the cavernous quiet of the middle of the night, I treat myself to a depressive fit of self-pity.

I’ll never date again, I’ll never be in love again. I’m mutilated, a side-show freak, piss-dribbler.

I plan out a rather elaborate suicide. I’ll go off in the woods by myself, somewhere I’ve never been, somewhere no one would ever think to look for me. Take a bunch of pain pills and drink a bottle of vodka. Then I’ll just rot and be left alone. Maybe some hunter will trip over my bones in a few years.

My wound begins to ache, then cramps. It feels like a fist clenching over and over. I hit the call button and one of the night shift nurses comes in eventually.

“I need something,” I gasp between cramps. “I’m in so much pain.”

“You’ve had all you can until morning,” she says.

“It hurts so much,” I say.

“We don’t want you getting addicted. Opiates are very dangerous.”

She turns to go and I scream at her polyester back. She waddles back in an eternity later. She strips the shitty hospital sheets off and pushes me onto my side. She stabs me in the ass cheek with a huge needle.

She leaves without saying anything or covering me up.

Ten minutes waiting for the drugs to kick in. I vomit into an empty water pitcher and finally drift off, the cramps now just someone shouting from far away.

—–

Morning. I’m going home today.

I look out at the featureless gray sky until a nurse comes in sniffling, red-rimmed eyes, trying to hold it in, shaking. She’s one that I don’t completely hate.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“Your discharge will be delayed,” she says. “You might not get out today.”

“Why?”

“The police will want to talk to you,” she says, cracking. “They are going to interview the entire floor.”

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“One of our colleagues has been murdered,” she sobs and runs out.

—-

“And you don’t remember anything else?” the female detective asks. The male one is looming in front of the window, making the whole room dark.

“I was in post-operative pain, and got a large dose of painkillers. I was out.”

“OK, well
” she began, flipping her notebook closed.

“What happened?” I ask. “I’m pretty sure she was the nurse who helped me with my pain last night.”

I didn’t tell them that she was going to leave me in pain until I began screaming. I instinctively lie to the police for no real reason other than that they are the police.

“We cannot discuss an on-going case,” she says, standing and straightening her clothes.

“She was suffocated,” the big cop says. Backlit as he is, I can’t see his face at all.

“Bill
” the female detective growls.

“Something was shoved down her throat until it cut off her airway,” he says.

“Fuck,” I say reflexively.

“And he took the murder weapon with him, if you know what I mean,” Bill chuckles.

“Bill!” she says and shoves at him until they both leave the room.

My catheter had been out since yesterday morning and I didn’t feel like using a bedpan.

I throw the sheets back and from the waist down here is a bright fan of blood on the bed and my hospital gown.

I press the nurse station button frantically.

—–

“Everything looks fine to me,” Dr. Frankengina says, the architect of my lack.

He had me wheeled to Obstetrics to put me in exam stirrups. I flashback to every girlfriend who complained about gynecology appointments. I feel humiliated and exposed and vulnerable and I try not to cry as he rummages around inside me.

“You are not closing up and the Alloderm seems to be scarring itself into place,” he says. I can barely feel him inside me, but I can hear wet noises and it turns my stomach.

“I’m not sure where the blood came from, perhaps it had been building up behind your cervical terminus,” he muses.

He stands and strips off his exam gloves. “Or maybe it’s just time for you to become a woman,” he says grinning. “You are a bit old for your first period, though.”

I glare as hard as I can. He ignores it completely.

“But, in all seriousness, no tampons for at least three months. Six would be better. And always use KY Jelly.”

I’m gathering a long list of obscenities for him when I cramp again down there. I try to double over but cannot in the stirrups, so I just grunt like I’ve been punched.

“Discharge tomorrow, maybe,” he says, touching my shoulder. I hurt too much to pull away.

—–

I’m back in the stirrups again and the doctor is telling me to scoot down further and scoot down further and my knees are in my chest, and I push down, hoping to just shit all over him, and I look over my stomach and he’s got his whole arm in up to the shoulder and still grinning grinning grinning.

I shake myself awake violently. I’m wet. I must have pissed myself. I check but it’s blood again. So much blood. No hospital discharge today. More giant iron pills. Fuck.

As I drift back off, I hear distant sirens.

—–

I’m picking at breakfast when the detectives come into my room. My nipples are swollen and tender. I am growing breasts.

“We have more questions,” the female one says. I glance at the cards they left last time. Detective Mata.

“About the nurse? I’m not sure what else I can tell you.”

“Not the nurse,” Bill says, looming. It seems he likes to loom.

“A doctor was killed last night,” Mata says.

“Your doctor,” Bill says with an undercurrent of rage.

“My doctor was murdered?” I ask.

“A nurse on your floor, and now your attending physician,” Mata says.

“Killed the same way,” Bill growls. “By the same pervert.”

“And there’s a lot of talk going around about how angry you are. Something about a botched surgery?” Mata asks, her eyes boring into me.

“I said I was going to sue him, not kill him.” I take a bite of cold oatmeal. It tastes like glue.

“Killed the same way,” Bill says again.

“From what you said last time, I think I can rule myself out,” I say.

“What do you mean about that?” Mata asks. Angry cop/Angrier cop is their vibe.

“Read my chart. I don’t have that equipment any longer. Lost it in the car accident.” Bill winces and I suppress a laugh.

Mata is glaring at me.

“You want me to show you?” I ask her. “Want to see my malpractice lawsuit?”

They both stomp out of the room.

The blood from last night is dried now and I have to peel the sheet off my thigh. I go to the toilet in my room and take a whore’s bath in the sink.

—-

My mother picks me up from the hospital and drives me back to her place. I’m going to stay with her while Sarah looks for a new place. I’ll look for a new place as well. I have no interest in moving back into our shared apartment to live in the husk of our dead relationship.

“What are you going to do about work?” Mom asks as I watch out my window, the city slipping past.

“I still have three weeks of sick leave left, I guess I’ll go back when they run out. Or maybe they’ll put me on work-from-home until I’m fully healed.”

I run my hand down the long scar on my left arm. I had been too worried about the wound to think about much else. Leg repaired with a rod, missing most of my left triceps, a foot that wasn’t going to work very well ever again. Dickless, scarred, and a vagina made of corpse skin.

The police are waiting for me when she pulls into her driveway. They have a court order for my DNA.

—–

I’m on the couch, watching soap operas with the fireplace going, ice packs on my budding breasts, and a warm, infected feeling between my legs when the doorbell rings.

I answer the door in one of my mother’s old robes. It’s Sarah, beautiful Sarah, and she’s been crying. I’m so stunned she steps in before I can slam the door in her face.

“I don’t want you here,” I say, leaving the front door open.

“Your mother told me you didn’t want to see me,” she says, her voice wavering.

“Yes, that is correct,” I say in a dead voice.

“I was just so shocked about the accident,” she says. “I was confused and frightened.”

“Imagine how I felt going through it alone,” I say, going for maximum hurt.

“I deserve that, I guess,” she says and flops down on the couch.

“Don’t sit, you’re not staying.”

“I just needed some time,” she says. “I never knew that you were
 confused.”

“Confused?”

“Dysphoric.”

“I didn’t choose for this to be done to me!”

“Don’t shout.”

“If you don’t want to hear me shout, you are free to leave.” I clutch my left almost-breast as it aches suddenly. I flushed the estrogen this morning after my mother left for work.

“I just needed some time,” she says again. “I’ve been going to a support group for people going through what I’m going through.”

“What you’re going through?” I nearly scream. My wound convulses and the pain is staggering.

“We’re called ‘Trans Widows,’” she says. “Women who have lost their husbands or boyfriends when they transitioned to being women. But I don’t want to be without you.”

I’m in too much pain to speak. I sit down in the recliner and curl into a protective ball.

“I told you about college,” she says. “I’m flexible. I’ve been with
 women before.”

“I. am. not. a. woman,” I manage through gritted teeth.

“No, of course not. However you want to identify.”

I search the pockets of the robe and dry-swallow two fat pain pills. I cough one back up and swallow it again.

“I’ll get you some water.”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“Your mom is right, you are bitter.”

“Just get out. Leave me alone.”

“I still love you,’ she says.

“I can’t give you kids, or have sex, or make you happy. Go find an intact male to give you all those things,” I say coldly.

“Are you thinking of hurting yourself?” she asks in a small, frightened voice. “So many do.”

“That’s no longer any of your business.”

“But
”

“GET OUT!” I scream.

She runs from the house, and I watch the fireplace, crying.

—–

Tearing. I’m having a dream about tearing. It must be a dream. Nothing real could hurt this much. Pressure. Release. Relief.

I finally wake up enough to move and get out of bed. Blood covers the sheets and my underwear. The maxi pad I put on in case the post-op bleeding returned lies on the floor, a fat comma of black blood in the center.

I make it to the bathroom and clean myself up. It really is a wound; it will never heal. I remember the old joke, I don’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die. I’m so high on painkillers I giggle as I sit on the toilet and wipe blood out of myself.

I probe carefully, but I cannot feel the Alloderm tube. I spend a vertiginous few seconds imagining it retreating up into my body, undulating through my torso and limbs, a blind eel searching. The entire wound track is blazing with pain. It must be too far up there to feel. How deep a vagina did that goddamn doctor make? Was he getting me ready for 6-on-1 gangbang? He thinks I’m a slut! I giggle some more and take even more painkillers and go back to bed, a thick towel under me. I guess I am ready to die if the painkillers take me in the night. All my careful suicide plan ruined.

—–

I wake up, disoriented, still a little high, and with an odd sensation between my legs. I reach down and touch myself gently. There is something hanging out of my wound, muscular and supple. Prolapse! I think loudly. As I touch it there is no pain, just a feeling of pressure. I am about to scream to wake up my mother when it pulls into my body like a frightened tube worm.

Dreaming, dreaming, I must be dreaming. But the towel I put down has a long streak of slug-like slime running toward end of the bed. I can feel it inside the wound as the corpse skin makes itself comfortable. It presses against my bladder and I piss myself, just a bit.

I go back and think over the last few weeks until someone starts beating on the front door.

—–

I get out of bed when I hear my name and walk gingerly into the living room. It’s Detective Mata and her looming golem.

“You’re under arrest,” Bill says, clamping a huge hand on my shoulder.

“What for?” I blurt.

“The murder of Sarah Bradley,” Mata says.

“Sarah’s dead?” I ask. Am I still dreaming?

“And for suspicion of two more, the nurse and the doctor,” Bill says.

“Sarah,” I say and a sob escapes.

“Might be more convincing if you weren’t covered in blood,” Mata says. I look down at my bloody crotch and legs.

“Sarah’s dead?” I ask again, dazed.

“What did you do?” my mother asks in an anguished voice.

“I didn’t do anything. This is all a mistake,” I tell her as Bill handcuffs my hands behind my back.

“Oh, God!” she says, looking at the ceiling. “My daughter is a murderer!”

“Jesus Fucking Christ, Mom!” I scream. The Alloderm vagina wriggles with the joy of hate. It is going to kill my mother next, I know it.

As they march me out, a forensics team goes in, and I hear them announce the search warrant.

“Look what you did to your mother,” Bill says. He yanks on the handcuffs, drawing my arms up painfully and then pushes me down face-first into the driveway. I’m up and in a squad car before I can react.

—–

“Three dead,” Mata says, slapping down printed photos on the table I’m chained to. “Look at them!”

The nurse who stabbed me with a needle. The doctor who turned me into a mutilated freak. Sarah. Their mouths were open and bloody, the eyes so hemorrhaged they looked black. They all died frightened and in pain. Sarah. I wanted to rip the creature out of myself and feed it into a shredder. Tough and flexible. I’ll see about that.

“I didn’t hurt them, I didn’t kill them,” I say in a voice that sounds tired even to me. They let me sit in here for three hours before they began. They gave me some coffee, it smelled like a stomachache and I didn’t touch it. At least my passenger was quiet.

“We found DNA on the back of their teeth,” Bill says. He stands behind me and despite his size I can’t see him except in the room’s mirror. He settles both huge hands on my shoulders and leans in. “You know what that means, dontcha?”

“Epithelial cells,” Mata says, watching my face. “Skin cells. They were also all the way in the back of the throat.”

“But no seminal fluid,” Bill says. “Is that why you killed them? Because you can’t jizz no more?”

“I don’t have the equipment for that.”

“So’s you keep sayin’,” Bill drawls.

“Look at my medical records.” I have just enough slack in my chain to flick the doctor’s picture at Mata.

“You bruised the back of their throats you fucked their faces so hard,” Bill says in hoarse whisper.

I try to stand and he pushes me back down, hard.

“I can show you! You want to see it? Let me pull down my pants. But you better get ready for the smell.”

“Tell us how you did it then,” Bill grunts.

“It won’t even heal. It bleeds all the time.” I look Mata in the eye. “All the time.”

“Confess,” Bill hisses.

“You didn’t find my DNA, did you?”

“What we found doesn’t make any sense,” Mata says, glaring at me.

“So, it wasn’t my DNA.” Bill grinds my collarbones a bit for that one.

“It was a dead man’s DNA,” Bill says. “And when we figure out how you did it, your ass is mine.”

—–

The house is empty and cold when I get back from the police station. My mother has left a note saying she is staying at my aunt’s house for a few days. I get angry reading it and the murder tube writhes, and I cramp. My mother is next, I guess. I think about the dead eyes of Sarah in the photo.

I start a fire and sit on the couch wrapped up in a couple of blankets until I’m warm enough to move around the house. It takes me nearly fifteen minutes of searching but I eventually find a bottle of vodka Mom has stashed under the kitchen sink. I take a long, harsh pull off the bottle and retrieve my painkillers from the bedroom. I don’t know if I have enough left to kill myself but the vodka will help. If I wake up tomorrow, then I’ll refill my prescription and try again. Now that I’ve decided, I feel very calm.

The part that needs to go is already dead and I know it will survive me. I take off my clothes and squat in front of the blazing fireplace. I plunge my fingers into the wound before I spend too much time thinking about it. It goes in the fire when I get it out. The Alloderm is slippery and lubed liberally with blood. I catch the edge and it pulls itself out of my fingers. I go deeper and it does as well, burrowing its way further into me. Even with most of my hand in myself, I can’t get a grip on it.

If it won’t come out, then it stays in. Forever. I pull the poker out of the fire and stare at it glowing dully.

What do you do with a wound? You cauterize it.