Braids
Being human
Marilyn braided her beard. She was saving for electrolysis for the hair she had to shave on her upper lip, because she hated mustaches, but there was something about a long, braided beard that she liked.
She took her hormone meds. After the disruption of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery, the doctors were still trying to figure out the best way to restore a healthy hormonal profile. It wasn’t as simple as just discontinuing the cross-sex hormones, and there were health drawbacks to any combination. Marilyn was currently trying out a combination that was still on the high side of androgens for women.
She felt better on a higher than normal level of androgens. And her muscles, especially with her continued work-out schedule, were still bigger than the average woman, and she liked that. One of the reasons she had hated being a woman was because it had made her feel weak.
Madge and Dora were at the corner gym, working out, as usual, when Marilyn got to the gym. She had an awkward relationship with them. A lesbian couple, they’d been burned badly by the trans fads from the twenties, just as she had. And Marilyn wasn’t really sure what her orientation was anymore. It had been a hard and rocky road to accepting her femaleness, but she wasn’t sure where that left her sexually. For now, if it came up, she just told people she was asexual.
Marilyn got to the voice studio. She could do a wide range of adult characters – yes, even women’s voices. Without other cues, she sounded like a man, but she could also pitch her voice to sound like a deep-voiced woman. She just couldn’t do children at all.
“Marilyn Stimmer?” came a voice. “Where is she?”
“Over here!” she answered. Between her beard, flat chest, and low voice – the character she was doing was male – her presentation was very masculine.
“Oh my gawd!” said Ms. Director. “I’m so sorry. He/him? Or something else? Non-binary?”
The woman sounded like a breathless teenager, but looked to be in her forties or fifties. There were still a lot of left-overs in entertainment.
“I’m a woman,” Marilyn answered, “but you’ve never met me before. And I do some female characters, too.”
“So she/her?”
The others in the studio were beginning to whisper and snicker. It was a small town, only a little over 150,000, and of course everyone knew everyone in the entertainment field here. The director was obviously new to the town, not just to Marilyn, who was a standard fixture here.
“I said I’m a woman,” she said. “Figure it out.”
Fortunately, the Director read the anger. And also, the fact that she didn’t have the room at all. Back to work. The anime series was called “You’re Out of Your Mind.” They started working on the scene.
When she stepped out of the voice studio at the end of the day, she practically tripped over the glitterbug. That’s what she called them – people who were too thin, ethereal, with lots of sparkle. Usually lots of shimmery, transparent clothing too, but not this one. Shimmery, yes, but not transparent. She looked across the street and saw the marquee outside the hotel welcoming the Fantasy Convention. It must be a cosplayer.
“No, I’m not a glitterbug, I’m a sprite,” said the person, beating her wings. “And no, they’re not fairy wings. How many creature metaphors are you planning to mix?”
If the woman had tried to act ephemeral or cutesy, Marilyn would have walked right past her without saying a word. As it was, she laughed at the cranky, very bass voice.
“Let’s go to the Lunch Place,” the sprite said, and folded her wings against her back in a very bug-like, un-fairy-like gesture.
Marilyn followed her to an unmarked door, down a narrow hall, and then into a large room. There were lots of people there, cosplaying fairies, dragons, orcs, and other fantastic creatures that were vaguely familiar.
“Well, yes,” her guide told her. “They’re all familiar because you’re human, of course. It’s your fairy tales and mythologies we draw on. We can’t do human directly, just human once removed.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Marilyn said, and then put her hand to her mouth, gasping.
“Well, I wondered how long before you noticed,” the sprite said. “They were right, you fit right in here. Felt normal for me to be hearing your thoughts, right?”
“You just used the word “right” three times in as many phrases,” Marilyn answered. “Your writer is lazy…. And why did that seem like a perfectly normal thing to say?”
A tall man, looking like a Tolkien elf, walked over with a glass of something and handed it to Marilyn. He looked her over gravely. “Your beard is correct for a dwarf-maiden. But why don’t you have a mustache?” His voice was beautiful and resonant, but also high soprano.
Marilyn didn’t answer at once, but he stood there motionless, seeming to wait for an answer. “You can’t read my thoughts?” she asked, finally.
“Do I look like a sprite?” he asked, and the response was not snide but curious.
“So only sprites can read thoughts?” Marilyn asked.
“Apparently,” he said. “But you haven’t answered my question.”
“I don’t like mustaches,” Marilyn answered. “And I’m not a dwarf-maiden. I’m a human woman.”
“Will you be getting rid of the beard, then?” he asked. “Dwarf maidens are the only females who have beards. Except for side-show freaks.”
Marilyn started to get annoyed. “I told you, I’m human.”
“Do you want to be?” he asked. “You could stay here. Where you fit in.”
She looked around. “What about my job?”
“You could be a bard here, as well. It’s what you were doing in the other world.”
As the evening wore on, she told stories and ate and drank with creatures that were like those from fairy tales, but not quite. Then she fell asleep.
When Marilyn woke up, she was back in her bedroom in the real world, and the alarm had just gone off. Another day at the voice studio. But everything about the previous evening was still clear in her head. It didn’t seem drug-induced, but then, what else could it be?
She turned on her screen, and checked her email. There was something from her brother. After the divorce, their mother had had custody of both of them, originally, but she had refused to support Marilyn when she’d wanted to transition to male. So she’d gone to their father. Her brother had stayed with their mother.
Her brother was in town for the Fantasy Convention, and had decided to look her up. He wanted to meet her at the atrium in the hotel. She printed out the email with the info, but when she picked up the paper off her printer, one side was the black and white of the email, but the other was full of color. There was an image of the sprite and the elf and words, in fancy calligraphy, saying “To see us again, choose blue. Otherwise, the portal will close.”
As she went about her normal day’s routine for a Friday, she looked at the printout in her hand from time to time. “Choose blue?” What did that mean?
After she was done with work for the day, she went to meet her brother. He was right where he had said he would be, and she started walking towards him. She saw him catch sight of her and pause. Would he recognize her? Would he still want to see her? What would their mother have told him about her?
Her heart sank when his steps slowed down, coming towards her. But there was something about the way he was walking now. It was as if he were approaching a rabbit. He didn’t want to scare her off.
“Me?” she thought. “Scared?!” She headed toward him deliberately.
He saw her pace change, from uncertainty to anger. Instead of taking the warning to be cautious, he strode out just as deliberately and surely as she was doing.
Then he was there, having not slowed his pace at all, and he had crushed her in his arms. “Sis, you’re alive!” was all he said, and she had to push to get him to let her go.
He took a step back, then, but touched her face, her beard. So many strange looks in his face – an unbelieving smile, moist eyes, a frown. “So,” he said, “you’re a dwarf maiden, now. A real one. Not like the Rings of Power.”
Then she looked up at him. Her little brother.
“I hated that they didn’t give Disa a beard,” she said. “It was part of the lore. And Disa isn’t a maiden. And neither am I.”
“So you have a … partner?” he asked, uncertainly.
“Not any more,” she said. She saw him trying to determine if it was safe to ask any more questions. He was still thinking of her as a rabbit, who might skitter away.
“It doesn’t matter,” he added, quickly. “Male, female, trans…. Just, I just found you again. Don’t go away. Please?”
“It does matter,” she said. “But I don’t know what I am anymore. Except that I’m a woman. I know that now. What that means … I’m not sure.”
“Why don’t you start with dwarf woman?” he said. “Do you want to go to the Fantasy Convention at the hotel across the street? I know you’re a voice actor. They’ll have stuff from ‘You’re Out of Your Mind’ there.”
“Isn’t the con sold out already?” she asked.
“Yup. But it turns out my girlfriend couldn’t make it,” he said. “She thought she’d be deployed back to the States by now, but it was delayed. She won’t be here until a couple of weeks after the con.”
They walked into the con, and he checked in by scanning the QR code on his phone. “Packet or access?” asked the person behind the table.
“I just have my phone with me,” Marilyn answered. “Packet.”
“Access for me,” said her brother.
They walked over to a place in the atrium of the hotel where they could sit down. He shrugged off his backpack and set it on the ground, then pulled his notepad out and turned it on. Meanwhile, Marilyn opened the packet and looked at the schedule.
A tall Tolkien elf came by. “Dwarf?” he asked her, and for some reason she was surprised that his voice wasn’t soprano. She nodded.
“I like the beard. Nice braid pattern. But where’s the mustache?”
“Dwarf women don’t have mustaches,” she answered.
“Is that in the lore?” he asked, frowning.
“It doesn’t contradict it,” said her brother. “Like Disa.”
All three of them joined then, in common disgust for Disa’s beardlessness.
Another Tolkien elf walked up then, with a tray of drinks. “Of course,” the elf said, with a high soprano voice. “Everyone knows dwarf women don’t have mustaches.”
Marilyn looked over the various colored drinks, and then took the glass with the red drink from the tray and took a sip. She half expected the elf to disappear into thin air, but he didn’t. He just walked away with the tray until he was out of sight in the crowd, and she never saw him again.
“You know that chick?” her brother asked, following where she was looking.
“Yes,” she answered. “Another detrans. Male.”
“Oh, sorry,” he said, but she laughed at him.
“Not like you could tell,” she said.
“Nope. You’re right,” he said, and smiled. “Head over to the vendor rooms?” he asked.
The other elf walked over with them. “No mustache?” he said. “That could fit….”
Later that night, they went up to their rooms.
“You and your girlfriend reserved separate rooms?” Marilyn asked, surprised.
“We’re pretty conservative. Evangelical. And both military. I mean, I’m ex-military, she’s still in. We’re going to get married in June.”
“A June wedding? How unique,” she said.
“Yeah,” he answered. “We’re a regular cliché.”
He slid the card to unlock the door to his room.
“Marilyn? Are you okay?” he asked, seeing her shake her head as she unlocked the door to her own room.
“It was just…” she said, “like a dream. I had to make a choice. And one of them ended here, with you.”
“You chose me?” he asked, awed.
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Well, that covers all the bases.”
Then she paused, tilting her head to one side as if she were listening to someone else.
“I chose the red pill instead of the blue. And that was always going to end up here with you.” She opened the door to her own room and went in.