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3.

    While attempting to clock out, the antique touch screen mounted next to the employee exit prompted Dani to approve a tardiness coaching. The message declared the day’s hours would be reduced by fifteen minutes per her “conversation with MOD Evan”. Dani clicked around the window hoping it would disappear; her pokes turned into jabs. She stopped herself before having to add something else to her growing list of mistakes. Evan owed her an actual confrontation if he was going to steal her pay, not that she was going to confront him about it. Dani approved the non-coaching and shoved open the employee exit.

    Fall had arrived in Massachusetts last night. The slightly crisp air didn’t register until after she walked a few blocks. The movement between seasons used to feel so magical. Dani and Roxy would ring in their favorite season with tarot drawings, witchy candles, and their enormous box of Halloween decorations. Cliché autumnal pick-me shit, but she always looked forward to it. Not this year. Fuming and exhausted, Dani reached the main bridge across the Connecticut River. Cursing under her breath, Dani accepted she wasn’t ready to face an evening being ignored or lectured at for her fuckups. After a long day spent on display for every customer to transvestigate, Daring Café’s resident stealth transsexual just didn’t have any more room for social interactions. A vague sadness crept in as she realized this meant her girlfriend was now included in the category of “social interactions”. Dani forced her head to empty and took a right, heading south; the long way home would fix her.

    A mile down the Connecticut, Dani crossed a smaller, rusty metal foot bridge that led into the woods. She peaked over the railing at her distorted reflection. It glared back. Dani’s cropped red flannel jacket, which she had bought long before she was the correct gender for it, blended with waves stained by fading sunlight. Red shuffled and mangled the world around this hunched other her. Dani pulled back her shoulders, berating herself for her bad posture. The reflection followed suit. A honk ripped her out of her trance, and she passed out of sight of the street.

    Dani used to take this path every now and then, when she had something big to chew on. It was in these woods, three years ago, that she first devised how to tell Roxy she was a chick. Over the past few months, she found herself taking the long way home almost every day. What began as a sacred ritual had become a desperate attempt to feel any comfort at all. Around this time of year, she kept an eye out for a type of red lichen that covered the rocks and trees. During a nature walk she and Roxy once went on, the guide explained it was called British Soldier Lichen. At the end of each stalk of fungal matter sat a small red spore, giving it the appearance of a tiny British soldier marching along the roots of the woods. This fall it was everywhere. The dim red sunlight lit the little crimson fungus that poked out from the dead leaves covering the forest floor. It was her favorite color. Not red in general, but the strange red aura this place emitted for a few weeks. Dani couldn’t help but let a little, creeping love of her lonely secret in. It wasn’t as comforting as it used to be, but it was all she had.

    A surefire sign that you’re trans, one the WPATH fuckers ignore in their endless pursuit of asking how often you stole your mom’s dresses or makeup, is the ability to find places to hide. For Dani, it started young. She’d hide in the bathroom at the old ballroom the local church used for etiquette classes. The other kids refused to talk to her or touch her during the dance portions. It made her want to disappear. After getting caught a few times, Dani’s mom stuck around to make sure she didn’t get away with it. Years went by and Dani learned to find better hiding spots, one’s nobody would discover. The creepy basement at her old high school, that one family restroom down a long hallway at Bradley International Airport, these woods; the perpetual discomfort of being trans gave her a sixth sense for hideaways.

    Halfway home, Dani deviated from the forest trail to find one such lonely place. The red lichen was denser here, almost like it was leading her to the clearing. Unlike some of her other favorite spots, this one was just secluded enough without having to take a lengthy hike. She stumbled into it one evening while lost in thought. In the center, a large, flat rock lay partially hidden by the grass. Dani truly hated people. She hated how they looked at her. She hated feeling like a perpetual outsider. What Dani loved was dirt – a holdover from the park ranger aspirations she had before transitioning derailed everything. This hyper fixation was a secret that she kept from everyone except Roxy. It just didn’t seem feminine enough. Not even Roxy knew about this place, though. In private, Dani would visit this clearing to lift the stone, revealing a microhabitat of invertebrates living in its shade. Hundreds of pill bugs, beetles, springtails, worms, and the like writhed in their own private little world, unconcerned with the machinations of humans and other animals. It wasn’t good that she disrupted their little paradise so often these days, but she couldn’t help herself.

    Dani hoisted up the slab. With one hand, she pulled out her phone to illuminate the soil. A gasp left her lips the instant her eyes adjusted. The thriving insectoid world was destroyed; a secret apocalypse had occurred sometime in the last week. Even the best hiding spots don’t last forever. Between the carcasses of an untold number of detritivores, strange, red chunks of molted skin lay scattered. Based on the size, they belonged to some large creature completely unknown to Dani. Her first thought was a reptile, but reptile skin was clear like cicada shells. These remains were too damaged to identify. They led through the carnage to the center of the stone’s imprint. There, stabbed deep into the earth, was a hole about ten inches in diameter. More of that red lichen oozed out of the soil’s wound. A strange feeling tickled her spine and millions of flickering shapes obscured her vision as her left eye began to vibrate again. In an instant, she realized that the stone was falling. She dropped her phone and jumped out of the way of the rock before it hit her shins. It crashed into the ground with a loud, resonant thud and the strange sensation in her eye vanished.

    Whatever this is, I can't afford to fix it. She pulled her soil-caked phone out from beside the rock and inspected it. Like the trees and dirt around her, it was now covered in that strange red lichen. Some of it had even rubbed off on her fingers. She sat still by the stone for a while. At some point the sun set. Once she was confident that the feeling in her eye wasn’t coming back, she stood and turned back towards the trail. Dani did not find the peace she was looking for in her lonely, crimson woods.

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