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Larry

It hits me as I am getting ready for bed, thinking of the UFO interview I recently did. My mother reliably sent my uncle Larry all my media about Bigfoots, aliens, and the paranormal world, which he enjoyed, having had experiences or opinions. He never saw my interview. He was too incapacitated in the hospital to bother with a video--and my nervous laughter about Disclosure would not be where one would start. Now, he never will see it.

It is something we had in common, though we only communicated about it by proxy my mother: I wouldn't have known how to contact him more directly.

He gave me an antler he suggested was alien proximal, which I kept around my living room because I thought it was cool. Amber suggested once leaving it in the woods to return to the earth, but I declined and am grateful for this now.

No thank you

I ask my therapist what he thinks. I had been detailing my life since our last session, beginning with my uncle dying. He didn't probe anything, so I kept talking until he found a thread worth exploring.

The only topic he is remotely interested in is my disinclination to have children, which undisguisedly baffles him. I did not bring this up this session--though it is among the reasons I returned to therapy. My goal was to reduce my anxiety in general and with the topic in specific, but not change my mind about it. I do not want to have to take a sick day because I am shivering from how much I have been triggered.

Peachy?

I come into the first day of work to find nothing has changed, in that there has been a cavalcade of changes that will prove inconsequential. My colleagues have the same conversations as we wait to be let through the gate. A woman calls me Quackendaddy, which is the epithet bestowed by a girl who crushed on me (and subsequently made a graphic PowerPoint about blowing me). She has not been a resident here in years. We no longer house girls because we never should have. It was mismanagement from on high that someone thought it was the best use of the space and girls. Though this is not the sex offender facility, it may be owing more to a lack of opportunity than desire. The way the boys treated the very idea that they were housed behind razor wire with three to ten girls (or transboys) bordered on hyenas aware of a felled gazelle upstairs, behind only one locked door.

This was not the Democrats' spread

Amber and I do not, per se, care about the local Democratic party. I'm sure they are fine people overall, and we are likelier to back their candidates down the ticket absent a compelling third-party comptroller who cannot cause too much upset if they do not get in. As Amber points out twice, just out of the Democrats' earshot, we are Green Party members. We know there are only seventeen of us in Red Hook, as a Green Party judge came to our door years ago to personally woo us--after sending two handwritten letters. There were four spots and five candidates, so the personal touch may have been wasted on us. (He did win. When I saw him months later and congratulated him, he had no memory of me, the ingrate.)

Not Ren

Ren and I speak past two when the restaurant closes—though it is curious that a restaurant doesn't care about dinner. The staff trickles out, some waving goodbye as though we are regulars, and this is just what we do every weekend. We ask if we ought to make ourselves scarce, but the staff assure us they will sweep around us.

Ren began our first meeting by asking my favorite cryptid, Gef the Talking Mongoose, about whom I had written a book. They followed up by telling me about a few cryptids with whom I am not acquainted, one of which is a ghostly Megatherium that once tromped about the woods of Sherman, New York.

Not a turtle

The child sits out of the county fair bathroom wearing a shirt reading, "There Are Only Two Genders," in white print on black. For all the effort someone made in creating it, it might be Times New Roman. Such things are rarely haute couture or made of material intended to end up as hand-me-downs. Three washes and it will be indecipherable lint.

They are the sort of young and obese where gender characteristics are notional, compounding the irony of this loose shirt. I settle on them being male because they are next to a boy, and I can't imagine most girls that age would consent to wear something so stupidly tacky (and poorly designed) in private, to say nothing of in public around so many strangers of every age. Girls tend to be more image-conscious and feel they are the main characters on the stage sooner.

I don't fault the boy.