Fleet: A Transgender Sci Fi story

By Sandra McDonald

For Isa Howard, a transgendered woman on Guam, life after the apocalypse is filled with family, fishing, and waiting for the return of civilization. When a trip across the island goes wrong, she must choose between saving herself and serving her community. It's no choice at all. Reprinted in the Year's Best Science Fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandra McDonald
• Release date: Dec 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310612299

Sandra McDonald

SANDRA MCDONALD has been a Hollywood assistant, a software instructor, a bureaucrat, and an officer in the US Navy. Her short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Her novels include The Outback Stars and The Stars Down Under. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

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Fleet

Copyright 2013 by Sandra McDonald

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FLEET

by Sandra McDonald

When I officially became a girl, I took the new name of Isa. At the time I was nine years old.

In the Umatac village records I’m still a male named Magahet Joseph Howard USN. It’s good luck to be given the name of an ancestor from Before Silence. My brother calls me Shithead, because he’s my brother. But most people call me Bridge, because the governors gave me that. Someone in every village is appointed to stand with one dusty foot in the past and the other planted in the Great Future, ready to take action when ships appear on the blue horizon.

Sounds important. Don’t be fooled. We’re not some backwards cargo cult, building mock radio towers in the magical hope of luring back civilization. Civilization will come again, regardless. We’re sure of it.

It’s hot today, late afternoon. I’m sitting on the beach and thinking hard about taking a nap. A dozen yards offshore, blue waves roll around Fouha Rock, where the gods created mankind. No kidding: it’s a giant limestone phallus jutting out of the sea.

What are you staring at, Shithead? my brother Rai shouts when the canoes return.

Your tiny shriveled-up balls, I yell back.

The men laugh. Among them is my husband Pulan Robert, who comes to me at night with reverence and good humor. He has a second wife, Kami Brittany, who bears him our children and hopes that one day I’ll be gored to death by a boonie pig. She can’t say that too loudly, though, for fear I’ll call down upon her a vengeful taotaomo’na. Those are the spirits that slink through the nunu trees under moonlight, and moan during storms as if in great pain, and brush their invisible cold