A Natural History of Transition

By Callum Angus

A Natural History of Transition is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Metonymy Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781999058883

Callum Angus

Callum Angus is a trans writer, editor, and independent scholar living in Portland, OR. He has received fellowships from Lambda Literary and Signal Fire Foundation for the Arts, has presented research at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, and was a 2018 Writer-in-Residence at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. A former bookseller at Powell's and the independent Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA, he holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a BA in geography from Mount Holyoke College, and has taught writing at Smith College, UMass Amherst, and at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. He's also worked in publicity for Catapult Books, Counterpoint Press, and Soft Skull Press, and founded the literary journal smoke + mold.

Book preview

IN KIND

After he gave birth at the hospital, they wrapped up the cocoon—the size of a loaf of bread, still damp from being inside him—and told Nathan to keep an eye on it, to give it fluids, that this happens sometimes, and they told him to not tell anyone. For the first twenty-four hours, he watched it from the corner of his bedroom. He lay it down inside a shoebox, unable to bring himself to put the cocoon in the crib. He could have sworn he saw it twitch. He put his face close to the opaque carapace, thinking he could glimpse some fingers or the struts that gave the wings their shape, but it was impossible to tell what was inside the murky soup. He thought the hospital had tricked him, that when they saw his shape laid out on the table, the scars on his wrists, the longer scars on his chest, they decided he couldn’t be trusted with the fresh canvas of a new person, so they gave him this instead. And then the thought occurred to him that this was the only thing that made sense coming out of his body: a nondescript brick, a game of wait and see.

---

Dot had seen her son in person only three times since learning over the phone about Nathan’s desire to live as a man. The pronouncement arrived following a five-year period of silence unexplained by either party, and yet a muting that both had adhered to with a monkish fervor. Each subsequent meeting was a cause to scan his body for changes, while Nathan squirmed like the flatworms he’d dissected in high school biology, wriggling in anticipation of the knife on the glass. Dot did not turn out to be the overly nosey mother he’d been warned of on message boards, nor did she appear squeamish when he explained the process of his weekly injection to her over brunch; she observed him coolly, like a gardener monitoring the progress of a patch of summer squash—not a prize vegetable, but one valued for its high nutrient density that would freeze well for winter. As the only child of a single mother, Nathan had been relatively certain that Dot couldn’t afford to cut him off completely—even though they weren’t close, she would need him later on; already her back throbbed during her rounds as a nurse in the ICU.

It was at their fourth meeting as mother and son that Nathan gathered the courage to tell Dot about his plans to become a parent. She sat expressionless as he ran out of breath explaining that he didn’t want to wait to find the right person, and even if he did, what if they didn’t have the same desire? He’d considered adoption, but when he discovered the extensive background check and social-service interviews he’d have to go through, he knew the likelihood of his being approved to be a parent by the government was dim at best, given that most states wanted their families to parcel out mothers and fathers into different bodies.

So you’ll have it yourself, said Dot. Nathan flinched. He wished she hadn’t called his unborn child it. True, the baby was still a hypothetical, but she might have said the baby or a child. But he let it slide. Perhaps he was simply oversensitive ever since the time his mother—flustered in the crush of traffic and without any cash—had called him it to the tollbooth operator.

Yes, said Nathan. I’ve still got all the parts. Once I start menstruating again it could be a matter of weeks.

Why would you want to be pregnant?

Have you been listening? I don’t want to exactly...

The thought of pregnancy filled Nathan with dread, but he was going to do it because it was the only way. For his whole life he’d felt like the corks in one of those coffee tables compressed under glass, a smooth surface but the contents under pressure, and he wanted to be something—to do something—explosive, something to break the glass. But if he’d said this aloud, Dot would have asked why wasn’t his first transformation enough? And if he was going to be a mother, then why had he transformed at all? And then he wouldn’t be able to do anything except leave lunch hungry and full of adrenaline.

Nobody likes being pregnant, she said, leaning over and giving him a pat on his clasped hands. You’ll endure it just like anybody else.

Nathan understood this offering of tacit approval, and wanted to know if this meant he could ask her about her own pregnancy. What had worried her, what strange foods did she crave, and did she eat them in bed or in the tub? But Dot snapped closed her pocketbook, the waiter came with the signature copy, and the moment dissolved. She put on a tight-lipped smile as she tipped ten percent, and in the waning minutes of their fourth meeting she collected her detritus from among the empty plates—phone, compact, credit card, purse—until she was a self-sufficient planet once more with her own center of gravity, no longer feeling the destabilizing pull of the man who used to be her daughter. As soon as they rose and walked from the patio table, a flock of tiny sparrows took it over, chattering softly as they hopped from chairback to tabletop for the leftover crumbs of bruschetta. They reminded Nathan of his mother’s birds who showed up daily at the feeders outside her kitchen window. Dot refilled the feeders every day, cigarette gripped in one hand as she made sure the large metal spinning discs were firmly in place to keep the squirrels away, even though they only made the squirrels work smarter for their share. She kept the bags of sunflower seeds and millet in the garage, where it smelled of musty seed and corn, in aluminum trash cans, and when he was younger Nathan would sneak out and sink his arm elbow deep in the seed just to feel the softness, to feel the way it sucked him in and held him.

---

As a woman, he’d been considered loud, boisterous, brash (sometimes obnoxiously so), the class clown, and the goofball on teams and at sleepovers. But as a man he was reserved, bookish, almost too private and buttoned-up. Nathan didn’t feel he’d changed much going from one to the other, only that the yardstick had moved. What Nathan had had to do in order to have a child of his own was arrest metamorphosis, press rewind for a short while, as long as it took to start bleeding again. Then it was relatively straightforward, like any other pregnancy, only as soon as the baby was out of him he’d be back on testosterone.

But now he was shaken by how quickly it had all happened. He’d stockpiled vials of the viscous liquid, clear and slow to move around the tiny bottle, in his medicine cabinet next to a syringe, a carrot on a stick comforting with its presence, with the option, so he wouldn’t have to go back through the rigamarole of therapists and letters and gee doc I really have felt like a man my whole life, when really he didn’t know, who really knew? It had relieved him then, but now he scanned the list of indecipherable compounds, the only thing he’d ever injected into his body, and he wondered. He hated wondering. But it was hard not to look at the cocoon on the other side of the room and keep at bay the thoughts of pod people.

---

Dot felt a lump in her breast while she was taking a shower. It was small and hard, but felt like the silicone model they’d practiced on in nursing school with the tiny bean lodged inside. The rest of the afternoon she watched the birds, thinking about several things at once: how inside her son there grew a child, and inside her, a tumor; how many times she’d changed IVs and administered meds to terminally ill patients, how several of the lucky ones had said to her after their miraculous recoveries that they appreciated her bedside manner—not plucky, not saccharine, but seeing the situation for what it was and treating them with a kind of noble gravity. This manner had seeped into her character without her ever really noticing, she decided, and furthermore it was completely useless to her now as patient, as a limb of the family tree waiting to be lopped off.

She called Nathan, and he answered with a What’s up, Dot? She could hear him doing something, soft thumping as if he was kneading bread, pausing to wipe sweat from the soft part of his neck that she remembered even after years of lost contact, which now was covered with coarse and patchy hair. Instead of telling him about the cancer, she asked about his day, and Nathan—who was feeling special because he was usually the one who dialed the phone and asked his mother questions about her health, her job, the weather—launched into the story of his most recent checkup, telling Dot all in a rush what he’d learned.

Hello? Are you there? he said.

Oh, yes. Sorry, I’m driving. What did you say?

It’s a girl. Nathan paused for a beat, then let out a laugh. Isn’t that funny? I mean, I’m so excited, but it’s like a bad joke.

Dot’s favorite cardinal landed on the feeder with a flash of scarlet. It began to surgically pick out the largest sunflower seeds and crack open the hulls with its beak, gobbling the soft meat inside, discarding the black shells in a flurry of precise movement.

She heard herself ask, What if I came to stay with you for a little while?

Silence. The kneading sound stopped. She pictured him wiping flour off on an apron, white streaks left behind as he adjusted to her suggestion.

Just to help out, she added, almost wishing she could take it back. You won’t be working in the bakery right up until you go into labor. You’ll need help.

I have friends, Dot. They’ve been really helpful so far... This was not exactly true. Nathan had a few friends, but some were strung out along the internet, popping up infrequently like buoys on a fishing line, and others were around but eternally busy. He didn’t hold this against them; most, like himself, came from poor models of family in the first place. They remembered birthdays, brought vegan dishes to potlucks, arranged vigils, but they also forgot to pay bills for months in a row, rarely did laundry, were bad at forgiveness. What if one day soon they no longer cared for him? And the biggest reason of all was that he hadn’t told them about the baby, in case something went wrong or he changed his mind and had to explain himself. He preferred their ignorance to sympathy. True, Dot had wavered at times. It had only been a few months since they started talking regularly again. Maybe this would be good for them.

Alright, he said. You can stay.

---

At the hospital, one sympathetic nurse slipped him a business card with the address of an old converted mill, a hulking brick honeycomb that sat on the riverbank spewing art and grant writers. At the support group, all anyone talked about was molting, but no one knew when or if it would happen.

At night, it makes a clicking noise that sounds like a katydid.

My husband hasn’t come home for longer than twenty minutes at a time. I don’t know where he sleeps.

I heard that in Indonesia, we’re considered prophets. And then, after it molts, they kill us and predict the future by which way our blood runs down the hill.

Nathan rolled his eyes; he figured if there were other parents like him on the other side of the world they were likely just as freaked out as he was, and probably just as lonely. Maybe that was it, he thought as he drove away from the mill, maybe the lack of people in his life deprived that developing bundle of cells of any other templates, and so it was left to mold and shape the leftover pieces of Nathan into a hunk of unformed clay.

All I’m capable of making is more change. The sound of his own voice surprised him—he had not spoken out loud in the presence of the cocoon. Perhaps it would crack open, reveal its interior like a sacred artifact responding to the secret password. He looked for movement in the rearview mirror. Nothing.

A feeling of defiance took hold of him then. Why shouldn’t he carry this cocoon around like any other baby? He turned into the grocery store parking lot, unbuckled the cocoon from the car seat, and strode purposefully inside. The cocoon couldn’t be placed in the baby seat of the shopping cart—it had no legs to anchor it in place and flopped over sadly—so Nathan cradled it in one arm and pushed the cart through the aisles with the other. He marveled at how nervous he’d been during his pregnancy about just this sort of mundane activity, how he would look: a man holding a baby on his hip, how everyone would assume the child held only his genes and not the memory of being inside him. Now that old fear was gone completely, for it was clear to him that people