I’ll tell you her name is Elenor. Like one of my favorite movie heroines. Elen for short. Grandma Elen.

She’s my only Grandma left now.

She’s possibly the tallest woman besides me on her side of the family, and she’s got curly hair I didn’t get. And she’s pretty skinny now. Enough to shock me a little, but not enough to truly worry me. She’s old.

She’s propped up in her bed by several pillows, her hands laid gently on her hips, full of soft tremors. Besides the baseline exhaustion that a few years of Parkinson’s has left her with, she looks well to me, and smiles when I peek in the door to see if she’s awake.

She’s so awake.

I give her a sort of smiling frown, and glance back out down the hallway meaningfully.

“Oh, I know, Sarah,” she says. “Come in.”

Her room is all soft blues and creams, with little hints of gold, lemon, green, and pink here and there. Besides the dark wood trim of the baseboards and furniture, that is. The quilt on her bed has large squares with embroidered berry vines and fruit trees in them.

And there’s a vase full of pink roses on her bed stand, taking up almost all the room there, crowding out her books, alarm clock radio, glass of water, box of tissues, and second pair of glasses. It’s kind of ridiculous.

As I enter the room and move toward the chair that’s been placed beside her bed, I can’t stop myself from glancing at her with all of my senses to really see her fully, and I see exactly what I guess I expect and stop.

I find myself looking thoughtfully in the direction of Mom, through the wall of the room, unerringly at her.

“What is it?” Grandma Elen asks.

“I think… that you, me, and mom have way more in common than I ever realized,” I say, absolutely not sure I want to explain that.

She smiles, and says, “You know, I always thought you were so analytical and observant. It’s nice to see you’ve still got it.”

I allow myself to smile softly, and say as I sit down, “I’m not sure that’s me exactly, but thank you.”

“Oh, well, yes, part of you is. The other part is very creative,” she says. “It’s such a powerful combination. It should take you far. It’s so unfair that you’re sick like me, but you look well, and now you’re getting published?”

“Yep! Actually, I might be feeling a lot less sick lately, too. We seem to have found some treatments that are working for me.”

“Oh, that’s so good to hear!” She grins, and moves her hand toward mine, but doesn’t reach all the way.

I lean forward and grab her hand so that we can both at least pretend to give each other a little squeeze. She manages. She’s still got some strength and coordination in her yet. Her skin has been freshly moisturized, but her hand is a bit cold.

I make a point of looking lightly concerned, and ask if she needs her mittens or to turn the heat up, even though it’s the middle of summer.

She shakes her head, and says that she’s just fine. Her hands just feel cold to others a lot now. It’s what getting old does.

“But,” she says, “You tell the rest of our family I plan on sticking around long enough to read all your books. OK? And I want you to write a lot of them!”

I think my laugh might betray nervousness or embarrassment, but my smile is genuine and I ask, “You haven’t been telling them that yourself? That might explain why they’re not actually trying to burn me at the stake yet!”

“Oh, come now!” Her voice is full of humor, not real scorn, but there is a warning tone to it.

I shrug and look out her window at the dog house in the backyard, where I had been sitting earlier, and the big elm tree that towers over it. The neighborhood behind that tableau looks so alien to me now, I can hardly register what it is I’m seeing beyond the fence.

The blue and white Cascade mountains off on the horizon make me think of Mau Rro, the Monster’s temple to Phage that now houses the Sunspot’s Tunnel Apparatus.

“Yeah, well,” I hear myself saying. It’s my voice and the words I’d choose, but it feels like someone is saying them for me. “I’m not sure I should talk about my disagreements with your children anyway. It seems rude. Maybe we all know what’s going on. And this whole thing is supposed to be for you.”

“It sure seems like a big to-do about someone,” she says. “But I didn’t ask for it.”

I shake my head, “I should have come up sooner, on my own. Somehow.”

“Oh. But you’re here now,” she says. “Tell me what you see when you look at me and your Mom? I want to hear about that.”

I look back at her to study her for a bit, pushing my mouth to the side amiably. She’s got that look in her eye, like she’s stepping into her old role as radio hostess, getting ready to interview me.

It’s her favorite game.

But I can’t just outright say it. I need to deflect. But maybe I can hint and see if she lets us know what she knows.

“Well, I mean, OK, so. It’s more than just how our faces kind of have the same shape, right?” I say. “We have the same set of expressions, and we laugh the same way. You know, typical family stuff. But I think I’m realizing how we three sort of react the same way to things.”

“Oh? How do you mean?”

She’s long let go of my hand, and I now lean back and fold my arms, squinching my mouth up a bit while I pick my words, “We three each have a sort of impatience. Like, I don’t really see it in anybody else. Mom’s impatience has been aimed at me so much, I didn’t really relate to it, though. Like, but with you, I get it.” I gesture at the roses.

She laughs.

I gesture again. “Why?” I ask. “Who doesn’t know you hate roses?”

“I think it’s Penny,” she says, smirking. “If you could move them, I’d really appreciate it.”

I nod and get up and lift up the vase and pause, looking at her, “To the trash, or just any old place?”

“I don’t care,” she sounds genuinely exasperated. But then she says, “Maybe on the floor just by the door. Let someone else take them away, when they realize I’m done with them.”

“I don’t think it’s going to happen that way, but OK,” I tell her and move to do as she asks.

“I’ll make sure it does.”

I shake my head some more, and say, “My favorite flowers were always the daffodils you had hanging from the eves over the back porch. So gorgeous in the morning sunlight.”

“Mine’s the wisteria. Though the hydrangea is a close second,” she says.

I wince, knowing that those have both been removed. Does she even know? Her voice suggests maybe. She sounds wistful and a little resentful, maybe.

I come back to sit down again, and say, “I miss staying with you here when I was a kid. Even though my childhood was all wrong and I wish I could have come out before then, I really miss it. And going for walks with you and Kensington.”

“Oh, that dog!” Then she pats the bed once with the side of her shaky hand. “Tell me what it’s like to talk to a publisher! I’ve always wanted to do that. And tell me about your books!”

“Well, I can’t say that our publisher is typical,” I tell her. “They’re small and queer and work out of Portland, so I feel like I’m getting some special treatment a lot of their authors might not get. Meeting my editor in person is pretty swank, actually. And kinda weird.”

“Really.”

“It’s kind of a lot weird, honestly, how they’re the first publisher we submitted to. They responded within a week, too. And didn’t balk when we sent their contract back to negotiate it. There were things they didn’t want to change, but they took our critical adjustments without complaint. I think Peter, our housemate, helped us look at it from a good perspective and prioritize it well, though,” I explain.

I notice she’s smiling at me. Almost another smirk. But I don’t quite get why and I keep going.

“So, then, our editor is named Karen, of all things. I mean, she’s the editor. They’re a small press. But she took the time to meet with us at our favorite coffee shop, and I think maybe we really tested her, and she didn’t balk. So, now we’re wrapping up final edits on our first book, and it’s going to be released on time. And we’re writing the third book already!”

“That’s incredible!” She grins. “Is it anything like proposing a show for the radio?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “We haven’t tried that. What’s it like?”

“Well, you’ve gotta make a pitch,” she says. “I wrote mine up as a letter and sent it in to the general manager of the station. But you have to know the format of the station and consider their audience and the kinds of things they might want, and see where that intersects with your own interests. Fortunately, I just wanted a way to talk to people that was orderly and purposeful, and where I could listen to what other people were interested in. So it didn’t matter to me what the topic was.” She shrugs. “It was a college station, so, you know, almost anything goes. I pitched it as a kind of local version of Fresh Air from Public Radio. Not that I could ever really be Terry Gross. And I told them I’d alternate, focusing on both local townsfolk and the students, so there’d be a purposeful mixing of interests. They liked that.”

Something she says there gets me thinking along an earlier tangent. I find that I remember I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon, since talking to Orin. 

I squint and shake my head a little and say, “That reminds me of how I meet people and make friends.”

“You send them pitches?” she teases me.

“No!” I say. “I mean that looking for an orderly and purposeful conversation, and sparking people’s interests. When we’re not meeting our best friends, and when we can afford it, I like to go to a coffee shop and set up with my sketchbook and a refillable coffee and just draw. Like, at a table with an extra chair, right next to the front door if possible. Or the middle of the room. And then, sometimes, another customer will come over to see what I’m doing and start asking questions. And, like, most of the time, we just become acquaintances, but that’s good enough. But it’s basically how we found Erik and the Murmuration. More or less. I mean, the Murmuration heard us talking with Erik about stuff we had in common, but it’s basically the same thing.”

She has a glint in her eye, and she asks, “The Murmuration?”

Oh, it’s been that long.

“Uh, the Audreys? Audrey?” I prompt her. “Do you remember us talking about Audrey last time we were up?”

There’s that smirk again.

“What?” I ask.

She appraises me like maybe she’s got a local politician on the ropes and is about to ask the big gotcha question she’s always bragged about, and then she hits me with it, “Whatever happened to your imaginary friends? Goreth and Phage, was it?”

I can’t believe how amazingly dumbfounded I am. I’m utterly discombobulated by how I didn’t see this coming or happening or how I was just now unconsciously participating in the lead up to this question. I’d slipped and had been saying ‘we’ when I’d meant to use ‘I’.

And a bunch of things come back to me, and it feels like I’m shifting through realities, sliding through the multiverse to realign in the timeline that I’d actually chosen, instead of the one I’d assumed I was in.

Of course she knows we’re plural. We’d come out to the whole family about it a few years ago. It’s why we were in Portland now in the first place. And she was the only one who hadn’t reacted with confusion or hostility over it. Just curiosity, and maybe an inability to really, truly grasp it.

But, by the time we’d come out to her, we were exhausted and wary and worried, and really didn’t push it. Her acceptance took us so off guard, we’d changed the subject at the slightest hint she maybe didn’t get it after all.

Imaginary friends.

By the time I come back to the moment, our mouth is partially open and I’m feeling around one of our roughly applied low-budget fillings with our tongue and looking at her. I close our lips and hold in a breath for a moment, then say, “No, Grandma. I’m the imaginary friend. Goreth’s the one who used to talk to me. And Phage is, well…”

“I always wondered.”

“OK. No,” I say, not taking her prompt yet. “Goreth and I are twins. But because everyone thought we were a boy, I hid all the time, and I might as well have been their imaginary friend.”

“But they’re a dragon?”

I widen my eyes and nod emphatically, “Oh, yes. Don’t you remember them playing at being a dragon and talking about their princess? And the moat monster that protected them both from awful knights?”

“Oh, yes. That’s right!”

This is my moment, I have the gotcha question, now, but I hope it’s kinda subtle. Just a little in. I feel a little proud of myself, about to ask a question that’s on topic with the conversation, about my Grandma’s past, like I’m supposed to do in a polite manner.

“Did you ever have an imaginary friend?” I ask.

“Oh, of course! I had a lot of them, actually,” she says. Then she gives me a sly glance and says, “Still do. Too. They never really go away.”

“Do you mind telling me about them?”

Despite the fact that she’s already doing so, she seems to lean back, stretching her spine and arms, and looks inward, to say, “I don’t know. I think I’ll have to see if they don’t mind. They’re so used to hiding from everyone now.”

“I get that,” I say. “That’s how it was for us until recently. Now I think maybe we’re too used to being out.”

“Oh,” she makes her mouth into a demonstrative O and furrows her brow at me. “If you can be yourself, you should be. Your authenticity is so precious. Don’t, don’t ever let go of it.”

As I smile, what she’s said hits me slowly but with a strength I find I’m not really prepared for, and suddenly I’m feeling sad and sorry before I’m ready for it. 

But the shift in emotions lets Goreth come forward to join me more fully, and they say, “There’s no going back in the closet for us.”

She doesn’t really seem to notice our change in voice, though, and says, “Well, you’ve got to consider your safety, too, of course.”

“Always,” Goreth says, then slips back to give me full reign again.

I feel Phage stirring, with an emotion of fondness and urge.

“Um, Grandma?” I ask.

“Yes?”

“If I really drop my voice, or, rather, if we do, you won’t start thinking of us as a man, will you?”

She really screws her face up and turns her head to the side, and scoffs, “No. Sweetheart, one of my oldest friends who’s still alive is an activist and a trans woman, and she’s got a deeper voice than you. Don’t be silly.”

“OK, well. This feels really performative and embarrassing, but…”

She reaches for my hand again, so I take hers, and she says, “We’re playing the same game here. No need to be self conscious about it.”

“Elen, thank you,” Phage says, and then drops away again, taking with it its own mute embarrassment over having so little to say after all.

Grandma blinks and asks, “Was that – ?

“Phage, yes,” I say. “I think it thinks of you as its Grandma, too, and it’s never had one before, as far as we know.”

She presses her lips together in a tight but definitely amused smile, and says, “That’s very cute. I appreciate it.”

Despite her reassurances I’m still feeling uncomfortable about switching so blatantly in front of her and talking about this subject now, even though I’d wanted to learn how she thought of herself. And I’m thinking maybe I’m taking up too much of her time and energy, what with the vultures in the other rooms of the house.

I wonder if our youngest cousins will get to see her today, or if they even understand what their parents intend for the day.

I realize I’ve become very tense, and I let out a big sigh to try to release it and relax.

With sadness continuing to well up in me, I prepare myself to stand up and excuse myself to leave. But I don’t even manage to twitch before she asks another question.

“What are your books about, Sarah?” she asks. “I want to read them, but these days, before I can get into a good book, I need to know what to expect from it.”

I tilt my head, and say, “Well, we’ve got two series. There’s the Sunspot Chronicles, which the publishers are still editing, and won’t come out yet for a while. But then there’s our autobiographies, which are on our website.”

“Autobiographies?”

“Well, three of us have written them, yes,” I say. “Ashwin is new. They arrived in our head a couple years ago and wrote the first one. It’s really just about their first couple of months here. Then Goreth wrote the sequel, and it’s about… I don’t really know how to explain this to you. It’s unbelievable and sounds like… Well, I don’t want to be saneist in my comparisons, either. Hm.”

“Sarah, my dear Granddaughter, you have to stop doing that to yourself. I’ve always liked a good story. And the weirder, the better!”

It’s at this point that I remember what I’ve been feeling when near her presence. The incredible permissiveness of her subconscious consent that floored me when I was in a Phage state earlier, that I can still feel now if I pay attention to it.

“Maybe I can’t say it with words,” I say. “But, can I talk to you through a demonstration? Can I show you something and tell you that the books are about that?”

“Like you would do when you were little?” she asks.

I hold up a finger and open my mouth and pause for a moment, but the memories come back to me. Goreth was always the talker. So, when we were little, whenever we were talking, it was them. And I did front back then. More than anyone maybe realized, because it took me until we were in our late teens to figure out talking.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes. But, if this even works, it might be startling and maybe a little scary. Definitely spooky. But it will be totally safe.”

“OK?” she ventures.

I get up and move back to the door where the flowers are, and then I take a moment to rearrange everything so that I can close the door, and turn to her and say, “Sorry. It’s a little magic trick, and I really don’t want Edward or Joseph to see me doing it. Is that OK?”

She wrinkles her nose, and seems to hesitate, but then says, “The sound of them chattering out there was getting to me, anyway. The quiet is nice.”

“OK,” I say, and then stoop over and pick a rose from the bouquet, pulling the flower off of the stem and cupping it in my hands. Then I turn to her to show it to her, and ask again, “Is it OK for me to do this?”

“Honey. We like it when things are a little scary,” she says. “But don’t push it with the suspense. Let’s see this trick.”

I feel the potentials of the room, and they haven’t changed. This is as good as it’s ever going to get, and my questioning hasn’t dampened anything.

And when I look at Grandma Elen, I can see seven awarenesses paying full attention to me and what I’m about to do.

I ask Ni’a, Phage, Goreth, and Ashwin to help me to gather and channel the forces we need, like we did when we opened that card from Mom that had invited us here.

Instead of drawing electricity from a battery in our pocket, however, we pull it from the wall sockets, ever so slowly and subtly, along with all the heat in the room and what’s available from outside. It’s really our own body heat, focused into one spot in the middle of the rose, that does the trick, and the rest of the energy is coming in to replace it, to keep us from inducing hypothermia in ourselves.

And once the reaction has started, and a little wisp of smoke is rising up before our face, I know we’ve got it, and I can take it from there. The rose itself has all the rest of the energy we need for the task of destroying it.

And now it’s just a matter of making sure it doesn’t burn our hands, and that the smoke is clean enough and disperses downward so that it doesn’t trip the smoke detector.

There’s a lot of nuance that I can do now, in the presence of our Grandmother, and now that I’m calm and focused with confidence, that I was unable to do in our bedroom. And I need less help than I thought I might.

The rose flares and cleanly incinerates itself in a flash.

“Oh!” Grandma Elen exclaims. “That’s delightful! How did you do it?”

I smile and say, “The books we wrote explain it all.” Then I kick myself, and say, “OK. It’s two books, so far. I haven’t written mine, yet, but I’ve been planning it all day while dealing with everything else. My mind won’t let it go. And I’m going to explain that rose in it, I promise.”

She smiles and breathes through her nose, and then she says, “Can you do the rest of the roses?”

I grin maybe a bit more wildly than I’ve ever grinned in front of her before and say, “Oh, can I?”

“Please do!” she says.

Picking up the vase of roses, I pause and look back at her.

For most of our life, Goreth and I honestly felt like we were going to die before we were twenty-five. Even with Phage protecting us, we had this sense of it. We just couldn’t imagine living longer than another year of our life, at any given time, with the very physical agony we felt from our dysphoria. And it seemed like the whole world was designed to torment and kill us, with nearly everything a sensory hell of some sort and the way that everyone seemed to be operating by an unspoken and ever changing set of rules that we didn’t have access to.

In the midst of that, and a family that didn’t have the patience for us, or the will to understand what we couldn’t articulate verbally, this woman and her dog had been an oasis. A shelter.

I’d learned to talk by listening to her and Goreth infodump at each other for hours.

She’d always said we had some kind of special connection, and bragged about it to everyone. And it embarrassed me, and I denied it internally, though none of us had the heart to do so out loud. We just quietly nodded and let her say her things. But thinking about it now, I knew she was right.

It’s really only the same kind of special connection we have with Erik or the Murmuration, a common way of thinking, of seeing the world. But we’ve had it for longer. Since Goreth, Phage, and I were a toddler, at least. She’d say even longer.

And I’m going to miss it. We’re going to miss it.

When we came out as trans, and then got our Autism diagnosis, both events were a huge turning point in our lives and our outlooks. For a brief time, we could see what we thought was a distant future. We could imagine growing as old as our grandmother was, seeing ourselves with gray hair and a stoop in our posture, and enjoying it. We finally looked forward to something we never thought we could have, and were proud to see ourselves as eventually being an old, Autistic, madpunk trans woman.

But then the turn in world and national politics in the last few years began to tear that away from us again. And our worsening health pounded the last nail in that coffin and we were back to where we were before, unable to see even a year in advance.

And now?

I can hardly even think it, it hurts so much, knowing just how long we’ll have to live with our choices.

I stand up straight and walk over to the chair I’ve been sitting in, and plop back down in it, roses in my lap, and bow my head for a moment.

Then I turn our head so that I’m looking at Grandma sideways, and say, “There’s something else in our books that I want to tell you about somehow. A possibility. A thing we might be able to do with you, if you want to do it. And it feels wrong to say it out loud, I’m sorry. But, maybe, if the others help me to show you how we burn the roses, I can then say it anyway.”

“I am getting tired, Dear. But I am curious,” she says. “Maybe if you tell the others I need a longer nap after this, then I can do that.”

“Gladly,” I say.

“OK, then show me what you’ve got,” she says.

—

Later, on the way out, we allow ourselves a little more wish fulfillment. We let Phage front and address our uncle Joseph, who won’t talk to us anymore.

“Everyone here is dying,” it says, in its deepest, scariest, most demonic voice. “But you are already dead to Sarah and Goreth.”

Only, my uncle doesn’t actually hear it, because that is the one and only thing we do that day that happens only in our head. It’s just a visualization, a daydream.

He’s not worth the breath.

A bit later than that, Mom finds Grandma smiling about all the torched roses, and that becomes a family story for generations.

Maybe, if these bodies all live long enough, we’ll mend the broken connections between the three of us. Maybe we’ll include dad.

Maybe there are other possibilities.

—

We’re just sitting down in a 24 hour diner to order a cheap but filling dinner of chicken strips and fries, putting our cane, cloak, and purse in a pile next to us on the bench of the booth we’re in, when our phone buzzes.

We fish back through our pile for it, mumbling to ourselves about how we’d do this anyway because we can’t get away from our social media accounts, even just to eat.

It’s a message from the Murmuration.

“Erik says the bus stop transphobe can go to hell,” the text says.

Suddenly we’re Goreth, and Goreth vividly remembers being on a boat next to a table where our friends would eat their food and play card games for the next month and a half. And Erik was there, gaping at them.

Goreth and I are in a daze, settling back in our seat and staring straight ahead into intergalactic distances, when the waitress arrives with our menu.

Niʔa thinks, Told you that would work.