Kelsey is Camille’s daughter. And, because Camille recognized her daughter’s voice faster than anyone, she was the first to jump out of her chair and get moving the moment Kesley started screaming. 

But Penny had just been talking to our mom in the hallway just a few steps from the basement door. So she got a true head start. And she’d moved with a determination and sense of righteousness that superseded all other concerns. When Camille caught up to her, she found she could not navigate around our aunt, whose presence filled the stairwell and then the basement hallway despite her slight frame.

This is why, when Penny bursts into the rec room to behold the family travesty, Camille finds herself swinging out in a wide arc to the far side of the room in order to make it to her daughter. It’s not just the momentum of her movement. Penny commands more space than she physically occupies.

Penny’s demand for clarity echos off the walls, and certainly bursts into the rooms upstairs without so much as a moment of regard for the solidity of the flooring that’s in the way, just before Camille settles in beside us to take her daughter in her arms.

I am sucked right into the front of our vessel just in time to catch a glimpse of the jelly bean sized blood blister on Kesley’s index finger before it’s whisked away in her need to connect with her mother.

I would be bewildered, shattered, and taken utterly by surprise, if it had been me sitting in that chair. If it had been me to spring up and tend to Kesley just before Penny assaulted us with her trumped up indignity, I would have been shocked into a complete loss of words.

I used to be our first responder in a crisis before our encounter with Mike a year and a half ago, but ever since that day my nerves have been shot.

Goreth, on the other hand, has gained that calm clarity I used to have, and being in charge up until a moment ago they’d prepped our body for this. And I hadn’t been there to mess things up.

Instead, I’ve been in a state devoid of strong emotion, passionlessly observing the state of the house.

Thanks to these circumstances, I’ve been reconnected to my old strength, and I find our body whirling and rising to face our aunt before I’m even consciously aware of my impulse to do so. And during the time of that movement, I’m already composing my words.

I tower above Penny, ramrod straight, and gaze down upon her like a governess addressing her student, evaluating the emotions shifting across her face, to say, voice soft and imperious, “Kesley has pinched her finger on the same toy police car that injured me when I was her age. I find it informative that no one in our family with the means to do so has seen fit to replace it. How old is that fascist thing, anyway?”

Hailing Scales, where did those words come from?

Her head wobbles up and down, left and right, repeatedly while she backs up and draws herself upward, almost standing on her tiptoes to try to meet my stature. Her mouth works open and closed a few times like that of a goldfish, as Judy, Joseph, and Edward file in behind her. Mom is two steps behind them, and moving cautiously, followed by Dad.

“That car is mine,” Edward says. “Dad bought it for my fifth birthday. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

“They certainly do not,” I tell him.

All the children have become quiet with fear in the presence of a cadre of angry adults facing off with each other, but Devin still asks Camille if Kesley will be alright.

Joseph’s deep, dry voice cuts through the silence like an ax, “What are you doing down here alone with the children?”

He’s spoken the words that Penny had come down here to utter in the first place, when she learned from Mom that I was here. Memories of sounds from before are coalescing in my mind and making sense, connecting with the chains of cause and effect that had been part of my very being just moments before.

I turn my head sharply to the left of Joseph and look at him out of the corner of my eyes, narrowing my lids and relaxing my face in an expression of default contempt, to say, “My duty as one of this family’s adults, Uncle.”

I leave unspoken the fact that my dad is one of two men in the family who ever bother to play with the children, let alone watch them. Camille’s husband is the other. And these two men before me, Edward and Joseph, have sons in the other room, where I can hear that they are still playing with the old Nintendo.

Joseph scowls bitterly at me, but Camille steps up beside me, holding her daughter.

“Kelsey’s fine,” Camille says. “She just pinched her finger and needs a bandaid. So, if you all will clear the way, I’m going to go get that for her.”

Judy leads the way in stepping aside, followed shortly by an otherwise short circuiting Penny. Both Edward and Joseph huff and puff and make a show of recomposing themselves as they move, facing me again with arms crossed or akimbo.

“Thank you,” Camille says, before stepping through the gauntlet with a sniffling and sobbing Kesley hanging over her shoulder, eyes shut and finger held tightly in a clenched fist thrust out directly behind her mother.

My aunts and uncles close the gap before my own parents can fill it. They seem to feel they have me cornered.

I turn my head a little further to the left, and ask, “What would you expect me to do? Stand around upstairs and listen to you disregard your own God’s plans and acts, as if you know them better than Him?”

I’m using the words they’d leverage against me for my transition first, as an act of taking them away from them. After all, we are one of the few who were born not only trans and plural, but with an intersex condition that left endometrial tissue scattered about our body. If God exists, He made us this way. Not that I’d exactly thank him for it, but I’m not ashamed of what we are, either.

“Show a little respect and propriety, perhaps,” Joseph says more quietly than before.

I tilt my head up, “What was that, Uncle Joseph? Please do explain that to me.”

“Jeremy, please,” Edward says to me with a raised voice.

At the sound of the name he’d chosen for us, Dad takes the initiative to push himself around his brothers- and sisters-in-law to face Edward. But not quite at my side.

They both open their mouths to speak over each other as I am nearly overcome with the impulse to break out in loud, mirthful laughter.

Instead I choose to take another tack, and utter, before either of the men speak, “If the raised and fearful voices of her children unsettle Grandma and keep her from resting, I hope they can explain to her why they were setting such a poor example for her grandchildren. Because I, Sarah Ampersand, her granddaughter, would love to understand more clearly what is going on here, too. Why did it warrant four of this family’s elders to investigate the cries of a child who was already being tended to by two adults?” I step closer to Dad, and add, “And whose own mother was already on her way?”

I am perceiving things so quickly I am able to watch Penny open her mouth to take a breath and then move her lips to form the labial plosive at the beginning of The Word before she even utters it, and the needed statistic jumps to the forefront of my mind as if delivered by a predictive text algorithm.

“Pedophilia – “ she says.

“ – occurs at a rate of about two to three percent amongst Protestant ministers.” I finish for her. “A demographic, I might add, that has a whopping ten percent conviction rate for sexual misconduct in general. What does this have to do with why we are down here discussing this in front of your children, who I’m sure would rather be playing with each other instead of being as confused about what’s going on as I am?”

If Penny had feathers, she’d be ruffling them, as she was readying for some kind of riposte.

I bounce on my toes and lift my hands above my head and gesture dismissively toward the hallway with my dangling fingers, “Shoo! Upstairs with you. Back to the adult rooms and settle down for dinner or something. I’ll be up shortly to have my session with Grandma, since Mom is here again to assist Dad now. And then I’ll leave.”

I am watching myself do this and cheering internally, because it seems to be working, too.

And I think the reason it did is because I managed to keep my voice calm and sternly audible throughout the whole ordeal, never letting go of the momentum of authority and reason.

But how I did that is every bit as much a mystery to me as it might be to anybody else.

It’s fascinating how, sometimes, having the louder voice does not always mean having the stronger voice, and vice versa.

Glancing in the directions of their own children, who really haven’t paid them any mind, my aunts and uncles turn to file back out of the rec room and shoot me looks that say they will have words with either me or my parents later. They are obviously conversing with each other already, via body language, without uttering any words.

I move to follow, but stand at the doorway of the rec room to act as a barrier so they must face me alone if they turn back, and watch as they move toward the stairs and one by one go back up them.

“You handled that better than I could have,” Dad says.

“And said some things,” Mom adds, leaving her elaboration implied.

I want to cry and thank my dad for complimenting me for the first time in nearly ten years, but instead I face Mom and say, “I’m sorry for how harsh and angry I was with you up in the yard earlier, Mom. But everything I’ve said today is true.”

And then I turn and head toward the stairs myself.

I don’t want to discuss this with her if she’s not going to acknowledge the transgressions of her own siblings and stand up for me in the first place. I appreciate her trying to look out for me and my relationship with Grandma, but she messed up by loudly admitting to Penny that I was downstairs with the children.

And now I’m spent, and the way she said ‘things’ carried the weight of criticisms she was gathering for me.

I can hear her muttering with my father about what just happened, but I can also tune out the words and choose to.

My goal now is to make it to Grandma before anybody else does. Which is the worst fucking game being played today.

But when I get to the bottom of the stairs, I can feel our vessel collapsing in on itself as the wash of adrenaline ends and the ramifications of the fight I’ve just picked with my extended family hit me in the back of my very soul like a gamma burst from a supermassive blackhole.

I turn left instead of right, into the open door of the empty room across from the stairs, and stumble across its floor to the farthest corner to collapse in it.

Head pressed between the two converging walls, hat brim bent and caught in the pressure, eyes clenched as tightly shut as Kesley’s, I feel more alone than I can remember. And like the biggest piece of shit that has ever existed.

How could I, this overly masculine freak of nature with no coherent or reputable upbringing, this queer, autistic, intersex, transexual, mentally ill failure of an adult human sexual deviant, think that I had any right to defend my presence amongst children?

How was it that I, a twenty-eight year old, could have the gall to argue with and attempt to shame true adults who are nearly twice my age and were the actual parents of some of the children I was with?

How did I even have the gall to call myself a woman when I had just used the strength of my height, my bulky girth, my imposing posture, and my domineering voice to shout down a group of responsible, upstanding, respectable, God fearing adults in front of their own sons and daughters?

I fought instead of having fawned. I lashed out instead of having fled. I’d leveraged my nearly three decades of trauma and resentment to take control of a room full of chaos and bend it to my will against my station in life, and now I was going to have to pay for it. And I would deserve every ounce of agony that came down on me.

I am the very thing I hate most about the world, everything that has ever hurt me, someone who has claimed any authority at all.

I know that all of these questions and accusations are wrong. Framed by the bigotry of our culture and not the truth. I know that I was in the right, and that I did well. But it doesn’t matter. The emotions and thoughts are not listening. And I can feel my relatives planning my demise as I try to sink into the concrete floor on my elbows and knees in the corner of a dark basement room.

Relax, I hear Ni’a think near my right ear. The shockwaves will return, but you were perfect. If you relax, you will not sink.

“I want to sink,” I mumble.

Oh, that’s what that emotion is, they observe. You’re crashing. May I soften it?

“No,” I feel myself snarl, defensive anger mixing with all the self loathing to make my body feel like that of a festering, rotten, odoriferous monster.

I don’t think my parents are coming to check on me.