The New Gods
She looks like a classic butch and something about that has always done it for me.
(When we meet, I’ve been at the theater for four hours already. It’s a Thursday. She catches my eye immediately: 5’ 3” and a pixie cut that she styles just-so. She wears a crystal around her neck and has five ear piercings on each side.
“Your pronouns?” Her voice is butch too, grounded and low, a little challenging. Magnetic.
“Sorry?”
“What are your pronouns?”
I almost laugh. “They/them.” Pause. “That’s the first time someone has straight-up asked me here. Sorry.”
“I don’t see why,” she says. “You’re very visibly non-binary.”
That comment is too much for me to unpack—what really is it to look non-binary and also what is it for a butch lesbian to say that to me after my lifelong struggle with the concept of “passing,” and all of my exhausted readings of “Stone Butch Blues”? Her comment is probably mostly thanks to my buzzcut anyway. I know what she means. “Thank you,” I say.
“I’m flirting with you.” There’s the challenge again, the magnetism.
“I don’t know if I can be femme enough for you, beautiful,” I reply.
“Who said I liked-” I’ve already returned to work before she can finish. I know how to play this game.)
We work together for three months before we somehow end up being the last two people at the bar after a Friday night outing with our coworkers. We work in the arts, so, of course, I’m wearing a far-too-uncomfortable white pencil skirt with painted peonies stretching across my right hip, my binder, and a dark blue button down with sleeves rolled above my elbows. She’s in her usual: black jean shorts, black V-neck, her rings, the one that is amethyst on her ring finger that I ache to ask about, her figure short but full.
(I’m sitting with her on the third floor of the theater, and we’re trying our best to figure out how to Exacto Knife a sheet of tracing paper without completely destroying it. I’m a writer, not a prop-designer.
“I don’t understand why we can’t just use the fucking cardboard,” she says for the tenth time under her breath to no one, and she knows I agree.
She’s on her knees, leaned over, and resting her weight on her elbows as she traces the shape in pencil again. Every other breath, her hand goes to her hair, brushing it back. I imagine I am her hands. I imagine I am her lips. I imagine I am working my way down.)
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