I arrive at the grocery store after midnight. Most other humans are absent and all sounds are audible. The squeaking of my cart and the hum of industrial lighting synchronize. Each aisle is a city of advertisements for disgusting luxury, packed with cereal masquerading as chocolate chip cookies, ice cream with no sugar or fat or dairy, crackers flavored with cheese, garlic, salt and vinegar, nothing at all. I do a little math on my phone, loosely calculating how many boxes of saltines I can afford to eat this week. Once determined, I drop the designated quantity into my cart; its large, silver mesh structure dwarfs the little blue and white rectangular prisms. I take my bounty to checkout.
The cashier has left her conveyor belt on and its muttering reminds me of old film rolling. First and only scene: five boxes of white flaky crackers. They are gently carried into the cashier's hand. She holds them over the scanner and creates a “beep.”
The cashier has left her conveyor belt on and its muttering reminds me of old film rolling. First and only scene: five boxes of white flaky crackers. They are gently carried into the cashier's hand. She holds them over the scanner and creates a “beep.”
“Th-this r-rush you've got is crrr crazy,” I joke. She giggles, almost inaudibly. Her eyes do not meet mine.
“You work... working all n-night?” I’ve worked overnights much of my adult life, and I personally believe there's always bonding potential between two witching hour employees. The cashier nods. She's finished bagging my crackers at this point and has taken out her phone. She types for a moment, then shows a message to me.
“I stand here and play mobile games all night! I have the third highest score in Danger Demons :3”
The cashier takes her phone back, stares at me for a moment, then types an addendum.
“I'm Moe by the way. they/she” they show me. My eyes go big.
“I'm Blair. They/them.”
At thirty one years of age, I've never once met a person who introduced themself to me using pronouns, much less the pronoun “they.” I'm ecstatic and afraid.
“Ma'am,” a voice calls from beyond our serendipitous experience. “I'd like to pay for my food please.”
Moe holds up a pointer finger for a moment before typing out another message.
“My break is in ten minutes. Smoke a cigarette with me?”
At the back of the grocery store is a storage room, and at the back of the storage room is a door leading outside. A few cars are scattered about the rear parking lot, and a couple mid-sized cacti have staked their claim to the stony land around its periphery. Street lamps mark little spotlights of safety. Moe takes a bottle of orange juice out of one dress pocket - presumably stolen - and a lighter and cigarette pack out of their second pocket. She combines the light and cigarette with a click, and breathes deeply. They smile at me and hold the pack in my direction. I don’t smoke, but I take one anyway. The cigarette is a frighteningly light little cylinder. Hard to imagine how something like this could kill a person. Moe hands me their lighter and, after a few attempts, I light the cigarette and suck in its smoke. My throat burns and I begin to cough and hack like never before and suddenly have no problem at all imagining how the teeny little twig of a drug could kill a person. After a minute of audibly developing cancer, I look up to see Moe grinning and shaking. They seem to be caught up in a silent, uproarious laughter.
“I take it yr not a smoker,” they manage to type.
“Not until now,” I write out on my phone in reply. I've decided to sidestep my speech impedement for the time being by duplicating Moe's technique.
“Have some of my juice dummy,” they pocket their phone and hold the small, orange bottle close to my face. I recoil, to my embarrassment, much like a threatened animal. My discomfort is obvious and Moe puts the juice back in their pocket and doesn’t bring it up again.
“Just dont start smoking now!!! It’ll kill you ok?” Moe types to me after my coughing fit has mostly subsided. We make ourselves comfortable on the asphalt and take turns flashing messages to one another, Moe taking gulps of their cigarette while I swallow little sips of mine. It makes me feel dizzy, like my body is halfway between heaven and earth.
“Do u work night shift too?” They ask.
“Used to,” I reply. “Got fired a few weeks ago”
“Im sorry :c” Moe consoles. They take a long pull of their cigarette and blow the smoke out carefully, then begin to fidget in their seat.
“I’ve never met another ‘they’ before,” I confess. Moe snaps back to their previous easy excitement.
“Really???” They ask. “I used to know lots!”
“That’s so cool” I type. Pausing, I decide to add “used to?”
“Some of us were dating and then we broke up and it got weird,” Moe shows me while she looks in another direction.
“I’m sorry,” I write.
“It happens, we were rly young,” their cigarette is almost finished while mine is barely a third of the way done. “im close with some women from the store now, and a lot of ppl online,” Moe smiles at me again, eyes shining through their bangs, lit from the side by the streetlights like they’re a star in an old movie. “But it’s really cool to meet a trans person in real life! I could tell right away! You don’t look like a man or a woman at all. You look,” they squint at me. “You look really non binary!!!”
I’m not quite sure how to take this. I feel warm like I’m blushing. I can hear the cars and gusts of wind in the distance very, very clearly.
“Thanks,” I answer. “I’ve never actually thought about it.” Not wanting to stay on the subject of my appearance, I type out “Do you like to play other video games too? I’m playing TKOGEN right now and it’s really fun.”
Moe sits up taller, eyes and mouth making little “o” shapes. “As in the kingdom of god ends now???”
“Of course!”
Moe spends the next week gushing to me about TKOGEN, detailing every moment of how they spent their three hundred hours of play time. I eat this information up faster than I’ve eaten anything in years. Finding secret locations and bits of story as Moe feeds me information on how to locate them is a shockingly intimate experience. At some point I cave completely and invite my new friend over to start a two-player campaign together. They agree enthusiastically and I am then faced with the reality of the state of my apartment. Dusty, no decorations, clothes littered about, crumbs sprinkled around all my favorite corners. It’s uninviting, to say the least, but I resolve to put as much love into sprucing it up as is reasonable. I clean my dirty laundry in the tub, and hang it on some string I've tied to two curtain rods on opposite ends of my studio. Once dry, I fold and place the clothes into their home in my cabinets, and put a second, fresh pillow on the floor in front of my game console. I pick a time to go out and nonchalantly exit the Goodwill with a vacuum cleaner, then return home and suck up every last crumb into its whirlwind. Lastly, I shave my head and set some water to boil for a bath. This will bring the bills higher than I'd hoped, but I can't bring myself to care.
When my bath is complete, I step out into the cold and shiver terribly. Running the towel over my body, I suddenly feel put off by my skin; the color is too light, golden tint from my childhood faded into a sallow, bleachy white. It hangs loosely, noncommittal on my bones like the laundry hung from its string. I understand now, looking at the creature in the mirror, why Moe felt I “look non binary.” My form is undefined, breasts just two empty sacks, shoulders and hips narrow. Do I like this? The question seems odd, like whatever “this” is has nothing to do with “me” or “I” or “my.” Like there’s no iteration of it that ever possibly could. Deciding not to torture myself further, I slink out of the bathroom and crawl into a monochrome outfit of jeans, t-shirt, and hoodie. My insides are light and my limbs ache. I am hungry; unavoidably so. Regretting that I’ll have to soil the clean floor, I go to my cabinet and retrieve a single sleeve of saltines. Carefully, I pull open the plastic and place a single cracker into my mouth. The familiar oral zapping sensation begins, acids desperately grabbing the saltine and turning it into mush.
Moe arrives in the evening. They smile and wave before coming in. I gesture to the two pillows. We sit ourselves down and begin gaming. I plug the shiny, unused second controller into the game console and boot up TKOGEN. Thumbing the joystick thrice, I move my cursor to the unfamiliar “multiplayer,” option. Once selected, the game explodes with life. Vibrant, gluttonous colors and shapes jump, pop, dance over the screen to swelling music and a choir of sound effects. Moe and I proceed to explain who we are and what we value through our interactions with these sensory inputs. Which ones will we attribute to ourselves? How can we use them in the process of reducing the images of demons and angels into shimmering, elegant pulps? Our focus is completely and utterly wooed by the task, by who we have become in order to accomplish this task, by millions of little pieces of matter dug up from the earth by persons forgotten to us, interacting in ways we can only begin to understand on the very best of days. At the altar of great and incredible sacrifice, we become Gods, thrashing this simulated world with our influence and flattening everything it once mistakenly held sacred.
“Hungry!” Moe texts me from the bathroom.
“Want some saltines?” I ask.
“Lol not really,” they answer. “I think there's an IHop a mile or so away. Wanna walk there?”
I send my thumbs up of agreement, knowing full well I can't afford to eat out.
Our desert town is cold at night. Winter rolls through each year, forcing everyone to find the down jacket they'd forgotten about between February and November. The land and buildings are flat, punctuated by mountains and smatterings of greenery that could beat the average person in combat. You can see everything for miles in all directions, and this helps me feel safe. If a person were to come after me, there'd be no place for them to hide. Moe, on the other hand, looks like they haven't felt safe in years. Their back is hunched, eyes to the pavement, arms holding one another. A snail without a shell to shrink into. In some misguided effort to comfort them, I reach out my hand and invite them to take it. They do so and we walk like conjoined twins for a while before the discomfort of another being's temperature, movement, texture become too much and we pull away, both trying to hide our signs of relief. Realizing the feeling is mutual, we cackle a bit. Moe relaxes their shoulders.
IHop’s insides are all red white and blue. God Bless America, says IHop. We find a booth and seat ourselves. Moe scans the menu while I use the free wifi to look at short videos. Someone has filmed themself baking a pink and purple cake. The batter is smooth and rich and I want to touch it.
“You gonna get anything?” Moe's text interrupts the reverie.
“Nah, not hungry,” I type.
“Share some of my waffle with me, if you want!” Moe offers. My body suddenly feels feverish.
“Evening ladies,” our waitress introduces herself. She's dyed her hair barbie-doll blonde and has the kind of southern drawl I rarely hear in real life. “Can I get you started with something to drink?”
Moe happily types out an order and shows their phone to the waitress.
“Pecan waffle and coffee with cream? Okay can do. What about you sweetie?”
“D-d-diet c-c-co. Co-coke.”
“I'm sorry love could you repeat that?”
“Die-di-diet c-c-c-coke.”
“Diet coke? Of course. And what would you like to eat?”
I shake my head, about ready to start crying.
“Nothing? You sure?”
My body just trembles.
“Well, let me know if you change your mind.”
Moe looks at me with great sympathy as the waitress leaves. They type for a moment.
“She looked like a bitch! Think she’s gonna poison our food? 0__0”
I smile a little.
“Probably.” I type, worn out on trying to speak aloud. Moe sends back three skulls and a smiley face wearing sunglasses. All seems to be well until the waitress comes back with Moe's waffle.
In spite of smelling sugar from the moment I walked into Waffle House, the scent was diluted by dirt, sweat, and grease. Moe's waffle, the size of the plate it rests on, sends a sweet smell to my nose that dominates all olfactory inputs. Syrup, the color of amber, sludge of chemicals and tree blood, is poured atop it; a slow motion waterfall. Moe sticks their fork into the pastry's plush body, and uses their knife to carve out a small triangle. They extend this fragment to me; an offering. They smile. I stare. The triangle drips a teardrop of syrup onto the table. I am reminded of a moment when I was ten, eating cinnamon buns in a box my mother had brought home from the mall. Halfway through finishing one, I found the pastry's decadent taste had turned sour. Plain. Cumbersome. Yet I kept going. A television clouded my eyes and ears, playing news about some kind of sweatshop factory crimes; something happening elsewhere. A bucket of mostly unused plastic toys was beside me, filled with anything I want and many things I never asked for. I picked apart cinnamon bun after cinnamon bun, placing all the pieces into my mouth and letting stomach acids claim them. Eventually, these stomach acids bent to my greedy will and brought me to vomit outside on the astro turf. My mom let me stay home from school the next day, and in the following years, I used this trick so many times she stopped taking pity on me and made me go to school anyway. Looking at Moe's dessert now, a lifetime away from that memory, I feel myself wanting to throw up again.
My phone is buzzing. I don't move to pick it up. I see Moe slowly stand, and sit back down next to me. They lean their head up close to my ear, and in a voice so soft and small it reminds me of a summer breeze, Moe says
“What's wrong?”
I can't answer. I am trapped on a bridge between now and before.
Our walk home is silent. There are no extraneous movements. Apparently Moe is holding my hand again but I feel nothing. I try to apologize but my lips will not even part.
“It's okay,” Moe whispers. “I get it.”
I want to feel comforted, but I don't. I want to pull my hand away, but I don't. I will not be in this humiliating moment.
We reach my apartment. Moe stays with me for a while. I lie on the bed, saying nothing. After a while, Moe picks up the shiny second player controller I’d given them earlier and boots up TKOGEN. I watch its colors reflect on her face. Reds, Whites, Blues and Blacks wash over the only other person I've ever met who reminds me of whatever I am, just a little. They nestle into the bed, head very close to mine, not close enough to touch but close enough to feel the body heat. I want them to leave, but I don’t want it badly enough to say anything.
“Um,” Moe pushes their tiny little voice through their vocal chords. “I dunno if…” the sound trails off here and there. “Bulimic. Still am. Not……. Don’t care how I look. It doesn’t matter…….. Guilt….. Bad…. No good…. Have what I shouldn’t…….. Don’t have what I need…… Like the game you know…..” Moe begins to cough, voice straining to its bitter end. They leave the bed and I hear them open the cabinets and run the tap. Afterwards they stand still for a few minutes, then walk to my door, open it, and exit my room.
When I regain control of my limbs, the first thing I do is look at what Moe was doing in TKOGEN. Their avatar is hovering in front of a successfully defeated angel and devil, tied up together in a single noose. The billionaire and slum child characters both appear to have been saved, but Moe left the game alone too long and the child shot the billionaire and stripped him completely naked. I laugh; I’ve seen this route before and always found it sort of campy. Little crumbs of saltine poke at my elbows and I realize I forgot to clean my bed. I’m starting to feel ready to get up when my phone buzzes and glows with a ghostly energy. I pick it up, expecting a bomb.
“I love you Blair,” reads Moe’s text, and I feel sick once again. Sick like you feel when you’ve eaten five cinnamon buns on a hot September night. My hands fumble out a reply
“I'm sorry, it's not your fault”
and then I block their number, erasing our history from my records. Going to the cabinet, I decide to be decadent and pull out another sleeve of saltines, losing myself in my body’s sense of urgency.