Manhunt

Community is when you never let go of each other. Not even after you’re gone.

It was actually good that the world had ended, because now no one could make her play Settlers of Catan.

Even here, at the gates of hell … dyke drama reigns supreme.

I know the world's dead, but that means we get more of a say in what happens to the people left in it, not less.

Sometimes you just have to live with that,” said Robbie. “Someone’s hurt, you don’t know what you did, and that’s … it. That’s all there is. It doesn’t make you a bad person.

The end had left them stiff and fragile, unable to accept that the suburbs were gone, that there was no more escaping the mob, no more pretending floors and toilets scrubbed themselves and reading about black people in monthly book clubs the way you’d read about the construction of London’s sewers or the history of the fur trade, as a kind of boutique curiosity, instead of actually talking to them.

That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent.

It's the fucking chromosome crusaders.

They remember, and men know it, and if you can’t rape a woman, if you can’t kill her, slap her, shout over her every word, then you have to face her, and you have to face the things you’ve done.

They’ll win, and they won’t even like it.

It was funny, she thought, that people treated her flesh like a public resource, a reservoir for all their insecurities and emotional dysfunction, when it was she who had their insides at her fingertips.

She wanted to die. No. Not really, she didn’t. That was just the beer and gin and crème de menthe talking, their liquid voices sloshing up from the depths of her uneasy stomach. What she really wanted was to already be dead.

You always could have done something, he thought as the van bounced over the speed bump at the motor pool’s threshold and passed through a loose clump of gate guards in full riot gear, faces smudged with soot, blood drying on their plastic shields. You were just afraid to be uncomfortable.

The more she thought about it, imagining those soft lips opening around her tongue, those long lashes fluttering in dreamy anticipation, the more she realized that no specific moment, no single touch, was to blame. What mattered was that she’d broken the silent rule. She’d touched a girl before the girl touched her, had laid her violent hands on tender skin. She should have known better. Self-pity pressed against her mouth and nostrils like a sodden rag. I’m a girl until a real one decides I’m not.

Later, she thought, in a moment of terrible clarity, each of us will tell herself the other was the one who pulled the trigger.

Each of us will tell herself, the other one's who pulled the trigger.

Nobody ever got anything from a boss by asking nicely,

An eagle swooped low over the field, passing by not far from him, and he wished, with the same terrible, helpless fury with which he had once wished to sleep and wake up as a boy, to shuck his skin and leap after it into the sky, to be wild and alone and friendless. Free.

Trannies, your families will never love you. You are living a lie & you know it. End your miserable existence. Commit suicide now. —Unknown troll

She says there may be a lot of them, but they’re the same stupid white women who thought pussy hats could overthrow the government. They’re complacent narcissists used to publishing unreadable papers and letting men do their dirty work. She says when it comes to blood, they’ll be worthless.

In some ways it made it easier, focusing solely on the technical problem at hand. She didn’t have to think about the snotty little child empress she was doing it for, or the people starving in the camp outside the blast gate. There are people starving everywhere, she told herself sometimes, when guilt crept close as she lay on her memory-foam mattress, cool filtered air blowing over her, the taste of butter lingering on her tongue.

The women who looked at each other in a way Beth didn’t understand, a way sealed forever within the cold and rigid bounds of cisness but which nonetheless told her without room for doubt that they couldn’t leave too soon. That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent.

Every dyke and freak and faggot in the world is my fucking problem

One slim hand dipped inside her coat—Ramona watched the crowd tense—and drew out a crusty

Robbie knew a lot about how to fight someone bigger than yourself. The first and best way to do it was to avoid them completely, to never be where they could find you, to give them no reason to realize you existed at all.

major in philosophy at expensive liberal arts colleges where they learned to care very much about the poor and the downtrodden and also to never, ever touch them or engage them in conversation.

You know what they do to trannies you stupid bitch. You’ve heard the stories and seen the Polaroids and unless you feel like posing for the mutilated faggot of the month inspirational calendar you’d better dig deep NOW.

A dozen women, most of them in their late teens or early twenties, a few younger, all in fatigues, most sporting undercuts,

I looked with hate upon the Steven Universe tee shirt that filled my vision. "Tenderqueer," I whispered, "Running dog of the TERFskyist tendency. Tumblr poster!" This last I delivered as a kiai, letting the release of air guide my hand as I delivered an open palm slam to the cartoonishly fake breasts of this clear she/they scumbag.

She kissed the pink bud of Sophie's clit and imagined sucking it out of its hood of tender skin, drawing it like a snail from its shell up into her own body where it might take root and change, drawing her cock up into her flesh, parting the soft curtains of her sex. She drank from Sophie. Greedy mouth on fluttered lips. The dream of a cunt growing like a seedling in strange soil.