by Otter Lieffe
“Okay…sorry.”
God, she never stops fussing, thought Ash. There's a reason we don't live together anymore.
“Do we have clinic tomorrow?” Pinar asked gently. She already knew the answer—their herbal clinic for the resistance had been every Tuesday for the last three years. In all that time, they had only missed one week when they both came down with the flu and neither of them could get out of bed.
“Yes,” said Ash glad to change the subject. “I think Yonah might pass by in the evening to pick up another batch for the City group. She said the trans collective had run out of oestrogenics and androgen blockers again—”
“We have enough hops for sure, I think we're low on red clover though. I'll go and get some in the morning.”
“Perfect. There should be another hormone drop off at the river in a couple of days as well, she'll tell us when.”
As Ash's boat-home was situated at the edge of the State's boundaries, she received regular medical deliveries from resistance members outside.
For years they had fought to keep the trans part of the clinic running as they were told again and again that hormones for trans women were 'non-essentials'. But Ash knew that for some people, having access to hormones, or at least the herbal replacements, was as essential as anything else: for many, it meant the difference between life and death.
“Last time there was almost nothing in the delivery,” she said sadly. “It's getting harder every month to source this stuff.”
“Yeah. I'm worried about that too. The herbs are great, but I'm not sure that they're as effective. Unless people take such large quantities they get liver damage.”
“And the pharmaceuticals destroyed the ecosystem. And mass produced oestrogens and prozac killed the starlings…”
Pinar nodded silently. She'd heard this rant many times before.
“Guess what?” said Ash cynically. “The system's really fucked up.”
Pinar smiled despite herself.
“We just have to keep trying,” she said. “I'm a little more optimistic than you, I guess.”
“How so?”
“Well, we've survived this far. Despite what they told us, it was never about consumer choices in the supermarket—or the pharmacy—or feeling guilty for social systemic evils. It's always been about wider social change, about tearing down the crap and building better alternatives.”
“—Of course— ”
“And although the able-bodied cis guys kept telling us that we'd be the first to die after the crash—the disabled and the pharmaceutically dependent and the trans people—you know what? We're still here.”
“We sure as hell are.”
“And in fact, the resistance would have been nothing without us. Isn’t that enough reason to be hopeful? I guess I just really want to be optimistic, even if it's hard sometimes.”
Ash leaned over and gave her friend a peck on the cheek.
“I'll let you.”
They sat quietly for a while, listening to the sounds of the forest.
“The planes stopped flying overhead,” Ash commented as she looked up at the red sky. “It's been weeks since I saw one.”
With no phones, no television and no internet, it was rare to get news from the outside world. Ash hadn't left the State's boundaries for the last three decades, Pinar even longer than that. They had often talked about leaving, but every time the conclusion was the same: they were still needed there, they still had work to do for the resistance.
“Maybe the oil finally ran out?”
“Maybe,” said Ash. “Hopefully.”
Pinar finished her tea and stood up.
“Ready for bed?”
“Go ahead, I'll be there in a minute. I just want to go do something in the forest. I'll be a while, so go ahead and sleep if you like.”
“Okay, hon, good night.”
“Night, Pin.”
Ash stepped off the little porch of the cabin and following a route she knew like the back of her hand, she walked out into the dark.
* * *
In the shadows, amongst the trees, Nathalie was having fun. She was already on her third rendez-vous of the night and every one had been completely different. The first was the same hot girl she'd met a few times already—a tall blonde who always wore a lot of make-up but had the softest lips Nathalie had ever kissed. She never got tired of bumping into her.
Number two was someone new, probably a soldier just passing through town. It was over very quickly at any rate.
And now after a quiet hour, she found herself happily lost in a knot of warm, damp bodies—a multitude of fingers and tongues touching her in the darkness. She looked up at the night's sky and watched the stars imperceptibly gliding by as a new mouth began tasting her nipples.
I love this. And I fucking deserve it.
Someone caught her attention. By that bush over there.
She was being watched, she was sure of it. And she was pretty sure this same person had been following her all night.
Whoever it was stayed just enough in the dark to keep her face hidden but just close enough to make her presence felt. Nathalie could feel the stranger's eyes on her, could hear her touching herself in the dark. Nathalie beckoned her over to join in, but she melted away into the bushes.
Well that's weird. Who are you?
Nathalie felt hunted, chased by a shadow, and she was loving every second of it.
It hadn't always been this way. There was a time when women couldn't even be out at night in this park without fearing for their safety.
There was a time when cruising was only for cis gay guys who despite police crackdowns, homophobic attacks, and public protest had been unable to resist the call to the parks and bathrooms of the cities. Then the Internet Years had arrived and the web did what the police were never able to. The gay guys retreated to their apps and websites and the parks were abandoned.
And now something new was being born. As the crash and the Improvement had kicked in and queers of all kinds had been driven to the margins, somehow cruising—of all things—had come back to life out here in the forgotten edges of the City.
This open space was being declared queer territory and anyone who could make the long walk had a place to enjoy the pleasures of a night-time hook-up with a stranger under the sky.
New ways of organising public space were coming into being and women led the movement, so safety was on everyone's lips and fingers. Nathalie was determined to make the most of it while it lasted.
She's there again, the stranger in the shadows.
Nathalie was leaning back against a palm tree, a dark-skinned woman going down on her. Nathalie had been close to orgasming for at least half an hour. She was certainly having a good time, but curiosity was getting the best of her. She was overcome with a thirst to know who this person was that watched silently from the trees as she played.
Anonymity was one of the many reasons people came here and Nathalie almost never shared anything more personal than sex with the people she met. But this time she felt a burning and unfamiliar sensation to know the name of this stranger, to know where she came from. I want to wake up next to you and watch you sleeping just like you watched me.
“Come on, join in if you like,” Nathalie whispered to the shadows.
But as the fuck drew to its peak and Nathalie's orgasms started to echo through her body, and through the park, her watcher disappeared again into the bushes.
Come back, please. At least tell me your name.
But the watcher was gone.
The dark-skinned woman stood up and licked her lips.
“Good?” she asked.
“Sure, yeah it was fine,” said Nathalie distantly. She pulled up her pants and went to follow.
Chapter five
Night had fallen and the forest around Ash's favourite clearing was deathly still and, with the new moon, perfectly dark. She sat amongst the ferns and nettles b
reathing in the smells—the dust of dry soil, the perfume of some flowering invasive, the spray of a fox who must have passed by recently. This was her nightly ritual, either at her home or at Pinar's, to just sit and connect with the living world around her. It was the moment of day that she felt the safest and the most at peace with herself. It was her time to sit and stop thinking. Tonight, though, she was distracted by her conversations with Pinar.
Why does she always smother me? No wonder I shout at her sometimes. She should know better than to push me. Anyway, it's fine, I guess. She always forgives me. Is that the owl again? It sounds like it's hunting. I wonder what's still out here for her to eat. It's so dry. I don't know if it's ever going to rain.
Ash caught her wandering thoughts and brought her attention back to her senses. She dove deeply into the sounds around her, felt their vibration in her skull—a cricket calling somewhere to the left, some small mammal squeaking way over near the cabin. She allowed herself to sense the air moving over her bald head and her clothes on her skin. To connect with her weight on the ground and the slight prickling of new stubble on her face: to inhabit her body. For some, it was such a simple thing they never even thought about it but for Ash, like so many trans folk, making friends with her body often felt like the toughest thing in the world.
I have to be better to myself. This old body won't take much more, especially if I keep journeying the way I have been. If only Pin could understand better what I go through. If I could just control it sometimes and stay in the moment. If only—
And suddenly Ash was standing.
She stood in exactly the same spot, amongst the ferns, but it was early evening. The sky above the clearing was a spectacular red and orange and she screwed up her eyes against the sudden change in light.
What the hell?
Over towards the cabin Ash could see herself with Pinar pouring steaming hot water over a naked white man, someone she had never seen before. This must be the future then.
Pinar was saying a name over and over again.
“Jason, Jason, Jason.”
A breeze brought the thick scents of rose water and lavender to Ash's nostrils and for the second time in the last few hours she felt sick and dizzy. Her future self, still holding the pot of hot water, looked over at her and smiled. The world spun and as quickly as Ash realised what was happening, she was sitting again, back in her spot.
Well that was weird. I wonder who—
Her heart skipped a beat. Over at the cabin, she could hear a voice calling her name. It was Pinar and she sounded terrified.
* * *
“What's up, are you okay?” Ash asked breathlessly as she arrive at the cabin, running.
“There's someone out there!” signed Pinar, standing on the porch. Like almost everyone who had lived in the City, they were both fluent in USL, a form of manually coded English. “I heard them, maybe two hundred metres towards the east.”
“Are you sure it wasn't a fox, in the clearing I smelt—”
“I know the difference between a human and a bloody fox, Ash!” Pinar signed back, her dark hands flashing in the light coming through the cabin window. “It was definitely a person, someone big, maybe a guy, and he was definitely moving towards us.”
“Let's listen.”
They stood silently and listened to the forest. Ash could only hear the cricket chirping again.
“I don't thin—,” she began.
“Shhh. There. Hear that?”
Ash was about to reply when suddenly they both heard the loud, unmistakable sound of twigs cracking in the forest.
They looked at each other. Pinar's eyes were full of fear as the sound came closer. They could already hear the laboured breathing of someone in pain.
“Who could it be? Should I get the gun?”
“Don't worry. I think I know who it is,” said Ash.
Pinar gave her friend a quizzical look as Ash called out to the forest.
“Hey! Who's there?”
“I'm with the resistance!” a deep voice called back, a voice racked with pain and desperately short of breath.
“What's the passcode?” asked Pinar. Everyone in the resistance used the same identifying passcode, half in Spanish, half in English. The State surely knew the code by now, but it was a tradition, a symbol and some things don’t change easily.
There was no reply, but the stranger continued moving towards them.
“What's the bloody passcode?” Pinar shouted.
“Las prímulas…” the stranger began. “…las primulas lucharán y the land—agh.'
The code was cut short as the person collapsed somewhere out in the darkness.
“Let's go,” said Ash.
“Be careful.”'
“It's okay,” Ash replied confidently. “I saw this coming.”
She took Pinar's hand and they walked out into the darkness together in the direction of the voice.
Chapter six
“My god, he's bleeding everywhere.”
“We have to get him to the house. We can't do anything for him out here.”
“Damn, he's heavy!”
Ash and Pinar managed to half carry, half drag the unconscious stranger into the house and onto the table. Ash brought candles in and after putting her long hair up in a ponytail, Pinar put on some surgical gloves and began to look at his injuries.
“He's cut, but I think it's only in this one place,” she said, pointing to a long gash down his side. “We need to stop the bleeding. Bring me some yarrow from the top shelf, hot water and towels, lots of towels.”
“On it.”
Together they cleaned the wound, bound some yarrow leaves to it which quickly stemmed the bleeding and then covered it in the cleanest cloth they could find. Their patient was still unconscious, so Ash began to inspect his other injuries.
“He's sprained his ankle,” she said, moving his left foot carefully to assess the damage. “Judging from these bruises, I reckon he's broken at least one rib. And his jaw's all swollen up—I think he was hit in the face by something—it'll probably need setting. Either way he's going to wake up with one hell of a headache.”
“It's pretty bad, but he'll live,” Pinar summarised as she cleaned blood off his chest with a damp cloth. “We're going to need to make up some more painkillers though. So, you said you were expecting him? How? Who is this guy?”
Ash brought some more clean towels from the cupboard and placed them next to the table.
“His name is Jason, and I guess he's resistance. That's all I know really. That's all I had time to find out.”
Pinar began to understand. “You saw him in a journey.”
“Yeah, just before I heard you yelling. It was very quick. I saw us outside the house, and we were pouring hot water over him from a big pot. He was crying and you kept repeating what I guess was his name—Jason, Jason, Jason. Everything smelt of rose and lavender and then I was gone.”
“Sounds like a cleansing,” said Pinar thoughtfully.
“Yeah, that's what I thought too. Although I was surprised that we'd be doing it on someone else.”
“Maybe it's necessary.”
“Maybe.”
They fell silent for a moment as they continued to clean Jason's wounds. Ash and Pinar had done the healing ritual they called a cleansing several times for each other in times of need, when nothing else could remove the trauma and distress that had lodged inside their minds and bodies. But a cleansing was no small deal for either of them.
Ash grew up in an army family between the US and the UK—white, working class and in her own words 'lacking in any culture except the military, microwaves and medication.' As an adult, though, she'd studied healing arts from various teachers in various parts of the world—Thailand, Argentina, Spain—and it had been an endless internal struggle for her to learn from other cultures respectfully.
As she took away another bloody towel, Ash remembered a conversation s
he'd had decades ago in the mountains in the north of Thailand where she'd studied and worked for a year helping out in a village clinic.
She had been preparing a herbal solution over an open fire outside her teacher’s house for one of the many patients who had arrived at the clinic that day. She stirred the herbs slowly, her eyes stinging from the smoke and the pungent smell of the plants she was using. As she often did while they were working, her teacher, an older woman who had lived her entire life in the village and had founded the clinic, took the opportunity to share her wisdom with Ash. Since accepting her as an apprentice several months before, she had been incredibly generous with her knowledge. And Ash had been an eager student.
“These things we learn, they come from the land—the plants and the animals,” her teacher had said. “So, remember to always give something back. Even this tree we're using today to make balm for our patients, that tree is also our teacher—”
Ash nodded and continued to stir the herbal balm.
“— Now put in some more leaves or it'll never thicken up,” she warned.
Ash obediently did as she was told and sure enough the balm soon began to thicken and became harder to stir.
“Good. Remember to respect all of your teachers,” her teacher continued. “Not just me, but the spirits of the land too, this beautiful mountain… and Ash?”
“Yes, teacher?” she'd asked as she took the finished balm off the fire to look at her.
“Don't steal, okay?”
“Of course not.”
At the time, Ash had been slightly offended at the suggestion that she would 'steal' anything from anyone. She considered herself a good, moral person. Not that stealing was necessary immoral—homeless people stealing from a supermarket, for example, had always seemed entirely ethical to her—after all 'he who steals from a thief is not a thief' - but what exactly had her teacher meant?
That evening while she was doing a laundry run for the clinic, carrying an overflowing basket of towels and sheets down to the river, Ash passed a group of noisy tourists disembarking from their bus, returning from some great adventure in the forest. They were headed to the village's only restaurant taking photos of every dog and chicken and house and villager as they went. As they passed Ash, they gave her a look of disdain. They were all in search of the same thing—exotic authenticity—and a white trans woman carrying a heavy basket of laundry wasn't what they'd come to see at all.