Love Machine

by Nic Anstett

The robots have taken Seattle and I am on the apps again. I can no longer sleep in my half empty queen bed without another body. More than India, I miss her dog, Binky, who diagonally draped himself across the mattress every night. Whether it was a soggy July evening or one of Baltimore’s cruelly dry winter nights, I could count on a furry dog blanket. Now, my nighttime hands grab only limp fabric and empty air. I miss the warmth and I miss having something living to pull towards me, which in the last several months had always been Binky. Even before she left, I could tell India was pulling away. So, now I’m spending my nights during the machine uprising swiping through the singles of the greater Chesapeake Bay area.

I’m not alone in this at least. It turns out that the oncoming annihilation of organic life makes loneliness even more lonely.

“You picked the right time to start messing around,” Krista told me over bloody marys two weeks back. “Even the straightest of straight guys are sleeping with transsexuals now. There’s no room for pickiness.”

I could always tell that part of India blamed Krista for my transition. She was still my only close trans woman friend and the first example I ever saw of someone proudly living a life I had ruled out as a possibility for myself. Krista only had eyes for men, but in a way, she had seduced me, her unabashed sensuality and confidence broadcasting the joys of a life that I had buried.

We’d first met two years ago at a gay bar downtown. I was still struggling through an ill-advised film degree at the time and several of my cohortmates had decided to get trashed at the local queer watering hole. Sure, some of us were out and looking for willing bodies, but the majority of us just wanted to occupy a corner table and hope that this would be one of the rare nights when John Waters would wander in.

Krista had slid into the empty space of the bar to my right as I waited for a Blue Hawaiian. She told me that she loved a man that could order a fruity drink.

“It’s yummy,” I had replied. “Why wouldn’t you drink something that tastes good?”

She smiled and asked me to dance, and I told her that I was taken. She frowned a playful frown and we talked for two more hours about the city’s slowly unraveling queer scene, that I was one of the more tolerable art students she had met, and how we both didn’t understand The Sopranos.

Now, she’s out on a date with a man named Paul she met in line for bread, and I am alone in my bedroom swiping. For a while, I kept the tv on as white noise, but so few stations are running anymore. The robots had razed most of Los Angeles during the first days of their onslaught, so now it was mostly local shows or whatever nervous broadcasters operated out of any states further east than the Rockies. Mainly reruns of comfort shows and live news broadcasts of the frontlines. But you can only see footage of giant automatons tearing apart tanks and frying unlucky soldiers with heat rays so many times before it just becomes numb and not even worthy of being a background soundtrack to swiping. Besides, we all knew the robots were coming. Nothing could stop them in their march Eastward.

Honestly, I don’t really know what I want from the apps. Krista tells me that I should give men a try, but I’m nervous. Sure, I had fantasized about a firm, manly arm around my waist and scratchy kisses of stubble, but I had only ever dated women. And never, really, as a woman myself. Except for India, who informed everything I knew about love, sex, and dating as an adult.

I had texted India once when the robots had first begun blasting their way through Silicon Valley and gobbling up transformers and power grids. A simple, “Are you seeing this? WTF. This is scary.” I got a one word reply in return. Krista took my phone that night and deleted India from my contacts.

Six years of dating and I never learned her phone number by heart.

What would I even do for a date? Most of the local bars and restaurants were still functioning but we all knew that this was a limited time thing. California was gone and took along with it almost all our nation’s produce. The will to work in the service industry with a mechanical armageddon looming on the horizon wouldn’t last long.  I give it three weeks before we all start living off oysters scraped from the docks of the Inner Harbor.

Three days ago, I had matched with a girl named Bianca who asked if I wanted to listen to a noise band at some underground bar in Pigtown. She had looked fun, her smile loud and light, and she played the violin, hoping to join the BSO someday, if symphonies survived the robot death march. I’d told her I was trans on a FaceTime date and she hadn’t even seemed to notice.

She’d nodded and asked me again where I’d gone to college.

I cancelled on her today. The day of our date. Said I was sick with some sort of stomach bug. I told myself that I didn’t want to listen to atonal screeching on my one night out, but I knew I was scared and swallowed by my own hopelessness. She texts to ask if I need anything, but I don’t reply. I swipe.

There are so many apps now. Back when I was single, back when I was a boy, there had been Tinder. Bumble if you fancied yourself a progressive. OKCupid if you were desperate. I was used to swiping hopelessly on bus rides or while taking a shit. The apps back then never pinged for me. I never once went on a date through them. I met India through a friend of a friend at a free concert in a city park. Now though, it’s a cacophony. I’ve turned my phone on silent and disabled vibrations. I told myself it was apocalypse horniness and not that I am now more desirable as a woman. I was scared of what an ego would do to me.

“You need to get over yourself,” Krista tells me later that night. Paul apparently was a dud who had tried to bury his emotional baggage in essential oils, and she had decided that spending the early hours of her morning with my mopey self was a better use of her time.

We sat in my living room on a collapsing two-hundred-dollar couch sipping jack and cokes, the only drinks I could pull together from what was in my pantry.

“I don’t even want to be with India anymore,” I say, which is only partly true. Krista shoots me a small eye roll but remains otherwise silent.

There had been a part of me that had been almost excited when India told me she was leaving. I had hurt, especially from the carefully worded disgust she described my changing body with, but I also felt eager. I’d never gotten to get dolled up for a date or seduce a stranger or even get wooed by some interested guy or girl. All my relationships had just sort of happened into existence or I had been the pursuer. I want to be wanted again, but I don’t know how.

“I’m just scared. I don’t know how to do this,” I say.

“Do you want to?” Krista asked. “Date, I mean. You don’t have to.”

This felt frustratingly ironic coming from Krista, who for as long as I’d known her had dates lined up every weekend evening. Scattered partners lasted for a few months at a time, but mostly Krista was always wading in the dating shallow end, reaching her hands into the waters and hoping to grab another man she hoped to swallow.

“I don’t know. Does that matter? It’s not like I have much time left,” I say.

“None of us do.”

. . .

The robots have punched through the Canadian border, and I am chugging down another Tom Collins. My date, Randall, keeps ordering them for me, insisting that they are secretly the best cocktail ever created. It’s fine. I like the citrus. It feels like a hard lemonade but with more maturity. Less like something you’d drink in a freshman year dorm room. Randall has had five.

“I just can’t shake the fact that I’ll never have one again,” they say.

The bars are closing. This one, which sports some Irish sounding name that I can’t remember in the fog of drinks, is throwing its grand finale tonight. All drinks must go. The owner and the few remaining employees are banking on the wads of cash lining up on the counters being worth something in the next few days. I doubt they’ll be.

I want to empathize with Randall’s obsessive need to down as many fruity cocktails as they can before the heat rays come flying, but I can’t help but be annoyed. I don’t mind bars, but I can barely move through the salad of bodies that has taken over all empty space. I’ve taken to guarding Randall and I’s corner table of high tops. I hold their chair in the space under my heels, pulling it away from any fumbling hands looking to snatch it away.

We’d matched on Hinge during the last few days that it was up and operable. Word on the street was that most of the servers designated for swiping had been swallowed by a hungry robot, leaving only a few apps up and working in its wake. I’d been impressed by Randall’s make up. Their pictures showed them dolled up in some wild, colorful babydoll dress, posing in baths of multicolored neon. I couldn’t tell if I found them attractive or if I was just caught in a riptide of extreme gender envy, but I swiped right all the same.

A girl in a bodycon dress reaches for the chair I have caught beneath my heel, but I pull it back. She’s tipsy, wobbling on her pumps, and for a moment I worry that she has lost her balance and may topple onto me.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were saving this,” she says.

“Yeah, sorry, it’s for my date. They’re at the bar right now,” I reply.

“It’s the apocalypse and our men are still leaving us all by ourselves, huh?” she says. I laugh, not bothering to correct her, and she eases her way back into the crowd, leaving me alone again in the churn of people.

I take a long sip of the melted ice at the bottom of my glass. Young women tend to drag out my worst insecurities. Or rather the reminder of young womanhood, girlhood. Prom dresses. Girls’ nights out on the town. Being young, gorgeous, and risky. I knew there was a shallowness in wanting it, but part of me ached at the idea that I had unknowingly traded that time of my life for a patchy denial beard and a forced like for IPAs. How could I not feel cheated? I often convince myself that if I had transitioned earlier, I could’ve had that at some point. I could’ve been the bubbly, half-drunk girl in the corner bar with her friends. I know this is wallowing and helps nothing, but, when the thought hooks into my brain, it grabs hold and refuses to leave without being fed a sufficient meal of self-pity.

It’s part of the reason that Krista has always entranced me. That one rare, millennial trans girl that seemed to figure her shit out as fast as possible. When I was rushing a frat, she was learning make up. When I bought my first dress under the guise of attending a drag party, she was already months into HRT living full time as the loud and audacious woman she is now. I’m a late bloomer. Finding my girlhood in the undertow of the apocalypse.

“I got you something different,” Randall says when they return to the table. “It’s some strawberry thing, I think. They’re trying to get rid of their juice.”

Randall still has their Tom Collins.

The drink is sweet to the point of being pungent, but it’s a welcome break from the night’s routine.

“So, where do you think they came from?” Randall asks after a deep slurp.

“Who?” I ask.

“The robots. Like, why are they here?” Randall asks.

“Space?” I say.

Randall laughs like I’ve said a joke. Like somehow the idea of killer robots from space is more absurd than a killer robot apocalypse from Earth.

“They’re not aliens! That doesn’t make sense. If they could travel through space, would they really be taking their sweet ass time crossing the country?” Randall says.

I can’t argue with them there. The robots haven’t figured out flight. Nobody knows why. Maybe they don’t want to or maybe they’re too heavy. Randall tells me that they think that the robots were some sort of experiment gone wrong. Some tech startups big, bad, no good at all mistake that’s doomed humanity.

“I don’t really want to talk about the robots,” I say. I know it’s rude, but it’s not why I’m here. I hear about them all day. It’s still all most people can talk about.

“Where did you live before this?” I ask, trying to change the topic.

“Oh, I grew up outside Chicago. I moved to DC to be with some guy who dumped me and then I fled to Baltimore. I hate the DC scene. Everyone pretends they know someone. It’s like LA, but at least in LA they were talking about movie stars and not politicians and secret service,” Randall says.

Randall asks me where I used to live, and I tell them I’ve always been a Baltimoron. The city has me in its orbit of yard flamingoes and rats, and I’ve never been able to pull myself out farther than Owings Mills.

We end up dancing, pushed chest to chest in the surge of bodies that flow to and from the bar. It’s to some stupid song from two decades ago, loud and poppy and filled with bad innuendo, but that’s honestly what the bar is craving for. It’s what I’m craving for. Randall puts their hands on my hips, and I swish my skirt. I actually want to feel them rubbing on me, to get that good friction and feel their hunger, but I can’t not feel my dick and how despite my best efforts to tuck, it still takes just the slightest moment of arousal to announce itself. I can only dance so long before I feel the tenting and have to excuse myself to the ladies’ room. I feel like a cartoon gorilla.

After I’m done readjusting and triple check my skirt in the mirror, I find Randall waiting for me outside the door and I tell them that I want to leave. “Oh,” they say. “Did I do something wrong?”

I feel like a bitch, and I want to tell Randall that maybe getting smashed on country club drinks in a bar so crowded that every breath feels stolen wasn’t the best first date, but I don’t say anything. I just say I’m tired.

Randall asks if they can walk me home and I say yes. I only live a few blocks away, tucked in between undulating streets of rowhomes.

“How much longer do you think we have until B-more gets wrecked?” I ask.

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about the robots,” Randall replies.

I don’t. India always used to accuse me of being too nostalgic. I’d cry about missing my cramped, messy dorm room or that divey diner on Charles Street that closed down almost a decade ago and India would roll her eyes. I yearn for places, even the shitty unremarkable ones that India thought were better off forgotten. I can’t stop myself from mourning the impending loss of the city more than the people in it, the people that are killing time before their doom. I wonder how much of this restless, gothic space will remain after the machines are done with their smashing.

“Do you miss Chicago?” I ask.

Randall shakes their head and tells me that it felt too claustrophobic, that they always felt that they were at risk of being crushed, that the city felt unstable and wobbling. I’m not sure I understand but also I’ve never been. I ask Randall if it’s because of the wind and they roll their eyes and laugh.

They reach for my cheek and kiss me on my doorstep. It takes me by surprise, and I think at first that the wrongness of their lips is just because I wasn’t prepared. I kiss back and wait for something to stir in me, even in my awful tucked away dick, but I have nothing. Randall pulls away and smiles and asks if we can do this again sometime. I lie and say yes.

 . . .

The robots have begun to fight each other, and I am being railed by a guy I’ve known for two days. I’m gripping the sheets, face down in the fabric. Dress hiked past my hips. Man inside me. Ass on fire. Feeling whole.

The original plan had been to hold off on hooking up with guys until I had tested the waters a little more, eased into some sort of comfort with my trans girl sexuality. But after Chicago was incinerated by the crossfire of warring robot factions, the time for procrastination was over.

“Is it bad that I keep watching the footage of that one bot punting the

Bean into the other’s face? Like, part of my lizard brain sees that and says, ‘fuck yeah’ even though I know it’s like wrong and people are dying,” Krista had said that day in her apartment when I told her my plan. “But yeah. I get it.

We don’t have long. Don’t want to go tranny hell without giving dick a try.”

Krista had long figured out the dance of finding cismen partners. Over wine and edibles, we would talk strategy about tiptoeing her way through the disclosure game. Krista often opted to hold off on telling her men that she was trans until well into her third or fourth date. She knew the risks and I, along with plenty of her other friends, refreshed her location on our phones for hours on the days she decided to make herself known. “Loneliness is worse than being somebody’s trans panic corpse,” she’d say to reassure us and as repetition of a personal mantra. The worst she ever got was a torrent of slurs and being left behind at the King of Prussia mall, but the possibility of something awful was always there.

“Like I said before, now is the time to do it. Nobody is picky anymore. A lay is a lay,” Krista said.

“What about chasers?” I asked. I wasn’t in the mood to be a checkmark on someone’s fetish bucket list.

“Who the fuck cares? We’re all going to die. You’re not going to find your forever man now. They might as well all be chasers or eggs,” Krista said, taking my phone. “Just let me do it. I’ll find you a guy. A hot one.”

And that’s how I ended up here. With a man finishing in me and on my back. Moaning and shuddering as my mouth bites down on sheets that aren’t mine.

“Damn, wow, shit,” the man, Dave, gasps. We uncouple and I lay on my stomach, and he flops down on his back next to me.

We’d matched several days prior and had texted back and forth trying to make room in each other’s fuck schedules. Or rather his. He was a busy guy, which in normal times would’ve been a bit of a turn off. I didn’t have interest in being a notch in someone’s bed post, no matter what the guy looks like. Don’t get me wrong, Dave is hot. He’s not jacked but when I grabbed at his back and shoulders during our first kisses, I could feel a body there. A man’s body. Something that felt powerful to me. Primal.

“How was that?” Dave says, turning his face to mine.

“Ow,” I gasp. Dave frowns.

“Like a good ow,” I say.

I had pictured this going so much worse. Even in my nonviolent nightmares I had envisioned a repulsion at the bulge under my skirt or a wave of tears to burst forth post-fucking as the guy went through some internal gay crisis. Instead, we both lie here in the aftermath, intimate and awkward in the same way every hook up I’ve ever had has gone.

There’s an unframed poster of Obi-Wan Kenobi on the wall. The young one. In the newer movies. The guy from Trainspotting. He watches us naked and recovering in Dave’s sheets. The whole room reminds me of a college dorm or more specifically, my own bedroom prior to India and I moving in together. What is it about cis guys and the complete lack of interior design skills?

“What’s your favorite?” Dave asks.

“Favorite what?” I reply.

“Star Wars. I see you looking at Kenobi up there. Or is Ewan just your type?”

That’s right. Ewan McGregor.

“I don’t really have one. I was always more of a Trekkie,” I say. Which is only partially true. I watched Voyager with my dad when I was a kid.

“Pick one,” Dave asks.

“The Last Jedi,” I say. “It’s pretty.”

I can tell Dave doesn’t like this answer, but thankfully he’s the one Star Wars fan left on the planet that doesn’t want to tell me why I’m wrong. He just smiles and shakes his head.

“I like Return of the Jedi. The Ewoks are badass,” he says, and I laugh.

I can see a younger him. Dressed as a little bear with a stick running through the woods.

I really know nothing about him. Krista swiped. I approved. We texted for a few days just to figure out the vibes of it all.

“Do you want to cuddle?” I ask and I feel silly. Childish.

He pulls me close though and I rest my head in the nook of his shoulders.

“What was the last good meal you ate?” he asks.

The grocery stores are mostly cleared out now. Nobody is working anymore. Supply chains are obliterated. We are all making do off our can stockpiles and frozen meals stuffed top to bottom in our freezers. We still have electricity. Somehow.

“Costco mozzarella sticks,” I say, proudly. I’d grabbed them early on in the attacks and saved them for a special occasion. I downed half a box last night trying to drown out the pre-date nerves.

“Damn, bitch. Okay,” he says. He laughs.

I ask him the same question, but he doesn’t answer back. I assume he’s asleep.

I try to time the rhythm of my breaths to his so we can ride the ebb and flow of each other’s chests together. But I keep falling out of sync. This is the closest I’ve ever been to a man. At least since my own father. I see what Krista sees. I get the appeal.

“Do you think this will be over soon?” Dave asks, startling me. “Do you think the good robots are going to stop the bad robots?”

“I don’t know if there are good robots. I don’t know why they’re fighting,” I say. I wonder if Dave can tell the difference. To me they all look the same. Several story tall machines spinning and whirling with death tools. If there were factions, I couldn’t make sense of them. It was all tumbling cyber appendages and oil soaked roboviscera. A mess. Loud and violent. Played out amid the corpse of Chicago and whatever city would follow.

“I think they’re good. I want them to be,” Dave says. He nuzzles me. I let him sleep.

. . .

The robots have passed Appalachia and I am standing in the cold in a neighborhood I barely know, checking my texts over and over. There’s no service. The networks are all down. At this point, checking my phone is a pointless tic.

For the first time you can see faint flashes of the frontlines in the distance. The punctuated whir of jets and helicopters is the new city soundtrack. The smoke, not yet thick enough to smother, hazes its way through the sky. Charm City knows that we are not much farther down on the chopping block. Maybe not as soon as Manhattan or DC or Philly, but we won’t escape the bots much longer. The harbor is primed for boiling.

And I am here, waiting for a sign that this man, this stupid boy, still wants me.

We’d texted on and off until the phones stopped working. I knew he was still fucking around with other people, but I figured, naïve girl that I am, that the fact that he was still texting me “good morning” meant that there was something there. That there was hope for something real. As real as it can be in the short time we all had left.

We’d met up once after we first slept together. A chilly walk through Patterson Park where he handed me his hat when he saw me shiver and held my hand as we watched the brownred leaves spiral beneath the pagoda. We had sex too of course, but the walk was what stuck with me. It felt special. Like a date. A date with a man.

But he didn’t show for our planned pasta dinner night, and I assumed at first that something had come up. I would understand, I told myself, if he got bad news about his family or he got sick or a friend appeared out of nowhere at his door asking to crash on his couch for a day or two before the end of the world reached us. Phones were gone. These little last-minute surprises couldn’t be broadcast like they used to. So, I sat on my couch and pretended to read a book I had put off reading my whole adult life while I waited for a knock at the door or a buzz from the downstairs bell. Of course, it didn’t happen.

Now, here I am. Hiking through Fed Hill, impulse checking my phone, and planning on showing up at his door like some kind of starved dog. I can hear Krista scolding me in my ear. She would be so disappointed in me. Trudging through streets of emptied out bars and convenient stores in an attempt to find the boy that was just supposed to be a dick appointment.

I pass other wanderers. You would think that with the arrival of bots just a few days out  we would all just be thrashing around in some kind of big group panic. I think we get it though. That looting and hoarding guns and boarding up our windows is just not worth our time. There’s a quiet calm, I guess, in knowing there’s absolutely nothing you can do.

His roommate answers the door.

“Hey, you’re here for Dave, right?” he asks, and I tell him yes.

Dave’s roommate directs me upstairs to Dave’s room even though I already know the way. I meet him at the entrance to his bedroom. His hair a mess, beard spiraling like ivy out in all directions.

“Oh, hey, it’s you,” Dave says.

“Yeah,” I say. I had of course rehearsed all kinds of verbal putdowns in the shower. I had been prepared to rip him apart with my teeth and leave him bloodied on the ground. But of course, I’m standing here now with a “Yeah” and nothing more.

“I’m sorry I didn’t show the other day. I’ve been struggling. Like shit’s hard,” Dave says. He’s wearing loose fitting boxer shorts and a white undershirt.

“We’re all struggling,” I say and Dave nods.

“I know that. I just haven’t heard from my parents in over a week and things look so doomsday. And I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t want to spend my last days with—”

“A tranny,” I say.

“I was going to say a girl I don’t really know,” Dave says. Quickly.

We stand there, me bundled up for the outside chill and him in his lazy sleepwear. I can’t tell if I was right or if Dave really is just hoping to ride out the end alone in his bedroom. If I had unfairly assumed the worst or if he really did shudder at the thought of spending his final moments curled up with a girl with a dick. Not that it matters now. I’d killed dead any chance of him changing his mind.

“I think I should go,” I say finally, and David agrees. He closes the door and I descend the stairs. His roommate says goodbye, but I play like I didn’t hear.

The next hour is a blank space in my day. I imagine I cried and made a mess of myself. But I doubt that people really cared because wailing in the streets was not an uncommon occurrence nowadays. Part of me knows I shouldn’t be wandering through miles of dark Baltimore streetway but I’m on autopilot, stumbling to the one place I can think to go to.

Krista somehow knows I’m outside the door to her apartment without me having to knock. She’s gorgeous, even now, in the kind of way that makes me feel like a worm still spinning its piece of shit chrysalis. I crumble.

“Oh, honey,” she says and lets me collapse against her shoulders. We stumble midhug, my legs dragging, to the living room couch.

“I already started making tea. My trans mom senses were tingling, I guess. You just know sometimes,” she says. She hands me a hot mug, sits down on the couch, and lets me rest my head against her thigh. I sip the steaming tea and try my best not to spill it on her legs.

“So, tell me,” she says. “Tell me about this fuckboy that’s ruined your life.”

I tell her as much as I can remember. Obi-Wan poster to pagoda date to ghosting to wandering the streets of Baltimore to being dumped while he wore plaid boxers.

Krista strokes my hair and listens. She’s loud and messy but she knows when to turn herself down and just exist beside someone. She’s called herself a pain sponge before, something to suck up other girl’s garbage feelings. I hope that’s not what I’m doing. Giving her more awful to absorb into her body. But I just start talking and I can’t stop.

“I would say he’s not worth it, but I know you know that. And I know you know that doesn’t help,” Krista says.

“I would say that I’ll meet other guys. Or girls. Or just people, I guess. But that’s not true is it? He was the last one,” I say. And I realized that was what it was the whole time. Not David. Not even that there was a man who could hold me and fuck me and make me feel wanted. It was that he was going to be the last. My one chance at something as the right me before it all went kabloom.

“Maybe. Girl, I don’t know. I wish I did,” Krista replies. She looks down at me and continues to pet my hair. She places her mug of tea on her sticky, wine-stained coffee table and cradles me beneath both of her hands. I stare back up at her. I realize that I don’t actually know how old she is. She exists.

I kiss her.

I think I feel her kissing back, arching toward me. I reach my hand up to cup her cheek in my palm, but she intercepts it. She pulls away and delicately places my hand back to my lap.

“Oh, hon. We’re not like that. That’s not us,” she says.

We stay paused in that awkward aftermath until I feel Krista’s legs shift beneath her. She stands and leaves me. I leave her soon after.

. . .

The robots have flattened DC and I am drunk and alone at a party riot in the city streets. The word came from someone’s radio which had been hooked up to huge concert style speakers at the end of the block. We had all taken to listening to the stories of the frontlines through our bedroom windows. There was a moment where things looked like they may turn around. The bots were smashing each other just as often as us now and the military had thrown pretty much everything it had into keeping the capitol from falling. But somewhere around when one machine chucked the Washington Monument javelin style into the Capitol Building, it was clear that it was over. The robots were clearly smart enough to target DC first. New York and Boston had already disappeared. Baltimore was next. And soon.

So, we’re all out here in the streets. The few still in denial have rounded up their guns or tried to flee by boat or car. But we all know it’s ending now. The rest of us are pounding back drinks, getting high, fucking, and dancing to a sound soup of everyone’s favorite song played on blast. “Beat It” slides into REM slides into “Hey Ya” slides into Run the Jewels slides into some KPOP I don’t recognize.

I’m on the edge of crossfading. I shared a joint with my neighbor until he decided that he and his boyfriend were going to bust open the National Aquarium to give the fish and lizards a fighting chance. I did shots with an excited older woman in the streets. She had lined up dozens of tiny glasses and was pouring out bottle after bottle of glass case liquor that she claimed had been sitting in a cupboard for the better part of a decade.

I figured I deserved to indulge myself. Ever since the double tap rejection of David and Krista I had tried my best to stay sober. I didn’t want myself wandering drunk off my ass to India’s new place or collapsing in some Baltimore gutter, ending my life like a pathetic transsexual Edgar Allen Poe. Instead, I’ve spent much of the last week experimenting with my leftover pasta and trying to read The Lord of the Rings. It hasn’t been going well. But now, with David, Krista, India, Randall, and everyone else in this town just hours away from a fiery laser and rocket fueled demise, I figured sobriety wasn’t worth it.

A man passes me an aluminum bat, offering me to join him and his friends in beating the shit out of a minivan. I pass. I worry that I would accidentally break someone’s nose. I don’t want to die guilty for cracking open someone’s face. I’m mopey enough as it is.

I sit and watch a game of basketball that has started on the corner. It’s kids mostly. Boys and their dads. Girls too. Neighbors, sipping wine beer and water, stand around and shout words of encouragement. I wish I cared about sports, but more than that I wish that I knew any of these people. It seems right almost. To spend the last hour alive cheering on your neighbor’s daughter as she dunks on her dad.

“Thinking of joining?” I hear her say.

I’m embarrassed to look so I let her sit down beside me. I worry that I seem like a bitch, a child giving the silent treatment, so I mutter out a short, quiet, “Hey.”

“Hey back,” Krista says.

“I think I saw you try to dribble once,” I say. “It’s maybe the one thing I’ve seen you suck at.” Krista laughs.

“I was a soccer girl. Or at least until the boys got too scary to play with.

Then I was a nothing girl,” Krista says.

“Do you think that maybe more of us would like sports if we didn’t have to play with guys growing up?” I ask.

I turn to her finally. Her hair is messy and unwashed, tangling in a spiderweb above her skull. Krista shrugs. She smiles at me. A quiet, small curl of the mouth.

“What are you doing here? This isn’t exactly close by,” I ask.

“I came to see you, bitch,” she says.

“Don’t you have—” I start, but Krista shushes me.

“Just for once don’t bitter dear. It all sucks, okay? But I’m here. I wanted to see you when it ends,” Krista said. “Trans mom senses and all you know?” She reaches her arm around my shoulder, and I lean into the space of her.

“I’m sorry I kissed you,” I say.

“You’re fine. I just didn’t want to hurt you anymore. Girls and me don’t go like that. Even the good ones like you,” she says.

The game has stopped. A boy has slipped and skidded his knee. A woman, his sister maybe, scurries over and helps him up. His throat bobs and he looks for a second like he might cry. The woman whispers into his ear, and he shakes his head. Makes a move for the ball to be passed to him. And the game goes on all the same. A cut knee slathered with asphalt blood not enough to stop the play.

“We get such a raw deal,” I say. “Even before the end of the world we barely had one to begin with.”

Krista kisses the top of my head. “What did I say about the bitterness?” she asks.

I laugh.

I have no idea who is winning this game.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t fix the world for you dear. I tried. I really did. You deserved the best,” Krista says.

“Thanks, mom,” I tell her.

She laughs her quiet sad laugh, and we watch the game, waiting for that moment when the rubbery bounce of play is drowned out by the clank of mechanical feet.

NIC ANSTETT is a writer from Baltimore, Maryland, who loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, University of Oregon’s MFA program, and the Tin House Summer Workshop where she was a 2021 Scholar. Her work is published and forthcoming in Witness Magazine, North American Review, Bat City Review, Lightspeed, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.