Covenant Ficlets: A Real Man

Ezra is a trans man. Before he knew he was Ezra, he grew up as a girl named Myrtle. He’s about 15 here. His sister Thea is just a bit older.

Tags & warnings: Gender dysphoria, teen angst, trans character using their birth name and pronouns

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Myrtle wasn’t that much for the newspaper, so Thea—who read every word of them when their father had finished with them—was the one who spotted the article and pointed it out to her. “Woman Who Dresses in Male Attire Starts Story She is a ‘Real Man’.”

It felt like being hit right between the eyes.

“I just hated to have my hair curled up and tied with a ribbon. I hated being told that I mustn’t run about and play like the boys.” It felt like someone had seen her after a lifetime of horrid, lonely invisibility.

“I did not like to be a girl; did not feel like a girl, and never did look like a girl,” he said. “So it seemed impossible to make myself a girl and, sick at heart over the thought that I would be an outcast of the feminine gender, I conceived the idea of making myself a man.”

She finished the article, while Thea looked on with all the excited anticipation of a golden retriever waiting to be told it had done well. And then she had to put it down and leave the room.

She couldn’t speak. Her legs shook so hard she wondered how far she could walk, but by god she needed to walk to the ends of the earth. She pulled the ribbon out of her hair and slumped to the front stoop of their little porch.

The street’s noise rattled around her but it came from somewhere else. The world was empty, silent.

Live as a boy?

Live as a boy.

After a while, Thea came out to sit down next to her, bundling her skirts tidily around her legs and leaning against Myrtle’s shoulder. It occurred to Myrtle that maybe she’d hurt her sister’s feelings, walking out on her that way.

But Thea didn’t indicate it. When Myrtle finally had the courage to glance sidewise at her, she found Thea just staring into the distance, more or less on the same line Myrtle had been staring, as if she might see whatever Myrtle did.

Thea understood. She’d been Myrtle’s confidant these past couple of years, as she began to grow up. Every day it seemed as if the future tightened about her like a noose. Her final condemnation as a woman growing closer and more choking every time somebody commented on how she was growing up or how pretty she was, how popular she must be with the boys. Thea knew how hard Myrtle had fought to find some way, any way, to feel as if ‘womanhood’ were anything except the final destruction of her as a person.

All for nothing. And it felt more and more to her as if there was nothing. Except.

“I could live as a boy,” she said, trying the words out loud, daring to bring them into the real world with all their hope. “I could be a man.”

Now Thea looked at her, and her hazel eyes were sparkling with the kind of joy that might come for somebody who’d just barely escaped death. “You could be,” was all she said though, because Thea wasn’t one for dramatic demonstrations of emotion.

It stayed in Myrtle’s head for weeks.

It sounded like something from Covenant. Only they didn’t have Covenant out west, did they? They were special, here, with him. Not everybody got the chance to ask for their heart’s desire.

Maybe this was Myrtle’s. Maybe she should go to him and ask to…to live as a man? To be a man? It was funny how she’d never thought of that before.

But what if she did?

Imagining it made her breathless with excitement. The freedom. The…the life. The chance to be who she wanted to be instead of…she didn’t have a word for it. 

Oh but it was terrifying. Would she still be herself? Would she be giving up everything? Everything she knew, everything she understood. Would people remember her? Would she become someone else entirely? Would she even be the Wrights’ daughter?

But she dreamed of it. So often. Dreamed of being a man, dressed like a man, called like a man, working men’s jobs with no one looking at her askance or expecting anything different while she served beer and waited tables, got into fist fights and knife fights and kissed girls who swooned in her arms. In those dreams, she was the least afraid she thought she’d ever been.