Prologue
Prologue I
When men die, they are reborn as women: it is their penance. To suffer as they made others suffer.
June’s past life was a brute: he left her a firm jaw and large hands and seven small bruises-turned-birthmarks across her arms and legs: little freckles of male residue.
Beautiful people fill June with rage: June is not beautiful: June is brutish: she has this unspoken fear that she looks like her father.
I wake in pieces of children
The child I won’t have, the child I won’t see again
In the morning light, she is a young boy again: tapping inside the cavern of her left ventricle: he beats out his pulse: steady soldier: he is full of rage, stirring June’s blood into plummeting apologies that pool in her bed sheets: a young boy: a clot of blood: a body inside: apologies for his pain: his sex: for being a man and for being a child: a boy in the night time: born and dead by dawn.
Prologue II
There is no such thing as men or penance. Your hate, in this lifetime, it is momentary: your morality tied to this culture, within this time.
There is nothing great. There is the sea, the sky, the land: the great bodies of those around you.
There is only now, and it is fleeting and barely here before it is already beyond you, behind you. Your mother, your father, and the lies that you tell yourself, the truths that they become when you choose to listen.
There is only everything: you and everything. And nothing more.
Prologue III
When men die, they do not disappear.
You cannot question it. In many ways, yes, they are there. Within your history books. Stone and paint across your city. Above your head as you walk into work. They live on in the names of laws, in the laws themselves. In the way that we view the world, and are viewed within it.
But on a metaphysical level, you cannot truly mean to say that death is a finality. A full stop. Not after all of that spiel we are forced to sit through in GCSE science. That energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We have not yet rooted the source of consciousness, nor the inner functionings of it. Is there yet some spirit, some integral soul we humans possess? Where does it go when the heart flatlines, and brain activity ceases to register? Is it left to bury itself into the memories others behold of that soul?
No, when men die, as in life, they simply can not just disappear.
They are in your blood. Your father carries his father, who carried his father’s father, in an endless litany of fatherdom. Flashes of their lives live on the surface of your skin. They will appear in the scrunch of your nose and the rounding of your shoulders. They are momentary remembrances and sudden forgettances. God, what is so special about men?
Forget the men. Forget the bitter tang they carry. Rip it from your throat. Reject that hate: reject his potential misdoings, and the guilt you may carry for them. Not all men. They always say that: not all men. But always men. June is not a man, yet she is: both women – them – and men – them – who came before her and will continue long after, as she will too. But June is not a woman either. Extrinsically, perhaps. But intrinsically, the beast in her belly and the bird at her breast bone mark her as theirs and themselves.
There is remarkable softness in that. The playful batting of her claws at his feathers as they wait, patiently- and sometimes, less so- for June to settle into them.