Little Fish

by Casey Plett

What’s up with your life, kid? I’ve always got my own shit. You’re always like, ‘Oh, everything’s fine, it’s all fine!’ Talk to me. You can’t be all be rose-coloured piss.” My best friend is dead. My best friend killed herself. I’m getting laid off and I’m doing tricks again and I’m scared a thing that happened to my friend is going to happen to me. But I’m making money. I’m almost certainly making more money than you. A man did something to me in an alley weeks ago, and I’m burying it because too much else has happened. Your father might’ve been a woman, but I can never tell you that, ever, ever. I don’t want to kill myself, but I don’t know if I want to live either. I’m taking new hormones and I like my boobs better and it’s made me calmer and less angry, and they might also kill me faster. Maybe. No one really knows. My best friend is dead. Every man I like and am attracted to would never love me, ever. Every man who thinks they like me is either an awful creep or is paying for the privilege and sometimes both. More and more, I feel like life is something that’s just happening to me. My choices don’t feel like choices at all. It’s like they’re things that have been decided and I just react to them the way anybody would. The older I get, the more life feels like a blank, gauzy haze where every direction is just the same thing. It seems like other people have this way of pushing back against things in their life they don’t like, and I just don’t have that. Doing tricks th...