Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

Everything Paul knew boiled down to this one gimmick: try for what you want.

Attention is a price you pay for services, a currency, a mirror held up to deflect.

“When women cover songs by men, they don’t swap the pronouns. Is this a.) a lack of anxiety about convention, b.) a biologically essential fluidity native to humans with vaginas and/or two X chromosomes, c.) rampant queerness among women singers, or d.) the universal male default?”

Paul thought about his asshole opening up into a cathedral and the smell of the wall and this feeling of being a federation of so many cosmic particles suspended in skin.

How could straight people, for instance, have real friends when their entire lives were an inhabitation of a myth?