Manhunt

by Gretchen Felker-Martin

The good news was that pregnancy was shorter now. Much shorter. The bad news was that the babies ate their way out.

The world was broken, but Beth’s face she could keep in one piece.

Fran had grown up with money, back when money still meant something, and she had that middle-class brain disease that makes people think calamities can be controlled.

No matter how prepared you were, some things just rolled over you in a hot, sticky black tide and you were lucky if they left you standing.

Not for the first time, Beth wondered if they were lonely, those things that had been men. If they missed their wives, their mothers, their daughters and girlfriends and dominatrixes. Or maybe they were happy now, free to rape and kill and eat whomever, free to shit and piss and jerk off in the street. Maybe this world was the one they’d always wanted.

New men, she thought, gripping the gutter and bracing a foot against the wall. Like Coke Zero. Same great vicious disregard for our lives, none of the socially enforced restraint!

There had always been radfems in New England, enclaves of sneering middle-class white women who talked a lot about performing gender roles and appropriating lived experience. They curated incestuous little social media cells where they repeated the same six talking points to the same thirty other women while cis men came sniffing around their hindquarters, venting pent-up hatred on trans women and making sure real women saw them doing it so they could get accredited as feminists and maybe, if they were lucky, catch a whiff of pussy.

The world is over, and the only way I can know myself is by hating other women.

It wasn’t the few who’d cheered that frightened her; it was the rest, watching with guarded expressions, not looking at those among their number who cried Go back to Maryland, you fucking Nazis and Fuck TERFs! The women who looked at each other in a way Beth didn’t understand, a way sealed forever within the cold and rigid bounds of cisness but which nonetheless told her without room for doubt that they couldn’t leave too soon. That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent.

Telling yourself what to feel is a brick wrapped up in silk: it looks pretty, but it hurts the same.