Dead Collections

by Isaac Fellman

The dead body is always pretty rude. It comes into your life and reminds you of the joke at the end; it ruins your appetite, it ruins your day.

The IV and the TV. They used to call it the TV/TS split, transvestite or transsexual.

Shoulda kept this one in the drafts, Sol.

On the phone everything is breath and speech; it is the least articulate medium for talking to people, the one with the least information, and yet the most intimate one. It’s on the phone and during sex that we notice breath the most.

How do you feel desire with a body that you can’t bear to have touched? Transition was just beginning to change that when I became a vampire—a state in which I had hardly been touched by desire at all.

Nobody ever caught on that I always had a migraine on unloading day. I remembered to feign migraines on other days too.

He's just like me fr

“Well,” I said, “I’m not a butch.” “Oh, that’s what all the butches say, Sol. What is it? You like a floral shirt? You can only fix an electric car?”

lmao!

Hey, tag yourself. SOL Third Category. FLORENCE Well, there’s no need to be self-deprecating.

This whole novel is dipped in a vat of inside jokes for archivists and fandom nerds that I can tell the author has been collecting over time. I think most of the meat of the book are those inside jokes, with really profound slivers of wisdom about vampirism and being trans.

The can was full of rust, and so were the button backs, and I don’t know how it happens—archival stuff just twists its way into your flesh sometimes, dried-up old rubber band bits, God knows what—but one of these pins just went straight under my nail and deep into my finger.”

I know the mundanity of how Sol becomes a vampire helps to normalize vampirism as a condition rather than a sensation-- but I can't help but lol at how boring even his death is.

He was assigned cop at birth, that’s all.

A nightmare, truly.