“Pick up the knife,” my boss repeats.

Smooth and pink, the body on the banquet table in celebration of Barbara’s retirement trembles—or do I? The butcher knife to dissemble the three-tiered cake onto party plates wobbles in my hand. I drop the blade and beg a coworker to perform the ritual. Still complicit, stabbing triumphant forks into the jam-bloody wedges, I decide: Hunger strike.

All morning, the bad news floods my brainspace. Tired of treading water, my eyeballs sink from the queue of hungry guests to the final BBC alert: COUNTY JUDGE REJECTS ACLU PETITION TO STAY EMERGENCY ORDER—JACK MALK, MISSOURI ATTORNEY GENERAL, BANS TRANSGENDERISM, HEALTHCARE FOR CHILDREN AND ADULTS, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.

“They expect us to shed our breasts??” bubbles a message from Safa.

“No refunds,” I reply, gift my coworker the last slice, and walk out until locked in my apartment, blanket-tucked as if safe.

The timing of the death sentence couldn’t be better. Last week, my suicidal ideation matured beyond a pros and cons list of methods to hefting a knife and visualizing the hard swallow and slashes, pain bright against these united states of erasure. Like my predecessor, who after 35 years as office manager expired of milk duct cancer within a year of her retirement, I would die anyway, one day. Why not now—right now?

I farewell food like a lover, guzzle sweet oat milk by the carton but tear the foil cleanly off a cool bar of 85% chocolate, slipping each shard into me, tonguing the bitter grit on my teeth. Our breakup sex the best we ever had, I lay myself to rest.

Concerned voices rescue me from the reality in which AG Jack Malk’s head balloons large enough that humans must trash another planet or slit the man’s neck. Popcorn pungent, back from a movie date I declined due to “work stress,” the sincerity of my partners’ six eyes freezes me in a casual stretch on the couch.

“‘…robbed of the right to life, I choose Gandhian provocation’?” they slow quote my Instagram post and want to dialogue.

When my partners refuse to share the number of post likes, I try to explain how U-Locking my appendages to a Jefferson City bench to waste away on the capitol steps seemed too dramatic, even for me, reminding them I might be the only queer who hates camping. I know suicide isn’t funny, but I want to hear my partners laugh, not because existence is a mirage, a waste of good tears, but because it’s not.

“I’m doing what I can,” I say and earn shallow nods. They don’t know I mean “starve.” The answer to my hunger has never been food. What tastes better than sufficient carbs to power a cost-efficient worker through middle age? Nothing, short of a body illegal to walk the streets, from out of my dreams. I explain time doesn’t seem to have anything better to do than lick Jack and me, our decades-old wound, and add, “I need to do this, here, in our home, where I feel any remaining control.”

“How sure are you?” Scout says, voice lumpy, double thick with doubt and concern.

“Sure as Jack Malk,” I say. No veto power in our relationships, the motion rests.

The first week around the couch, we family movie night all 3 hours and 11 minutes of the Gandhi film, hankering for how-tos. As self-appointed social media manager, Ale documents my material complaints. Between bathroom trips, Scout keeps me in honey water and clean sheets. M takes my temperature, themes our sleepovers. On face painting night, someone draws eyebrows on the dog, making her somehow more judge-y. I dare a mustache with spiral ends and consent to Ale posting a photo with the caption: “I’m OK, still a woman.”

The less they move, the more my legs squirm as if egg sacs birthing ravenous worms. When my ankles swell—not a cute look—I think, That’s weird, as if on the other side, not the threshold of discomfort. Panic sits me upright. The fruit of my transition is rotting. I invoke memories of walks in the woods, branch swoosh and bird squeak, a sunlight bath so delicious two butterflies must dance. My legs shuffle the path because that’s what they do—did—like my body once toward gender joy, onto the final transition. A hush in the treetops, as if the world holds its breath.

“The reporters are coming!” my partners announce. I should be thrilled but catch the creeps from a glance in the mirror, the girl looking back less ASPCA commercial than corpse-adjacent.

“Why the long face?” Safa jokes, and I giggle awake to the fronds of my friend’s eyes, her feline smirk. Some things can’t be said except between trans girls. Like, the first night she and I let our sads show, we declared hot dog tacos the most t girl of meals, limp wieners bobbing from our limp wrists, “a new take on mystery meat!” This time, her tender, dagger-nailed hand in mine, she asks if the category is Cryptkeeper realness and offers to do my makeup for the cameras. My internalized shame gestures vaguely at the ethics of performative womanhood, settled by my only certainty.

“I’ll die as I’ve lived,” I say.

“There’s my girl,” she says, casting face magic until I feel me, ready.

On day sixteen, when “#starvingforachange Transwoman” makes local news, my loved ones cheer. It’s the first time I come close to crying. They’re assuming we’ll win.

Mostly, I cringe on the spear of media attention, how my tantrum twists the AG ban into a single sob story. Follow-through my only redeeming quality, I fluff my pillow, lay down quietly screaming over the irreconcilable: My over-inflated self-importance, and I deserve better, and we all do.

Dad calls. Mom still follows me? She updates him about the full-time job, the highlights of my slow death. During a tangent about my brother’s “baby boy,” Dad drops a line we grew up hearing: “Family is the most important thing. Everything else is…” Twice, he can’t finish. If I snuck a meal between interviews, he’d still be proud of me. “You don’t want to lose a good job,” he advises, then tries a new line: Maybe it’s time he broke neutrality after the two-year excommunication over me being trans and convinced my bio family to let me come home. “You’ll be coming home soon. You will,” he says, as if I can walk. I thank him for saying beautiful things that make me feel good, promises he won’t keep, like any boy.

Better than TV, I watch my partners cook and caress, share chores, theories, dreams, fill our table with fruit and flowers. Rolling as a square has never been gentler, what I’ve longed for, but when their hands can no longer chase the ache from my atrophied muscles—their massages affectionate, methodical, generous—I quit complaining. My partners’ eyes pool, reflect the horror of me. Always, they want to talk. Can’t they see I’m busy hitting my target weight? Humorless, they say the trans are moving to Collinsville or Carbondale, some nasty C-word. A twenty-minute drive from the city, no border guards yet, we could save our family, preserve our lives together, the shameless pursuit of queer survival. Honestly, I can’t talk about my pride, how it feels to embody a decision. I say I’d rather brave non-existence than the subdivisions of rural Illinois.

M continues to nurse my estrogen injections, illegal vials mail ordered from Japan to a friend of a friend and smuggled in, my partners convinced the police search our mail—and no one confesses to calling counselor Kathryn. Less shocking, she’s great, doesn’t suggest an eating disorder flare but frames “the present situation” in terms of bodily autonomy and Tarot.

“Are you familiar with Temperance?” she says.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please, welcome to the stage…Temperance,” I joke, again failing to land a laugh.

Kathryn raises the card, a blue blade of water suspended between chalices while, from the cast aside deck, the High Priestess recognizes real, her face a blank, gowned in the curtain between reality and dreams. I point to my spiritual sister for whom the divide itself is the illusion, but Kathryn counters, “What’s the value of life if only a dream?”

Ale quotes me to social media when I answer that Kathryn’s question is a luxury trans Missourians can’t afford. “You’re right,” I admit. “People like Jack Malk leave me no choice but to think more about dying. Is a hunger strike extreme? OK. My weight on the scale—it’s all the balance I’ve got.”

Jinxed, day twenty-three, the attorney general calls. I’m not proud to blush when passed the phone, flattered Jack hasn’t deleted my number.

“Beautiful morning, Dannyboy. You get out for a run today, Dannyboy, stretch your biologically male legs?” he says.

“Finally grow gray matter, Jackass,” I say, “or are you missing the cruel joke of deadnaming the girl you’re murdering?”

I ask about his wife and kid and can’t tell if he believes his rant about Jack Jr.’s recent autism diagnosis, the liberal plot to “infect the American people into neurodivergent queers.” In high school, track and field, Jack was the faster runner. As his meet alternate, we shared hotel rooms, queen beds, and although being “within breathing range” made him “want to vomit” or “shatter [my] face so hard,” on bus trips across seas of soybeans and feed corn, state lines as wavy as the concept middle west, Jack confided in me sideways about appeasing his girlfriend, his still-married parents, and their plans for his future—the bloodless battles of an adored white boy. Often, Jack asked for and benefited from my “faggy” advice, but I believe he most liked me at his heels from a sadistic pleasure in my crush. I wouldn’t abandon him no matter how hard he smashed me, a track we raced too long, leaving a residual injury of self-loathing.

I want to tell you a story about disorientation, shower steam, the shock of a shove, and my lip split against wall tile, “Crystal” in his mouth, Jack in me thick, about water and blood, how we finish each other—but fantasy fails to change the body of facts.

“You live, you lose,” Jack says. “You die, prove transgenders are unwell, you lose.” The more he talks—resistance is futile, etc.—I’m certain he isn’t closeted and lashing, just a bully drunk on the politics of punching down.

When Jack pauses to breathe, I hear him, listening for an emotional reaction, confirmation that he isn’t so confident. I almost say I’ll miss him. “Goodbye, Jack,” I hang up, block him, shocked by the silence, the cool wash of relief.

Weeks six and seven are full of final calls. Fired, my thirty-day health insurance coverage period races me to termination. The university isn’t positioned to comment, says my former boss, and can I accomplish one task correctly and transfer my file access to the new admin to preserve institutional memory. The ACLU shares recent victories against the Missouri ban. They blocked the attorney general’s warrant to seize my body for force-feeding, and yesterday, the petition for federal intervention lapped 10,000 signatures. The advocate’s message is clear: Keep up the good work.

Did you know death from hunger strike requires the loss of 50% body mass over 60-70 days?

Worse than boredom or the chore of breathing are the lost dreams—Christmas in Maine, my unfinished time travel novel, a welcome home dinner with bio family. I supervise my internal organs sleepily, lit rooms of a house that flicker goodnight. My doghter licks my hand to wake me, curls vigilant at my feet. She’s barely eating, my partners say. “Don’t let her repeat her mother’s mistakes,” I plead, encourage more spoiling, of themselves too, to do what I can’t and be big.

For the hundredth time, M takes my temperature—still dying.

The organ damage is irreversible, says the doula, my bones sustenance-scavenged and porous, little eyes that let the light in. If lucky, I’ll survive the night. I do. “Faith,” someone cusses, but I can’t hear the rest, back on track, the 200-yard sprint, past the chug of limbs, the me machine, past the will to give more, the moment when, if one has enough to win, it just has to be there. I imagine the superior runners pulling ahead as single-minded, fixated on the finish line as the herd rounds for the homestretch. I glance up at the bleachers. Why? All the world is streaky, silent, nothing discernible at light speed, except the miracle of time stopped.

One morning, the dog whines. Safa, the ACLU, several reporters, my former boss and the sympathetic coworker, a trans girl from Chesterfield, Jack and Jack Jr.—they crowd around the couch to comment why my living or dying matters. I could be delirious. My parents materialize, Dad’s blue eyes a downpour, wanting to bend and hold me. He doesn’t. “You’re smarter than this,” Mom says, and deflected by my inert tongue, the message soaks the room. Above me floats something like god in the Venn diagram of my partners’ heads. I want them to wrap me in their many arms, to wing us away to a better place, safe, whole.

“We’ll miss you. We love you,” they say. It’s not enough. I’m starving for the day it will be.