I prowled through my usual haunts, hoodie on but hood down. Wearing the hood would make me a suspicious character, whereas I was definitely not. It was peak sidewalk traffic hours, with everyone’s workday ending. They were excused from where they had been, and now they hurried off to where they would be, through this liminal concrete zone. I was unusual in this respect, for where I needed to be right now was here, in the in-between, that space used only to transition between other spaces.

The crowd rushed around me, so well-packed that if I were to reach out my hands and lean back I might have been able to surf on it. Instead, I spied a glimmer in the throng and my hand darted out for just seconds, deftly retrieving a too-large bracelet some modish madam was barely holding on her thin wrists. It was at least gold-coated. I stuffed it into my hoodie, keeping my face neutral. I was an employee, after all, getting home. It wouldn’t do for me to run.

The interaction I’d had today was still bothering me. Not only for its potential danger to my anonymity, but for the very real effect I’d felt in her presence. It was both shocking and disturbing for me to have lost control like that. My mind filled with tropes of romantic novels, visions of brute men “losing control” around fair maidens. I shuddered. Surely I had never been a fan of stories like that. A quick peek at my memories revealed nothing but the nebulous greys of the past.

At the very least, I conceded, I had the capacity to act badly. Perhaps that capacity extended to acts other than of material gain—but a closer examination of my feelings towards the subject returned confused results. I definitely did not want to force myself on anyone. Not only that, but the concept of me piloting my body in any carnal way was met only with disgust. Perhaps my mechanical form was not fit for concupiscence. Or perhaps I simply had no desire in that regard.

Pondering the subject of my interiority had snatched my mind away from the girl, who in turn was distracting me from my pickpocketing. Gently chastising my attention, I returned to conscious control of my craft, allowing surprise to show on my face when a drop of water hit my head. I turned upwards, and discovered the grey clouds above had finally grown heavy enough that their brief snatch at ethereality was now falling victim to the realities of gravitational attraction.

I pulled my hood up, but the rain grew harder. The crowd moved faster now, a sense of true urgency permeating the mass of people. What was briefly a drizzle now became a shower, then a lashing of water at the indolent laity. I looked around the nearby buildings, seeking shelter from the storm. A nearby sign proclaimed that there was a group of some kind meeting inside at this time, some sort of support group. I squinted, bleary-eyed, before pushing open the door and crossing through the threshold.

Inside was a short corridor, clean but unwaxed laminate giving way to several side rooms. A steady trickle of laughter and discussion wound down the hallway, which I followed until I came to a certain room. The door was open just a crack, and as I gently displaced the barrier the chatter in the room diminished.

Inside were several people sitting around a large circular table, all in folding chairs with more leaning against the wall. Large bags of chips with napkins and plates to accompany were piled together on a side table, and what looked to be a stack of several board games made up the contents of the center one. I looked from person to person, finding expressions of congeniality plastered on their faces. Giving a practiced smile myself, I entered the room and let the door behind me fall back to its previous position.

“Sorry,” I began in a soft voice, “it was raining pretty hard outside.”

Most of the rest of the group tittered and resumed chatting, with one well-groomed man taking the lead in replying. “No worries, we were just starting. Grab a chair and find a spot.”

I made my way over to the folding chair repository, but I didn’t get far. Sitting against the same wall as the door was the girl from today, the girl who was my mark. And this time, she definitely recognized me, staring directly at me with an inscrutable expression. Then she visibly brightened, scooting over her own chair in a clear invitation. Unsure what to make of this, I accepted the offer, taking a chair and making my way over to her.

“So,” she began, clearing her throat, “I guess I misjudged you.”

Her voice sounded wonderful, with a sort of mesmerizing huskiness about it. For a moment, I almost felt bad about planning to steal her medication. “That remains to be seen,” I grumbled out, then paused. I hadn’t planned to say that. Was my internal monologue escaping to the external world?

If she noticed something was off, she didn’t show it, merely chuckling and extending her hand, which I shook. “Thalia. Pleased to meet you.”

My mind froze. Giving my name, my legal name, to someone I would be stealing from felt almost brazenly reckless. But if not that, who was I? I opened my mouth, and the first name I thought of fell out. “Chloe.”

I physically froze. That couldn’t be my name, clearly not. It didn’t fit with my appearance at all, harsh and decidedly male as it was. But Thalia didn’t skip a beat, continuing on to ask the strangest question I’d ever heard.

“Nice! What’s your pronouns, by the way?”

Pronouns? Pronouns, like the way you’d refer to someone without using their name or title? I internally scratched my head, unsure if anybody’s pronouns for themselves differed from “I” and “me”. “Uhh… I don’t know,” was all I managed. Great, now she thought I was an idiot.

But no, instead she just gently smiled at me, a kind of empathetic melancholy in her emerald eyes. “Understandable,” she proclaimed, “and valid. In that case I’m glad you’re here, it’ll give you a space to—”

The man at the front clapped his hands vigorously above his head, and everyone else around the room turned to look at him. He cleared his throat. “It’s now five thirty, so the meeting’s officially started. Before we begin, though, I can see that we have a newcomer, so let’s all go around and introduce ourselves. I’m Kyle, he/him.”

The next guy over gave me a wave. “Oliver, he/him.” Oliver smiled at me, a grin that reached from cheek to ruddy cheek. It looked like he had a small but noticeable amount of facial hair, and I briefly managed a shot of empathy for someone who clearly also had to deal with the unpleasantness of five o’clock shadows.

The introduction train continued. “Dinadan. He/him, but really I’m agender.” He went back to obsessively picking at the cuff of his flannel shirt. I frowned. He was a gender? What in the world did that entail?

“Uaine. They/them.”

“Lily. She/her.”

“Fern. He/they.”

The rest of the introductions went similarly, until my head was positively awash in names and third-person pronouns. Was that what Thalia had meant when she’d asked me for my pronouns? Well, in that case, I was… I was…

It was my turn to introduce myself. But my lips stayed clamped shut. I stared down at my hands, folded in my lap. Work, curse you! But I wasn’t inside my mind anymore, I was in the body. In the machine. It was me breathing, me sweating, me wearing a too-damp hoodie because I preferred how it looked over anything else, thievery and excuses be damned.

Thalia spoke up. “They’re, uh, Chloe. Questioning.” I blinked and turned to look at her. She gave me another one of those warm smiles that I couldn’t help but be present for, and I felt like some part of my clockwork was melting.

Kyle clapped his hands together, and I got the distinct impression that was something he liked doing. “Alright, gang, as we decided last time, this week the discussion topic is going to be dysphoria. How we feel it, and how we combat it. This is a pretty sensitive issue, so if anyone feels like they have to step outside at any time that’ll be just fine.”

Dys… phoria? What? I swallowed. I didn’t expect to have to know the lingo.

He continued. “If anyone wants to start us off that’d be great, otherwise I’ve got a list of prompts we can run through. And as always, there’ll be snacks and board games at the end.”

The congregation murmured assent, then one older lady (whose name I thought was Grace but it could also not be) raised her hand.

“I’ll start. It’s a bit of a strange case, but back when I transitioned I was considered around the right age—thirty five, with a wife, no kids. I got started on Premarin after a year of RLE, and that was considered standard. I scheduled surgeries, learned makeup, I pass most of the time—sorry, I know I’m rambling.”

Grace sighed, wiping her hands on her floral-print skirt. “It sounds so… mean, so cruel, but when I look at how young and how pretty some of the kids are today, I get jealous. And then I look at myself, and I just… God.”

I didn’t understand half the words she’d said, and the rest of the group showed a similarly muted reaction. Then another, younger woman raised her hand. “Y’know, I got on HRT at twenty two, and that was considered pretty young then. But now eighteen is basically the default, and younger if your parents get on board, and…” She took a breath. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I see you, and it’s a super complicated mix of joy, jealousy, and resentment that I feel when I wonder about what could have been.”

I shrank into my hoodie. What could have been… I mean, what could have been? I still had no idea what these people were talking about, but from what it sounded like there was some kind of missed opportunity being talked about here, something about physicality or ideology. And missed opportunity I could definitely relate to. My own life was more or less a catalogue of chances I either hadn’t taken or couldn’t take.

Fern raised his/their hand. “Um. I’m non-HRT, but I can definitely relate to social dysphoria over things I missed. Like, I only sussed out my identity in the last year of college, so just thinking about how I had to go to senior prom in a dress, and comparing it to the stories nowadays of kids getting chosen as, like, prom royalty, it does get me kinda down.”

He/they had to go to prom in a dress? What cruel kind of parent would force their son/child to go in a dress? I mean, I wouldn’t have minded, but clearly Fern did, so his/their parents really should have been better about that…

Thalia coughed. “I uh, I guess I’m one of the youngsters y’all are jealous of, since I transitioned at sixteen. Had to run away from home to do it, though, so my bag of regrets comes from that. The dysphoria is mostly physical for me. I didn’t get much in the chest department, even with the head start, for example. And sometimes I worry about my—okay now this is gonna sound dumb—I worry that my ribcage is too wide and manly. I cope with it by, uh, well, when I cope with it in a healthy way I do it by putting on… thigh highs? What Grace might call long socks or stockings? Just uh, feminine clothes in general, even though I’ve got a pretty masc style outdoors.”

A small amount of chuckling filled the room, the first time since we’d started. As for me, I was desperately searching for the meaning behind some of these terms, and I think I was coming close. Dysphoria, it seemed, meant some kind of discomfort with one’s place in the world, the role one played… and something to do with their physical appearance? I nodded. I could eminently relate to both, and especially to feeling far too masculine. Personally I didn’t have any feminine clothes to wear, which made sense because I was a guy. Feminine clothing was just one of those options that wasn’t really available to me.

Uaine decided to speak up. “Outside of specific examples, I find that dysphoria can manifest itself in the form of generalized depression: a sort of unspecified dourness that extends mainly to one’s physical form and their recognition by others, but also to great swaths of general life.” 

They gesticulated with their hands as they went, an elocutionist with a vocabulary after my own Lovecraft-infested soul. They continued, “It can be especially hard to recognize, and I recall when I was an egg that I had actually formed an entire ideology around this, of the flesh as merely a vessel for some greater power.”

I actually allowed myself a tiny grin. Without wider context I of course couldn’t evaluate what they were saying, but for the first time tonight I felt genuinely seen. Though they’d talked about it as though it was something they had once been but no longer were, like I merely inhabited a temporary storage area of self, the concrete sidewalk of identity.

Kyle barked a short laugh, possibly sensing that some of the assembled members hadn’t managed to follow the prose. “Crazy how vast the transgender experience is, huh?”

My heart missed a beat. Transgender? Like… that thing I’d heard about in the news, where you were once one gender then swapped to another? That was what this was? I, I’d been duped! Tricked! Into relating with people completely unlike myself! I stood up, whirled around and stomped out the door, picking up speed as I made it to the main entrance and out into the rain.

The last thing I heard was Kyle, proclaiming “Damn, I guess the topic got a bit too much for them.”

---

I didn’t know how, or why, or even when, but I found myself standing in front of the Rabbit Hole, drenched head to toe. The neon of the sign was flickering in and out of existence, yet another liminal state for me to exist in. I pushed open the door, squelching my way over to the bar. Alice was busy serving another customer, but I sat in my usual stool and took the bracelet out from my waterlogged clothing, placing it in front of me. Then I sat back, and sighed.

A little while later, Alice found her way back round to me. A sparkly glimmer in her red eyes (I was fairly certain she wore contacts) and the bracelet was gone, snatched into some pocket of her bartending outfit. Two twenties took its place as payment, which I gingerly accepted and stuffed beneath the hoodie down into the front pocket of my employee shirt. 

Alice smiled at me, a smug grin that just barely got away from being classified as a smirk. I’d seen her modulate her smile for different customers, different situations. At least here, there were people like me. “What can I get ya? Usual?” I whispered under my breath, already knowing how the conversation would go.

“What can I get ya? Usual?” recited Alice, delivery perfect as always.

Payment, I revised, was two twenties and as many cheap, moonshine-cut shots as I could handle. “Nothing tonight. Sorry, Alice.”

Her smile fell, leaving a waifish stare. I briefly wondered how old she was, realizing that for all the stories of her to be true she would have to have been close to Biblical in age. “Nothing, doll? What’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “It’s just… I got a little affected tonight. Got emotionally wrapped up with a mark. It was unprofessional.” I improvised the words as I said them, but found myself believing them more and more. So I knew my mark’s name was Thalia, eh? But she still didn’t know mine. Though she did know where I worked, that could prove troublesome. 

Alice nodded sagely, running a cup under the tap to get me at least water for the night. “Don’t I know it, doll. There was one time, back in ‘67. Summer of Love, real tight stuff. She had hash, and I knew where to pawn it, but then we got to smoking together, and she invited me back to her place…” Her eyes grew a little wistful, but it was clearly practiced. 

She put the glass of water in front of me, patting me on the arm as she did so. “There’s nothing in the Thief-Oath that forbids a healthy dose of romance. Enjoy yourself! More marks will come.”

I shook my head gingerly. “It wasn’t like that kind of emotional. I just…” I sighed. “I got confused, got my head in the wrong place.”

Alice nodded, taking another customer’s order. “Hold that thought, I’ll be right back. But I’ll be expecting details when I return.” She scampered off to meet with a legally blind bruiser.

I sat there, rainwater slowly flowing off me. I wondered if it was enough to cause water damage to the floor. I hoped not, I liked being here. This place was an underground nexus, a gathering place for the queer and the strange, which were sometimes the one and the same. Society associated a certain danger to the different, by dint of associating a certain difference to the dangerous. And anyone who was misclassified under the former, perhaps had the obligation to become the latter. I smiled and took a drink of water.

Tomorrow was close enough to a month from the initial meeting. Tomorrow I would get my pills. And then I’d only have the legal ramifications to worry about. I took another sip of water; it felt thematic. Exchanging the liquid dripping off my soaked clothing for one imbibed into myself, replacing the burdensome with the useful. I neither wanted nor needed any relationship with Thalia… with a mark. She would be but another in a long line of victims. And she would deserve it.

Alice came back. “So what was it anyway, that got your pants all in a twist?”

I smiled tentatively, setting my face in the most jocular fashion. “You know, it’s weird to say, but she almost convinced me that I have dysphoria. That I’m trans. Weird tactic, right?”

Alice looked at me strangely, a development in the conversation I had not expected. “Doll…” she started, using my pseudonym with so much gentleness you could almost mistake it for an actual name. 

“Considering what I’ve noticed over the months, I’m not sure she…” Alice paused, stretching her mind for words. Then she reached over, and patted me on the arm again. “Just keep searching for yourself, alright?”

I would. And I wouldn’t let any marks influence me, no matter how pretty they might be.

---

The actual theft was uneventful, almost insultingly so. I had the key. I had sunglasses. I had a coat that was long but not so long as to be suspicious. I retrieved a brown package that made noise when I shook it. The time was 6 am, still dark outside, and I stole away into the elevator, which greeted me with a groan.