My Cardboard Balcony

I'm Sorry, But I Had To by Belinda Roddie She fired the gun eight times, and eight bullets shrieked from its dripping nose. They left red kisses on the front of her father's shirt, her brother's blazer, her mother's blouse. Gray, blue, and white, stained by a foreign, violent love. All of them survived their wounds, and she was pulled screaming into the maw of a police car, its jaws snapping her up like raw meat, wailing as it spun her into a world of bars and tiny windows, windows that, when she peered out of them, only had drab, black and white views, fragments of sterile life before the alcohol and the drugs and the fights, before her husband clawed at her face and wished aloud that she were dead, before he poured toxins from highballs into her brain so that she thought her family was the enemy. She could only look at views the size of bullet holes.

It was easy to transform my image once I left high school and settled into college. I cut my hair. I wore flannel shirts instead of blouses. I bound my chest and let my kneecaps sneer from holes in my black jeans. My mother wouldn't let me start hormone therapy until I had gotten my degree, and I didn't really have another choice - I was on her healthcare, and I followed her rules. Still, I came up with a name I preferred more than my birth moniker: Ethan. That suited me.