Short story - The Shirt

Coffee still cooling in his hand, he greeted the mid-morning day alone on his porch.  The elevated deck was just high enough that his feet didn't touch the ground when he sat on the floor, but low enough that the chickens were able to nibble at his sandal clad toes, waiting expectantly for some scratch or a piece of fruit.  Those birds were her idea too.

It was dry and the air held vestiges of a cool starry night sky and the sweet aftertaste of desert sage and the caramelized pine needles from yesterday's sun-baked forest floor.  In a few hours the sun will have chased away the last remaining traces of the cool morning but even in this early hour, the clothes he had set on the line were already mostly dry.

They hung silently, wavering occasionally as they saw fit, but he was a man of simple tastes and his clothes refused to make a scene of themselves in front of him.  Plaid cotton long sleeved shirt, red with green and black.  Two pairs of his work pants, Carhartts, one a darker beige, the other a greenish beige pulled the line down with their weight.  Another plaid shirt, this one a simple blue and black.  Five white short sleeved shirts, some splattered with hues of blue and yellow, were the rowdiest of his clothing, letting the wind gusts billow them out like sails when it wished to.

He'd take them all down soon, before he got up and off to work.  But he'd leave the last shirt, the only dancer of the group, as he had left her up day after day.

It wasn't a terribly flamboyant shirt, nothing to radiate and essence of proud, sexual womanhood, but it said everything it needed to say.  A medium brown, sleeveless tank-top, a simple v-neck with the cloth below the V stylistically bunched up and sewn together.  While it wasn't her favorite shirt, he had considered having the morgue lay her out in it.  That was before he saw her, before they advised the closed casket.  She was too badly beat up, they told her.  Showing her to everyone else could only upset them.  He guessed they were less concerned with upsetting her illegitimate husband.

He told them to cremate her in the clothes she had died then, in snow pants so unused she had forgotten to take the tag off, in that drab, deep purple gore-tex jacket she said made her feel like a stuffed animal.  The boots would remain on her precious feet, those boots that cost him more than a few times her beloved embroidered clogs and sandals - boots that he loved in equal measure to her aversion to them.  He was only able to buy them through careful trickery, saying that the boots were for him.  The two shared a shoe-size though, and she hadn't seemed surprised when the boots mysteriously ended up in her closet.

While she never really took to the outdoors like he did, it goes without saying that he loved her.  That is why he shared his life with her.  That is why he got on his knee and proposed to her in that restaurant in Madrid, a year ago.  Even when they returned home and were told they couldn't get legally married, it didn't stop his devotion to her.  Nor did it stop her devotion to him.  She never told him she wanted another man.

He was just a stupid, confused little girl from Idaho when he first met her.  Back then he was perpetually frustrated with himself and he could never figure out why.  He grew up alone, the sole daughter of a ranching family's hard talking son and an evangelical real estate agent, but his emotionally distant father and stifling mother weren't the only sources of his misery.  He was only able to find peace from his discontented mind away from the busy eyes and expectant minds of his rural hometown, climbing the neighboring foothills and mountains. 

But even if it wasn't his parents who made him feel clunky in his skin, even if it wasn't the leers from the high school jocks he started noticing as his breasts filled out and his hips became uncomfortably wide who made him question the purpose of his life, even if it wasn't his fire and brimstone preacher who made him question the existence of god when he told him he would be raped by the demons and devils well after he had bled dry in hell, when he confessed that he felt "tingly" around his fellow cheerleaders, all of those factors did finally push him away for good when he announced to his mother and father that he was a lesbian.  Mere months shy of finishing high school, he was assaulted twice in the street by classmates, threatened, and disowned.

When he moved west, he knew he would never return.  He thought that should have been liberating enough, but his skin still did not fit.  His life still seemed a wasted repetition of going through meaningless motions, without purpose or guidance.

He found a lot of what he never knew he was looking for in her.  She was bold and exciting, fresh and new.  When she looked at him, he knew she didn't see him as man or woman, but as a person, a pure, unique personality built on a set of experiences and motivations. To her, he was divorced from prejudice and assumed predispositions that have been forcibly woven into into the fabric of society since the birth of man. 

It was her who first suggested the surgery, but not before she healed his head.  As they dated, he came to understand himself and the source of his malaise as he readjusted the pre-programed algorithms of his life to match his most earnestly held desires.  She helped him every step of the way with kindness and patience.  While his hips still felt too wide to function properly, his relatively small chest felt superfluous and heavy, she helped him at least escape the scathing judgment of dashed expectations.  In return, he wanted nothing so much as to protect her from every harm in the universe and give her a new world to dance and play. Skin like hers was made for caressing, lips like hers were made for kissing, and eyes like hers were made to draw him into her cocoon of compassion and caring.  He did not fail to oblige her body in every way.

Yet he still held on to his womanhood for the first few years.   They spoke of it together, the transformation, but her responses never satisfied a decision.  More, she worked like a gentle interrogator, drawing out his fears and hopes, little at a time, lest the splinter within his heart shatter and become unrecoverable.

Growing up he never felt particularly masculine or feminine.  He enjoyed playing tag football and playing with dolls, though his dolls were more likely to become explorers and mountaineers than fashionistas.  Initially he was worried that he was making a choice to bury a part of himself to favor another; losing a leg to gain an extra arm.

She had laughed at him for that, as she had often found it easy to laugh at him when he was being unreasonable.  She promised that if he went through the process, she'd be sure to remind him that he still liked to do "sissy things like painting" and that she wouldn't let him turn completely into a "mountain hermit".  She took away the fear that all he would do is add new expectations he never wanted to himself, and made the transformation a question of physical and mental comfort.

After surgery, he knew he made the right decision.  He wouldn't miss out on anything life had to offer.  She would safeguard and remind him not only her own femininity, but his as well, and he promised that he would treasure both his own masculinity and hers.  Well after surgery he was still climbing the Sierras and painting the flowers of her garden, but this time, he felt the present was right, and he could start talking about the future.  That was when he planned the trip to Spain.  That was also when the two started thinking about having a family.

A year ago they were still having these conversations on the other side of his proposal.  Even as she helped him escape the expectations of his community and family, the two of them could not escape the expectations of the state.  Idaho insisted he was female, and California declared that two women could have no legal marital bond.  She was in tears about that, and the only reason he wasn't was that he needed to be strong for her. 

Less than a month ago they had decided together to adopt.  While they prepared the paperwork and looked for candidates, they prepared their home, their hearts and their lives.  She said she wanted to do things she had not ever done, to understand him better and to do it before the responsibilities of the child prevented her from joining him again.  She wanted to be his mountain woman, even if just for a weekend.

Sitting on the porch, his coffee well drained he absently wondered what time it was, though he was sure he was late for work, again.  It didn't matter.  His work was a meaningless pattern of repetitive motions he wasn't willing to sacrifice for.  Not anymore. The rockslide had robbed him of that and the helicopter would never be able to return it to him.  In the garden, the flowers were wilting from neglect, his canvas went unused and the adoption papers had been abandoned. 

He had been in this rut for two weeks, since her death.  He could no more escape his reeling mind than take down that brown shirt from the line.

As the two fastened their seatbelts in the car, just before they left the house together for the last time, she had shrieked.  She had forgotten about the shirt she had handwashed and hung up to dry.  They were running late, he had told her, if they didn't reach the trailhead soon they wouldn't make it to base camp before nightfall.  It would be fine to leave it out a night.  She had relented of course, seeing the impatient excitement of a child on Christmas Eve in him.

Whenever he took his own clothes off the line he would stop now, and touch her shirt.  Two weeks later he could still smell her scent, underneath the soap of the laundering, but every day meant that she was growing weaker.  The smell of sage and pine sought to claim the shirt for their own and there was nothing he could do to stop it.  In a few days she would be completely gone.

He threw his coffee mug at a nearby rock, startling the chickens and they ran away.  As it shattered he put his hands up and started to cry.  He couldn't be strong for her anymore, he failed at that.  He failed at protecting her when she needed it.  He got up and ripped his plaid shirts from the line.  The Carhartts came down as well.  The white shirts he pulled off and ripped them with his bare hands.  Nothing remained on the line except for that brown shirt, dancing in the gusts of wind.

Again he searched for her scent in its folds, weak as it was, and cried into it, feeling as lost as he had when he was a little girl.  She had been everything for him.  His guide, the one who gave him purpose and meaning, while helping him to hold onto the things that mattered most.

Clutching the hem of the shirt, he hesitated, then pressed on the wooden clothespin , releasing the shoulders from the line.  Both shoulders bore an indent where the pins had been but that too would fade in time.  He removed his shirt, his now flat breasts exposed to gentle breeze and hugged the brown shirt one last time.

He put the shirt on, and went inside to grab his paints.