Standing in the apartment doorway, Grant hears a loud and familiar sigh. Marco has vanished into the master bedroom. Grant feels judged by the living room's cowhide sectional couch, the mauve, scooped-out chair. "It's a womb chair," Marco had said, when it was delivered on Grant's birthday—and how ridiculous they'd both been, Grant thinks now, pretending Marco had bought it for him. He envisions running through the floor-to-ceiling windows, a flailing man against the April blue-sky panorama. His body lusts for it, trapezius muscles clenching—the thing, though, is that he never wants to land.

Grant is a laptop composer and makes his money as a nightclub DJ. During his half-year with Marco, he was only able to chip in 1,200 dollars toward rent each month for their Manhattan condo in the heart of the Meat Packing District. "Relax," Marco had said, the first time they'd discussed their finances. "It's nothing." Grant had hummed, working through a new melody. "Shut up," Marco snapped. And then softly: "For me, it is nothing."

They'd met at a show Grant had been invited to by a friend. He hadn't known the band, but was instantly entranced by the voices of the man and woman singing: meaty, forceful. No swooning, no vibrato. They both had rhinestones glued in arcs beneath their eyebrows and wore smocks of patchwork images of Catholic Saints. Grant was swaying when a hand squeezed his shoulder. He stiffened, turned, looked. When he saw Marco's smile, a different song began.

Grant had lived in a cramped studio with a roommate, spent his meager savings having the breasts that he'd kept bound for four years, sweaty and smashed, removed. He enjoyed imagining the breasts carried away by people in Hazmat suits, the excised tissue glowing like toxic waste—but as Marco would say, Ridículo! After Grant moved in, Marco pressured him to transition, as he put it, "all the way."

"All the way to what?" asked Grant.

"You're a man. You need the equipment. It's a simple equation. I'm paying. No questions."

"I'm a man with a fucking pussy," said Grant. "Why do you hate that so much? I'm not making you fuck it. I don't want you to. Please. Just call me your, whatever—fidanzamo."

"Findanzato!" said Marco. "The money is no issue. It is, for me, nothing."


*


Gliding out into the springtime, Grant pictures the neon yellow tree buds as radioactive bullets halted in midair. In the traffic circle there is an old man and a small boy, wearing old-fashioned dress suits, holding mics.

"What's your name, fella?" says the old man.

"I'm lil' Frankie!" says the boy.

"Aw, yeah? Frankie what?"

"Frankie Sinatraaaaaaaa!"

The music starts, the two Sinatras crooning together.


*


"The real king isn't Elvis," Marco once said. "It's Frank."


*


Grant blasts toward the subway. Crowds seem to part for him. When his parents used to take him to their church in rural Indiana—their embarrassment overcome only by their hope that he might be saved—people parted. But that had given Grant none of the angry rush he wanted, none of the surging fuck you he feels today. He is tearing up the sidewalk, making his way underground. He sings loud on the L train.

Only now does he think of the Bible, in a way that had never occurred to him back at church with his parents—of Moses, parting the seas. That scene wasn't finished, though. The seas must've come back together eventually. And then what?


*


Izzy, Grant's new roommate, is a wiry and frenetic woman in her late 70's with a tamed raven named Beauty perched on her floral tattooed shoulder. Grant associates her, for reasons he can't understand, with the couple whose voices he'd been swaying to when Marco had interrupted him. For the first few weeks in the apartment, Grant studies Izzy. She doesn't take shit from people—the super, the landlord. Each of the dozens of plants in her apartment is thriving. She's dying of mesothelioma, yet appears unafraid. Izzy inspires in Grant a conviction that human potential is colossal and he doesn't want to blow it—the whole deal. Friendship. His music. Sex. Health. Affection. Time.


*


Izzy and Grant fall into platonic love. Izzy tells Grant he's only the fourth person she's ever said "I love you" to, and maybe that's a lie and maybe it's not, but either way the words are sacred, like gems he now carries in his pockets. Sometimes Grant worries that, by not agreeing to any more surgery and instead choosing to leave Marco, he's lost something big. Probably it's all about finances, he thinks, which he knows is shallow. For the most part Grant's new compositions, nights spent DJing at clubs, and shared laughter with Izzy flatten Marco into the first dimension. Yet the thought always returns, sparkling his brow with sweat: maybe, what Grant lost really was the man.

"Don't mope over that dude," says Izzy.

Grant had been humming a woeful melody.

"But what if I made a huge mistake?" He sits on the couch beside her, plucking one of Beauty's blue-black feather's from her coarse, steely hair.

"Marco was a real asshat," she says. "Good for you, not lettin' him change you." She gets up and takes Beauty out of his cage. "You ain't broken you know."

"There was something," says Grant. "We were this album. All the songs sucked, yeah—but now I'm alone in the white noise past the last track. And how do you know I'm not broken? I mean, I don't know. I've never been to war. I could be a total wimp."

"You ain't a wimp," say Izzy. "You're living your life. You make your music. Unlike Beauty, here," she says, stroking the bird's feathers, gleaming iridescent in a beam of sunlight, "you sing."

Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of a novel, THE AUSTRALIAN. Her collection of stories, ALL THE WAY GONE, is due out in 2020.

Read her postcard.

Detail of photo art on main page courtesy of Thomas Hawk.

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