12 Parables

Issue 51 • Spring 2025 • Fiction

This short story won second place in the Spring 2025 Contest judged by Fernando Flores, who called it a “stylistic and innovative take on the campus story that isn’t afraid of humor and tenderness.”

            Queer theory class at Barnard makes them ask questions.

            Do they feel dysphoria in the same way other people feel dysphoria? What is it really? Are they really trans or are they just weird?

            Once in a while, they look at their body and think, well,

            What is this? A weird flap of skin? A blob of fat?

            How is this ever supposed to represent me?

            Stupid sink-y cheeks. Stupid little rat fingernails.

            Stupid face, stupid legs, stupid butt.

            Sometimes you just want to crush yourself like a can.

            It feels bad, but no different from being thirteen and disturbed by how fat you are.

            But often, they are impressed by their body. It’s like a spaceship, or an iPod. All the immaculate details. The tiny lines on finger skin getting smaller and smaller as you go from knuckle to nail, first the width of a piece of thread, then a piece of paper, then a strand of car fur, then a red blood cell. Like one of those papers showing the strokes of finer and finer pens, but it goes on forever. And all the different types of hairs! Eyebrows, like fine camelhair paintbrushes. Leg hairs like the barbs of black feathers. That soft, rabbit down fur under the ears. Even in the nose, tiny hairs, adapted perfectly for the nose! How did God think of nose hairs? When did it occur to God to make each person a designer ship to pilot through this strange world?

            And isn’t this all a bit too much focus on the self, the body, the Earthly? A lot of fuss for something temporary?

            It seems like a bad mistake, expecting something like a body to represent you. After all, a body has just one form—a soul has thousands. It seems like setting yourself up for disappointment.

            The other students at Barnard say:

             “Taking hormones felt like getting my body back.”

            “Growing up, I could never actually be myself.”

            “I’ve always known there was something different about me.”

            A few weeks in, they hear themselves say, very confidently, “I always related to my gender differently than other kids.”

            It’s true, they guess, maybe? Are they baring their soul, or wrapping it in convenient packaging?

            Almost everyone in gay class is beautiful in a different way.

            There are so many ways to present your hair! And did you know people’s vocabularies can match their appearance? Perhaps it happens for the same reason that people end up looking like their pets. A guy with teal nails and a leather jacket tosses off the phrase ‘a kind of punk intersectionality’ like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

            It’s sort of amazing.

            They’ve been doing a secret experiment, noting down when he feels like a boy, when she feels like a girl. He feels like a boy most often in the early morning, during biology class, when he’s reading aloud, when he’s walking in the woods. She feels like a girl most during her other classes, when she’s reading or watching movies, when she’s swimming, when she’s eating. When they wake up in the middle of the night, they feel like a beast in a den. When they pray, they feel like a small, perky, nervous animal, a puppy rolling onto its belly before God.

            When they read theory for gay class, they just feel wired and overtaken. The ideas are packs of hounds, licking and running and growling, sometimes loving, sometimes threatening. And then they go to class, and the professor wants to know whether or not they agree with the hounds. They think they agree with most of it, but it also seems slippery and wild. This is why they are a biology major.

            Their classmates like the theory in an uncomplicated way. For everyone else, Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick settle down, lolling their tongues out and begging for treats.

            In class, someone says Western gender roles come from Christianity. That non-Christian societies didn’t have such rigid ideas of gender; that missionaries introduced transphobia to places like the Philippines. They call Christianity a fundamentally gender-essentialist religion. They do not explain why Christianity is gender-essentialist, but they all know how the arguments go. It begins with Adam and Eve; God, always, is male.

            He decides to be easy. The criticism of his religion is mostly true and somewhat fair. And did he really expect anything else?

            But as everyone piles on, he gets sweaty and agitated. The arguments don’t bother him as much as the unquestioned consensus.

            And then he’s off, saying, “But couldn’t you say that about any belief system? In Greek mythology the Gods were all rapists, and in Islam you get forty virgins in Heaven, and Nietzsche inspired Hitler. It feels unfair to single out Christianity, it feels biased. And anyway, the flaws don’t mean we throw them out, right? Would you rather people not have any meaning?”

            Now all his cards are out on the table, including a few he didn’t intend to play. Oh well. It was only a matter of time before the class saw this side of him — “strident” if you’re polite, “annoying” if you’re rude.

            But at the end of class, one of the beautiful nonbinary people, named Aster or Ashley or Ash, comes up with their immaculate orange curls, and says they liked his rant. That sometimes the class gets a little echo chamber-y. Their eyes run towards and away from him, like sandpipers on the beach when the tide comes in.

            The person from gay class, whose name turns out to be Aster, takes her to see a John Waters movie in the humanities department lecture hall. One of a series of screenings of classic movies.

            She feels bad about not liking the movie. Maybe she should have admitted that she doesn’t like most modern movies? Why would you make a movie like that, where every character is some degree of horrible? Why does anyone think this is positive queer representation?

            “It’s because, like, everyone is disgusting. The people society thinks are the cleanest are actually the dirtiest. So it’s actually better to be dirty openly, you know?”

            This is what Aster says. They are standing in the space-y half lit linoleum hallway outside the screening room.

            She is not buying it.

             “But where is the emotion?” she asks, “Where is the goodness? Where is God?”

            Aster doesn’t have anything to say to that. The few people left in the hallway shuffle their feet and pretend not to hear.

            At least that’s what she thinks, until Aster kisses her hard on the mouth, no tongue.

            And she laughs, because is there anything less sexy than arguing about a movie? Especially when she’s gone and brought God into it?

            Aster is the second person who’s ever kissed her. College is so strange.

            She wakes up at 2am, and her roommate still isn’t back yet. She could have been friends with her roommate, if her roommate ever spent any time in the room. She aches with the thought of what could have been.

            The room always looks dusty at 2:00 A.M., and the light from the buildings outside makes it look like an old photo. Maybe someday an archeologist will discover, at the back of a pyramid, a dorm room, perfectly preserved so a young, dead king could attend college in the spirit world.

            There’s something like adrenaline jerking her heart around, making her twitch like a dog and roll over and think and think. It’s like her body needs her thinking, and if she stops thinking she’ll die. A low tickling fire down near her intestines and gallbladder, it feels like it’s burning all the gasses in there, burning them all up steadily. Is she stressed? Has she missed some important assignment? It would be good to have a meter to measure the amounts of every chemical in the body. She could check the meter before making any big decisions, to make sure she wasn’t compromised by hunger or sickness.

            She gets up, sits on her roommate’s bed and eats a banana while the low fire burns. She actually feels very bad. She feels like a dead fish. No, she feels like a man in a trench coat. And when she opens the coat, there are dead fish hanging off the skin of her arms, pinching and dragging the skin down. Five or six on each arm. All long and shrunk with needly faces, eyes blackening and dissolving into holes.

            The long, dead fish are her sins. Pulling them off means pulling off swaths of skin, tearing off thousands of capillaries like velcro and leaking blood all over the road. The littler fish are small sins, or sins she doesn’t know are sins yet. There are a lot of those. Maybe one of them is pretending to be trans when she’s not really trans—just a person who doesn’t like her own body sometimes, like anyone else.

            Then there are the big sins. Sin #1 is laughing at Aster. What kind of person laughs at someone who tries to kiss them? Sin #2 is she never really enjoyed any of the sexual things she’d done with the person she dated in high school. She always got distracted halfway through, and starting thinking about other things. She could never give all of herself. Sin #3 is not telling her family about this gender thing, and not having any desire to. Sin #4 is never visiting Mary Beth in the retirement home. She said she would do it during fall break, then winter break, but she never did it and she never would. She did not want to see Mary Beth’s dying body.

            He understands, theoretically at least, why suffering (free will), why death (brevity makes life precious). But why the limit of a body, a body which often feels wrong, which malfunctions and gradually disintegrates? Why don’t Christians discuss the problem of the body like the problem of evil?

            The Bible says the body is a temple, and a temple is just a building, after all. A building lent to you by God.

            It’s interesting, sometimes, to think of the soul, fixed inside the guts like a rogue cell, gazing up at tapering pink walls, veins like stained glass and a ribbed dome barely visible at the top. Thinking, where am I? What sort of church is this?

            He went to see a concert alone. It was Of Montreal, a band that Aster had mentioned a few times. He hitched onto one of the big groups bumping and flowing into the center of the crowd, and then somehow ended up at the front. After a minute, he decided to dance. He jumped and swayed his body the best he could in between groups of people staring at each other, leaning against each other, laughing with each other.

            He was still dancing in a sweaty rectangle in between people when Kevin Barnes came out. Kevin Barnes, wearing a white faux fur coat with giant pink buttons, and swirly blue and pink makeup, looked like nature. Like an arctic fox, like a pitcher plant, like a beetle with a calligraphy-painted shell. Kevin Barnes opened their lips, bright as a bird’s beak, and somehow human pain came out.

            He’d tried to do a crash course in Of Montreal the day before, and enjoyed five or six songs, the ones with really good dance grooves. He felt stupid for not understanding the rest. But when he looked at Kevin Barnes, he understood. Kevin Barnes was the context in which the music made sense. The music of the angels, he thinks, angels being something larger and more complex than humans.

            During the concert, they imagine themselves as:

• A half-grown buck deer, with big awkward antlers
• A little gerbil, springing up to catch glimpses of Kevin Barnes’ strange glory
• A girl with very long hair, curtain hair, that she can dance inside of, like a tent. The hair protects her from the world
• A punk boy with lead boots that ring against the ground and add to the sounds colliding in the music

            And then Kevin Barnes sings, “Other people can say there is a true belief system, but all my life I’ve been betrayed by my mother’s religion.” In this song, they are not Kevin Barnes, but one of the other people, the people with a faith that hasn’t betrayed them. Kevin has found other ways to create meaning, ones that don’t hurt as much.

            At the end of the concert, she runs into Aster, and they end up talking in the dorm kitchen. There’s flour and flour-covered baking implements thrown randomly on surfaces. She doesn’t know if she’s attracted to Aster but they are amazing in a certain way, and she’ll probably have some kind of important college experience regardless. They drink some wine left in the kitchen by the same people who left all the dirty implements.

            “How did you feel about the concert?” Aster asks.

            “Underdressed,” she says. She can only ever be witty if she’s drunk.

            Aster laughs, a long whooping bro-y laugh.

            Then Aster says, “You know that thing, where you put on clothes in the morning, and they feel really good and right, and then later, you start to feel like a different gender, and you start to feel like you’re in drag?”

            She likes Aster’s mental bigness, how they’re not afraid to fill the room like a character in a sitcom, and their physical bigness, the way they look from a distance both kind of like a female bodybuilder and a man in slight drag.

            “I know exactly what you mean,” she says.

            They talk drunkenly about high school. Somehow, he ends up talking about Mary Beth.

            He rode to church with Mary Beth when his parents were too busy or too lazy to attend. She’d throw atlases and kids’ drawings and Sheryl Crow CDs off the front seat of her little gray-green Honda, making room.

            She’d tell these stories on the way. About a kid in Sunday school who passed out goldfish crackers yelling, “Look! I’m just like Jesus! Loaves and fishes!” The time she asked if anyone knew who Herod was, and some eight-year-old confidently answered, “The Greek Goddess of marriage.” The eight-year-old thought Hera had tried to kill Jesus. When Mary Beth told the stories, she’d laugh, and her laugh was more like a whoop, like a sound someone would make on a roller coaster. This was an appropriate noise to make in Mary Beth’s car, because Mary Beth was a terrifying driver. Once, after the 2016 election, she got so mad thinking about Trump that she rear-ended a school bus.

            She’d lent him The Cider House Rules and made him read it. When Mary Beth really wanted you to do something, she was prepared to be extremely annoying until you did it. And when he finally read it, and liked it more than any book he’d ever read before, she said “John Irving’s a minor prophet, you know. He never plans what he’s going to write, it just comes out. That’s how you know it comes from God.”

            He knows he’s been talking about Mary Beth for too long, but the length is part of what she wants to communicate. To talk for a shorter amount of time would be like lying about her real feelings. College is supposed to be the place where it’s OK to be weird. Aster is supposed to be the type of person it’s OK to be weird with. He might also be delaying the part of the conversation where Aster talks about their own life, and reveals that they don’t really understand his.

            Aster, predictably, didn’t have any kind of good experiences with religion.

            “I was kind of traumatized by church,” they said.

            “Traumatized?” she asks. She’s not naive, she knows what kind of story she’ll get. She knows everyone queer has been betrayed by religion, just like Kevin Barnes and anyone else who seems cool. But it feels like you shouldn’t be able to just throw around words like traumatized. You should have to explain.

            Aster would wake up from nightmares about hell, knowing that’s where they’d be going because they lied and liked to masturbate. They said that’s how they thought of God: just like a boss, or a principal, someone who watched and judged and punished. Like a scary Willy Wonka, they said. They had not liked any of the people at church. The preacher included changing your gender in a long list of the sins God could send you to hell for. And actually, they said, one of the owners of their church was a big Republican political donor, and helped elect the politician who passed the anti-gay law that’s been all over the news lately. So, they say, it’s all connected.

            “But,” she is now too drunk not to say, “that preacher sucked. But you’re an adult now. You can find God for yourself.”

            “I guess I don’t feel like I need God, right now,” Aster says. “I have art, and I have my friends, and I love my life.”

Aster looks so self-possessed, sitting there Godlessly, that she ends up kissing them—why?

            He spends four hours researching the megachurch Aster attended. It’s about what he expected. Aster’s right: the owner of the church is definitely in cahoots with the state government. He reads everything about it, even when he’s no longer learning anything new.

            When the preacher from Aster’s megachurch speaks, he sounds like a dad trying too hard to get through to his kids. The preacher talks through the parable of the sower. He tries to plant faith in people’s souls, keeps doing it even though most of the time it doesn’t work. It never takes root. Or it backfires, and the seed grows into something else, something like faith but not. You’ve got to keep trying, he says. It is a good sermon. It is a good sermon by someone who hates him for complicated reasons.

            At one point during the video, he starts crying, but it passes after ten or fifteen minutes like a brief rainstorm. He blinks the tears off to keep watching, eyelids like windshield wipers, going and going.

            The first time he met Mary Beth, he asked her why Jesus had kicked the fig tree. He was being a smart ass, trying to test her, to see if she could come up with a good answer. That part of the Bible was so random. Mary Beth said, “Oh! That’s a tricky one,” like it was a math problem. She said the fig tree was like the government, something that could help people. It was supposed to help people, but it didn’t, and that’s why Jesus got so angry. It wouldn’t have hurt the fig tree to make fruit. It wouldn’t have been a big deal for the tree, but it just refused to, and because of that, people went hungry.

            He wasn’t expecting her to say something interesting; he had to sit down and think about that for a while. He walked around for days, listening to Mary Beth explain the Bible in his head. Of course Jesus would want to chop down the fig tree, this thing that takes and takes and gives nothing. But from the tree’s point of view, it’s just living in the moment, slurping up water, making leaves. The fig tree hurts people, but can never understand the concept of hurting them. It’s fucked up.

            He paces around and thinks about that for a while, until he decides to do the reading for queer theory class. The teacher always puts trigger warnings on the first page, and he always reads them, he’s too curious about what people get triggered by. One of the triggers for this reading is “religion.” Religion! Like being triggered by cities, or school, or art.

            She tells Aster about an idea for a sermon, one she’s been thinking about all day. It’s about Daniel in the Lion’s Den.

            It was miraculous for Daniel, but it was even more miraculous for the lions. These animals, who kill each other all the time, who murder each other’s children, looked at a human and felt love. Like a person empathizing, suddenly, with a basil plant. For the rest of their lives, the lions would never be able to express what they felt.

            Someday, she will become a preacher in her own church, and she will finally share the story of the lions. It might sound silly now, but it won’t feel silly then. People will cry for the lions who, only once, knew unconditional love.

            “That’s awesome,” Aster says. “That’s so much more interesting than anything anyone told me about the Bible.” They say, “If you had been there, I might have actually been into the whole God thing.”

            On the rides to church, Mary Beth told him all the stuff she had to cut out of her sermons, everything that was too controversial, or took too long to explain, or was too much of a stretch, or just (sometimes, it seemed) was too interesting.

            Once, after jerking the car into the left lane, she said: “Most Christians think that, after the Rapture, only sinners will be left on Earth. But, you know what I like to think? I like to think the Meek will be there, too. Because, you know, the Meek will inherit the Earth—am I wrong? And all these sinners are going to need someone to look after them. And it’s a test, right? These meek people, who have always honored the law and trusted the judgement of the authorities, suddenly become the authorities. They’ll need to build justice and order from the ground up.

            “Everyone gets the Beatitudes wrong, anyways. Inheriting the Earth — that’s a lot of work. Meanwhile, the rule breakers—the ones who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, they get heaven, and that’s so much easier. They’re the real winners.”

            Aster is the kind of person who casually refers to the world as a capitalist dystopia in conversations that aren’t even about politics. They mention going to anti-war protests as a fifteen-year-old.

            Aster, and probably everyone else from gay class, are the righteous rule breakers who will inherit the kingdom of heaven. And unless he does something terrible or amazing, he’ll end up as one of the meek, stuck back on Earth, trying to reason with racists and domestic abusers and corrupt rich people who now, post-rapture, have nothing.

            It will be so, so hard, but he thinks he might be good at it.

            “It’s so gooood,” says Aster on the elementary school playground. They’re talking about a song by an old band called the Jesus and Mary Chain. The frontman sings in his tough sleazy voice about liking every member of the Beatles. It’s really wholesome for a punk song. When he sings, “I’m a boyfriend and a girlfriend in your eyes,” she doesn’t point it out. That would be too on the nose. She just smiles a little bit and lets Aster notice the smile or not. She lets her swing list sideways.

            “Ok, this song is good,” she says. “It is really good.”

            It’s a little after 11pm, that hour when everything looks touched-up—the ground under the blue streetlight seems color-graded. It’s strange how in movies, there is no time. People just skip from scene to scene, into the future, back to the past. She could open her eyes and be in another time, and Aster would still be there.

            Aster nods their head and drags their feet on the ground, scraping out a trench like some kind of big animal marking their territory. Wood chips jump onto Aster’s sweatpants like little creatures. She thinks about kissing Aster while they’re talking about how the drummer and guitarist in the Jesus and Mary Chain met.

            “I was born again tonight,” the singer half-shouts. Somewhere in a bush, crickets are going. She kisses Aster and Aster puts their cold hand under her shirt.

            Sometimes when Aster describes music, it sounds like preaching. She’s suspected for a while that Aster does believe in some kind of God, but of course they’d deny it.

            People access God through songs all the time. Why isn’t there a religion that preaches The Jesus and Mary Chain like Christians preach the Bible? Maybe everyone has faith, but only religious people need to make a big deal out of it. What if everyone believes in some kind of God? What if everyone feels like a girl sometimes, and like a boy other times? What if everything that makes you different is just semantics? What if it’s all made up?

            They kiss and neck and touch each other’s chests, moving from the swings to the picnic table while the night leans in around them. They sit on the bench, hands on each other’s backs. They talk about music, and the future, and the past, and Aster plays several other, less-good Jesus and Mary Chain songs. The later it gets, the less hi-def and electric the night feels, but they’re not ready to leave yet, because maybe something great and beautiful will happen.

            They end up talking about the past, again. Why do they always end up back here? She doesn’t want to go back to the past. Or maybe that’s not true, maybe she wants to be here, with Aster, now, and back in the car with Mary Beth tomorrow, and the next day somewhere in the future. Maybe she wants to live in a movie.

            Aster talks about her first (Christian) boyfriend, how she’d convinced herself she wanted to marry him.

            “Well, he would hate me now, so, I mean, fuck him.”

            “Well, sometimes, it’s just…you know Mary Beth, how I said she was really great? I told her I was nonbinary and, you know, I don’t think she really got it,” she says. She feels the floor drop out of her voice, she sounds vulnerable in that way she hates. “She said I would like, grow out of it.”

            Under her hand, Aster’s muscles tighten and they say, “Well, fuck her, then.” Aster looks down for a second, then says, “I just mean, fuck that she didn’t get it.”

            She peels her hand off Aster’s back. She sits back in the swing, stares at Aster, who’s sitting there all defiant, like she did a good thing by telling off some 80-year-old woman.

            “But I didn’t think she would get it,” she says. “She’s 80 years old, of course she doesn’t understand. I need to go see her, she’s old and she doesn’t have family.”

            She tries to explain for a while. She shouldn’t have told Aster about this, she should have known Aster wouldn’t understand.

            “I mean, you should visit her if you want to,” Aster says, “It would be a nice thing to do. But you don’t have to, you know. You don’t owe her anything.”

            “Mary Beth is dying,” she says. “And it’s my duty to visit her. If I don’t do it now, I’ll regret it forever. Forever.”

            She’s overdramatizing; Mary Beth doesn’t have terminal cancer, she’s just old. But so what? Old age is a terminal illness.

            They fight about it for a while. It becomes a larger conversation about What We Owe To Each Other.

            Really, she ends up arguing, who cares, that Mary Beth didn’t understand? According to Jesus, you don’t get credit for loving people who really get you. Everyone does that, Jesus said, that’s dumb loyalty, not love. You have to love the people who don’t get it.

            And even Jesus did not understand a lot of things. Maybe that’s what life on Earth is about, loving people who don’t understand you. Maybe that’s what separates Earth from the Kingdom of Heaven. She would go visit Mary Beth in the retirement home, she would do it when the semester ended.

            They finally go to sleep at 4:00 A.M., and wake up together on her dorm room floor.

            This is the Parable of Standing Like Both Genders:

            Once upon a time, nearly a decade ago, their fourth grade drama teacher taught the class to stand like both genders. Boys put all their weight on one leg, and sprawl out. Girls stand balanced, straighter, smaller. And all year, and into the next, they practiced switching between positions. Now stand like a girl! Now stand like a boy! In line waiting for the teacher to lead them into class. Stand like a girl! Stand like a boy!

            The Parable of Standing Like Both Genders was reassuring. There were other stories that were not as legible. How could they be nonbinary, when they’d wanted to go to gender segregated camp as a fifth grader, wanted to make more friends of their birth-assigned gender? What to make of the fact that, as a child, they never fantasized about changing gender, but did pray every night to wake up as an animal—a tiger or a Steller’s sea eagle or a wolverine? But the Bible, too, has many illegible parables. It’s not a matter of understanding each parable; it’s a matter of faith.

            Mary Beth was the first person he came out to. They planned to tell her the Parable of Standing Like Both Genders. They had delayed this, but why? There was a gay pride flag outside the church.

            Normally, Mary Beth was always moving, like a flighty bird—drinking coffee, putting on the blinker, fussing with the radio. When he said this, he expected Mary Beth to stop moving and look at him, look into him, but she didn’t. She said a lot of words about how she had been a tomboy growing up and she hadn’t always liked her body. She said being a teenager meant being unhappy with yourself, with your body. She said when he was an adult, he would be happier.

            But he hadn’t said anything about being unhappy. He was happy, here in the car with Mary Beth. He was happy and he was queer, and she wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t actually engaging with him. He sat there and waited for an opportunity to present another parable, but she talked for the rest of the ride, keeping her eyes on the road for once.

            He still feels a little bit embarrassed, thinking about it, but why should he be the one to feel embarrassed? Why does he still feel ashamed and unfinished whenever he thinks of this, like there’s something scratching at the bottom of his soul?

            “Now we see each other, as in a mirror dimly, then we will see each other face to face.” That’s their favorite Bible quote.

            That summer, they finally go visit Mary Beth. They stand in her room, and she makes painful jokes, and they do not talk about gender or faith. They think about Heaven.

            In Heaven, everyone’s true form will be revealed. Maybe they will be an animal. A giraffe would be good, or a lion tamarin. Maybe they will be a mint green sports car. Honk honk, they will honk cheerfully, driving up into the clouds, and all their dead friends will scream: “A mint green sports car, we always knew, we always knew!” And Mary Beth, now a quilt of pears and feathers sown together with barbed wire, will wrap up the mint green sports car to welcome them to Heaven.

            Heaven will be filled with different people, with different forms, scattered across the clouds like Monopoly tokens: the shoe, the iron, the dog. Every once in a while, light will streak in and flow through everyone, pick them up with the force of its current, and they’ll all vibrate with love.

Issue 50 • Fall 2024

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry