Size / / /

Content warning:


The testosterone makes me look
half-beast. My heart hammers each time
I see the needle. Excitement and stress
are the same emotion, my therapist tells me.
It feels more and more like fear.
My head has become a bull: full of
violent thoughts that I don't
remember having before the injection.
The urges, the focused precision.
I am always threading the eye of a needle,
I am always on guard for Theseus.
The hormones have turned my body
into a hairy landscape of tunnels
& my mind becomes the labyrinth
to escape. I wait, I wait, I wait
for a surgery date that does not come.
If I’m rejected, without a scalpel,
I will have no way of sword-fighting.
How can I cut the Minotaur down
if I still have parts of me,
blocking the entranceway to the maze?

No answer comes.
Days pass. Months. Hormones
even out. My upper lip looks less
like a dusting of black snow
and more like a wall. You're normalizing.
Catching up to the rest of us, my therapist says.
The shadows make her look half-human.
What if the Minotaur never lived in
my body? What if the Minotaur was
a lie to keep people buying scalpels as swords,
to keep a line of invisible men fighting, holding
hopeful tricks in their hands?
What if my body could follow my mind
and untwist to form a place I
could live in, sold as is, instead?
What if, broken and
sharply violent like a rock to Goliath,
my body was a home instead?

I like the resolution.
Fuck Minos, & sword-swallowers,
starving children, and Theseus.
I follow the red thread of my veins
from the needle to the injection
to the line-up to the sidewalk
& I start my way home.



Eve Morton is a writer living in Ontario, Canada. She teaches university and college classes on media studies, academic writing, and genre literature, among other topics. She likes forensic science through the simplified lens of TV, and philosophy through the cinematic lens of Richard Linklater. Find more information on authormorton.wordpress.com.
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18 Mar 2024

Strange Horizons
We are very happy to welcome Dante Luiz as a new fiction editor on the team! Dante is a Ignyte Award winning author, and has been with Strange Horizons working as an Art Director for the past several years. We’re stoked to bring him on to the fiction side and have him bring his wonderful insight and skill to the fiction team.
Day in and day out, the rough waters of the Pacific slam themselves against the protrusion of sandstone the locals refer to as Morro Rock. White streaks of bird shit bleed down the rock, a testament to the rare birds of prey that nest in its pocked face overlooking the bay.
in my defence, juggling biological and artificial, i tripped over my shoelace, and spilled my lungs empty of the innocence that was, before guilt.
the birds, / who carry with them / the many names of the dead
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