CW: transphobia and trans misogyny, sexism and misogyny, violence, death/dying, blood.

The dryer groans to life, then begins thumping ominously. Maddie, already halfway out of her building’s laundry room, swears under her breath. The machine grinds and shakes. She slams the stop button, trying not to think about what the landlord might charge to replace the last semi-functional dryer.

Piece by soaking piece, she unloads her clothing, and then kneels, trying not to think about what’s being transferred between the sticky cement floor and her sweatpants. Above her head, fluorescent tubes buzz, ceaseless and insufficient.

“I hate this place,” Maddie says and turns on her phone’s flashlight. The interior of the dryer is battered and scratched, but it’s probably thirty years old, so no surprise there. She can find nothing that should cause it to make alarming noises. Except . . . Something small has buried itself at the very back of the machine, embedded between the drum and the wall. Her shoulders are too wide to let her fit past the door, so she contorts herself, reaching blindly, feeling her way to it. It’s small and cool, like a jagged pebble.

“Everything okay here?” Maddie jumps at the unexpected voice, banging her head. Of course the creep from 12D would pick this minute to show up.

“All good,” she says, taking care with pitch and tone the way her vocal coach taught her, though it probably doesn’t matter with 12D. He doesn’t want her to pass, obsesses over her because she’s trans. Maybe if she tried to sound mannish, he might lose interest.

Or he might get violent.

“Need a hand?” He says, eyeing her wet clothing with prurient interest.

“I’m good,” Maddie insists, and shoves her laundry back into the dryer as fast as she can. It starts with only its usual reluctance. “Washer’s free,” she mutters as she edges past 12D. He seems like the type to steal something from her laundry, but if she has to give up an article of clothing not to spend the next hour in his presence, she’ll make that sacrifice.

It’s not until she’s safely locked in her apartment that she remembers the pebble she pulled from the dryer. Except when she pulls it from her pocket, it’s not a pebble: It’s a human tooth.

• • • •

r/weird

MadAboutMads: I found this molar in my apartment building’s dryer. Any ideas what’s going on here?

CatFantaSee (most upvoted): It’s probably a prop tooth like the ones on sale here. My guess is that someone’s fucking with you.

• • • •

Maddie spends her day off waiting for 12D to leave the building so she can do her laundry in peace. His walk is distinctive, a heavy thump that proceeds rhythmically until it pauses too long at the landing beside her door, then continues downward.

She doesn’t know if he’s just a creep or something worse, doesn’t know what she’ll do if it’s the latter.

“I’ll probably get stabbed a lot,” she mutters to no one, trying to make it a joke, because that’s all she can think to do. Her roommate’s cat yawns.

This time the dryer works, more or less. She doesn’t find the tooth until she’s back in her apartment, folding clothes. It falls out of her cutest top, rattles against the old hardwood floor. As far as she can tell, it’s a human canine. She puts it in an empty jam jar with the molar.

• • • •

The teeth continue to arrive, one per dryer load. They cluster at the bottom of the jar, most of them from the basement dryer, two from nearby laundromats. The internet thinks they’re fake, but if so, someone took time with them, removing any trace of mold lines and the tar-like adhesive with which faux-teeth are generally affixed to their packing material.

Maddie knows a lot about teeth, now. None of it helps her understand her growing collection. The gold crown of one tooth glimmers.

“I’ll have to remember to put you away before I have a lover over,” she tells the jar. It’s a joke insofar as it implies she has a love life. As her grandfather would have said, “funny, but not ha-ha funny.”

• • • •

Maddie’s days are monotonous. Take the bus to work. Feel the eyes of strangers on her. Ignore the way her boss ties sentences in knots to avoid using Maddie’s pronouns. Spend her lunch break walking, which is safer in downtown than in her neighborhood. Ignore the occasional catcall or slur. Slip past 12D, who somehow always manages to be checking his mailbox when she gets home. Do chores. Chat online with her friends. Fantasize about joining an inclusive choir, or one of the underground trans support groups she’s heard still exist. Ridiculous dreams, meant for someone braver and more well-connected than Maddie has ever been. Might as well dream about living someplace better, someplace where the law treats her like a person.

Do her laundry. Find a tooth. Teeth.

They start appearing in batches of twos and threes. Months pass and the collection expands to a bigger jar, then jars. She keeps her bedroom door locked, fearing what her roommates will think, fearing what will happen if she has to find new housing.

Maddie can accept that there’s no rational explanation for the teeth. She finds it harder to accept that the uncanny can become as blandly familiar as the rest of her life.

It’s amazing what you can normalize, she texts her best friend.

I’d like to normalize giving you a hug, Kels writes back. I’ve got some savings. Let me buy you a bus ticket. Come visit.

Maddie says she’ll think about it. But there are long, long miles between them, miles in which strangers who might find the opportunity for violence.

• • • •

One night as a fever burns through her, Maddie puts one tooth under her pillow, just in case.

When the fever burns away, it’s still there.

• • • •

She’s just restarted the dryer after collecting its offered teeth (five) when she hears 12D’s steps on the stairs. She ducks into the shadows underneath the stairwell, hoping he won’t notice her. This is what she’s always hoping for: to pass unobserved, unremarked, safe. Normal.

The thought curdles like her roommate’s months-old milk.

12D thumps into the basement. He’s a few feet from her. She could reach out and touch him. There’s something in his eyes she hasn’t seen before, something wild and reckless. Is this an escalation, or what he always looks like when he thinks he’s alone?

He stands in the doorway to the laundry room, his head darting back and forth in confusion, like he was sure she was there. But he’d left the building only a few minutes ago; she’d waited more than an hour for the sound of his leaving rather than risk encountering him.

Is he surveilling her? Maddie shivers. She wants to run, but can’t make her feet move. She can only watch as the man kneels down in front of the dryer. And then she knows what she’ll see: him pulling teeth from a pocket, depositing them in with her sodden clothes. Sending some incomprehensible message to her.

But he doesn’t reach into his pocket, doesn’t reveal a fist full of teeth. He stops the dryer, roots around in her things (Maddie fights back a gag), and removes a pair of her underwear. He restarts the dryer and heads back upstairs.

Later, when Maddie meticulously checks the load, there are no teeth to be found. 12D isn’t the answer; he’s just another creep.

• • • •

TransSendAnt: Sorry for the DM. I saw your message about identifying surveillance equipment. The feedback you got was decent, but there’s better stuff out there. A mutual aid group I work with put together a pdf zine on this. Here’s the link.

MadAboutMads: This is perfect! Thank you! And thank your group for me.

• • • •

Maddie finds three cameras tucked away on the landing, above her apartment door, and in the basement. She can find nothing in her apartment, but knows better than to trust that. The cops don’t help people like her and she’s afraid to make 12D angry, so she only adjusts the angle of the cameras, changing the view. Later, through her apartment’s peephole, she watches 12D fiddle with them.

She texts Kels: I need to scream at the sky with you. When can I visit?

The reply comes at once: as soon as you can catch a bus. Just sent $. Let me know if you need more.

The bus rumbles across the endless stretches of I-70. Nothing to see but cornfields and billboards that tell her fetuses are people and she’s not. In the long silence, she feels the absurd desire to sing, bold and unashamed. Like she used to be.

And then a snarl of brake lights, and the bus crawls along, stop-and-go. Maddie expects to see a traffic jam, maybe a self-driving car fooled by late-afternoon glare, but there’s no twist of metal, only police cars, an ambulance, and a photographer snapping pictures of a corpse, a woman killed and dumped beside a major highway. Probably the killer figured that their victim wasn’t anyone the cops would spend much effort on.

• • • •

Maddie reaches into Kels’s washer, then staggers back, her hand wet. The air is pungent with iron. “No no no,” she hears herself saying as she holds her hand in front of her. It’s streaked with red.

An hour later, after the panic attack, after she’s steeled herself and promised herself that, whatever this is, she will have dealt with it before Kels gets back from work, Kels who always looks out for her, and doesn’t need another problem dumped on her. Maddie dons rubber gloves and pulls out her clothes, some part of her brain relieved that this was a load of darks, even as she envisions horrors. Finally she finds the culprit, small and soap-slick. A red worm? Her stomach lurches, but she makes herself look, makes herself see, and it’s not a worm, but it is biological, reminding her of the viscera of slaughtered chickens.

She starts a “self-clean” cycle on the washer, wishing she could climb in as the machine does its work. It takes time and many ill-formed web searches to make sense of what she’s found. Only when she adds “inflamed” to her search terms does the answer appear: an appendix.

How many bodies like the one beside the highway are out there? How many teeth and organs and other parts that used to be a human being must she find? Soon Kels will be back. Maddie will not share this with her, will not ruin their time together. Sometimes she’s grateful for dissociation.

• • • •

She knows she’ll put the appendix next to the teeth on her dresser, not because she wants to keep it, but because she fears that throwing it away may make things worse. If she can keep it captive under glass, it can’t make its way back to her. It can be seen, controlled.

• • • •

Even though she can’t bring herself to tell Kels about the body parts, they talk about everything else: work and video games, Kels’s partners and Maddie’s lack thereof, cat videos and the state of the world. Only when they’re stoned can Maddie talk about the guy from 12D.

“Girl,” Kels says, “don’t think for a moment you’re heading back there without a plan.”

What they come up with isn’t a plan, precisely, but at least it is a first step. TransSendAnt and their mutual aid group provide the idea, and Kels donates a bottle of UltraBlack nail polish to the cause. “It’s a pain to remove even if you know how to do it.” Her grin is fox-clever.

Back home, it takes only a few swipes to cover the camera’s tiny, fish-eye lenses. It won’t solve the bigger problem, but even so Maddie feels like she can breathe again, like some of the weight has been removed from her chest.

That night she keeps vigil, expecting some reaction from 12D. Sure enough, sometime after 2 a.m. he thumps down the stairs, and she watches from behind her door as he pulls the cameras down, stares at them. His shoulders are hunched, his breath rapid. He retreats upstairs, his fear outweighing his anger.

• • • •

Things are quiet for a while, no more teeth, no encounters with 12D. She’s not foolish enough to think the danger has passed, but the hurricane’s eye is still welcome. She’d forgotten there was a life beyond the accumulation of menace and body parts.

There’s work to be done, at her shit job and at the community garden (where she’s side-eyed by some people and welcomed by others). The sun and the loam beneath her nails soothe her, help her sleep a little easier. Whether it’s 12D or some stranger or the government, the end is coming for her: Her bones ache with surety.

All the more reason to enjoy these moments while she has them, she tells Kels.

Girl, get yourself into therapy comes the response, and then: right now.

Madie settles for a VPN and a support group run by a friend of TransSendAnt. Everyone uses pseudonyms to avoid charges of providing material support to subversive ideologies.

In her dreams, dark figures catch her and cut her apart, piece by piece. She doesn’t know if they’re aiming for her death or detransition.

• • • •

Weeks go by before she discovers two fleshy nubs caught in a pillowcase she pulls from the basement washing machine. These she recognizes, because as a child she’d begged the doctor to let her see hers once they were removed. It probably broke a rule, but he’d obliged. She’d studied her tonsils in their little glass tube with awe, amazed that something could be part of her and then be removed, yet she could still be whole, be herself. Much later, in college, she’d learned about the Ship of Theseus. By then she was already planning to make herself anew, to insist to the world that she was a she, that she was Maddie, the organs she did or did not possess be damned. In those days, that had been a safer choice than it was now. Not safe, but safer.

Maddie has become an expert at making herself. Buying unneeded estrogen from cis friends, contouring her face with stolen drugstore cosmetics, changing her stride, her voice, her mannerisms, not because she doubts who she is, but because sometimes it helps others to see her as herself, not as they assume she must be. She used to think it might save her life, but now she knows nothing will.

She cups the tonsils in her palm, these fragile, dangerous things, and envies her young self, who was still capable of seeing potential in herself, in the world, in the manifold ways people could shape themselves into themselves.

12D steps into the laundry room, not quite fully blocking the door, but not giving her a way through, either. Apparently he’s overcome whatever fear had been holding him back. “Hey, gorgeous,” he says, with a smirk she suspects he’s practiced to exhaustion in the mirror. His entitled eyes roam her body. She wonders if this is her end, and how much it will hurt.

Maddie should be terrified, but that’s buried so deep, beneath exhaustion and surety and the desire to live on her terms, even if only for a few moments more.

She pulls the last of her things from the dryer. “I’m not interested,” she tells him.

“Hey, can’t a guy give a girl a compliment?” He asks, putting a bit of extra emphasis on “girl.”

“I don’t want your compliments.”

He shifts to take up a bit more of the door; he’s engineered all this, knowing she’ll feel trapped, confident he’ll get what he wants. This is dangerous, a poor place for a confrontation, alone with him and trapped.

“Don’t be a bitch.” He wears a rictus smile.

She balances her basket against one hip and approaches him, wordless. Fury flashes in his eyes. His hands clench. She ponders edging past, bull-rushing, screaming for help. She left the pepper spray in her room. Now she’s trapped, unarmed.

But not empty handed.

“Here,” she says, holding her free hand out to him. “The first and last thing I’ll ever give you.” He hesitates, but unclenches his fist and extends his hand. The tonsils make a soft, distinct plop when she drops them into his hand.

“The fuck?” 12D says, then his eyes widen and he flinches, the organs falling to the concrete floor. She ducks past him, through the doorway and up the stairs.

In her room, shaking with the adrenaline comedown, she wonders if any of the teeth are hers. Their story isn’t finished, just as Maddie isn’t finished making herself. So many others were robbed of that chance, and maybe someday she will be, too. All those body parts: Are they evidence of loss or transformation? Even if some of them are hers, and even if they’re meant for her, they can’t be from her alone, can’t be for her alone.

Her phone buzzes: a new message from the mutual aid group, asking for help distributing donated food. I’m in, Maddie replies at once. She’s a string plucked, remembering music, remembering itself. She’s a note, lovely, fragile, and better as part of a chorus.