An Urban Trans Literary Fiction Story

(The Life Of Alma is told from the POV of a young Afro-Latina, trans woman navigating life, love, and loss in New York City in the early 2000s)

The following is an abridged, early draft version of the first 15,000 words of my lost manuscript The Life Of Alma.

This story is serialized in the LGBTQ-centric publication Prism & Pen here:

Trans In Sugar Hill | Trans Sibling Reunion Goes Awry | Trans Daughter Reunites With Scornful Mother | Repressed Memories Of A Trans Beginning | Trans Emotional Catharsis Through A Lost Parent

Help Fund This Unique Project: Patreon

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Alma awoke that hot July morning to the rattling of the half-busted fan in the window across the room, the clammy feeling of sweat in her armpits and between her thighs, and the golden light of the sun creeping through the gaps in the blinds. The magic of her dreams escaped into that light, flourished and crystalized, which she studied through a tight squint. From the bedroom, she could tell that the apartment was still and, from the window, through the rattling, that the streets were bare. But neither of those things was what got her out of bed. It was the pressure on her bladder that was most demanding, and she fixated on that as she kicked herself out from beneath the sheets.

Early mornings made the apartment feel like a different place: the creaky parts in the floor were louder and more offensive, words became secret things, and possibility was in the air. Even the mice had not started their scratching and scurrying, blessedly silent in shallow dens. The blinding light transformed once familiar things like the moldings of door frames and marks on the walls until they seemed completely new. That comforted her because she had always liked the feeling of discovery and renewal. It made it easy to take her time in the bathroom and hallway studying trivial details from angles that convinced her she was seeing them for the first time. That curiosity led her on the balls of her feet to the window across from the kitchen where she crept out onto the fire escape.

The daylight was even more refreshing. The air smelled of morning dew, wet concrete, and the week’s garbage piled high on the curb in oily black bags, but the light was spectacular. It pierced through the clouds and washed over barren rooftops, through and off the windows of the buildings that loomed overhead, to bathe Harlem in a glorious, melancholy haze. Alma produced a pack of Newports from a pocket in her shorts and crouched on her haunches to strike one up with a match. The cigarette was long and cheap, and as she took that first divine drag, her gaze fell onto the street to savor it.

A garbage truck appeared at the intersection, beeping, flashing, and exhaling plumes of steam like a living machine. The flicking of a lighter exposed a lonesome man or woman in the shadow of an alley across the street trying desperately to light what Alma imagined was a blunt, on account of its dusky color. Shrouded in a hoodie pulled over their eyes, she had the sense that they wanted to be left alone. A tough aspiration, she thought between pulls on her own cigarette and a wandering gaze that revealed windows open to the frame and flashes of naked bodies busying about apartments. The faint cry of a baby echoed out into the street, the chatter of children, laughter and screams, and enraged adults pushed to the limits of their patience. A few desultory-looking pigeons, perched on window ledges and street lamps, fluttered with agitation and she wondered if they were looking for the dilapidated coop on the roof of the corner building that was a half-step from crumbling. The clatter of rising shutters drew her to the store on the corner where the clerk was fighting with the padlocks to coax them loose. An older man was already putting out a milk crate and folding chairs in preparation for those early morning meetings where street gargoyles would gossip, play dominos, drink beer, and coo to passing women.

The garbage truck made its way slowly up the road as the first of the cheering children, too eager in their quest for fun, stumbled down a flight of porch steps. There was no time to dwell on the embarrassment though because the rest of them were already spilling out onto the street to pass around a rubbery kickball. The cigarette seemed to slow that all down and give her the sensation that she was out there with them, hair plastered to her face with sweat, toothy smile beaming dumb and reckless. She used to hang out with the other neighborhood kids when she was their age, trading baseball cards and penny candies on the stoop, taking wayward trips to the corner store to distract the clerk with a raucous scene for someone to swipe a few bags of chips or a handful of Mary Janes, and playing intense games of soccer in the park with boys that underestimated her ability because of her dainty ways. They were precious memories of a bygone era and their tenderness made her remember the morning’s dream, its bizarre manifestation of her angst, and she sobered in its recollection. It was a morning for memories and she was not prepared or willing to resist them.

The cool breeze sent a chill up her bare legs, which made her notice it for the first time, and she shuddered and hissed. It seemed to carry the scents of bacon and buttery toast. The clatter of dishes and the muffled tunes of Marvin Gaye from over her shoulder made her realize that she may have been smelling them for some time. She was grateful that they came from inside because her empty stomach had begun to fuss. Her cigarette had reached the filter anyway, so she flicked the butt out into the street. Before crawling back through the window, she rubbed the soreness from her legs and licked her dry, cracked lips.

For as long as she could remember, her favorite thing about the morning was breakfast time: the smells — butter, fennel, and cinnamon; the sounds — sizzling bacon, the clanging of pans, and the bell of the toaster; and the tastes — salty, sweet, creamy, and rich. Even when she had nothing except a backpack of clothes and a cot at the homeless shelter, she looked forward to savoring her corner store egg and cheese roll. When she was too broke to afford that simple luxury, she would sit on the benches in central park and reminisce about the spreads that her mother used to cook up early in the morning before anyone else in the house awoke. Rafael knew that about her. In the shelters, they filled their idle time with conversations about their lives, families, and dreams. So, whenever he managed to wake up before her, he would rush to fill the apartment with all the sense of breakfast.

Alma shuddered and fanned herself with her hands as she stepped into the kitchen. Rafael was splayed out on the couch in the connecting room with a standing fan pointed between his legs.

“Oh my god!” She palmed her chest with a squint and shuffled toward the table. “I feel like I just walked into the inferno. My soul is on fire. Is this hell?”

Rafael flapped his magazine onto his thigh and flashed her an annoyed expression that made her smile — involuntarily. His resting state always seemed to be some degree of captious.

“It is hot as fuck out here, and I just cooked you a whole-ass breakfast.” He snarled, gesturing toward the plate on the table even though Alma was already sitting down to eat. “You know that oven is old as all hell.”

“Okay, but who bakesbacon? Who does something like that?”

It took every ounce of willpower that she had not to break into a smile. His stunned face was worth the trouble.

“Are you serious?”

She turned away to hide the fault in her façade.

“Give me the plate.” He postured to get up.

“No!” She cried, her voice carrying through the halls and her body folding over the table to shield the food. The magazine flapped over her head and bounced off of the molding where there may have once been a double door leading to the living room. “I’m playin’, I’m playin’! Chill out!”

He adjusted the fan speed and settled back down into the couch. Alma looked cautiously over her shoulder before relaxing enough to eat.

“You shouldn’t be eating all that fried food anyway. Putting things in the oven is better for your heart. We have to look after our cholesterols.”

“How many cholesterols do we have?” She snickered between mouthfuls of perfectly scrambled eggs.

“You know what I mean, with your fat-ass thighs.”

Alma nearly spat out her food in surprise. When she was sure that he was looking, she slapped her fleshy legs and sneered.

“You just mad ‘cause all the boys want me and not your skinny ass.”

“Girl, please.” He rose from the couch to sit across from her at the table, dragging the fan behind him. “If they’re interested in you, then I am not interested in them. I do not have time for those down-low boys.”

“Oh my g — god!” She gagged on her food and Rafael recoiled in disgust. To emphasize her words, she tapped pastel green nails on the tabletop. “You can’t tell me about those down-low boys, lookin’ for a little Afro-Latina flavored girl that could give them something that they can’t get from their girlfriends. I can’t stand them neither. Don’t get me goin’ now — it’s too early for that.”

Rafael set up his fan on the floor and adjusted it on himself at full power. Alma glanced over her shoulder toward the scent of a fresh pot of coffee but was too deep into her meal to expect to get up now.

When she looked back at him, she could not resist smiling. They had come a long way together, from fourteen and homeless to twenty-seven with their own fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Sugar Hill, Harlem. In that shabby two-bedroom with drafts like an outdoor shed and lights that flickered in the winter, surrounded by the monuments to their struggles — reminders of triumphs over the shelters and halfway houses, she felt a modicum of success. Together and apart, they stumbled over life’s countless pitfalls on the climb out of New York City’s seedy underbelly but, when Alma landed a job as a salesgirl at a Manhattan Bloomingdale’s, there was light at the end of the tunnel. Hot with the tease of a better life, Rafael quit escorting and applied at every boutique up and down Madison Avenue until someone took pity on him. Now they were both living their own version of the good life.

Alma went on with suspicious certainty.

“I read in this flyer that cooking meat in butter can give you stomach cancer.”

“You serious?”

“It’s true, I looked it up.”

She had not looked anything up in a long time.

“See what I been saying? They don’t want us to know anything. I am so glad we got that plant butter.”

She looked into the kitchen again and her expression twisted with confusion.

“You mean that country stuff? That’s not from a plant! That’s margarine!” She looked down at her eggs and her voice softened, full of wounded betrayal. “Did you cook my eggs in margarine?”

“It’s from a plant! Margarine is from a plant. It’s better for you. Trust me, sis. Kitty told me about that, and you know how that man she’s been seeing does medicines.”

“Kitty?” Her tone was enough to make him retract. His tongue had betrayed him, too sharp and loose. “Kitty from Chelsea? You’re still talking to that animal? You remember what she did to me, right?”

He stood up and went to retrieve his magazine from the living room floor so that he did not have to meet her eyes. “Yes! My god — yes! I’m sorry!”

“I don’t trust her, Rafael. She told me to talk to that guy, like she didn’t know that he and his little friends had clocked me. I could have been beat up! I could have been laid up in the hospital for weeks. Or I could be dead in the morgue!”

Just thinking about that day was enough to make her nervous. It could have been the heat in the air or the margarine in her eggs, but suddenly, she felt sick.

“They looked at me like I was a monster or something … and he spit in my face. My face.”

“I’m sorry, I just ran into her — that’s all!” He was trying to cleanse the conversational palette, but Alma may have taken a stroll too far down that venomous road. “Next time I see her, I’m just gonna keep it moving.” He mumbled as he sat back down across from her, undulating his hand to mimic a wave.

Alma mirrored the gesture and contorted her face in mockery. “I’m gonna keep it moving.” she blabbered through pursed lips and crossed eyes.

“Jesus!” Rafael sighed and pretended to be more interested in reading his magazine.

Alma took off her silk bonnet and let her hair fall gently over her shoulders. The salon had blessed her black and brown treasure trove of kinky curls with a top-tier deep conditioning and she was finally ready to show it off.

Rafael grinned, shook his head, and took the opportunity to change the subject.

“Damn, girl. That’s all you?”

“Yessir!” She bounced in her chair and her toothy smile infected him.

“Lord have his mercy. There’s something in the estrogen from that new plug. You just keep blossoming.”

“It’s not the estrogen, stupid. I be using my aloe vera.” She ran her hands along her waist. “I feel like that estrogen is gettin’ this body extra juicy though.”

“Estrogen and all that dairy, you fat bitch.”

“Boy!” she shouted and shot to her feet. “Bag your face. I’m done with you.”

Rafael almost fell out of his chair in hysterical laughter. Alma marched into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

“First you call me a wishbone ‘cause I can fit into your pants, then I put on a few pounds and you want to keep trying me.”

She wanted a cold glass of milk but there was no way that she could reconcile that after what he had just said. Hot coffee would have to do.

“Get outta the refrigerator! You just had a whole meal!”

She was certain that his obnoxious cackle must have echoed throughout the entire fourth floor.

The phone in the living room started blaring and they locked eyes. They could not afford cell phone plans, so every call that either of them received was through that line. Alma rushed toward the sound but knocked her toe against the oven and stumbled onto the tile. Rafael leapt out of his seat.

“Calm down!” he snapped and walked briskly out of their poor excuse of a dining room.

By the time Alma limped out after him, he had the receiver to his face. She snatched his magazine in hapless frustration but he barely seemed to notice. He actually looked a bit confused, which gave her pause.

“Is it my job?” she sighed, but he dismissed her with a wave.

“Excuse me, you’re looking for who? Alejandro?”

Alma’s heart sank to her stomach at the sound of the name, as if it were a curse meant to destroy her. Alejandro. Just thinking it was enough to give her goosebumps. It had been a long time, and a part of her had almost hoped to forget.

“I think you got the wrong number, honey.”

“Wait!” She pulled the phone gently from his hand. When their eyes met, he knew what it meant. As quickly as he could, he took the magazine from her and slipped out into the dining room but did not go far, listening just out of sight around the corner.

Alma held the phone tight against her face with both hands to stop herself from shaking. Her voice was a cautious whisper, and even she barely heard it.

“Hello?”

The woman on the other line exhaled sharply. Her voice was just as uncertain.

“Alejandro? Is it you?”

Alma bit her lip and looked over her shoulder as if she were afraid that someone might hear.

“No.” It was mumbled. “I don’t go by that name anymore. My name is Alma. I did it all legal. How did you get this number?”

The woman repeated the name with a snicker, and Alma found something in her voice that was terribly familiar — a certain venom that she had once known better than the taste of food. This was someone that she knew from another life — from a family that she had not seen in over nine years — one that she had nearly forgotten. Obscured by trauma and time, their faces had become the fusion of one torturous villain. Their voices, however, remained distinct, ringing through the annals of her memory like an alarm.

“That’s precious. Did you get that out of a comic book?”

Those words helped Alma see into her past as if through an open window.

“Esme?” she asked, but could barely believe that it was true.

It was her older sister, Esmeralda: her former idol and dearest friend, a protector and accuser, a love and a pain. They had last seen each other at their grandmother’s funeral in July of ‘93, nine years ago to the day, and there had been no kind words between them. At the funeral parlor, cousin Esteban had forced her out of the reception hall with a hand around her neck. Once out of view of Granny’s casket, he hit her across the face with the back of his hand. She fell to the carpet and tore a seam in her rented dress. Esme was there behind him but she did not say a word. He called her a faggot and a drag queen and threatened to kill her if she disrespected theirfamily again. Then he sent her on her way with a crumpled ten-dollar bill and a warning to ‘never return’. It was the last time that she had ever tried to reach out to any of them.

Alma had been through too much in the last nine years to let her so-called family put her down again. With sudden bravado, she switched her hips, put the phone between her shoulder and chin, and tied her hair up in a ponytail with a velvet scrunchie from her shorts’ pocket.

“What do you want?” She gave the question as much attitude as she could, and it must have been a lot because she heard Rafael snicker from around the corner.

“It’s Mommy, Alejandro. She’s not doing well.”

That softened her instantly.

“What do you mean?”

“She had a really bad heart attack in January. They said her heart is no good. She’s been talking crazy all the time now and … I don’t know why, but she asked for you.”

Alma’s mind raced through time to collect the cherished memories of her childhood so urgently that it was hard to find the right words. When she finally did, her voice was full of dread.

“What do you mean it’s ‘no good’? How can she live without a heart?”

Her sister spoke gently, which surprised her. “She can’t, Andro. Mommy is on the way out.”

With those words, on that July morning in her drab living room that barely caught the sun, her world was torn asunder. She would hardly remember the rest of the conversation, but they spoke for a few more minutes about arrangements and where she could to visit. She wrote down the address and then the trains and buses that would get her there. By the time they finished, she was numb.

She went into the dining room to find an expectant-looking Rafael at the table. She simply stood in the passage for a while, counting the tiles on the floor from wall to wall. He knew her well enough to recognize that strange silence and, to temper her, crossed the space between them and took her hands.

“What’s the matter, baby?”

She inhaled sharply and looked up as if she had not seen him in a long time.

“My mother. I think she’s dying.”

She threw up all of the food that she had eaten that morning, and all of the milk that she drank to comfort herself too.

That night, she dreamt about her mother.

She was a child of nine years, and they were in that tiny apartment in Morris Heights, when Daddy was still around. Alma lay on the rug at the foot of the couch sharpening a red colored pencil. Mommy had sharpened the rest of the pack and was laying out parchment paper on the coffee table. It felt like the evening, as the windows caught the full glow of the sun and bathed the living room in warm gold.

“Come, my love. Bring me your talent.”

She did just that. Her thoughts slipped out of time for a moment and she took hold of her mother’s sleeve, pressing her cheek against her arm. She wanted to hold on, to feel, and to smell her, as if she knew that they were running out of time. Mommy leaned over, kissed her cheek, and whispered into her ear, “Don’t worry, mijo. I’m not goin’ anywhere.” It was comforting in a way that could never be exceeded.

They worked together on the canvas, etching with all the colors in the pack. Alma drew herself, Mommy, Esme, and Daddy. Mommy drew their building, their car on the street, and the sun in the sky. When they finished, she held it up against the window and they looked at each other with wonder.

“It’s a masterpiece! Let’s put it on the wall!”

She woke up then with a start, and it took a moment to get her bearings. The room was dark and she was alone. She cried into her pillow for a while before Rafael came to check on her. She spent what felt like hours telling him about how intimate she and her mother were before the fallout, until the both of them fell asleep.

Before the night was over, they migrated to Rafael’s bedroom because he had a box spring and a bed frame while all she had was a cheap twin mattress on the floor.

It was torturous but she waited until Friday to make the trip out to her mom’s apartment in Prospect Heights. She did not have a number to reach Esmeralda, but she and her husband would meet her there since Mommy was practically bedridden.

She had gotten her nails done yesterday with a matte silver polish and an almond cut. It was meant to match the gray bodysuit that she had picked out — the one that best accentuated her curves — paired with her black Dior Saddle Bag, which cost half her rent even with an employee discount. She fixed her hair in a high ponytail and changed her lip color four times before leaving the house. She wanted to look her best because she had not seen either of them in a long time.

It took nearly two hours to reach the address, and even when she did, she was not sure that she was in the right place. The sidewalk was three times as wide as the ones in her neighborhood, there were no kids playing stickball in the street, and no bodega in sight on either end of the block. The building was at least thirty stories tall with an awning and a sharply dressed doorman. Esme had told her that their mother lived in a good neighborhood, but Alma had not expected anything this modern. She cursed herself for not wearing her black leather stilettos, even though she could barely walk half a block in them.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” The doorman stopped her at the entrance, but he was polite. Men were usually polite with her.

“Y-yes, sir. I’m try’na visit Paula Castillo. She’s my mom.”

He nodded, smiled, and held the door for her. As she entered the reception area, she gasped and palmed her chest. The lobby was several times bigger than her apartment, and the ceiling was at least thirty feet high. She must have looked pretty lost, because the young, blonde woman at the front desk called for her attention.

“Hello, ma’am. Can I direct you anywhere in particular?”

“Can you direct me?” she parroted under her breath, scanning the room. “I’m just visiting my mom, Paula Castillo.”

“Oh, sure, do you know what apartment she’s in?”

“I don’t know yet. I mean I’m not sure. I never been here before. My sister’s supposed to meet me in the lobby.”

“Right, no problem.”

Alma ran her fingers along the marble top of the desk toward a glass dish of individually wrapped red candies.

“Wow.” she sighed.

“Ma’am?”

“This is fancy! This is like a luxury building or something, right?” Her usually tame Bronx accent always got the better of her when she was excited.

The woman smiled nervously and nodded in a strange way, like a bobble head doll. Alma caught those judgmental eyes on her body and was instantly self-conscious. Her bodysuit was form-fitting but so loose around the shoulders that it rested on her deltoids, and even though she had the muscle mass of a poodle, she still feared the exposure. Estrogen had given her the butt, hips, and thighs that she had always wanted but left her with a scant B cup. Because of her small frame, and to spare herself from those cheap department store straps digging into her shoulders, she often went braless. Today may have been the wrong day for that, and she blamed the heat for missing her pointy nipples in the mirror that morning.

“Can I wait over there for her?” She pointed toward a lounge area with black leather couches and armchairs between a few massive floor-to-ceiling columns.

“Yes, please.”

“Thank you — you know what time it is?”

“Yes, it’s 10:43. In the morning.” The woman pointed to a large analog clock on the wall behind the desk.

Esme and her husband were going to meet her at 11. She took a candy from the dish before going to sit down.

While she waited for them to arrive, her thoughts took her back through time, to when she was eight years old, coasting down the hills of Morris Heights in her lime green skates on a warm Saturday afternoon. Esme was half a block ahead of her, but Alma wanted to prove how fast she was. She kicked her legs in her best road runner impression and was tumbling head over feet down the hill before she knew it. Her knees and elbows were intact thanks to her bulky pads, but her fragile ego was pretty banged up. As the tears began to swell in her eyes, Esme wrapped her in a hug and started rocking her back and forth. She could still hear that voice, gentle and full of grace.

“What are you doing, bichito? How am I gonna look out for you if you ain’t lookin’ out for yourself?”

Being in her arms made her feel safe.

“I wanted to catch up with you.” she exclaimed while looking down at the new scuff marks on the whites of her skates.

“Are you okay?”

She was, but pretended not to be so that Esme would not let go.

The candy had to have been as old as the building because it tasted the way the inside of her grandmother’s closet used to smell. She spit it out, wrapped it back up, and stuffed it into the side pocket of her bag. For the last twenty minutes, she watched yuppie men and women prancing back and forth from the elevator to the door with absolute indifference for the lobby around them. Most of them did not even notice that she was there. Those that did were almost exclusively men. One that was likely in his late thirties was forward enough to approach her.

“Excuse me, do I know you?”

Without warning and much to her dismay, her heart began to race. She brushed the curls from her face to a place behind her ear and shook her head with a feigned smile.

“No, I don’t think so. I’m not from around here.”

“You don’t live in the building?”

He moved nearer the couch and looked to be ready to sit across from her. She shook her head again but did not say anything this time. He looked around the empty lobby and put his hands in his pockets. His voice became a whisper, as if he were telling her something secret. She understood why right away.

“Are you meeting someone here?”

There was no way that she had dressed herself that provocatively. She uncrossed her legs and pressed them together, rubbing her knees with her palms.

“Yes.” She looked toward the receptionist, but as soon as she did, the woman looked away. “They’ll be here any minute.”

“I understand. You know, I swear I’ve seen you somewhere before.” He ran his fingers through his hair and seemed to want to say more, but, instead, put his hand into his blazer pocket and produced a business card, extending it to her. She did not take it right away.

“Go on.” he coaxed with a smirk. “Give me a call when you’re ready to meet someone else. I have an apartment on the nineteenth floor.”

She took the card without looking him in the eyes and could smell his leathery cologne. She knew how to identify the more expensive fragrances from her days working tricks at the pier. The more expensive, the better. Those guys always tipped the best.

When he finally left her alone, she ripped up his card and put the pieces in her purse. She had left that life behind long before she got that sales job at Bloomingdale’s. She had seen too many girls ravaged by disease, beaten beyond recognition, and murdered — showing up on the channel eleven news as another ‘dead crossdressing hooker’. She did not want her story to end as another headline.

It was 11:30 by the time Esmeralda and her husband arrived. Alma recognized her right away — those dark eyes, downturned lips, and milk chocolate-colored hair. They had different fathers and, even though Alma’s caramel skin made her disparate enough in the eyes of the Hispanic community, they looked very much alike. She shot to her feet, straightened her dress, and fingered her hair.

“Esme!” she cooed.

They met at the couch. Alma tried to understand her sister’s convoluted expression, somewhere between surprised and confused — and maybe even a little happy, but it was impossible. She had to remind herself to keep smiling, in a conscious effort to disarm her.

“Whoa, you look … different.” Esmeralda’s words were a curiosity.

They were only an arm’s length from each other now, but neither of them postured for an embrace. Esmeralda’s gaze drifted to the surrounding space and, for a moment, she seemed to disappear. Then she shook her head and stiffened, tightening her grip on her purse. “Yeah.”

You look different. Alma thought the words over but was not about to let them ruin her day. She knew that she looked damn good, and was determined to be civil.

“Damn, I haven’t seen you in so long. I like your hair.” Her ear-to-ear smile was too charming for her sister to deny.

“I like yours too.” Esme smirked and nodded at her curls.

“Thanks — I just got it done Wednesday. It was like a hundred dollars.” She worried that she was sharing too much. It was a nervous habit of hers. “I had braids before, like Janet Jackson in that movie. It was so dope.” She did it again and dug her nails into her thighs in frustration.

Esme gestured toward her husband, a lean Hispanic man with gelled, jet black hair and a forehead that was too high for his face. He had a cross on a gold chain around his neck and a giant gold watch on one of his wrists. Alma had almost forgotten that he was there.

“Oh sorry, I’m buggin’!” she laughed and extended her hand.

“Rico, this is my brother, Alejandro.”

The words cut so much deeper than she thought that they could, but she tried to keep smiling.

“It’s actually Alma now.” She and her sister met eyes, but Alma looked away in embarrassment, down at her quivering extended hand. “I changed it a couple years ago.”

Rico accepted her gesture with the lightest grip that she had ever felt.

“Alma, right.” His chuckle was so obnoxious that it made her skin crawl. Somehow, despite this indignity, she managed to keep her composure.

They took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. Dreading an uncomfortable silence, Alma filled the void with her own musing.

“This is crazy, right? I can’t believe Mommy lives in a place like this. You should see my building — we don’t even got an elevator.”

“You’re off the streets now then?”

Esmeralda barely looked at her, but Rico’s mortified stare was insistent. Both made her wildly uncomfortable.

“Well, yeah, Esme. You called me at my apartment, remember?”

“Oh, I didn’t know what it was. I just dialed the number.”

Alma groaned and began to wonder if trying to stay positive was too much trouble.

“How’d you even know where to call?”

“I spoke to Precious.”

Her aunt, Precious, on her father’s side, a fiery old matriarch that Mommy had always compared to La Madama. Precious was the only member of her father’s family that she had ever known, and she was the only one that tried to help her when she was at her lowest. It honestly surprised her that Esme kept in contact with her, because the rest of the family pretended that she never existed once Daddy was gone. But Auntie Precious died in ’99. That meant that Esme had been sitting on her number for at least three years and had never used it before now.

Mommy’s apartment was D14, the last door at the end of the hall across from the stairwell. While Esme fished for the keys, Alma pushed open the stairwell door. It did not slam shut on its own like she had expected. That was a nice surprise that had her mumbling and snapping her fingers with an overdrawn frown.

The apartment was nicer than she anticipated, with a living room, a real dining room, and even a sit-in kitchen. Alma left her shoes at the door because she knew that Mommy did not like people tracking the street onto her floors. As they were led into the living room, they heard Mommy’s voice call out from down a dark, forked hallway.

“Martina? Is that you?”

Alma barely recognized it — so different from what she remembered. The voice calling from the dark was strained and uncertain — unlike the mother of her youth who was deliberate, loud, and full of attitude.

“No, momma!” Esme called back. “It’s Esmeralda. Hold on — I’m coming. Just wait here a minute, Andro, let me make sure she’s okay.” Esme put her purse on the floor by the couch and Alma noticed that neither of them had taken their shoes off. “Andro, listen … you need to prepare yourself for this, alright? Mommy isn’t herself anymore. She doesn’t want to go back to the hospital either, you know how she is.”

“Okay.” She nodded but her gaze fell to the cream-colored carpet as she sat on the couch across from Rico. The warning terrified her, and her imagination carried it to blistering heights.

Esme disappeared down the hallway, flicking on light switches as she made her way to their mother’s room. Alma distracted herself from her thoughts by looking around the apartment from where she sat. She leaned forward to see beyond the kitchen, into what looked like a walk-in pantry or laundry room. There were vents in the walls up by the ceiling, long blinds, and a thick black-out curtain on the window beside them. The television was on the wall between the living room and the landing, and there was a sturdy-looking chair facing it from across the room with a wire coming out of it.

Alma checked her make-up twice with a tiny mirror from her bag while they waited. She thought about what Rafael would say if he had been there with her, and it made her smile.

“This is a really nice place. I’m glad my mom has such a nice place.” She glanced at Rico but he was already staring her down. He did not respond, but she knew that he could hear her.

“I haven’t seen my sister in a while. How long y’all been together?”

“Yeah, I hear you got different dads.” He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat with a menacing glower.

“Yeah.” She thought that that was a strange thing to say. Trying to make sense of it made her angry. “She was four when my dad came around. She never knew her father, so he raised her like she was his.”

“Where’s he at now?”

All she could think about was how badly she wanted to smash his face into the wall. At least then he would not be able to antagonize her anymore. Again, she kept her composure, looked toward the window, and responded in a voice so low that she knew he would strain to hear.

“Probably in the same place you lost your hairline.”

“What was that?” His grimace finally faded and he leaned forward in his seat. She looked at him with a face as serious as fire. They stared at each other in silence for what felt like minutes before he crossed his arms and leaned back. She was not about to be bullied in her mother’s home.

“Andro.” Esme appeared in the hallway but the indifferent and difficult expression was gone, replaced with sobering grief. “Come.”

The walk down the hallway was one of the strangest experiences of her life. Her steps were heavy and her feet like tree trunks. Time protracted and she thought that she could see herself from the outside, as an observer. They went left at the fork, but she looked right and saw an open doorway to a bathroom at the end of the hall. There were towels on the floor, soaked and dirty, and a smashed bottle of lotion. The door to Mommy’s room at the opposite end was cracked open and Alma could smell the urine-soaked sheets from the distance. Her stomach turned and her heart ached, but she fought the tears that threatened her mascara. She would have to be strong, she told herself, at least until Mommy saw how pretty she was.

Esme stopped at the door and let Alma enter first. As she did, she asked God for the strength to endure.

The lights were off but the room was dimly lit by the sun peeking through the curtains. Everything from the walls to the windows, and the floor, seemed to blend together into a gray, dull painting of sadness and sickness. The air smelled of it too — filth and old fruit. Alma looked to her sister for an explanation, but Esme looked away and then left her there on her own. But she was not alone.

On the tall, waist-high bed was a small, crumpled figure beneath thin sheets. She would not have seen it at all had it not been for the breathing that disturbed the stillness of the bedding. Her mother had been a strong, solid woman with big hips, fleshy limbs, and chubby cheeks. The wraith upon the bed must have been an imposter, but it had her mother’s rings on its hand, which hung over the side of the mattress nearest the window. Alma was not strong enough to hold her emotions at bay for much longer.

“Alejandro? My Alejandro?” Closer now, she could hear the parts of her voice that rang true through the memories of her childhood, and it broke her heart. Her foundation rocked and the dam failed. She covered her mouth to muffle her sobs.

“Mommy?” She asked, some distant part of her hoping for an answer that she knew she would not get. As she crossed the gulf between them, the woman’s face became clear, tired and gaunt, but clear. It was her mother Paula and, for the first time in twelve years, she seemed happy to see her.

“Whoa, my god.” the woman exclaimed, pulling herself up against the headboard. Alma dropped to her knees beside the bed and sobbed into her mother’s hand.

“Don’t cry, Andro. You’ll ruin that makeup.” Her laugh was almost the same.

“I’m sorry, Mommy … I’m sorry.” She took a tissue from the nightstand and noticed the laundry basket, overflowing with dirty sheets. She dabbed at her tears as carefully as she could. Her mother just stared for a while with the faintest smile. Then something in her face changed and Alma felt that she was looking through her.

“Where did you go?”

The question confused her, but she shook her head and got a folding chair resting by the wall and posted it at the bedside.

“I’m right here, Mommy.”

“Where did you go before?”

Alma looked into herself and then answered assuredly, “I think that I’ve always been here.”

Mommy nodded very slowly with that faint smile.

“You still dressing like a girl, mijo?”

“Mommy!” she grumbled and rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m not a boy. And I’m not a girl either. I’m a woman now.”

“This is what God gave me, Andro? You say you’re not my son anymore?”

She shook her head and nervously adjusted the shoulder of her bodysuit.

“Who did your makeup, Andro?”

“I did it myself. And it’s Alma now, Mommy. I did it all legal.”

“Alma?” She whispered the name, seeming to mull it over. “You look like your sister.”

“Oh my god.” She wondered what Esme would have said if she had heard that.

“Or maybe she looks like you.” Mommy clarified with a wink.

Alma bit her tongue with a smile and swayed from side to side in the chair. “You gotta admit, I do look fly!”

They laughed together and, for a while, it was as if they had never been apart.

They chatted for over two hours, and it was mostly good. It turned out that Granny’s life insurance policy had paid out a lot of money and Mommy used it to get that apartment. She also paid for Esme to go to school to become an accountant. That bit of information stung in a particularly harsh way, but she hid her disappointment. Over the time that they spent together, she collected a few glasses of water and some roasted chicken wings from the refrigerator for her. She got the sense that Mommy had a lot of difficulty moving around on her own.

When Esme complained about her schedule for the third time, Alma knew that she could not hold her at bay anymore. She gave her mother a long and tight hug. The woman was so small now that she could feel the bones of her spine in their embrace. There was a certain sadness in her eyes when she said goodbye that left Alma feeling unsettled. She was asked to draw the curtains before she left the room. Then to turn the thermostat down. And then to retrieve the three-day-old newspaper on the dresser. Mommy did not want to be alone, so she exhausted their goodbye until there was nothing left to do.

In the landing, while Esme checked her purse for the keys, Alma took her time putting on her shoes. She looked back down the hall. It was dark again. Her sister had turned off all the lights.

“Who’s Martina?”

No one had spoken for a while and it took Esmeralda a moment to respond.

“What do you mean?” She found the keys.

“Mommy asked for Martina when we got here.”

“Oh … she’s the home health aide. She comes twice a week.”

Alma stopped fiddling with her shoes. “Twice a week? Who’s with Mommy all the other days?”

Esme shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, and looked away in what Alma imagined was shame.

“Hold up. She lives here alone?” There was no response. “Esme, tell me that Mommy is not here by herself without nobody!”

Rico sighed and began fidgeting with the door.

“She’s not alone, Andro. I stop by to check on her. I can’t be here all the time — I have to work. We have to go!”

“Wait a minute!” She could not believe what she was hearing but tried to make sense of it. When they arrived, the apartment was dark and silent. That woman could barely move on her own. How did she use the bathroom or get something to eat? Alma thought of the urine-soaked sheets and her heart sank. While she sat in the lobby downstairs waiting for Esme and her husband, Mommy was in that apartment alone, unsure if she would be spending the night without food or water. She had not even been told that they were coming today.

“Esmeralda, she can’t move.” Her voice trembled. “That room … it’s a tomb! I’m not gonna leave her like this!”

“We have to go, Andro! We have to go!”

“No.” She kicked her shoe off and it hit the wall. “I’m staying with her.”

“What?” Esme rolled her eyes and sunk her shoulders like a frustrated child. “You can’t stay here. Let’s go now, I’m gonna be late.”

“No. That’s my mother. I’m not leaving her alone.”

“Alright, let’s go.” Rico grumbled and moved toward her — as if to force her from the apartment. Alma jerked out of his reach. She clapped her hands together several times and looked up at the ceiling as if in prayer.

“I swear to God, if you touch me, I will knock your whole face off.”

He was stunned, and so was her sister.

“Are you fucking crazy?”

“Rico!” Esme shouted, drawing both of their ire. “Please let me deal with this. I will meet you downstairs.”

He glowered at Alma with hateful eyes. Neither of them wanted to budge, but he took the cue from his wife and stepped out of the apartment, growling in the process, “You crazy bitch.”

“Fuck you!” Alma shouted back and her voice rang down the hall.

“Fuck yourself, you fruitcake.”

When the door closed behind him, she immediately turned her anger onto her sister.

“That’s the mother fucker you chose, right?

“Calm down, Andro! You know you can’t stay here.”

“It’s Alma, and this isn’t your apartment. Mommy!” she leaned into the hallway and shouted, “You want me to keep you company tonight?”

There was silence for a moment, then a shrill but certain “Yes!”

“There you go.” She crossed her arms beneath her chest and raised her brows at her sister, daring a response.

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Esmeralda sighed and turned to rest her forehead against the door. Her voice was an intense whisper. “Why are you doing this?”

Alma was surprised by the question and stumbled over a response. “Why — what’re you … what are you asking me?”

Without turning to see her, Esme hissed into the door. “What are you trying to prove?”

“Wow!” Alma leaned back and almost fell onto the floor. “What the fuck is wrong with you? This don’t got nothing to do with me! I don’t got anything left to prove to you or anyone else. I’m not leaving my mother here to rot. Her room smells like piss, Esme. You can’t wash her fucking sheets? I ain’t even really seen that bathroom, but it look like someone dropped a grenade in there.”

“The home health aide will be here tomorrow.”

“Who wants to hear that?! You’re talking major bullshit right now. She obviously don’t care enough to wash the sheets either! I’m not stupid, Esmeralda. I don’t talk like you and I don’t live in no fancy buildings, but I love my mother just the same. You could look down on me all you want, but I’m loyal. That woman gave birth to me, and I’m not letting her die alone.”

Esme spun around to meet her with a face full of rage and pain. Her cheeks were red, her lip was trembling, and there were tears in her eyes. The sight gave Alma pause, but she did not stop speaking.

“We had our differences, but I don’t give a fuck what you approve of or whatever. I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

Esme was trembling and her face was growing hotter and hotter. Alma saw how her grip on the keys tightened like a coiled snake.

“I can’t be here.” Her voice cracked. “I can’t … be here.”

“Then go.” Alma pointed at the door. “Because I won’t. That woman deserves better than this.”

That afternoon, Alma called her boss to tell him that she was very sick and would not be able to come to work for a few days. She also called Rafael to tell him to drop off some of her clothes and her favorite comic books, all of which he got wrong.

The first night, Alma helped Mommy out of bed and into the washroom for a long, hot bath. While she bathed her, they reminisced about happier times, like the long nights they used to spend watching marathons of the Twilight Zone, baking box cakes in the middle of the day because their shared sweet tooth needed to be sated, and hanging out at the corner store playing red light, green light with Esme and the neighborhood kids while Mommy flirted with the clerk.

While Mommy soaked in the tub, Alma scrubbed the mattress and replaced all of the bedding. She put the entire basket into the laundry room to be washed. If the home health aide did not do it, then she would do it herself.

That night, she found out that her mother had not had a proper bath in a long time. The skin on her lower back flaked off into the water like scales, leaving the flesh beneath pink and tender to the touch. She was gentle with her and used Vaseline to keep her most delicate parts moist. She asked her if she wanted to sit in the living room and watch television together, but she just wanted to go back to bed.

Alma slept in the spare room down the hall with the door open to the wall. She wanted to be ready to tend to her mother if she called out in the middle of the night for the pain medication that they kept in the bathroom, lest she confuse herself and take too much. Sometimes, Alma would go to her unprompted to make sure that she was still asleep.

While standing in the doorway, her thoughts would take her back to infinitely simpler times.

She was a child again, barely ten, and had just woken from the most vivid dream of her young life. She had been pregnant, lovingly doted on by her family, and given birth to a beautiful baby girl, more real than any of Esme’s dolls. She went to her parents’ room but did not have to rouse them because they were already up playing scrabble in bed. She told them about her dream — how she believed that she was actually a girl — and that God had made a terrible mistake by putting her in the wrong body. Daddy, a hard black man from Striver’s Row, took his leather strap from the coat hanger on the closet door and, without a word, beat her like a horse. She screamed and thrashed, but he kept hitting her until it was sure that she would not forget what her words had brought upon her. He dragged her by the hair back into bed and spent a while cursing and stomping around the apartment. When he left, she asked God why she had been born a boy.

Before that night was over, she crept out of her room to get a Ding Dong from the cupboard for comfort. She found her mother at the kitchen table scribbling in a black notebook that looked smaller than her palm. When she noticed her, she called her over and gave her a loving hug. Alma started to cry again, but Mommy wiped her tears. Her voice was a gentle murmur.

“Don’t worry, my baby. Daddy just wants you to grow up to be a good, strong man.”

She asked for some milk and half a snack cake before being sent back to bed.

Daddy left a year after that. He went out on one of those late nights and just never came back. After a while, Mommy stopped expecting him to return, and Esme stopped putting up flyers. A few months after he left, the police found his body in a freezer in an old restaurant on the ground floor of a condemned building. The place did not have power, so he was so badly decomposed that he had to be identified through dental records. They said that he had likely crossed the wrong person at a gambling ring that used to be run out of one of the abandoned apartments. He had not been a very kind man but had provided for both of Paula’s children and always made sure that they had presents under the tree on Christmas.

There was a funeral, she remembered, but only a few people showed up. At the time, she did not think much of it, but later in life, she pondered who her father was and cursed her mother’s side of the family for not having the decency to say goodbye.

She started opening the curtains in Mommy’s room every morning to encourage her to rise and meet the day. The woman had spent so long in perpetual gloom that she did not know whether it was day or night. Alma just wanted her to have some semblance of a normal routine. Mommy was very resistant to it at first. She would curse, call her names, and demand to be left alone, but Alma remained persistent, even when a pair of reading glasses were tossed at her head. She swallowed her pride, made a witty joke, and cracked the window.

When the home health aide came by, Alma followed her around the apartment to make sure that she did her job. And, when Esme came to check on them, she gave her a list of supplies that she and Mommy had put together.

Once, she got Mommy to come into the living room and sit on the couch for a while. She learned that the woman had not been in her own living room for over a month. That made Alma very sad, but she hid her tears by retreating to the kitchen to cook dinner. And such dinners they had. Esme had butchered their list, but it gave them the opportunity to try different things. Instead of skinless chicken thighs, she bought turkey wings. Instead of a Spanish onion, she bought a bag of shallots. And, instead of Vienna sausages, Esme bought chicken hot dogs.

“That girl doesn’t listen, Andro.” Mommy would complain.

“It’s Alma, Mommy! And, I know, it’s like she took the list and threw it away!”

They wound up loving those hot dogs and, after giving her such aggravation for making the mistake, Esme berated them when they asked for more.

When Alma left the apartment to toss the trash down the incinerator one afternoon, a man stopped her in the hallway to ask how long she had been living in the building. She was in a cropped shirt that revealed her belly and shorts so tight that the fabric was taut against her little friend. Embarrassed, she tried to slink away gracefully, but he kept asking questions and measuring her body with his eyes. She eventually had to tell him that her sick mother needed her right away and retreated to the apartment backward so that he would not get another salacious show on the way out.

She had always attracted male attention, even before openly transitioning. As a freshman in high school, she already knew that she was a girl, and somehow, the older boys knew it too. They took advantage of her hopeless desire for affection, and, too often, she found herself alone in the restroom with her fingers down her throat, trying desperately to vomit up every bit of them that she could. Boys always left her feeling empty and desperate. Those mindless and meaningless encounters eventually left her with a most bitter indifference for sex. It may have been why it was so easy for her to accept working the piers as a hooker at the tender age of sixteen. At least then, she would get paid to perform.

One morning, while Alma was searching the bedroom closet for a good board game, Mommy asked something that disarmed her.

“What’s it like to be someone like you?”

She looked only slightly over her shoulder toward the bed.

“I mean someone like … you know.”

“A transsexual?”

Ashamed, Mommy looked down at her newspaper.

“Yes.” she mumbled. “Do you have friends?”

Alma sighed and pulled out a well-weathered Monopoly box. It probably had a lot of missing pieces and less than half of the money left, but she brought it to the bed anyway.

“Well, it’s not easy, Mommy.” She sat down and her mother seemed to lean in close, eager for her words. “I do have some friends, but not a lot. It’s really hard out here for women like me.”

“What about the gay community? The whole LBZTA.”

Alma chuckled at her mother’s ignorance.

“You mean the LGBTQ community? You would think I’d have a whole bunch of friends and all that, but I’m telling you, Mommy, I’m a black, Latina, transsexual woman. Nobody’s inviting me to the party.” She looked at her nails — the polish had begun to wear down and chip off around the tips. “Too often in my world, I have no one to turn to. The lesbians and the gays don’t get along. The gays don’t understand the transsexuals. The transsexuals don’t understand the lesbians. And the queers are just along for the ride, ready to jump off the train at the first sign of trouble.” Her thoughts ran on some of the down-low boys that chatted her up in those ritzy Manhattan bars, looking to play with all the parts of her that she wanted to keep hidden. “I never had it easy out here, but I never looked for easy either. I knew what I was getting into, but I had to be true to myself. I made some friends … and lost some friends. But I got some really good people around me now. People that would stand up for me. Even if I wasn’t there to see, you know?”

“That’s good, mijo.” Mommy looked very serious. “That’s real family.”

“I know.” Alma said, knocking the side of the Monopoly box with her hand, hoping to divert attention. It did not work.

“What about at Nordstrom? Do they treat you different?”

“You mean Bloomingdales?” She scratched her head even though there was no itch. “Well, no. They don’t know. I mean, I pass. My manager knows — he hired me — but he’s a really nice guy. To everyone else, I’m just another girl.”

“Wow … do you worry about it?”

Alma did not have to think hard about her answer.

“Everyday.” She fiddled with her belly button and stared blankly into the wall — into her past. “Especially when men come up to me, asking when I get off and what I’m doing after work. I worry about people finding out about me all the time.”

“How will they ever know? You’re my own child, and even I don’t know!”

Alma did not know what to make of that, but Mommy continued.

“That’s your real hair, mijo?”

She had given up on reminding her to use feminine pronouns and instead focused on the name. “Yes, Mommy. I don’t do wigs anymore. I just take care of my head.”

She thought about how she used to try to emulate Esme’s Disney princess tassels with flat irons and hot combs but only ended up damaging her hair and burning her scalp. Her Aunt Precious had to show her the ways of gently caring for kinky hair, secrets long held by black girls seeking to show off their well-kept manes. Even now, Alma carried those cherished secrets with her, light in her hands like a baby bird.

“You and Esme be saying a lot sometimes, but I know my shit look dope.”

“You look like you could be on the MTV.”

“Thanks, Mommy.” She blushed, moving curls from her face.

Her mother looked at the beaten-down board game that she had pulled out of the closet, and there was a familiar twinkle in her eye.

“You ready to lose, mijo?”

Alma scoffed and started emptying the contents of the box onto the bed. “Ask me that again when you see my hotels on blue.”

When she had put the woman to bed for the night, Alma stayed up to rewash the clothes. The home health aide had put them through the rinse with less than a shot glass of detergent. While she stood in the laundry room going through their undergarments, her thoughts ran on a more complicated time in their lives.

She was fourteen years old and had just returned home from school to find her mother on the couch scribbling in that palm-sized notebook. She did not even acknowledge her until she closed it and placed it on the cushion. Apparently, Mommy had cleaned Alma’s room earlier that day and discovered a trash bag full of girl’s clothes and playgirl magazines underneath the bed. She had been using her allowance to buy girl’s clothes for a while by then, and she had stolen some of Esme’s pornographic books. Mom asked her if she was gay, but she said no. As she had done years before, she told her that she believed herself to be a girl, but Mommy was not prepared to hear it. The woman dismissed her with disgust and told her to throw away the clothes. She hid some of the frilly undergarments in her pillowcase but threw the rest in the dumpster. A few days later, while they were driving home in that old SAAB 99, Alma brought up the frustration that they had not spoken about her revealing that she thought she was a girl. Mommy was silent until they reached the building. She directed her out of the car and onto the sidewalk, and Alma knew now that that was to compound her embarrassment. Mommy screamed at her in full view of passersby, the kids playing basketball in the park across the street, and the neighbors hanging out of their windows. “No son of mine is gonna be a faggot! If you want to be a faggot, you’re gonna have to leave my house!” A cute boy from school was walking along the sidewalk in front of them as Mommy yelled, and all Alma could do was lower her head in shame. She could feel his eyes burning a hole through her. “You understand me, Alejandro? Your daddy ain’t here to show you how to be a man, but I’m not raising a faggot! Tell me you understand and don’t ever bring this up again!” She had to repeat it before she was allowed back into the building. That day, Alma vowed never to trust her mother with her feelings again.

By the seventh day, Mommy had started refusing to eat and barely drank water. She could not make it to the bathroom anymore, so Alma would have to carefully clean her at the bedside with a washcloth and a basin of water. She put towels down beneath her so that when she urinated or defecated, it would not ruin the sheets.

When Esme stopped by again, Alma was at a loss for what to do.

“She won’t eat the food I made her. She asks for it but when I bring it to her, she just stares at it.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m not a doctor.”

“Should we get her a doctor?”

“Why, Andro? Mommy knows what’s happening. She’s on the way out — no doctor is gonna be able to help her now.”

Alma fisted her hair in frustration and backed up against the wall.

“Maybe they can make her more comfortable? They can give her drugs or something, so she can sleep better.”

Esme hung her head and chewed on her bottom lip. Her voice was a wispy thing, almost lost under the hum of the air conditioning. “I don’t know.” She put on her other shoe and stood silently staring at the ground. Alma had encouraged Mommy to start exercising control over her home again and she had made Esme start taking off her shoes at the door. “I just don’t know. But I’ll stop by again on Monday. Call me if Mommy needs anything.”

Frustrated, Alma looked to her sister for help, but found only the back of her head, rushing out the door. She slunk down against the wall onto the floor and hunched over, resting her head on her knees.

She thought long and hard about her relationship with her sister and where it had all gone wrong.

When she was fourteen, not long before the fall-out that caused her to leave home for good, Alma was raped by her sister’s boyfriend.  She had been asleep in her room when he snuck into her bed. She tried to tell him to leave, but he told her that he knew what she needed — that someone had to show her what a real man could do, and held her down. When she would not submit and tried to crawl out from beneath him, he punched her in the ribs. She cried into her pillow the entire three minutes that it took him to finish. He tried to stick around until he could go again, but Esme found them and exploded. He told her that Alma had convinced him to come to her room, but she did not believe him. She slapped him at least ten times, kneed him in the crotch, and kicked him out of the apartment. When Alma tried to tell her what had happened, she slapped her too and asked why, of all the guys in the world, did she have to choose her boyfriend. She told her that if she just wanted a dick up her ass then she could have gotten a cucumber from the grocery store. Alma cried all night, and so did Esme. They never spoke about it again. They never spoke about much at all after that, and Alma always resented her for not hearing her out. That night, she lost her dignity and a relationship with her sister.

On the tenth day, Mommy had been very quiet. Alma had given her an extra pill to soothe the increasingly frequent bouts of terrible pain. She had spent most of the afternoon alone in the living room staring at the blank television screen. She had not even turned it on. Mommy did not want to play games, talk, or eat anymore. She just wanted to sleep. And, Alma feared, to die.

When night came, she went to the doorway. Mommy was on her back, feebly scribbling into the same little notebook that Alma remembered from her childhood. The room was dark and the woman did not have her reading glasses on. Watching from the doorway, Alma thought about times when she used to sneak into her bed at night to wish away her nightmares. When Mommy noticed her at the door, she fumbled to close the book and push it beneath the pillow. She did not have the strength or dexterity anymore, so it stuck out on the side closest to the wall. Alma pretended not to see it.

“Hey, Mommy … how are you feeling?”

She seemed even smaller now, and that scared her. Her eyes were bulging, cheeks dark and gaunt, and her movements slow — shaky. Her voice was nearly gone.

“No good, mijo.” It was all that she said.

Alma crawled into the bed and wrapped her arms around her. “Can I sleep with you tonight?” she asked, through muted tears. Mommy only nodded and struggled to turn on her side. The curtain was slightly open, but it was enough for the moonlight to bathe much of the room. They laid together for a while without words. Alma cried quietly into the back of her shirt.

At some point, before they drifted to sleep, she whispered into her, “I love you, Mommy.”

It took a while, but Mommy responded through labored breath, “I love you too.”

They fell asleep shortly after that. Alma briefly awoke in the middle of the night to hear her mother snoring like her old self and it made her chuckle. At least she was finally getting some decent sleep. She nestled up close to her and let herself drift away.

She dreamt that night about the worst day of her life.

She was fourteen when things had finally reached their breaking point. Her grades had been subpar for a long time, but now she had stopped going to school entirely. Two officers had picked her up for truancy one afternoon and dropped her off at the apartment. They told her mother that they had found her with two other boys in the last car of the train doing funny things. They used more words than that, but she did not want to remember them. When they left, Mommy came into Alma’s room swinging her belt. She hit her on her arms when she tried to defend herself, and her back when she turned away. This indignity broke the last beam of support that held up Alma’s secret life, and she finally snapped. She snatched the belt from Mommy and pushed her into the wall. “Leave me alone!” she screamed, “I am not gay! I am a woman! I am not living like a boy anymore!” Esme tried to come between them, but Mommy turned her wrath onto her too. “You let your brother roam the streets sucking dicks? You was supposed to look out for him! I trusted you!” The apartment became a chaotic mess and before she could understand what was happening, Mommy started throwing her things out of the bedroom window and into the street. She cried and asked her to stop, but was not heard. Mommy forced her out the front door and told her that if she wanted to be a girl then she could be a girl on the street. Alma begged and pleaded with her through the door, but she did not listen. She went outside to find her clothes, shattered toys, and broken glass from a folding mirror on the sidwalk, and her skates in the middle of the road. When she looked up at the building, Mommy was still throwing things out of the window. “Please! Mommy Please!” she cried, but would not be heard. The woman tossed a black trash bag down as well. “Go be a girl, Alejandro! Go do whatever you want! You are not my child anymore!” Terrified, Alma dropped to her knees and screamed at the peak of her lungs — not words, just her voice, full of pain and desperation. People on the street were staring and whispering, but they had started to disappear into the background noise of the world. She sat there for a while before Mommy came back to the open window and shouted, “Go or I will call the cops!” And, then, she had no choice. She collected some clothes among the shattered pieces of her Sega Master System, a bag of cheese crackers from amongst the contents of an exploded tin of colored pencils, and shook the glass off of a pair of good sneakers. She grabbed whatever could fit into that trash bag. Now, she was fourteen, hopeless, and alone. Slowly, she retreated up the street, away from her mother and sister, from the only home that she had ever known, toward the subconscious urges bursting through her skin, a bittersweet deliverance as the woman she had always known herself to be, and the horrors of an uncertain future.

She tried to come back once when all of her belongings had been stolen and she had been beaten so badly that she did not recognize herself in the mirror. But they had moved, and the new occupants called the police on her when she tried sleeping in the stairwell.

Mommy passed away in the night. When Alma woke up, she knew it right away because her body was stiff and cold. She spent a while that morning holding her and crying. When she was able to get herself together, she telephoned Esme and told her to come say goodbye. Then, she went back into the room to ensure that the woman had her dignity. She cleaned her body and got rid of the soiled towels. She painted her fingernails rose pink, cleaned her face, and opened all of the curtains in the bedroom. She collected the board games that they had played together, all of her magazines and newspapers, and the cups from the nightstand. She also took the little black notebook from beneath the pillow. Finally, she turned the thermostat down and kissed her mother’s forehead one last time. When she left the room, she shut the door behind her.

When Esme arrived with her husband, they entered the apartment as if it were hallowed ground. Alma told her that Mommy was no longer in pain and that she was with God now. She needed to hear that. And she told her where to find her. She was not going to go back into that room now.

Rico and Esme were in the bedroom for a while. Alma waited for them in the landing, listening to her sister’s cries. When Esme came out of the room, she was alone, and came right at her, grabbing and holding on for dear life. She sobbed into her shoulder.

Esmeralda’s face was red and her eyes were bloodshot by the time she pulled away. She looked into Alma’s eyes and really saw her, for the first time in a long time.

“Thank you for doing this.” She was sincere. “Thank you for letting her enjoy her life before the end. I couldn’t …” Her words vanished again, lost in shame and regret.

“I know. I love you, sis.” Alma tapped her shoulder and smiled. “You got my number. I’ll see you around.”

And then, she left.

The elevator arrived before she could press the call button, and inside were two of her elderly aunts and her cousin Esteban. The women politely said good morning to her and headed down the hallway. Cousin Esteban looked right at her and held the door with a smile. She thanked him and pressed the button for the lobby. They had not even recognized her.

Alma did not go to the wake or the funeral. She had already said her goodbyes. She found out from Esme a week later that Mommy had been buried next to their grandmother in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

There were times after that week that Alma found herself crouched on the fire escape overlooking the street, smoking a Newport down to the filter and poring over what had happened. She wondered about her mother’s illness and why she had chosen not to go back to the hospital. Sometimes, she blamed her for not fighting harder. Other times, she blamed Esme for not pushing her before things had gotten so bad. But, often, she blamed herself for not being able to encourage her to see the beauty in living.

Rafael came to the window once and asked her why she wanted to be left alone.

“I don’t really know.” She hugged her knees close to her chest and looked out over the city. The sun was setting. “I think that maybe I’m supposed to be alone. Who watches their mother waste away and die like that? I couldn’t do anything to save her.”

Rafael took a cigarette from the pack resting on the window sill.

“Don’t do that, Alma. Don’t do it.”

She looked over at him, squinting from the wind that whipped the curls loose from her bun.

“We’re all out here living our lives. You can’t stop someone from living they own life the way they want to live it.” He lit the cigarette and took a long drag. She stared intently at him, and the noise from the street below faded into a distant psalm.

“You can feel like she was somehow your responsibility — that because she was your mom, you was meant to save her. But she was a whole person, baby girl. Our parents are people too, all on their own journey through this world. We forget that sometimes ‘cause we think that they belong to us. We can’t control them, we can barely control ourselves. All we can really do is be there for them, and let them know that we love them.” He took another drag on the cigarette and looked her over. “Were you there for her?”

She thought about bringing plates of food to the room and how they ate dinner together in the bed, careful not to sully the sheets. She thought about performing the dance routines that she had memorized from her days performing in underground beauty pageants, and how Mommy laughed so hard that the neighbor rang the bell to ask them to keep it down. She thought about the last bath that she had given her and how tenderly she had washed every part of her body.

“Yeah.” She looked toward the horizon in search of the sun. “I think I was.”

“And you told her that you loved her?”

“I did.”

So many times.

“Then, you straight.”

Alma smiled at him then, but her thoughts never really left her mother. “Can we go out tonight? I want to dance.”

He howled and tossed the lit cigarette out onto the street. “Yes, bitch! Let’s do it!”

The summer turned to fall, and the fall into a bitter winter. Even with so much distance from her mother’s death, Alma was still haunted by dreams of being in that apartment, not knowing whether or not each night would be their last together. Whenever she awoke from those nightmares, she would sit up and stare at her mother’s notebook on the nightstand by the bed. It had sat there for months because she still could not bring herself to read it.

On one terribly bitter December morning, she slumped into the kitchen, drawn by the scent of fried salami. Shorts and crop tops had been traded for sweat pants and baggy shirts, and flip flops had become fuzzy slippers. Their apartment was a hapless slave to the weather and, while they boiled in summer, they froze over in the winter.

“Raff, I swear to God, this woman better seal up these drafts.” Alma grumbled, pulling up a chair to the table. Rafael had fixed her a generous plate of mashed plantains, eggs, and salami. “I’m not dealin’ with all that this year.”

“Did we pay the rent this month?” He was across from her, flipping through the mail. She nodded her response because her mouth was already full of food.

The phone rang from the next room and Rafael abandoned the envelopes to get it. Alma remained seated at the table with breakfast. She had not picked up the phone herself in a while because she did not want to hear from family members who had been calling for her since July. Rafael screened all of their calls and told them that she was not around. She did not know what they wanted with her, but she knew that she wanted nothing with them.

“Girl.” He appeared in the walkway and his voice softened. “It’s your sister. What you wanna do?”

She took the call.

“Esme?” she asked into the receiver, as if she expected it to be a prank.

“Hey.” The voice was both a comforting familiarity and a sobering reminder of that terrible place. “How are you doing?”

Alma moved closer to the stand, away from the center of the room. She pressed her forehead against the wall and shrugged her shoulders as though her sister could see. “I think I’m okay. What about you and your man?”

Esmeralda chuckled, “We’re alright over here. I’m pregnant.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. We figure we should probably bring some life into this world after everything, you know?”

“Yeah, wow. That’s crazy. I’m really happy for y’all.”

“Thanks, Alma.” It was the first time that her sister had ever used her name. “It’s important to be able to move forward, I think. To move on.”

She did not say anything — only held the phone close.

“I had to reach you. It took us a long time to go through all of Mommy’s things. She was a really private person, you know. So we didn’t find out about this until just yesterday.”

“Find out about what?” She looked toward the partially drawn curtains of the bay windows and, for a moment, she was standing in her mother’s bedroom watching her crumpled body beneath the sheets struggling to get comfortable.

“Her savings account. She put our names on the paperwork. Mommy left us a lot of money. There’s twenty thousand dollars in here for you.”

Her heart skipped a beat and she found it difficult to speak. She had never seen that much money before.

“A-Are you sure it’s for me?”

“Yes, your name is on the account.”

“For me?” She could not believe it and Esme could tell.

“I’m positive. You shouldn’t be so surprised — you were her child too.”

“Where did Mommy get that kind of money?” From their conversations, she knew that what Granny had left her had dried up long ago — lost in that luxury apartment and her sister’s education.

“I don’t know, but she’s worked really hard her whole life. Maybe she was saving it for us … for when we were ready to start our own families.” Her voice gained a somber tone as she went on. “I should have the check by the end of the week. I can bring it to you if you want. I have some of Mommy’s jewelry that you can look through too.”

Alma nodded to herself several times and pressed the phone close to her face with trembling hands.

“Yeah, please. That would be really cool.”

She gave her the address and warned her about the stairs, but Esme reassured her that she had their mother’s spunk. When their words waned and the silences grew long, they said their goodbyes, but her sister said something then that almost broke her heart.

“Well, okay, I can’t wait. I’ll see you then, bichito.”

The tender nickname that she had used all the time when they were kids — her little bug. Whenever she heard it, her stomach twisted in knots and her cheeks glowed red. Esmeralda was, at once, again her idol, her protector, and the first friend that she had ever had. Her big sister, never far, and always watching over her shoulder.

“Wait!” Alma shouted, and she heard Rafael drop his envelopes onto the floor in the other room. Esme lingered on the line while she searched for the words.

“What do you like to eat?”

The question seemed to catch Esme off guard. “What do you mean?”

Alma cleared her throat and wiped a tear from her eye. “I want to make us dinner.”

When she got off the phone, she talked to Rafael about the money and the two of them screamed so loud that the downstairs neighbor started banging on the ceiling. He told her to open up a bank account with JP Morgan down the street because he knew that she kept all of her cash in her underwear drawer. She mused about a lot of things around the apartment and finally being able to get an air conditioning unit and a space heater. She also talked about getting herself a canopy bed so she would not have to be on the floor like a homeless person but, really, she had no idea what she would do with the money. She had never even considered things that could cost that much before.

That night, visited by waking dreams of her young life, she decided to read her mother’s book. It was old, maybe older than her, small, but fatter than a bible. As she held it in her hands like a treasured heirloom, she feared that it would crumble away. She asked God to keep her close before curling up on the mattress to have a look.

Turning cautiously through pages as fragile as a spider’s web, she found that each was dated: February 3^rd of 1965, April 13^th, April 21^st, and so on. There were entries throughout all the years of her life, sometimes days or even months apart, written in a dizzying mix of English and Spanish. Alma frantically searched for personally significant dates while all her words escaped her.

December 10^th of 1975: My baby boy finally decided to come out. Fifteen days before Christmas. He has his father’s eyes and my smile. This is the greatest gift that God could give me. I know he will make us all proud someday …

January 11^th of 1986: Alejandro told us that he dreamed he was a girl. His father beat the shit out of him and left to get drunk at the damn bar again. I don’t know what we will do with this boy sometimes. He is so soft and sensitive. He is an angel, and maybe that’s what makes him so different …

September 8^th of 1986: Marcel is gone. I have to raise these kids by myself now. We had been together for so long that I think I forgot how to be alone. Need to be strong for them, can’t let them see me cry …

June 1^st of 1989: God help me, I am going to send my son to you today. He is dressing like a girl and looking at pictures of naked men. I knew he was different but this is too much. He needs to have this gay thing shamed out of him. I will not raise a fag. I will cut him out of me before I let this happen. I am terrified that I cannot raise a man on my own …

The entries went on for years. Alma anxiously combed through them for something written around the time that she was kicked out of the home. She found a short entry, written in pen and smudged along the last line as if it had been wet.

March 23^rd of 1990: Why have you done this to me, God? I do not have a son anymore. I mourn my baby boy and I fear for his soul. Please, God, you made him, so you watch over him. He is yours again now.

Alma fought back the tears and anger that persuaded her to throw the book into the incinerator. Could she really have expected anything else, she wondered, from the woman that had thrown her out onto the street at fourteen? She skipped a lot of pages but kept reading — peering cautiously through this window into her mother’s soul — and eventually found something that confounded her. An entry, written during the years that they had been apart.

July 21^st of 1993: I thought about my Andro today and I wondered if he was okay. I wanted to talk to him at Momma’s funeral, but he left so early. Where did you go, son? Don’t you want to see me? Esmeralda has another man again and she told this one that her brother died. I don’t like that …

She had not expected to find herself mentioned after 1990, probably because she had imagined that they had written her out of their lives. But where she thought of her mother over the years, her mother thought of her too. And, in an instant, she felt woefully self-centered and naïve.

December 10^th of 1993: Today is my son’s birthday. I have thought about him a lot this year. Losing my mother has made me see how important a parent is to a child. I may not have liked his choices but I should never have abandoned him. Would God forgive me? I don’t think so …

March 1^st of 1995: I tried to talk to Precious today but she does not want to hear from me. We used to be close before Marcel died. She never really got over how few people from my family came to the funeral. I think she’s been speaking to Andro. How else can she know about the crossdressing? I asked her to tell me where he was staying but she hung up on me …

May 14^th of 1995: I saw him on the train today, I know I did. It was a young brown skin Spanish girl that had squeezed herself into a beautiful green dress, but I knew it was my Andro. He looked just like his sister. I called out to him when I realized it but the doors closed. He looked back at the train but I don’t think he saw me …

There were so many like these, and some were pages long. She spent hours reading through them, trying to gain a sense of the complicated woman that her mother really was.

It was past midnight by the time she was into the last few pages, but she kept the same blinding fascination as when she had first opened the book. Until she came to the very last entry, written on the night that she had died, on that bed where Alma had lain with her. The words were roughly scribbled into the paper, as most of her strength had left her by then, but she could still make them out.

July 26^th of 2002: I am afraid to go, but I am so thankful because I am not alone anymore. My baby is with me now. We lost so much time together. I should have listened to her when she was young. I think she was right about God making mistakes sometimes. He put her in the wrong body. I couldn’t see her for who she was and I can’t ever take that back. I don’t care for God to forgive me anymore, just her. So please forgive me, my beautiful daughter. Please forgive me, my Alma. She is a better woman than I ever was and I know that she will be a better mother.

 Just as she suspected she would, she broke down. All her life she had wanted to hear these words, and now she found them in the pages of an old journal, long after Mommy was dead. Even though she desperately craved to hear them from her lips, this was somehow enough. Her mother had been a prideful, traditional woman growing up, but it seemed that in her later years, she had looked back on her life and questioned her mistakes.

Alma kissed the bottom of the page with the last entry and closed the book upon her lap. She spoke to her mother then with closed eyes. She told her that she loved her and that she forgave her. She also asked her to save her a seat in Heaven next to Daddy. The next morning, she told Rafael what she had decided to do with the money. She had thought about paying for sex reassignment surgery, but she knew that she did not need a vagina to complete her journey into womanhood. She was already a woman. She had known that her entire life. Instead, she wanted to put herself through night classes at the nearby Community College to earn an education like her sister. She did not want to remain a salesgirl in a fancy department store, constantly worrying whether or not she would have a job at the end of the month. And, fresh off of her mother’s blessing and tireless example, she wanted a better life for herself and the family that she hoped to someday build.

* * * *

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This short story represents the first 15k-words of a forthcoming urban, literary fiction novel, The Life Of Alma, following a young, Afro-Latina, trans woman navigating life, love, and loss in New York City in the early 2000s. While this subject matter may appeal to a wide audience, it was written for this woefully underrepresented community. We are living during a time of unprecedented trans awareness and emerging trans-focused art. Highly successful television programs like FX’s Pose and HBO’s Legendary, and documentaries like Sara Jordenö’s Kiki and Vice’s My House have brought to the public consciousness an underground world of transsexualism, pageantry, and sexual liberation. There remains a yearning in the ethnic minority trans and non-binary communities for representation in sophisticated literary fiction where the characters and settings are contemporary, relevant, urban, and ethnic.

Transsexualism in black and brown communities is not an in-vogue fad that can be censored, plastic-wrapped, and delivered to the public with a pretty pink bow. It is complicated, often difficult to mitigate, and painstakingly human.

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To see more from this world, take a look at this abridged excerpt, hailed by L.A. Blade Columnist James Finn as a “brilliantly realized work of art.” ⤵

Philadephia, Fall 1992

For more on the current struggle with getting this book published, check out this frustration-piece I wrote ⤵

I’ve Written An Unpublishable Manuscript

For more information on ethnic trans communities and to help support ethnic trans women, please visit the Trans Women Of Color Collective

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• Zayn for a Day
• It Came!
• My Story About a Trans Teenager Was Published in a Literary Magazine!
• Philadelphia, Fall 1992
• Protected: Masculine Trauma and Gender Identity

A playlist of songs that have helped me to get into Alma’s headspace. Without some of this music, she would not be the woman that she is today. ⬇

Thanks For Reading!

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