"I Get It Now"

Short Fiction | Published with Levitate Magazine Issue 9 | May 2025

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You look good, Raina. Even despite… everything. I mean, I guess I should have known that this would happen eventually. You always said you felt trapped in the wrong body. Mom blamed our first grade teacher Mrs. Crane. She said the fairy tales Crane read us were stuffing our heads with cotton. But you know Mrs. Crane. She didn’t show us Grimm Brother picture books or Disney movies. We got to hear the real fairy tales. She said that bad children were never just bad, said that they were changelings. That’s when a fairy would crave human babies — to eat or to care for that old bat never specified — so they would swap out the real baby for a copycat fairy infant. That’s a changeling. And sure, they may look human, but they would never really belong in our world.

Mrs. Crane’s stories were fucked up to tell a kid, but we didn’t care. Then I thought it was no wonder it got to your head. No wonder you kept telling people that you belonged in the woods with fairies. It was a funny thing to think so Dad and I kept letting you say it, even if it pissed Mom off a ton. I just didn’t know how badly you meant it. I thought you were saying it because of growth spurts and oily skin and hormones. I thought everyone was supposed to feel trapped during those years.

The trap didn’t stop at fifteen years-old like it did for everyone else, did it? That’s basically what you told me that last time I saw you. I remember it so clearly — us sitting in rusted swings across from our dusty old Arizona house, you in your soccer cleats and me in my theater shoes. Mom whupped you for buying me mascara at the dollar store for my show. She thought it would make me gay as if I hadn’t been secretly seeing Vivian Brock since ninth grade. 

That day the swings groaned from the weight that puberty made us gain. There, you told me you were sick of Mom, sick of living in a town where Ronald Reagan was still considered a good man. 

And that was it. That night you were gone like there never was a Raina Davenport in Flagstaff, Arizona. Even eighteen years after that conversation, I still wonder what I had done to make you leave me. What was the point of being your twin brother if there was no other twin to belong to? I wondered if I said something wrong or if I didn’t say something right enough. I wondered, and I wondered, and I wondered.

That wonder was the last thing on my mind the night you called.

You can read the whole thing here.