WILDCARD

[OVA version]

By Kara Shelby

A wayward trans woman feeling isolated after moving cross-country and going stealth finds parts of herself slipping away. A story about weird bugs and drifting apart.

This is a half-finished draft of... something... I wrote in 2024. This was mostly written haphazard stream of consciousness style without much of a sense of what I was building towards. If I figure out what I was doing I might continue it, but if you're here, you probably know how this goes with me. I think it has some value as-is though.

Incidentally, this is what I was working on when I did all the research that inspired the pages at the oldladies keyword.

Chapter 1: Who are you again?

When you think of a bad translation, there’s a couple things that might come to mind. One would be that it’s simply unintelligible. The translator’s knowledge of the target language was insufficient, they took a few guesses at how something ought to be expressed, and were wrong. It’s easy to make fun of these kinds of things when we see them, but I always feel kind of bad about it these days. Like, they stuck their neck out to make themselves accessible to me instead of the other way around, right? It seems rude to go back and mock them for it after they put in all the effort.

The more interesting ways that translations can be bad in my mind, are the ones where the translator does clearly know what they’re doing, but overcompensates for one of two things: first, in an effort to make a text accessible to the target audience, they attempt to replace as many references to the original culture as possible with ones the audience would be more familiar with. Second, a translator might go in the direct opposite direction and leave things like opaque idioms or unnatural sentence structure intact to affect some idea of faithfulness.

Like on one hand if you do something obvious like anglicanize all the names, or edit a turn of phrase in a key line in a way that messes with important subtext, readers who are familiar with the work will get up in arms. But on the other hand, if you preserve things like foreign honorifics or hard to translate words, then some Joey Bag o’ Donuts in suburban Milwaukee is gonna grab Tonari no Totoro off the “for kids” shelf at the corner video rental store and lose the plot.

See, the problem is that as a translator, you’re supposed to be invisible, but fundamentally it’s impossible for the work that you read and the work that you produce on the other end to be the same. Language just does not work like that. You’ll always have to make your own judgment calls and editorialize things in order to bridge the gap between the author and this new audience, and it happens much more often than any monolingual readers or viewers will realize. But if a translator makes the wrong call and disrupts the delicate balance between faithfulness and relatability, then they’re exposed for the world to see and ridicule. It’s not terribly forgiving work.

Anyway, all this is why I quit my job at the publishing company after my first big project. It’s all very stressful. I moved around a bit since then, as these things go, but for the moment I was working on some cozy, stress free software user manuals. Maybe you’ve heard of this stuff? The Matsubara Softworks Computer Design Suite? I hear SuperCAD had a bit of a hold overseas, and I think they used it a lot at Yamaha? But of course Matsubara focused on PC-98s, and it didn’t sound like they’d have a Macintosh or IBM-compatible version of the software in the works any time soon, so I was skeptical whether it would ever have legs out here in the states. The start-up noise is nice though. It’s like, bwuh---duh-biddleyboop.

“Hey Cathy?” a voice from behind me beckoned. It was Syd Spears, from a few cubicles over. I think he was a sales rep, but it was a pretty small office and we were all kind of jumbled together, so it was hard to keep straight. At any rate he was on the phone a lot.

“Mhm?” I responded, even though Cathy was actually the name of the lady who had this job before me. I gave up on correcting them after a month or two, so I was Cathy Barnes to most people at work by then. Ultimately it didn’t matter, I suppose, kept my real name free of some wear and tear, you know? And I guess staying under the radar was kind of the goal anyway.

Syd continued. “I’m trying to organize a birthday party tomorrow for Rosa, Dean’s secretary?” He explained, “Do you think you could help out?”

“Sure,” I said. I finished the line I was typing and swiveled to face him. Syd was a younger guy, I doubt over 20, clean shaven, still had some acne. His red-on-yellow plaid shirt made me think of a legal pad. “What do you need?”

“Well, it’s really short notice, but could you pick up the cake? I already called it in, but it turns out I gotta drive somebody to the airport, so I can’t pick it up after work.” He paused. “Uh, I don’t think I had you down for anything yet so I figured I’d ask.”

“That’s fine,” I said, “I’ll make it work.”

“Phew, I owe you one,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “She’s a real bombshell, I’d feel like a moron if I fumbled this whole thing at the last second,” he admitted.

I was inclined to agree about Rosa, though I was reluctant to voice this observation for the obvious reasons. I copied down Syd’s directions on the corner of a memo about the upcoming holiday party and tore it off. It was pretty out of the way, but I got off easy on the previous office birthday by drawing “plates and utensils” so it all averages out I guess. I figured I’d at least pick up a treat while I was there to make it worth it.

Syd shot me the finger guns on the way back to his desk and I got up to refill on coffee. Besides the sales guys, who are always on the phone, the rest of the office was typically pretty quiet. It was great for concentration but most of the staff finding each other at least mildly unapproachable was a double-edged sword when it was your turn to bug somebody else for something. As I scooted along the back wall of the office towards the break room, muttering excuse me sorry pardon me the whole way, I took note that the snowglobes and other wintery accouterments were starting to creep into people’s decor.

It’s a little rich, right? Winter in Los Angeles? I’d lived there for coming up on two years, and I don’t think I’d seen a flake of snow the whole time. But the weather was honestly a big draw when I moved out here. I grew up in New Hampshire and the year long dreariness had been getting to me.

...Is what I told people. But here’s the thing: I’m a transsexual. Don’t tell anybody, okay? I work pretty hard making sure people can’t tell, and typically they don’t unless we’re on a date and I tell them directly. But part of that is I’ve had to move around a lot. In the last 10 years, I bounced around Boston for a bit when I was part-timing in college, but people kept recognizing me and causing problems, so I moved down to Baltimore-ish when I committed to full time and did the same thing there until I got the icky medical stuff squared away, and at that point I was so fed up dealing with random dates or former college acquaintances or whoever turning up and making a fuss that I decided, I can’t do this anymore, I’ll move to the other side of the damn country and maybe then I’ll have some peace.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I was engaged to a Kathy-with-a-K before this all got started, which did make the whole “Cathy” situation sting a little.

When I got to the break room, Dean, the manager, was in the process of topping his own mug up with the last of the most recent pot. We exchanged a few pleasantries, he made an unwelcome comment about how my stockings made my legs look, and drifted off like nothing happened. I tried not to let it get to me, all the office girls had to deal with him to some degree. Whenever it happened to me, though, I was on pins and needles around him for the next week. I mean, a straight guy, who’s also the boss, gets interested in a transsexual unbeknownst to him? I don’t even want to think about what could happen.

I filled Mr. Coffee up with grounds and water, and while he burbled to life, I tried to distract myself by going over the rest of the day’s work in my head. I had to get the current page’s worth of text done and hand it off to the layout guy, Paul. It had been kind of tricky though, because it was talking about some niche features in the physics simulations that were kind of going over my head, so it took a while to check and make sure the program did what I was saying it did. And Paul was kind of scary, so I didn’t want to mess up and make him redo everything. I mean, he wasn’t mean or anything, just so stern.

Mr. Coffee finished his work and I filled my thermos. The thing said University of Iowa on the side, but I never went there or anything. A guy I had a date with forever ago left it in the hotel after we were done, and part of me thought it was kind of funny to hang onto it. I swear I’m not some kind of kleptomaniac or something. I always return borrowed pens and the only time I’ve stolen from a fridge was when somebody else had stolen my own lunch.

I excuse me-ed and sorry-ed my way back to my desk. Don’t get me wrong, LA was nice, and I don’t just mean the weather. The food was like nothing we ever had in New England, there’s a horrible pit of dead things across the way from a rather nice art museum, and there was something of a gay community there. Such as it was. I mean we were most of a decade into the epidemic with no end in sight, with hate on the rise the whole time. All of that shit was the worst any of us had ever seen it. But it was nice that summer, watching the parade surreptitiously from a donut shop for a bit, and tuning out the protesters.

It’s hard though, not really being able to join them openly anymore. Although I suppose my younger self never got to enjoy it much either, for other reasons. I’ve heard other girls describe it as leaving one closet for another, and I dunno, I still think that’s sort of pessimistic, but it’s not that far off.

The rest of the work day passed uneventfully. It took longer than it should have, but I felt as confident as I ever did when I passed the text along to Paul. And he gave me the same old tired look, as always. I powered off my computer and quickly tidied up my workspace before heading out for the day, and since my neighbors left before me, I took a moment to wave goodbye to the PC. See you tomorrow.

Outside, the faint odor of asphalt and exhaust that permeated the city made itself known. The parking lot was lit in sharp yellow light from the streetlamps overhead. I beelined towards my CR-X, whom I had rechristened “Bubblegum,” who waited obediently exactly where I left her. Always a relief. I tossed my briefcase in the back and undid the club on her steering wheel before turning the ignition. I debated between a few cassettes stuffed under the seat, and chided myself for putting on Be Yourself Tonight for the zillionth time that week. But it was fun driving music, in part because Annie Lennox was a tad easier to sing along with than a lot of other pop stars.

I stuck the scrap of paper with directions in one of the cupholders in the console and pulled out. Rush hour traffic was hellish, as always, and it took a full play of the tape and change to get to the bakery and park. The door made a pleasant electronic chime as I entered. At the counter, an older latina woman beckoned “Welcome” in a practiced cheerful voice that nearly masked the length of her shift. I explained that I’m here to pick up the cake, and she assumed I was “Sydney” when she brought it back. I didn’t bother correcting her. It had become a mostly gender neutral name by then, I figured. I picked out a concha for myself and then realized:

“Thirty-two?” I asked.

“Yes,” the woman replied, “Oh, while I was on the phone my daughter was talking to me and I didn’t know whether you had said thirty-two or twenty-three.”

I couldn’t remember how old she was either. Although I was pretty sure she was younger than me.

“Was this wrong?” she asked.

“N-no,” I said, surely sounding hesitant. I smiled. “This all looks delicious, thank you.”

The drive home took another play of the tape, and I was starving. As I fumbled for my keys on the landing in front of my condo I could hear my two cats, Lum and Trixie, clawing at the door. The moment the door was even slightly ajar, Trixie squeezed herself through the gap and began swirling around my legs and purring loudly, while Lum had jumped up on the kitchen counter, and was in the process of vociferously scolding me for daring to be home late. I muttered “I know, I know, it won’t happen again” in response as I left the concha on the counter and stowed the cake in the fridge.

As I cracked open the food for the kids, I heard a knock at the door. The retired lady downstairs had picked up a package for me again.

“I was worried it would get stolen,” she explained, “this neighborhood and all.”

“Right, uh, thanks,” I stammered. I accepted the parcel, avoiding eye contact. “You really didn’t have to do that...”

“Nonsense!” she guffawed, “it’s all I’m good for, these days.”

We exchanged some hasty pleasantries, and she returned to her abode. I knew that the neighborly thing would be to do something to thank her, make an extra large batch of pasta or something, but... the thought always caught up to me: does she know? Would she still be as kind to me if she did? What is the maximum number of interactions I can have with her before I give it away? And then after feeling a spell of vertigo, I inevitably abandoned the idea.

The package was small but dense. I checked the label and instantly got excited. It was from my pen pal Cindy, who had just recently moved to Hawaii with her fiance Brad. While I nuked some leftover gyudon, I opened up the box with my pocket knife and peered inside.

First, a can of macadamia nuts. Next, a letter. In her impeccable handwriting, she wrote that she’d been enjoying her new life there, with Brad. They were renting a nice townhouse in a neighborhood a ways inland from the tourist sector, but still close to the beach. Cindy was adjusting to her new job at a travel agency, Brad was taking surfing lessons, they kept getting mistaken for tourists.

But words don’t do it justice, Cindy wrote, and helpfully, a thick stack of photographs had been included to illustrate, complete with captions on the backs. I sat down with my dinner and flipped through them. Naturally the cats were very curious about it all, so I fished out some meat for them and occasionally flashed a photo, though no prizes for guessing which they were more interested in. There was one of Cindy and Brad on the beach in some nice swimsuits, one of a get-together in their living room with some coworkers, Brad posing with a surfboard, a nice sunset, a cool bird... and it continued for probably another three dozen photos. I’m not proud of it, but as I flipped through the bundle, part of me resented it a little bit.

I tried to brush it aside and dialed the new phone number she included in the box. The answering machine caught it.

“You’ve reached the home of Brad Walker...” Said the voice of Brad Walker.

“...And Cindy Young!” said the voice of Cindy Young.

“It looks like we’re out catching the waves at the moment,” Said Brad.

“So go ahead and leave a message after the tone, okay?” Said Cindy.

“Haaang ten!” Said Brad.

BEEEP

My voice caught for a moment. I took a deep breath. I’m not gonna let it get to me, I repeated to myself. And I left a perfectly cordial message.

Cindy’s another transsexual. We met through the clinic in Baltimore, and while we’d started things at about the same time, she's a few years younger, which had... advantages. She eventually got a secretarial job at the department of transportation under, who else, Brad. And when he got transferred out there to help with some public works project, he took her with him. Love, huh?

I washed the dishes and got comfortable on the couch with the cats and my dessert, plus a beer for good measure, and tuned in halfway through a nature documentary about central Africa. Trixie snuggled up against me in a naked bid to get closer to the food. Lum left the room every time there was a snake on screen.

Look. I knew plenty of people who had things a hell of a lot worse than me. And I’m not going to say that Cindy got totally lucky in her life either, because she hasn’t. The point is, having a nice enough place, a tolerable job that paid the bills, and two cats whom I loved, was a perfectly fine way to live. But that wasn’t where I wanted to be, you know? It would’ve been nice to be able to freely spend time with the people around me, to be recognized in my work, to be a wife, to be comfortable, happy, even...

Late that night, I awoke with a start after having a nightmare or something, heart racing and covered in sweat. I don’t know what it was about this place, but I hadn’t gotten a good night of sleep since I moved out here. Must be the noise from the street, or the light from the kinks in the blinds, or the cats stepping on me, or something. Although I’ve gathered that I’ve always had an usual number of nightmares. One time Kathy-With-A-K mentioned having trouble getting back to sleep after a bad dream, and she said it hadn’t happened since she was a kid, which I found astonishing, whereas she found that happening to me on an every-couple-nights basis similarly unbelievable. It’s kind of a strange thing to know about yourself, right? That your subconscious is particularly good at freaking itself out?

Before I could fall back to sleep, the phone started ringing, so I extricated myself from the tangle of blankets and cats that had formed while I slept, and reached for my glasses on the nightstand. The machine took the call for me as I slouched out of the bedroom. Hearing my own voice always made me squirm.

“Leave a message after the tone,” The machine finished its monologue in my voice, and added, in its own: “BEEEEEP!”

Cindy’s voice mumbled something unintelligible over the speaker. It sounded like she was crying. Another rough night, huh? I dutifully reached for the receiver.

“Cindy?” I answered. My voice is always kind of wonky right after I wake up. It takes a few sentences for the muscle memory to switch over.

She bawled something that could have been my name in response. Her voice, flawlessly girlish from the first time I met her, was having trouble keeping up with the surge of emotions. I suppose we were on even footing for once.

“Are you okay? What happened?” I asked.

“It- it’s Brad, he-” She broke into tears again.

“What did he do this time? Did he hurt you? Do you need help?” I asked, as if I was in a position to do any such thing.

“...No,” she sniffled, “it’s just- god, he can be so mean sometimes!” sniffle. “We were, you know, doing the deed, and he was having trouble keeping it up, and- so I asked if anything was wrong, and he said-” she paused, and it sounded like she blew her nose, “He said that he liked me better when I still had a thing. Except he used that word I don’t like! It’s been a whole year since I got my parts done, you know? God, I feel like such an idiot...”

“You’re not an idiot, Cindy,” I said, “Bradley is just a creep.”

“It’s just- I just thought he liked me for- for me, you know?” she stammered, between sobs, “Story of my god damn life,” she curses. “There’s not a single good man in this stupid world!”

“Well, we certainly get to see the worst in them,” I offered, in commiseration. I did the math in my head over whether veering the conversation away from the thing currently upsetting her was worth the risk of crashing right back into it if a memory led back to Brad. Well, and it was also weighed against my all-time losing record of talking people off ledges directly without making things worse. “So, you get around to scuba diving yet?”

Sniffle. “Huh? Oh, no, not yet, but it’s on the list,” She said, “we did go snorkeling though. I saw a uh, a sea turtle. And we went by a reef, so I saw some anemones and that.”

“Any clownfish?”

“Yes! I actually did see some! They’re so cute,” She squeals.

“You know,” I began, with an affect of gravitas, “clownfish are what they call ‘sequential hermaphrodites,’ which means-”

“Shut up!” Cindy giggled, “Jeez, do you really have that whole monologue memorized still?”

“Only enough to provoke a reaction,” I admitted.

“I keep seeing import shops in town,” She said, “I’ll have to keep an eye out for a replacement copy of that stupid thing for you. What was it called again?”

“夏のたけなわ.”

“You’re gonna have to write that down for me, girl.”

Time flew as we kept talking late into the night. She introduced her new coworkers, complete with gossip she’d already picked up, I complained about my current project, she pouted about how they put coconut in everything out there, I recommended a movie I’d seen, she told me to try making spam musubi, I kvetched about having to take Bubblegum in for more repairs.

She said, “you know, I think you’d really like it out here,” and offered to let me stay at her place if I ever flew out.

I told her I’d think about it.

By the time we’d wrapped up, we were rapidly approaching the hours where it would be almost pointless to try going back to sleep, and to be sure, I tried anyway. But you’d never guess what was keeping me up. That stupid cake. I laid in bed, gently running my hand over Trixie and staring up at the blurry mashed potato texture of the popcorn ceiling, and the only thing I could think was there’s no goddamn way she’s thirty-two.

I pried myself from bed once again, and lurched over to the fridge. I didn’t have any frosting I could write with or anything in the cabinets, so I wracked my brain to try and think of some way to correct the mistake without certainly making things worse. I came up dry, so I pivoted to ideas that would only probably make things worse. I jabbed at the frosting lightly to test consistency. Thanks to the fridge, it felt pretty solid. Terrible plans formed in my mind.

I pulled out a plastic spatula. With the steadiest hands I could muster, I pierced the frosting next to the three and oh-so-gently scooped it up onto the edge of the utensil. Next, I pivoted the whole setup ninety degrees and repeated the procedure on the two. Right. Now the issue was how to get them back on in the right order. I set the spatula down on the counter and reached into the sink for a clean knife. Then I thought to myself, Rosa deserves better than a sink knife, and grabbed one out of the silverware drawer.

I realized with horror that Trixie had taken the opportunity to jump up on the counter, and was investigating the spatula. I darted over and snatched the implement away from her before she could do anything rash, and held it aloft while I scolded her. She seemed unperturbed. With my free hand, I scooped her up under my arm and lowered her to the floor.

Right. Time to put the numbers back on. I scraped the knife under the frosting, and... it was stuck. Applying more force just started to squish the digit instead of cleanly removing it. I swore. I wondered if sticking it in the freezer would make them rigid enough to just snap off. It was getting dangerously close to “getting ready” time by then, so I tossed it on top of some bags of frozen gyoza and taquitos, shooed both Trixie and Lum off the counter this time, and transferred the cake to the fridge while I took a shower.

I locked eyes with myself in the mirror while I blow-dried my hair. It does feel weird to say, but I thought I looked pretty good, usually. Listen, I’m through being self-effacing, okay? I already got my stupid letters and everything, and this isn’t a doctor’s office. It’s normal for a woman to think she looks pretty, right? And I’m not going to append “for a tranny” or something to that, because I’m also through putting the other girls down. Once I had somebody describe me as looking like if they cast Faye Dunaway to play Ms. Frizzle, you know, from those kids’ books? It killed the mood at the time, but I made peace with it, I guess. I emerged from the shower, and got dressed. Tragically, I don’t have access to Frizzle style outfits, just the hair. It’s the tan skirt and blazer today.

I once again stared down my nemesis, the cake, spatula in hand. The two came off without a hitch after some gentle coaxing, and I carefully lowered it into the tens place with surgical precision. The three shattered. I cursed. Well whatever, I thought, two pieces isn’t that bad, I can just smudge them back together when they thaw out. I stuck them in place, and went about wolfing down a bowl of cereal for breakfast.

It was around there that I made a fatal mistake. I left the cake unattended while I finished getting ready. When I got back, a criminal, known to some as “Trixie,” had planted both her forepaws in the cake. I shouted her name, and she looked back across the living room, eyes wide, and after a moment’s hesitation, she wheeled around and attempted to leap off the counter. But she’d chosen a less than stable point to jump off from, and slipped and tumbled onto the floor, before taking off in a sprint and leaving little frosting footprints across the carpet. On the other hand, the cake, the object which she had chosen as her starting blocks, had been transferred to the floor. I swore again.

When Rosa was poised to blow out the candles on the replacement cake (which I had made myself late for work collecting) during the office party, she suddenly started cackling and told Syd:

“You’re playing a joke on me, aren’t you! You know I’m not twenty-three!”

WILDCARD

[OVA version]

By Kara Shelby

Contents

Chapter 1: Who are you again?