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The air in my bedroom was blue with hazy summer sunlight through the curtains. I sat on my huge old bed, surrounded by my own memorabilia that played dueling aesthetics with my “mom’s” doll collection. This had been her sewing room until I graduated from college and moved back in with my “parents”.

I’d met Poly at a New Year’s party the previous year and spent several hours making out with her before I found out how old she was. Cue the club theme from Trainspotting. We backed it off to just being friends, but after she reached the legal age of consent, she wouldn’t leave me alone. I was lonely and clueless and drowning in the present day and Poly was…Poly. I’d taken to walking her to work about every other day. My “mom” would shake her head and lapse into moody silence every time I left to do so.

Down the hall, presently, there was the sound of a toilet flushing and the hiss of the sink. Then the bedroom door whispered softly open and closed.

Poly looked so sharp in those days. Her hair was dyed black, streaked red in two different places in the bangs, bobbed and held back with silver butterfly barrettes. She was petite, with wide blue eyes and a clear porcelain face that colored beautifully in the oppressive heat. Her nose was small and angular. Her lips were long and full over cute braces and a slight overbite. Her wide, coy eyes danced with light, their whites as blue as a baby’s. Even back then, I noticed the way those eyes seemed to generate their own light.

She had a body that wouldn’t quit, from the delicately rounded bones of her shoulders to her long legs that had gotten quite strong from all those months of walking to her McJob out on the Croyon town line.

That day, she wore a mesh shirt over a black body-suit. Shimmering silver tights clad her legs under olive-drab cutoffs laced up the side with a shoelace where they’d frayed to tatters. Her shoes were clunky black creeper sandals with metal rims around their high clog heels that made her three inches taller.

She locked the door, crossed the room to sit beside me on the bed and clasped one of my big, spindly hands in both of her small, soft, oddly-shaped ones. Poly’s hands were very old, worn and wrinkled and yet somehow childlike. She cracked her knuckles obsessively and chewed her fingernails down to the quick.

“I told you…you’re in big trouble,” she breathed in my ear, crossing one leg over my lap and holding me, her mouth soft against my neck.

I was surprised. “I thought we were gonna go back to your house.”

We’d gone to a family reunion that day. I was about half in the bag. Poly made a show of acting shy and tongue-tied around my family then spirited me away into the woods until I got her off, but not the other way around. However, the goddamned little imp had all but given me a hand job through my pocket in the back seat—hence the “you’re in trouble” remark.

I thought I knew what to expect. But bad was better than nothing. Sex and Trauma went hand in hand in this part of the woods. And these woods were full of traps.

“Did I ever tell you I was adopted, too?” Poly asked out of nowhere.

I shook my head. “No, I—” She always managed to throw me for a loop. “I mean, you don’t look a thing like your mom, but that’s not—”

Poly laid one small finger on my lips. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

I cocked one eyebrow.

“Some of the real reasons why I got put away. Mom couldn’t deal. She blabbed it up and down to my Aunt Sandy that it was because I got busted huffing Dust-Off in the mall that one time, or because I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen, I told you about that…”

She had. “Right, right—”

“…or that I was depressed about breaking up with Brad after we’d been goin’ out for so long. But that wasn’t it at all.”

I waited. “What was it really?”

She held up one hand. “I dream about my real parents sometimes.”

My head was starting to pound. “Elaborate. Why’d you get put away?”

“I’ve never completely shown this to anyone else.” Her eyes were cast down. “There is so much,” she struggled with a sob, “that people are just not willing to see. I fuckin’ hate…people. People suck.”

“That’s why we don’t.” I had no idea what I was saying any more. “Because we’re not people.”

She looked at me funny, like she was trying to figure something out, then laughed to herself. It was a cold, bitter laugh with no humor behind it.

“They all think they know everything, while they go on ruining this whole world. My mom had me put away because…shit. I can’t even explain it. I guess I was just born like this. It’s like being two people at once. On the one side…I’m The Bitch. And on the other…I don’t really even know who…Poly…is. I haven’t met her before. Just… Do you promise you won’t get weirded-out?”

There was a long silence. “I love you,” I told her. “We have no secrets. Just do it.”

Then the room stretched, all light and sound growing, slowing, encapsulating. The sunlight pouring through the curtains crossed the spectrum from blue to a pale forest green.

“Oh, Bottom, thou art transformed…” I muttered to myself. Poly didn’t hear. She was busy, and I was…oh what was this… With one spell, this wet creature before me had peeled my psyche as naked as a Mayday virgin, made me think and feel things my head could not contain, memories from before I knew I had memories to draw from.

Something about a woman with beautiful copper-colored hair holding me against her shoulder and singing in an alien tongue…that I could understand. Something about blood, and smoke and fire. Something coming in through my nursery window in the night, and then…a break… A turning away. Blank pages of pain, waiting…

Through the tornado of memories, I forced myself to Be There Now.

Everything in the room was wider, twisted and echoing, growing steadily more so as Poly did something with those strange hands of hers, something that looked like a raver kid with a pair of Glo-Sticks making tracers in the air.

And then she began to undress.

“But…but…” I sputtered, thinking of my folks downstairs. The room wasn’t the only thing that had been pulled through the looking glass.

Poly slid off her tights and stood with her arms out, turning, turning in a widening arc…

This hurts. Bear with me. Remember when I mentioned people who were above gender? I—

I saw what Poly really looked like, the weird bones of her vestigial wings that probably hadn’t worked for a few generations in her real family. Beyond the human range of sight, her real form made total sense to me, all the ways I clung to her and couldn’t let go… Her long, webbed hands and graceful, hyper-human curves all a marvel of biomechanics and more of…everything…than human…

Her body iridesced a brighter silver than her tights. Her wing-like shoulder blades flexed and shimmered, armored with muscle above her intertwining spines, the unreal softness of her back and vastly different anatomy, farther in between and down and across and wet and taut and pulsing and urgent and so many different—

I never trusted my own perceptions after that day.

My head was spinning from more than the beer. I undid my belt-buckle with shaking hands. Taking…all of her…in, I gasped and blurted out, “I think I’m gonna be here for a while.”

The creature that was Poly all along crossed the room.

“I think…yeah, you are,” she whispered in a dead, compulsive junkie whine. One glowing, tapering finger pushed gently up on my chin.

I was lost in that gaze of purest, pupilless blue. She reached out and drew me toward the bed. Not by the hand…