The God-Shaped Hole
A short story.
Untitled, Donald Judd.
I woke up with a God-shaped hole so I asked it what it wanted.
Fire, the hole said. Twenty dollars. A shotgun. Running in a field toward a train. Gummy worms and Hot Cheetos.
My body was a melting Peep. I was wearing an awful little yellow dress like it was Easter Sunday. The God-shaped hole laughed. On Easter Sunday my mom made sure her daughters were in little pastel dresses, hair tied back with matching ribbons.
“June!
Lucy!
Lily!
Abigail!”
June. My name was June. Well, that made sense, it was the name I had chosen for myself.
The other doors on the second floor flew open and a flurry of feet hammered down the stairs. My sisters even made the carpet sound loud. We were four sisters now, no awkward gangly older brother who hid a Taylor Swift t-shirt in the back of his closet.
An hour ago I had gone to sleep as a thirty-year old depressed trans woman living in Chicago who hadn’t spoken to her parents in over a year. Now I had woken up as a twelve-year-old cis girl version of myself, back in my family’s house at age twelve. With all my adult trans trauma memories intact, like when my family cut me off and told me I was the result of a demonic homosexual curse. “Actually,” I’d told them, “I’m straight now.” They found it less funny than I did.
***
As I went downstairs, I asked the god-shaped hole what it wanted again—just to see if it had been satisfied.
A watch. A labyrinth. A locked room murder mystery, the hole jeered. Sex, candy, blood, and a piece of olive oil cake.
My mom was cooking eggs for breakfast, using too much pepper and roasting garlic. A bag of shredded Kraft cheese was spilling on the counter. I wanted to pour myself a cup of coffee but I was twelve. What did a twelve year-old girl drink? Having water with breakfast seemed ridiculous. Milk even worse. No one was anti-dairy yet and while perhaps my twelve year old girl stomach could take it, I had no intention of finding out.
“How did you sleep, girls?”
Everyone mumbled as they grabbed plates and shoveled eggs and toast. My dad was on the phone in his office speaking in his faux-excited voice. He was wishing his parents a happy Easter. We were going to go over there for dinner. Ham probably. From the grocery store my grandma liked before she developed Alzheimer’s and stopped talking to me.
“June, can you take out the trash?”
I nodded, afraid to croak. My mom didn’t see me though so she said it again with a slower cadence.
“Yes,” I said.
She eyed me for a second with the same empty frustration I could never place. I got up and took the big black bag full of paper plates and water bottles to the garage, setting it dutifully on top of the overflowing trash can.
When I came back in, everyone was looking out past the deck.
“There’s a veery,” my mom said. She spent so much time feeding the birds she’d named some of the ones she could identify by sight. The tense of past and present were rubbing against each other like two oarless virgins. I didn’t know how to think about her. She was right in front of me, acting out another typical holiday. I wanted her to say my name again so I could taste it.
Lucy and Lily were scraping cheesy eggs around their plates as Abigail went back for more. She forked more eggs onto her plate and went upstairs to change out of her pajama tee.
My mom and I were the only ones staring at the veery. It looked so precious with its plump silver belly and terrifying black eyes. The loud trill annoyed Lucy and Lily who rolled their eyes at us and went upstairs.
Dad walked in on us and said, “Hey,” in the way a suburban white dad interrupts his family to say something important in a casual tone.
“Grandma’s in the hospital,” he said.
My grandma stopped speaking to me when I came out in my twenties, it felt strange to remember that she was a monthly fixture in my childhood. I suddenly remembered the day I had gone back to, the day my grandma went to the hospital. At least I knew she was going to be okay.
I felt disappointed not to eat the Stouffer’s microwave macaroni she made in huge batches and set on the dining room table in chipped stoneware.
My mom didn’t say anything. She looked at my dad, wincing in his pain.
“Well, let’s get going,” Dad said softly. Lucy and Lily peered over the staircase, letting their red hair sway wild in the entryway.
“Brush your hair girls,” my mom said.
I shuffled back up the stairs, trying to catch a hint of my parent's whispers behind me. They closed the door to the office and sat in the spinny chairs.
“Do you think everything will be okay?” Abigail asked with a toothbrush in her mouth.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“So serious June, come on. I’m sure it will be fine,” she said.
Lucy and Lily were screeching in their room, deknotting and detangling.
“When can I cut my hair short?” Lucy whined.
My mom used to make me get my hair cut short. She taught me how to unfold my legs like a boy. I wondered who she would teach now that I was a proper girl.
The God-shaped hole turned over in my stomach. I grimaced and clutched my tummy against my childhood bedroom door. Get out.
***
In the car, Lucy was picking her nose and kicking my Mom’s seat.
“Why can’t I play with Jake tomorrow?”
“He’s not a good influence on you,” Mom said.
“Because he has two moms?”
“No,” Mom said. “That’s not it.”
“We like to go wrestle in the woods,” Lucy said. “It’s fun.”
I could tell everyone’s nerves were shot. They wanted Lucy to shut up. Lily was sighing and Abigail was reading a copy of Seventeen magazine.
Mom shot my dad a clouded look, as if this was something they commonly talked about. I used to be one they argued about. My effeminate vocal fry and girly hand-gestures.
“That sounds fun, Lucy,” I said.
“You should play with girls your age,” Mom said.
The family had a new punching bag. A bit of a tomboy, the hole noted. The cycle had not been broken.
We wanted this, the hole said. A new family dynamic. A weird sibling with gender trouble. We wanted the boogeyman to pick on someone else.
I wanted to go home.
***
At church I learned obedience and duality.
I want freedom, the hole screamed inside my boiling body. Long walks without destinations, a speeding car on a country road, fucking in a muddy river, getting drunk at an obscene corporate party in Manhattan.
Each of my sisters was scribbling on their church bulletin. The blank space where notes were supposed to go was filled with idle gossip and sketches of the back of women’s heads. The preacher was talking about resurrection.
As an adult I tried to fill the God-shaped hole. I kept hoping for the promise of peace but it never came. Losing my virginity, changing my gender marker, chopping off my dick. Things got better, like the Youtube videos said, but they never took on the utopian quality the LGBT mafia loved to advertise.
Still I never stopped believing in eternal peace or eternal damnation. They just changed shape like a chimera, adopting pieces of Christianity, Socialism, queer theory, and some ketamine-induced hypotheses. I tried to remake myself over and over, hoping I would unlock the key to heaven. All of my hopes and dreams, dutifully chronicled in my diaries over the years, meant nothing. Each obsessive, rabbit-hole phase—library girl, academic, goth girl, band girl, blogger girl, pottery girl—they all gave me a little bit of time in everyone’s eyes. Purpose in miniature. No one expected me to do anything but survive.
“We just want you to be happy,” they said when I came out. Some said it as encouragement to keep going. Some said it hoping I would detransition.
When I read about older single women, or older trans women in general, I wondered what kind of mothering they did to banish their God-shaped holes. Was it only Protestants who had the hole? Only Christians? No, the futility seemed to touch everyone. They whined about the end times without ever having read the Good Book.
I sat listening attentively, not scribbling on my sermon notes. There was nothing here I hadn’t heard before, whether in the suburban church or on the streets of the city.
“You know, many of you know, my son and I used to have a bad relationship. He wasn’t always the best-behaved boy in the front row,” the preacher was saying. He was never the best-behaved boy. When I was sixteen he bullied me for being a sissy by plunging my head into a toilet and getting me kicked out of youth group.
“My son was trying to fill something that could not be filled by earthly desire,” the preacher said. “He was trying to fill the hole in his humanity.” That wasn’t the only thing he was trying to fill. “But only God completes us.”
Everywhere I went people declared the holiness of God. i would believe in god if he gave me the last poptart, I once posted.
The God-shaped hole was gurgling and wiggling around under my egg-yolk dress. My mother shushed me as if I was making the noise willingly. I grimaced and clutched my tummy. Get out. You’ll be the predator before they have any chance to ask why you’re here. The transsexual vampire everyone has been waiting to rally around.
I walked out of the service, ostensibly to go to the bathroom. I didn’t go to the bathroom though. I was still too terrified even with a perfect cis body.
***
Acid. Faith. Snake oil and a gallon of light roast coffee, the hole demanded. An invisibility cloak and a cigar. I want to send out smoke signals to someone else who will come and rescue me. I want a prince with abs and a thousand-dollar smile. Then I want him to crush me with all his weight.
The playground outside our church was empty. I wandered over to the swing set, staring at the gravel and swaying. Chillier than I expected. How long would it last—this redux? Was girlhood everything I wanted and more? I hadn’t expected such an overdeveloped sense of interiority. Twelve-year-olds are supposed to be fumbling through the primordial ooze not contemplating God. But contemplate I did. And did again.
Boyhood, girlhood, children of Satan. The hole was never filled by fidelity.
“What do you need?” I asked again as I started pumping my legs into the air, getting higher and higher on the swing. The noise in my head crackled. My stomach felt so nauseous I wanted to lay down on the ground and stop resisting but I kept on pumping. I would be an angel if it killed me. Let me walk with thee, close to thee, close to thee.
I want more than just the last Poptart. I want a Grammy. Three boyfriends and one girlfriend in a polycule. I want to be a bisexual icon who people make Youtube compilations about. I want a photoshoot on the cover of Vogue where I’m licking a gun like a Bond girl. I want to swim with manatees and move to a new country.
The hole inside of me took shape. No longer whispering, only the rustle of feathers and Jell-o of eyes. My Biblically accurate angel. It was hard to look straight at his prismatic halo.
“Greetings,” the hole said. “Fear not, for I am Gabriel.”
Out of the swirling darkness came spinning, forever weaving onto the human plane. He was molting. His eyes circled his body along a gold line, his feathers sparked with holy infinity. My sense of taste and smell didn’t work around him. Like I’d just used mouthwash.
“Hello,” I said. “Do you still need a Pop Tart?”
“A treat sounds good,” he said, and I agreed. I didn’t need a Grammy or a girlfriend, but chocolate would be nice.
We decided to play hooky and walk to Target. They were likely to have all the treats we wanted. No manatees, but maybe an aquarium.
“What is He like up there?” I asked.
“His voice is the sound of a hundred dolphins whistling.”
“Where was God during MeToo?”
“Now you’re interested in philosophy?”
“I didn’t know it was philosophy to ask something like that.”
“The Absence of God,” Gabriel said, “is always philosophical.”
We walked through the candy aisle and past the frozen drink machines. I almost asked him to stop and get a slushie. I thought it would fulfill one of his urges. One of our urges.
He ran his fingers over the cheap rainbow of nail polish. If I had been a girl I would’ve shoplifted. I was a girl. I could shoplift. A few bottles made their way into my pockets, clanking like marbles.
“Do you want all the men in jail?” he asked as we wound our way through the beauty supplies.
“I never said that.”
“God is an abolitionist in some ways. And in other ways, he is not.”
“Does he believe in punishment?”
“I think even abolitionists do,” Gabriel said.
Someone saw us strolling down the shampoo aisle and snapped a photo on their phone. Maybe they’d send it to TMZ. I’d fucked the alternate timeline, spoiled my dream with fury. Gabriel could become the next big thing. Biblically accurate angel kidnapping teenage shoplifter.
“What do you think of autofiction?” the angel asked.
“I think it’s silly.”
“When you get bored you look just like Marilyn Monroe.”
I had never watched a Marilyn Monroe movie all the way through, so I just blushed.
“Have you read the big detrans book?”
Gabriel shook. I assumed that meant no. In the future me and my girlfriends argued about the book. We spun theories on who was who and what a biomythology was.
“The basic plot of the detrans book,” I started, “is that a trans girl witch meets a detrans witch with a lion familiar. The main trans girl witch eventually starts dating the lion and discovers he’s a trans man the detrans witch put a spell on.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“I never finished it.”
“Well then why do you think about it so much?”
“I like to think.”
I realized, perhaps, angels didn’t think that much. They just sort of existed.
“How many pages is it?”
“About seven-hundred,” I said.
“I’ll take a look tonight and tell you how it ends.”
“While you’re at it, Can you make it so that transsexuality isn’t a sin?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Have I… detransitioned?”
Gabriel chuckled and his wings shimmered.
“Not unless you think turning from one kind of a woman to another is detransitioning.”
For the first time since I’d left the church I wondered if my family missed me. When I was a young nerd I was both the troublemaker and the peacemaker. Even before I was trans everyone knew something was wrong and tasked me with fixing it. As a boy I held the family together, but in this new ecosystem, how important was I to the unit? It seemed they now fed on a different dynamic, I was no longer a meek caretaker or repository for guilt.
I loved being a punching bag. Even if everyone hated your guts, they needed you. Every family needs a fall guy. I took in everything around me and swallowed it down, waiting years to burn the coal.
“Stop crossing your legs,” Mom said.
“Don’t hold your mug like that,” Dad said softly.
“That’s how girls wear their hair,” my grandma whined.
“Black coffee,” my grandpa said. “Men drink black coffee like me.”
“I love you,” Dad said without looking at me. “I just want you to be happy.”
“Keep it zipped,” Grandma said.
“That’s kind of weird for a guy,” my sister Abigail said.
I worried about Lucy, but worry isn’t worth a lot in an alternate universe.
Gabriel was looking at a sticker book. I wandered over and saw he was looking at a page full of marine animals.
“There’s no manatee.”
“Why are you so obsessed with manatees?”
“Because God thinks they’re the funniest creation,” he said.
“Really? Funnier than a platypus or a blobfish or an axolotl?”
“Yes, much funnier than an axolotl.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re so helpless. And everyone wants to swim with them in captivity. The way you’ve let your world go, you’ll be lucky if there are any manatees left in the wild by the end of the decade.”
“Animals are always getting endangered. Why didn’t God plan for that?”
“I think God hoped more of you would blow up pipelines,” he said, before ushering us out of the Target—though not before a detour for a box of purple Pop Tarts.
***
From the woods a few hundred yards away we watched my family stream into the church parking. My parents had yet to buy me a cellphone so they just started yelling.
“JUNE!
JUNE! SWEETIE!
JUNIEEE!!!
JUNE!
JUNE!!
JUUUUUUUUNNNNEE!”
They were frantic, crawling like bugs over the asphalt. A few old women started looking for me on the playground. I craned my neck to see Lucy in the distance. The look on her face killed me.
Turns out taking angelic form had not quieted the rupture in my belly. But what if it’s boring? I replied. What if I don’t know how to hold such a strange gift? What if I ruin it? What if it hurts Lucy?
“What will you do with this new precious life?” Gabriel whispered.
It was easier for him, he floated among the branches. I was struggling to hold on to a crackling oak branch for dear life. Emptier than ever now that he was outside of me and had already given me everything I wanted.
The cardinals were singing.
He took a bite of a purple Pop Tart and offered me the other half. I munched on the cold pastry contemplatively, letting the crumbs spill on the forest floor. A thousand yards in the direction opposite the church a man was starting his car, a six pack in the passenger side. A honky-tonk song played loudly over the speakers as he turned the engine and drove off, something about women and protection. Vintage misogyny.
I watched my dad hold my mom. My sisters looked at their feet. Other congregants gathered asking what they could do. They would find me soon if I didn’t leave. I took a final, piercing look at Lucy and turned back to Gabriel.
“How do I get away?”
“Further and further on up this road? Or back into your old life?” Gabriel asked.
I turned back to the God-shaped hole that still dwelled within me and asked her what she wanted.
Fire, the hole said. One million dollars. A sword. Sparklers in a hot tub. Going down a waterslide with the hottest trans boy in Brooklyn. Takis and Lavender Ice Cream. Omakase. Crashing a rich boy’s Lamborghini. But most of all fire.
What if a little spark was enough to do the trick, I thought. “How about a little fire first?”
Gabriel nodded.
With the beat of a thousand angel wings, a blossom of soot arose. A small fire broke out in the west wing of the sanctuary. The white wood crackled with fire. White then brown then the bluish tinge of kindle before curdling black. It didn’t feel apocalyptic at all. I would no longer have to sit and listen to endless revelations or the praise band trying to milk a C-major chord for all its worth.
People were screaming, fleeing the building in horror. Little kids whined in confusion. The whole church was soon enveloped. Glory, glory to all the deacons who called me a pervert.
The house of worship and horror one and the same at last.
“They’ll be okay,” the angel said. His many eyes were watching me watch the inferno. “You didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
Church-burning felt so good. So calming.
As I stared at the smoking steeple, Gabriel hailed a passing truck. Hitchhiking with an angel was far less threatening for a twelve-year old girl than going alone. I don’t know if the woman driving saw the same terrible monster that I did, but she let herself be charmed into driving us far, far away. I think she thought he was a pastor or something. He seemed to have a calming presence on her because she didn’t ask too many questions. Much farther than the original destination the angel had originally told her. My hometown fogged up in the rear-view mirror. We sped out of that devil town soundtracked by some classic rock song I’d never heard before.
We drove past McDonalds, prairies, trees, gods, devils, churches, anti-abortion signs, forgiveness, cemeteries, diners, empty lakes, quarries, fields of corn, fields of wheat, fields of past loves, parks, drones, UFOs, government buildings, ghost towns, motels, pain, fires, rallies, trade wars, poisoned water, rising insulin prices, pestilence, plague, frogs, Trojan Horses, mysterious explosions, covens, a giant cross, joy, hope, grace, love, and huge bird nests.
When the crucifix faded behind us and we rolled into the parking lot of a diner, the angel and I jumped out of the truck. The woman smiled and hugged me, and googled where the nearest women’s shelter was. She almost seemed happy to write me off as a battered kid rather than a simple religious runaway.
The neon sign in the diner blinked slime green. An old crone stood smoking in a long cherry-colored coat. Motorcycles rattled in the distance. Country air hung loose around us in the hushed twilight.
“This is where we part ways too,” Gabriel said as we pissed behind a nearby car wash. The hedges were tall enough to hide my squat. He gave me a few thousand dollars and his armada of eyes winked at me. He would always be open inside me, I realized. Emptiness springs eternal.
“Thank you,” I said. “Please. Take Lucy somewhere safe.”
“I will,” he said. “Lucy’s my next stop.”
I kissed the God-shaped hole and licked the embers of his mouth.