Smiling Ferocious Thing
by Scott Nelson
Courtesy of Unsplash.
Smiling Ferocious thing
Scott Nelson | JUNE 2025 | Issue 46
Tonight I’m not organizing phone banks, or scrubbing ash from the Eaton Canyon Fire off my porch, or weighing hope against fear. I’m walking with you down a sketchy alley to the flickering-lighted door. The mountains behind us are burning. The planes above us are falling. I’m carrying a shoulder bag full of rope and sharp things, pointed smiles and promises. You’re dragging a roller suitcase full of electro gear and I’ve got an extension cord. You’re carrying the desire for experience. I’m carrying the need to be felt. We’re walking in bodies that could be stolen from us. Together, we shoulder the fear that we might not be alive in four years.
For the last six months, on every organizing Zoom meeting, the icebreaker question has been “What’s been bringing you joy—despite, you know, the increasing fascist hellscape we’re all trapped in?” And I’ve been saying “My cat,”—which isn’t wrong— but it’s this. It’s us. It’s you.
It’s the way your shoulder muscle reacts when I run the electro wand over the back of your neck. It’s you scream-laughing at me. It’s your whimpers, your ragged breathing, your hands balling into fists. Your cries ringing in my ears. It’s you shimmering with pleasure-pain. It’s your courage when you say, I want to hurt like this—and only like this. I want it right here, I want this much, for this long, give it to me now.
And then I’m stopped midweek in a crosswalk, spiraling. If the entire world wants to hurt trans people, why am I hurting trans people? If there’s a boot on both our necks, then why are my boots on your thighs? Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute brute heart—is that us?
But then you text me “WYD Friday?” and oh, honey, I have so many ideas.
My spikes under your skin. My fingers in your nerves. Your skin twitching and tightening against mine. Me cackling, grinning, growling into your ear, sighing, moaning, strutting to get your bottle of water. Your scent, pain and excitement. The smiling ferocious thing in me meeting the joyful suffering thing in you, both of us unmasked and exposed and loved and loved and loved.
Because to be trans in California right now is to sit on the couch as our apartments fill with smoke, and tonight I get to be your ax-wielding maniac.
See, I’m possessive. I want you to only suffer for me. May I be the only scary, violent white man in your DMs. In your house. Walking your streets. Inhabiting your country. Your doctor will take your chronic pain seriously. Your trauma will never be exploited by social services to raise money. No institution will fail to protect you when you become politically inconvenient. You will never have to perform trans joy to reassure cis people, nor remain silent in your pain to deny them the satisfaction.
Suspension points, silver rings. Tighten the upline. You are allowed to scream, cry, melt down, beg.
Did you know this room was built in the AIDS crisis? Boots like ours walked these floors and marched in these riots and grieved at these funerals and danced at these parties since before we were born. In here, four generations of queers have practiced courage, desire, consent, body autonomy, breath, embodiment. Even as these things are stolen from us, we say, I want. I want life, I want to feel, I want to risk joy, I want to have power, I want to have rights, I want to be seen, I want to be felt, I want to leave my mark, I want it. Give it to me.
We leave after three a.m., fireworks going off inside us. You carry my marks under your clothes, along with your surgical scars, your self-injection bruises, the place that still twitches after laser hair removal, the tattoos that you agonized for, and every other hurt that we fought to say I WANT, GIVE IT TO ME.
We will not be undone. There are cave paintings of us. There are cuneiform tablets of us. There are hieroglyphics of us. There will be queer sadomasochists born on Mars, lighting the Tesla chargers on fire.
The crescent moon is a smile. Underneath, we embrace one last time. I’m carrying a map of your body in mine. Your curved spine. Your hypermobile shoulders. The too-early creak in your joints. I reach for the scar in your hand. Put your lifeline against mine. Touch me here.
Scott Nelson (they/them, and trying on he/him although they still feel conflicted about claiming masculinity, but ever since they changed their name and decided to let their hairline go, they’re trying to get more comfortable with it) is a queer and trans writer based in Los Angeles. Their work has been featured in Brevity, Ninth Letter, Catapult, and elsewhere, and their novella, Have You Seen Me, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. Scott is writing a novel that’s an autistic comedy of manners about being gay and doing crime.