I found a jacket that remembers a missing girl, and it’s rewriting my body one day at a time. Now I have to solve that girl's murder before the coat finishes its work and I disappear into someone else’s life.

Chapter 6

At 5:30 the alarm doesn't go off, because I turned it off last night, but I wake up at 5:30 anyway.

I lie there in the dark with the spare blanket and the wrong quiet and the ceiling, and the body starts its inventory: breasts, the weight of them in the position I've been sleeping, the labia warm and in their soft continuous contact, the hip bones wider against the mattress. Eight seconds, maybe. Then I'm done with it and I'm just awake at 5:30 with nowhere to be.

*A Life in Plain Sight* begins with Steve, a thirty-five-year-old man whose small, fine-boned body and naturally androgynous presentation mean strangers routinely perceive him as a beautiful woman—a fact Steve has lived with for years without allowing it to complicate his certainty about who he is. Intelligent, literal, funny, intensely curious, and comfortably isolated, Steve has built a perfectly functional life around work, family, hobbies, and the conviction that *not unhappy* is good enough.

Magnolia Blooms & Sakura Petals
By
Rebecca Anna Coleman

-6-
The Greenville Bazaar

The Greenville Bazaar was a massive charity shop that was located at the very start of main street. According to local tradition, main street started at the base of the massive concrete levee and ended on concrete steps of the courthouse. Anyway, as soon as I entered the building I felt a sense of wonder come over me. I felt a sudden sense of joy come over me.

Sent By Sophia

Chapter 17: Midpoint

A Transgender Coming of Age Adventure

A Story from THE ONE

Ariel Montine Strickland

*

Tommy walked home from the bus stop, his long blond hair swaying against the small of his back. He was five foot four, a height he had reached recently and likely the end of the line, considering his father had stopped at the exact same mark. With his soft features and the way his hair caught the light, he looked like a mirrored image of his mother, only thirteen years younger. When they went out together, strangers often complimented his mother on her "pretty daughter." After a few years of it, Julia and Tommy had simply stopped correcting them.

CHAPTER 29
Breakfast was as almost as limited as it had been in the first two places, but here there was a much better selection of jams, plus far more tasty cold meats and cheeses. Nicer still was that instead of a cheap plate with a single piece of bread and a croissant, there was a whole array of bread to be eaten at will.

I waved at the choice before us, and grinned at Ange.

“You can pick our hotels for the rest of this trip, love”

There; that word dropped into conversation just as she had served it to me. Your call, Ms Meads.

CHAPTER 28
We moved up the coast bit by bit, starting at the spot where the mountains ended. It was surreal: the Pyrenees simply came to an abrupt halt not just at the sea, but also at the edge of a vast plain, like a crease in a bedsheet. More importantly, though, we had sand rather than gravel.

We stopped in at the tourist office, where they had a list of hotels that Ange checked against her book, until she went “Ooh! That one there. Not the most expensive, but it’s got a bloody Michelin star!”

CHAPTER 12
Work had left me frazzled, as that time of year always does. There are various interpretations of legal responsibility by both accountants and clients, and by that I mean more or less blatant breaches of the rules, as I have said. As a firm, we don’t do that, or at least I haven’t seen it. I see so many entries on websites like Companies House where accounts haven’t been filed at all, or regularly late, and I can’t do that anymore than I could shoplift. Annual accounts are, in essence, an account of a year’s business plus a snapshot of where that business is at the start of April. Some clients try their hardest to either squeeze things in or hold them back, for financial advantage, but we refuse to play that game. When those windows and doors shut, they are shut.