Ellen and I were both handy with tools, but only doing odd jobs. To take a chance at something better, we entered a do-it-yourselfer reality TV show. This type of thing wasn’t for everybody. We had to be able to spend weeks on location in Key West (because it was billed as an “island getaway” to draw in viewers), and even more time there if we won. So it was ideal for people like us with no steady work.
What we really hoped for was a way to set our bodies straight. Ellen and I had met at a therapy group. We were both transgender but deeply closeted about it. This was a way for us to come out in front of some other people. It sort-of worked, as we found each other, but it also made us aware we couldn’t afford what we needed to change our bodies. And while transgenders were becoming more accepted in the world, being open about it, if you couldn’t pass well, was a negative on your earning potential, and lower earnings meant not being able to afford making your body into one that could pass well. So we were kind of stuck, and continued to only cross-dress in private and among trans friends.
We came out to the team from the show because they encouraged us to not keep any secrets about our lifestyle and that nothing about us would disqualify us from the show. And the producers liked the idea of having a trans couple on the show, but they got us stuff to make us look better. I got electrolysis on my facial hair and stick-on breast forms that were good enough to even use with a bikini, along with a gaff to hide my junk and hip pads to improve my shape. Ellen got some of the opposite gear to give her a straighter shape. And they had excellent makeup; Ellen even got fake beard stubble.
So during the challenges, I often dressed female and Ellen male, and then we were Angela and Henry. It was tough; they had to do a lot of makeup work on me every morning, and Ellen had various things to wear to hide the shape of her body to become Henry. Whenever we were in the little village for the show with only the competitors and TV people around, we were Angela and Henry. When we had to go out among other people, those days we were Joe and Ellen because we weren’t confident we could pass well enough and we didn’t want it to detract from our ability to succeed at whatever the challenge was. But we probably could have passed with their excellent makeup. I did have to wear a bikini for one challenge; for that one we were Angela and Ellen, since Henry's male disguise wasn't good enough to let him be a topless man on the beach.
After three-and-a-half weeks of challenges that would be spread out over 12 weekly episodes on television, we won! Our prize included $100,000 cash, a heavy-duty pickup truck, and 90 days of everything we could use from a closed hardware store. The last part of the prize had conditions on it: We can’t just sell or give away the items we take; we have to use them in some project, and we have to let them film us building that project for the final episode of the season. But after we finished, we could keep or sell whatever we made. We could also keep any tools we took from the store that we used in the project.
The store was in southern Florida, but we were told to pretend it was still Key West; they would interpose sea and beach scenes to make it look as if we were still there. The store was closed due to a bankruptcy; it would reopen sometime after we were done with it under a new name, with whatever goods were still inside. But we had access to the tools, hardware, and building materials inside the store to build... something. We could spend time in the break room in the back of the store and use the restrooms there (electricity and water running), but most of the store was on minimal power. No heat when it got down into the 50s at night, and low light. We had plenty of light to see inside the store, though, because they filmed us every time we went in and the film crew brought lights brighter than the store’s regular lighting would have been. TV viewers would never know how dark the rest of the store usually was. The show also provided an apartment for us to spend our nights in nearby. And again, since most of the time it was just us, the TV people, and the empty store, we were Angela and Henry.
Henry came up with the idea of building our own trailer home, starting with just a simple trailer. The kind of trailers we were looking at as a base were flatbeds built to haul cargo, so would have the capacity to hold the furnishings we put in it, and our prize truck could haul it. Of course, it wouldn’t be a simple thing; we would install every luxury we could fit in.
The producers approved our plan and agreed to our condition that the 90 days began on the day our pickup was delivered so we could use it to bring the trailer to the store; we would build in the parking lot. I found a place that was liquidating trailers and we were able to get it on day 2 of having the pickup. A 9 x 28 foot trailer with a flat bed and slots to mount walls for $2100.
Now that we had the actual trailer, we could work out a more detailed plan. The first goal was a framework for the structure. We needed some kind of beams that would fit into the side slots and support a roof. We actually found some arches in the store which were perfect to make a rounded roof. We put one at each end and three in the middle to divide the roof into sections which were less than 8 feet long, since many of the materials we had available were only 8 feet wide.
The exterior would be made of sheet aluminum, but we cut it to the size we needed, using a rig across three saw tables, only one of them having a saw mounted in it, the other two just having stocks to align the metal. The saw was a high-powered but standard saw; it just needed the right class of blade. And we found such a blade and a saw it would fit on in the store. I think the producer enjoyed seeing this setup.
We bolted the sheets to the beams, but in addition we welded the edges both from inside and outside the trailer. Welding was definitely not my thing, but we had the tools available, and it was going to provide a secure seal so that the trailer would be waterproof. We did the same thing for the roof; the sheets were flat when we cut them but could be bent around the arch of the roof.
The ends were tricky. On the back end, we cut a flat plate to cover the top, carefully matching the arch shape, and we put double doors below that would let us bring in any sort of furniture that would fit inside the vehicle, using top and bottom latches so we did not need a center post. We installed twin exhaust fans in holes in the top plate. The front was a flat plate too, with a hole for our air conditioner, but at the top, we installed a series of triangular plates coming to a point which would make a somewhat aerodynamic shape above the top of the pickup. Aside from that, these extra plates were purely decorative.
We had to use a grinding tool to smooth out the welds on the outside of the trailer. On the inside, we didn’t worry because we knew everything there was going to be covered by interior walls, and we only smoothed jagged bits. We cut holes and installed windows. Three and a half weeks into the operation we had the whole shell of the trailer built, save for painting it. There was a rainy day just after this and we checked that our trailer was sealed against rain. There was one spot where a little water was getting in, not enough to flood it, but enough to mark it for resealing, and we found the hole the next day and rechecked it with a water hose after it was welded and smoothed again.
We split up after this, Henry priming and then painting the outside, while I worked on installing wiring on the inside, hooking up lights, outlets, the fans, and two windows at the front that would open slightly outward at the bottom, and could be kicked out as emergency exits. Henry used a paint sprayer to apply the main coats, which required covering a large part of the parking lot nearby in tarps so we didn’t leave a big mess. He did the primer and first main coat the first day, second main coat the second day, with some artistic work in the afternoon, and two coats of clear sealer the third day. There was touchup work after each coat to make sure no gaps were left.
I needed two days to do the wiring. While Henry continued painting the third day, an electrician the show hired inspected my work. Since I was not a licensed electrician, this was a safety requirement the producers imposed, but they paid for the electrician.
The day after all that was done, we started on the interior, primarily trying to set up the things that would rest against the outer walls or go inside them, before we installed inner walls in the remaining spaces. We added cabinets and other storage spaces, a mini-fridge, and a few things that would fold up against the wall when not in use, including our bed, 2 tables, and our stove with 2 burners. Folding the stove was a little tricky in that we had to make sure it did not get folded against the outer skin of the trailer while it was hot. We did that by mounting the hinge so the back stayed an inch from the wall, and at the top installing some bumpers that would rest against the front corners of the countertop when it was folded back. When there were hollow spaces behind other installed items, we installed standard home insulation. There were a lot of spots that couldn’t be insulated, so it probably wouldn’t work well, but some insulation was better than none.
The producers loved every trip we made into the store, seeing the stuff we adapted to the purposes we needed. And they celebrated All-Gender Day with us on March 13th, the 72nd day of the year, so designated because of a theory that there were 72 genders, by having the entire crew cross-dress.
On both sides of the trailer, along its entire length, we installed small cabinets which slightly resembled the luggage bins on airplanes. Their doors opened upward and they were flat on the bottom. Where we had the more accessible cabinets, these went directly above with them and flush with their fronts.
We had left a space for a bathroom, but this was another tricky area. These trailer bathrooms work by using a small septic tank and there was a very specific hookup needed to empty them at campsites. The store did not have that and we had to go elsewhere and find one, one of the few parts besides the trailer base itself we had to spend money on. The water was stored in a tank overhead, which meant we had a limited number of flushes between refills.
The walls went in next. They weren’t like house walls. Sheetrock and plaster would not survive the rigors of the road, so there were plastic materials that were used instead. The typical sort wasn’t something the store had in stock. We used some of the practically indestructible composite fiber building materials more commonly used on modern decks and outdoor stairs. The same saw we used to cut the sheet metal was employed here, but with a different blade. Wherever there wasn’t a window or something up against the wall or which folded against the wall, we installed this material on the inside of the beams, with insulation behind it.
We installed laminate flooring, stuff you might install in your house, directly on top of the originally provided trailer floor, with only a thin layer of foam insulation under it that was meant to be used with this kind of floor.
We installed a TV using a wall mount, and we put in a low-rise TV antenna near one edge of the roof. This made the top of it not any higher than the peak of the roof. While we were at it, we measured that roof by measuring a beam placed across it with vertical supports on both ends, by measuring the height of both ends and taking the average, and checking the front, middle, and back of the trailer for the highest height. The 10’9” we measured would fit under standard overpasses, but not some low clearances and probably not any parking garages.
We had also noticed the trailer sloped down slightly toward the back when it was attached to the truck, and now we had measured the difference was an inch and a half from front to back. That seemed wrong, and we confirmed online for trailers that we could get specs for that they were expected to run flat front-to-back. The tires didn’t seem low. We weren’t actually sure what the right pressure was, but they did not seem obviously low enough to cause such a difference.
We took it over to a tire store and they explained that trailers can take tires of different sizes. Whoever had used this trailer before had either just been trying to be cheap, or had towed it with a small pickup which was lower to the ground, and had put small tires on it. To make it right for our truck we needed different tires, ones comparable to the size of the ones on the truck. He had some in stock and we paid our third out-of-pocket cost during this entire process to put tires on it which matched the truck.
The rest of the time, we loaded whatever looked useful into those cabinets. All the tools we used in the construction were ours to keep, as was the leftover hardware in any packages we opened, which included a couple of those everything boxes with 30 or 40 little drawers with different things in each one that we had taken to reduce the number of trips into the store for one-off parts, as well as some large boxes of the more common screws. We took some cases to keep the small stuff organized, and built or installed various things to hold the tools and other larger items. We took all the tools including the saw and all the blades we used on it, but we didn’t have room for the saw tables. They were going to be donated to local schools. But we managed to make two sawhorses - the kind where you just buy the brackets and add your own wood for the legs and crossbars - that would fold up, with the crossbars removed, and fit in one of the overhead cabinets. We were setting ourselves up to be the construction road show.
We went to several other stores to load up the trailer with food and other supplies we could not get from the hardware store, the camera crew riding along with us. And finally, our 90 days was up, we took our belongings from our temporary break room in the store, and, for the finale, we did drive back to Key West so they could film us driving the trailer past the “Mile 0” marker at the start of U.S. 1.
Then we hit the road to enjoy the camping life on our way home. We were dressed as Joe and Ellen, though, because we knew we would travel through some country unfriendly to trans people, and while our disguises were good, we were not as good on our own with the makeup as the show’s staff was and the overall appearance was not as good. We’d gotten so used to our trans names after dressing that way for four months, though, that we still called each other Angela and Henry in private.
If we were lucky, we wouldn’t stay home after we got there. Inspired by what we’d done, the producer of our show was trying to make some “dream makeover” show that would be a sort of construction road show. They would find people who needed a bunch of work done but couldn’t afford it and were suitable charity cases, we’d come and do it, the show would pay for the materials, gas, a standard rate for our labor, and $20 grand an episode on top of it all. But at the time we set out, he hadn’t managed to get buy-in for this show, so the plan was still up in the air.
Home was more than we could manage in one day, so we stopped somewhere in Georgia, found one of those trailer parks with hookups, paid a small fee, and prepared to really use our trailer for the first night. It worked well, though it was still a trailer. There were things we could have made nicer but required buying things that weren’t at the store, and we could always add them on later. The biggest thing was the convenience of having our bedroom anywhere we wanted.
I had an elaborate dream that night about The Wizard of Oz, or at least the land of Oz. It didn’t follow the movie plot closely, but it clearly took place in Oz, with characters, places, and other elements from the film. There were plenty I didn’t recognize, but I would have plenty of time to meet them, because when Henry and I woke up, we were still in the dream-world. Our truck and trailer were there. Even the trailer park with its electric, water, and sewage hookups were there, but it was run by a munchkin.
When we awoke, the bright and fanciful colors of the landscape made it immediately obvious we weren’t in Georgia anymore. Nor Kansas.
“Henry, are we still dreaming?”
“Um, it looks like it. Did we have the same dream last night?”
“About visiting Oz?”
“Yeah.”
“So we did. What do we do now?”
“Follow the Yellow Brick Road, I guess.”
Henry pointed out the road passing by the trailer park, which was as brilliant a golden-yellow as the one in the film. The trailer park itself appeared to be just dirt, though it was an exceptionally rich-looking reddish-brown dirt.
If the people here looked like Munchkins and whatnot, nobody was going to care about a woman with an Adam’s apple or a man with barely disguised hips and breasts, so we dressed as Angela and Henry and prepared to enjoy the day.
Henry unplugged our hookup and the Munchkin thanked us for visiting. Had we paid him? I know we did in the dream. I guess, as far as this place goes, that was real.
I started the truck in the usual way, and I could feel the rumble of the engine, but it was almost entirely quiet. Some sort of magic must power it here, though still by turning the mechanical parts. We took off, down the road, the same way we were headed relative to the trailer park when we stopped in the real world last night. I couldn’t say where we were headed, though, because none of our technology worked, and even if we had paper maps, who’s to say they would match anything here?
When we were getting hungry for lunch, we found a farm stand where we were able to buy some fruit (not any fruit we knew, but it tasted good) and what looked like chicken wings, using some unfamiliar coins we found in our wallets.
We came to the Emerald City at what we figured must be dinnertime. When you have a motor vehicle and aren’t waylaid by witches and other travelers, you can make distance fast! Despite looking nice, it didn’t look like it was very big, so when we found a trailer park near the edge of town, we stopped there and walked into town. It was less than a mile from where we parked to the middle of everything.
And of course this was a world with magic, so it was a truly wondrous place. There were so many amazing things in the marketplace. They had a copper, silver, gold coinage system. Among my coins I had 1, 2, and 5 of each metal except only 1 and 2 of gold, and none of the prices even on more expensive items used numbers above 9. That turned out to be because a silver was 10 coppers and a gold was 10 silvers. But our total money supply was about 25 gold, so I hesitated to spend it wastefully. There was a magical map and a magical version of a compass and that seemed important to have if we were going to live in Oz now, so I spent a total of 6 silver to buy them both. And we spent a silver on a nice dinner in a restaurant. And finally we made our way back to our trailer and our bed for the night, where our hookup for the night cost 4 copper.
I woke up and went to the bathroom without noticing the change, but when I looked outside later, the Emerald City was no longer there.
My first thought was Oz had been a one-day thing and we’d returned to the real world. There was grass outside and trees. But our electronics still didn’t work. I opened up the magic map, and that still worked. We were in Middle-Earth, which I then recalled having dreamed about.
“Yep, I remember that,” Henry commented. “There aren’t any trailer parks here, but the water and waste handle themselves magically.”
“So what have we gotten ourselves into?” I asked. “A different fantasy every day, or perpetually jumping between them? Will we eventually get back home?”
“If there is a good place to sleep other than in the trailer, we should figure out if we can keep from jumping if we don’t sleep in it. The jumps only started when we started sleeping in it, so it makes sense that is related.”
“To the extent any of this makes sense,” I responded.
“Yeah.”
But since we were in the middle of nowhere, and didn’t even find our way to a village that day, and didn’t dare camping outdoors in some unknown place, we didn’t do it that day. We depended on our stored food and slept in the trailer and jumped again.
The next morning, everything outside looked like a cartoon, including the people. We soon discovered we were in Springfield from The Simpsons, and nothing we did could allow us to leave. We got on a road out of town, having no idea if it was the right one, since we didn’t even know which state’s Springfield we were in, but it didn’t matter because a little ways down the road we found ourselves entering Springfield at the same place we left. So we just parked and tried to enjoy ourselves.
The next morning, we found our technology worked again. We got a few weird errors from our phones, but ultimately they worked; we had GPS and internet. Our money was back to normal money. We tried to call our producer, and while there was a production company there, they knew nothing about our dream makeover show, and the people we knew were not there. So clearly we were not home yet.
But we were only six hours’ drive from home, or at least where our home should be. Not knowing whether “our house” would be ours in this world, we mapped a course and worked on finishing our trip. The street existed, anyway, and we did still have the house key, whether or not it would open the door. We dressed as Joe and Ellen and got normal breakfast and lunch at some restaurants. When we got to our street, we saw our house wasn’t even the same house. Other people were inside, and I did a slow pass by it and moved on, stopping in the parking lot for a nearby shopping center (which was mostly the same as I remembered).
“So now what?” I asked Henry.
“Well, we could keep trying. Camp out somewhere around here, check back each day and see if our house is ours.”
“I would ask whether the people there would find it suspicious we keep walking by, but it’s likely it will be different people until we get back to our actual house.”
“Actually, I had another thought. My credit card worked. That means we still have an account here. Maybe we can use online access to find our address.”
Sure enough, we were able to log into our accounts. Sadly, when we checked our bank balance, we found that we’d never received the hundred grand in this world. But we did find another address in town which we apparently lived at. So I simply drove there, and the key we had opened the door. It still wasn’t the same house, but at least it looked like our stuff. Some of it, anyway. There were no trans clothes.
At the house that was apparently ours in the world we ended up in, we took the opportunity to wash our clothes, and we looked through papers to try to see how we lived on this world. It looked like we had a handyman business.
“Yep, totally believable for us,” Henry commented.
“And probably missing us today,” I added.
But they weren’t missing us today, as it turned out. About 6:30, while we were eating dinner we made with the food here, another Joe and Ellen walked in the front door.
“Told you, Joe” other-Ellen said.
“So you did, Ellen” other-Joe said.
“Well, this is awkward,” I admitted. “But I can explain.”
Other-Joe replied, “Please do. Ellen and I both dreamed last night about the trailer we see out front, and about gender-swapped versions of us, which didn’t make much sense, as we’ve never felt in the least transgender, not even to crossdress for each other. Ellen bet me that our other selves would be here when we pulled up and saw the trailer out front for real, and now she’s won that bet.”
I started, “OK, I will try to keep the long story short. I’m Joe, but Angela when dressed female. My partner is Ellen, or Henry when male. We went on a reality do-it-yourselfer show and we won.”
“Oh, like the one we signed up for?” other-Ellen asked, then to other-Joe said, “They already won. We don’t even need to do it now.”
“We’ll compare notes later,” I said. “But let me continue.”
“Certainly.”
“We won, and our prize was the pickup parked out front, and some cash, and we got to use anything out of a closed hardware store to work on a project for three months. We built the trailer.”
“I can believe that,” other-Joe said. “That is the kind of thing we might do.”
“And we tried to drive it back here, and camped out in it along the way. And that’s when things got weird. Ellen and I dreamed the same dream, that we had visited the land of Oz. And we woke up there. And every night we slept in the trailer again, dreamed a shared dream, and went to the place from that dream.”
“So,” other-Ellen said hesitantly, “We’re from some movie or TV show world of yours that you dreamed up?”
“Oh, crap!” Henry shouted. “I dreamed about that crazy show last night where Donald Trump is president and as a result everything was messed up.”
“That’s our world!” other-Joe and other-Ellen shouted together.
“F**k!” Henry and I shouted.
“I guess crossdressing is going to be out for us here,” I said. “Trump hates trans people more than anybody.”
Other-Joe said, “Well, I don’t know about that. He hates a lot of people. But trans people are definitely one of those he has it in for. You’re welcome to stay, but yeah, unless you can pass really well, you probably shouldn’t crossdress while you’re here.”
The other couple made some dinner for themselves and joined us, and we told them about our experience.
“When we got into town, we went to our address from our own world first, and the house was different and somebody else was living there. But we checked our online accounts and found we lived here in this world, so we came here. And our key opened the door, so we thought we’d found home. At least, a home. We didn’t realize there’d be our other selves here.”
“Well, if we didn’t both dream that you’d show up, we’d have a lot of trouble believing it,” other-Joe said.
“You dreamed about us. Weird. I wonder if we had other selves in those other worlds and affected their dreams, too. If we did, we never met those other selves,” Henry said.
We weren’t particularly happy just knowing that we were living in Trump world, but it was a place we could test out the theory that we wouldn’t jump worlds if we didn’t sleep in the trailer. Other-Joe said we could live with them as long as we helped with the work at their woodworking shop, which was something we might have done ourselves in our own world, if we could have gotten the seed money to set it up.
“You want to try staying here?” I asked Henry.
“We can try it. I know I’m getting tired of waking up in a different world every day. Assuming, of course, that the jumping worlds really is caused by sleeping in the trailer. Since it started the first night we slept in the trailer, we’ve been assuming it was related, but we didn’t visit another normal world before this one. Sort of normal, anyway.
After our other selves finished dinner, we all compared notes. As far as this world was concerned, we were the same two people. The accounts we’d looked up to find our addresses were the accounts our other selves used. We had credit cards with the same numbers. Our cell phones had the same numbers, and they went a little batty when we tried to use them at the same time. We figured they probably had identical SIMs and the network wasn’t equipped to handle such twins.
“No problem. We’ll go get you new SIMs tomorrow and add you to our family plan.”
They also agreed that, so that we would all have unique names, but ones matching our appearance, Henry and I would go by Henrietta and Angelo, while they would remain Joe and Ellen here. As the visitors, we agreed to that. Also, Henrietta and I had pins from the show, and we agreed we’d wear those to help distinguish ourselves - or name badges when we were in their store.
Our other selves had a guest room which they set up for us, so we slept in a bed other than the one in our trailer for the first time in several nights... and woke up still there.
“Yay, we made it!” I said as we came out to join them for breakfast, when I saw our doubles were already there eating.
“Welcome, Angelo and Henrietta,” Joe greeted us.
They had made food for us as well, and when they finished theirs, Joe explained what they do in more detail.
“We have a carpentry store. We sell wooden furniture we’ve made from new materials, unfinished or finished-to-order. We also repair and refinish antique wooden furniture, both items that customers bring in, for a fee, and items we pick up from yard sales, discarded as scrap, or whatever, which we sell in our shop. Some of our friends help us find these items, and we also go out...”
Joe checked the time.
“... Right now, in the neighborhood where trash is being picked up, to look for items people are throwing out and take a pickup-load with us back to the shop. There’s more area we could cover each day, so if we both go, we could split up and pick up more things.”
So we finished our food quickly so we could get out before the garbage men picked up and threw away the stuff people had set out. The guidelines Joe gave us were admittedly similar to what I would have set myself. If it was wooden furniture set out as trash or marked “FREE”, and there wasn’t a serious problem with it, like if it was covered in something disgusting, just pick it up. Only real wood, though; anything made of particle board or similar should be skipped. Mixed metal-wood, such as wooden tabletops with metal legs, is OK if there is no or only minor rust. Broken is OK, as long as there are some useful parts. Even if it was too difficult to repair, it could provide parts for repairing similar items. Joe gave us an area to cover and then the address of the store, and said we should scour the area until the pickup bed was full or until 9 AM and in either case head to the store.
We actually reached the point it was hard to pack anything else into the truck bed, even with tie-down cables, around 8:30, and made it to the store just a couple minutes ahead of Joe and Ellen. They pulled up just as we were starting to unload our treasures, and joined us in that effort. Soon, we had lined up five bookcases, two dressers, four regular wooden chairs, two folding wooden chairs, two desks, one dining room table, and a few other miscellaneous items.
“You get this much stuff every day?”
“Well, in the past it’s been half that, and only four days a week. Fridays, the area where trash gets picked up is way on the other side of town, and we never really felt it was worth going that far.”
Ellen added, “We don’t manage to use it all. Some of it is just too beat up, though we may salvage pieces of it.”
Joe commented, “We collect the chairs. Sometimes people want one or two chairs to match ones they have, so we keep a bunch of different styles, and only rarely do we sell a set of four along with a table. If one of the spokes in the back is missing or broken, and we have a match, we replace it. If we don’t, we replace all the spokes with plain dowels, and save the good ones as spares.”
As we went into the store, he showed me where they had stacks of two to five chairs in each of several styles, plus a couple stacks of unmatched chairs. But all the new items went into the workshop, where there were a few items in progress and lots of parts, tools, raw wood, and the like. Ellen showed us around.
“It sounds like you are as experienced as we are with this, so just use your best judgment,” Joe told us.
I grabbed a chair at random from the new arrivals and checked it out thoroughly. One of the rungs on the bottom was busted, which made the whole chair a little wobbly, but it seemed like if that was fixed it would be in good shape. One of the back spokes was loose and spun freely, but that just needed some glue. I asked Joe about where they kept spare bottom rungs and he pointed me to a drawer which had about twenty in various styles.
“Don’t worry if that’s not a perfect match. It’s down low where people aren’t going to be looking closely. Just pick one that’s roughly the right style.”
Indeed, I did not find an exact match, but there were several that had the general pattern of broad bulbs with a couple spherical ones of the right thickness and length, and I picked one, wedged it in, and added some glue to hold it in place. I also glued the loose back rung. Then i set it aside to let the glue dry and grabbed a bookshelf to work on.
The bookshelf was structurally sound, but it was badly worn, the finish worn through to bare wood on some of the shelves where books had been shelved and removed many times. Most of the outside was filthy. On one side there were a bunch of stickers some kid had put there... a kid who was likely now middle-aged. It was clear this needed to be sanded down to the wood, especially since once those stickers were removed there were likely going to be spots where the finish did not match.
I had already seen the section labeled SANDING AREA when we came in. There were several different sanding tools, ranging from large belt sanders to a Dremel tool for fine work, and I knew I’d use a few of those to do both the large, easily accessible flat surfaces and the inside corners which were hard to get at. I tried peeling the stickers, but they ripped into small pieces. He had a cleaning solution which I applied and used a scrubber like you’d use to wash dishes with stuck-on food to wash off most of the muck and also clean off the stickers. A few bits of sticker remained, nevertheless, so I used a coarse sander to get them off before working on the remains of the finish.
Once I had gotten even the traces in the inside corners out with appropriate Dremel attachments, I put it out next to other unfinished bookshelves. It was only at this point that I realized Ellen was out front, running the store. At some point she’d quit working on furniture to do that. When I got back into the workshop, Joe was also just finishing a job, and he suggested we take the table to work on together next.
The top was heavily worn, so this was going to be another one we had to sand down. But first we needed to fix the table, if we could even do that. One leg was loose because the piece at the top that held it to the table top was cracked. Another leg had presumably been broken and had been replaced with a length of 2x2 which hadn’t been shaped other than to fit it into the bracket at the top and cut it to the right length. Even that had been done poorly, and cracked the wood. We removed the leg to examine it.
“Do you have a lathe?” I asked. “The top of this was formed well and it just needs to be shaped like a leg to look good.”
“We do, but we try to sub in matching parts before we use it. It takes twice as long to make one good table leg on a lathe as we usually spend on an entire piece of furniture.”
So instead, he removed the wobbly leg and showed me where they had a large bin with a couple dozen table legs in it. There was one that was a reasonably good match, and I brought it over.
By this point Joe was working on the socket for the wobbly leg. He’d removed the cracked diagonal piece the leg mounted against, and cut a piece of 1x4 to replace it. We lifted the table upside-down on top of a workbench to give Joe access to fasten this against the lip of the table. I had to shave about 1/8 inch off one side of the top of the leg to fit it in, but I did that, we marked the spots for the screw holes, drilled, and finally, we screwed the new leg on. The table no longer wobbled.
The next step was clearly going to be to sand it down, but Joe called for a break. It was now 11:45 and time to start lunch. One corner of the workshop was walled off and there was a small kitchen in it. It seemed Joe and Ellen normally had sandwiches for lunch and that was fine with us too. There was a countertop just long enough for the four of us, and with me and Henrietta in the middle, Joe retrieved each ingredient and passed it down the line. We each applied it or not, as desired, and Ellen at the other end put the things back away.
There was a round table with two chairs and Joe went out and got two more chairs so we could all use it. We enjoyed our lunches and chatted for a bit. We agreed it was going well; we were actually on pace to get through almost all of the newly acquired pieces today. We cleaned up, and then went back to work.
By this point, the chair I’d glued and two that Henrietta had worked on were good, and we took them out front. Ellen came out with us, unlocked the front door, and replaced a sign that said “Closed for lunch / Ring bell for service” with one that simply said OPEN. Henrietta and I found the most closely matching stacks of chairs to add the three new ones to, and headed back for the workshop.
Joe was sanding the table and did not seem to need help, so I grabbed the smaller desk and Henrietta took one of the folding chairs.
The desk was solid, but definitely needed work. The finish was worn to bare wood in places. It was a kid’s desk and again it had old stickers on it. There was one small gouge I could fill in with putty. And the pulls on all the drawers were in bad shape. One was missing, and one was literally falling apart. How old was this desk, anyway? Aside from those defects there wasn’t really any damage. I am surprised nobody in the neighborhood snapped this up, because it was completely functional apart from the missing and broken pulls, just a bit ugly. I removed all the pulls, cleaned off the grime and stickers, and set it over next to the sanding area to work on when Joe was done there.
I started on a chair, and when Joe was done I sanded the desk. I got the chair done as well, and started looking at a dresser that had some major damage. Ultimately, I decided the dresser was not salvageable. Two drawers were broken, and the bottom panel was missing. It provided a bunch of good pieces of wood, pulls, and drawer slides, and Joe showed me where they kept all those things in the workshop. While I was there, I found a set of pulls suitable for the desk and put them on, though it was likely that when anybody painted or stained it they would take them off again. Still useful to have something there until then.
We had a few pieces of furniture left, but Joe called closing time. They closed the store and we all went home and ate dinner. We had a relaxing evening and it was nice to be able to sleep in a real bed again. I reminded Joe that we didn’t do the thing with the phone SIMs, and he promised to do it the next morning.
Friday morning, without a trash district to search, we decided that Henrietta and I would bring our trailer in to work, and then Ellen would run the store alone for a bit while Joe took us to a store where we could get some phone SIMs. Once that was accomplished, and we confirmed we could all call and text everybody else, we got to work on the trailer.
We had decided we were retiring the trailer as a travel vehicle. It would serve as external storage, while the tools in it would be brought inside and added to Joe and Ellen’s supply. And the bed absolutely had to be removed; nobody was to sleep in it, or in the trailer at all, ever again, to avoid any possibility that the trailer, us, the sleeper, or anybody else nearby would head off into dreamworlds elsewhere. But we kept the bed in case we changed our minds. There was a small attic storage area Joe and Ellen did not really use, but it was big enough to slide the bed into, so that is what we did with it.
We soon realized the trailer would be better with an electrical hookup, and we found shopping online an adapter that cost $50 that would let us plug the trailer’s campsite hookup into a 240-volt outlet, which the store was equipped with, and I went out to pick it up when we saw it was available locally.
Joe also took some time to update us on other activities. Weekends were busy. Especially on Saturday mornings, they went out through yard sales looking for furniture, typically in a better condition from what they picked out of the trash, on sale cheap. Saturday and Sunday afternoons they both stayed in the store, as a lot of customers came in and tended to buy up a significant portion of the refurbished furniture from that week, and sometimes they took finishing and/or delivery orders. Sunday morning, both weekend evenings, and at various other times they worked on the finishing and delivery orders, and with us around they thought it would make those a lot easier.
As for today, Joe and Ellen had two finishing orders that had indeed been finished and were due to be delivered. After confirming the customers were both available, we put pads around them to protect them and strapped them to one side of the truck bed for delivery. Henrietta rode with Joe for this delivery, and I was promised a chance to ride with Ellen on other deliveries soon.
While they were out doing that, I had a finishing order of my own to start. I got two coats applied before the end of the day, doing the repairs on other remaining furniture while I waited for the first coat to dry, while Ellen tended the shop.
Just when we thought things were getting normal, on Saturday morning before we left the house, another pickup towing a trailer showed up. It looked like our pickup and trailer, if we’d let hippies decorate the outside. The people who came out of the truck looked like we might imagine we would if we’d been hippies, which was something we had never imagined before, since we were born decades too late. Except that Joe, Ellen, Henrietta, and I all realized we had just dreamed about them. We invited them in and served them breakfast.
“I’m Aspen, and this is my wife Flower,” my counterpart from the new couple said. “Seems like Squaresville here, but thanks for inviting us in.”
“I’m Angelo, and my wife is Henrietta. The couple over there preparing breakfast for us all is Joe and Ellen.”
“Square names, too, from the old times.”
“Did you two by any chance win a TV reality show and build that trailer as part of your prize?” I asked them.
“We did! How’d you guess?”
“We did that too, and every night we slept in it, we were transported to a different world.”
“That happened to us, too! It’s been the most groovy experience.”
“Was this where you lived in your world?”
“No. The address we lived at doesn’t exist, but we found this one written on the truck’s registration paper and decided to come here.”
“How do we tell them about the state this country is in?” Henrietta asked me.
“I think we just tell them this world is different from theirs, straight up. Warn them,” I replied.
“What is it that we need to be warned about?” Flower asked.
“I’m afraid our world is not like yours. You called it Squaresville, and from your perspective that may be right. Hippies were a short-lived fad in this world, and while the concept of the flower child never fully vanished, they are few and far between today.”
“I figured that had to be. How else could the place look so boring?” Aspen replied.
Flower added, “They must not have had the revolution here.”
As Joe and Ellen brought our food and then joined us in eating, I commented, “Oh, right. The more political hippies wanted a revolution, and the others simply wanted peace and an end to the war in Vietnam, or at least for the United States to withdraw from it. Tell us how the revolution happened in your world.”
Flower said, “California voted to secede from the United States on November 4, 1969. For almost a year they stood alone as the California Republic.”
“What, they just let them secede?” Henrietta asked, flabbergasted.
“The United States sent in troops, twice, but most of the troops deserted and joined with the hippies when they gave them pot.”
We all laughed as Flower continued her story.
“Oregon joined them in secession August 4, 1970, and on August 10, 1970, the two states established the Hippie States of America. In November 1970, secession was on the ballot in twenty-two states, and only in Michigan did it not pass. These states joined the new nation later that year. The United States withdrew from Vietnam immediately after that, but it was too late for the old country. Most of the remaining states seceded in separate votes during 1971. New York was the last state remaining in the union, and it’s not clear whether it was their vote in May 1972 or the federal government’s vote that same month that officially ended the United States, but by the end of the month, all fifty states had joined the Hippie States, and Maryland annexed Washington, D.C. so that they wouldn’t be left out. Guam and Puerto Rico also joined as states to bring us to fifty-two.”
“So it was a completely peaceful revolution?” I asked.
Aspen replied, “Yes. Peace was the key point in the new nation’s constitution. They promised not to get involved in other nations’ wars. Only if it was necessary to protect the HSA would they participate in war.”
“I wish we had peace here,” Joe commented.
“Who are you at war with?”
“Officially, nobody. But we have a president who wants to be a dictator and has tried to pick fights with the whole world. He’s also used immigration and customs enforcement to effectively run a war of terror on immigrants within the country. It’s supposed to be illegal immigrants, but in reality they are simply going after anyone who looks foreign, or different. There are enough in Congress who are theoretically part of his party to keep them from doing much about it.”
“Why, that’s awful!” Flower exclaimed. “Thanks for the warning.”
Aspen added, “The other thing we were promised was legal pot. We even put it on our flag: Green, yellow, and red stripes with a black pot leaf in the middle.”
Joe replied, “We still don’t have it at the federal level here, but several states, I have lost count of how many, have passed various kinds of laws to legalize marijuana. You can just walk into a store in those states and buy it; even though it’s banned federally, the federal government has chosen not to enforce the law there.”
Ellen interjected, “Well, you can only buy it only in special stores that are licensed to sell it, and you have to show ID to show you’re of age, and in some cases, a resident of the state.”
“Well of course!” Aspen exclaimed. “It’s legal in all our states, so we don’t have the resident rule, but we have a minimum age, which is 18 in most of our states. Some states have raised it to 21, while some at times experimented with reducing it to 16 but those have all gone back to 18. Schools will punish kids for bringing it into school or for being high in class, even if they can legally use it, and there are other places you can’t use it, too.”
Joe responded, “We don’t have legal pot here, but our states that do all have rules like that, too. That is another thing we need to warn you about. If you have any pot, keep it hidden while you’re here today. I assume you plan on leaving tonight the same way you got here.”
“We haven’t stayed in any of the worlds for more than one day. Have you confirmed that sleeping outside the trailer will allow us to stay in one of the worlds?” Flower asked.
I replied, “Yes. We have been in this world a few days now.”
Aspen said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but where’s your trailer?”
“Joe and Ellen here didn’t go on the show yet. We parked our trailer over by their store since it’s no longer used for sleeping. It is extra storage and lets us use the tools we brought with us. Speaking of which, we should all be heading out to our workshop.”
“Oh, what are you making?”
“We collect damaged and broken furniture people are putting out as trash and repair, refinish, and sell it at our store.”
“That’s cool. We might have done something like that if we hadn’t gotten lost on the way home, but being lost has become its own adventure. Good luck,” Aspen said, as he and Flower left. They got in their truck and drove off.
The weekend was as hectic as Joe and Ellen had said. We only brought in a few new pieces but I completed the finishing order I started Friday and two others, and started on another two, and participated in three deliveries, as well as helping out on the sales floor and with loading furniture for some people who picked stuff up.
Joe ordered pizza for Sunday dinner while we were all still at the shop, and we ate it in the kitchen area of the workshop. Two large pizzas, because we were all hungry after working hard. And as it turned out, we were so tired that we all passed out on the table.
It was sometime in the middle of the night when we all awoke, and we immediately realized we’d had one of those weird dreams again.
“Crap!” I shouted. “Did we dream ourselves to another world?”
“I think so,” Ellen responded. “I dreamed we were in a place that celebrates All-Gender Day.”
Henrietta replied, “I bet, with Trump in charge, you guys didn’t have a day like that.”
Joe said, “Nope.”
I added, “So this might be our world. Things aren’t completely smooth sailing for transgender people here, but we don’t have the government trying to kill us, deport us, or deny we exist.”
We were still in the kitchen area of our workshop, but it wasn’t the same. Apart from where we’d dirtied it knocking stuff on the floor as we were dozing on the table, it was clean and new. The store itself was different. There was lots of new stuff throughout the store, and nowhere near the inventory we’d had. Apart from the remains of our dinner, there wasn’t even any food in the kitchen, as if we’d just installed the appliances and had not gone out to buy food to stock it with yet.
We went outside and saw that both our pickups, which had been parked under the shelter by the store’s loading dock, and the trailer, which was still attached to its outlet, came along with us. While it was at the same address, the store in their world was freestanding, but the one here was at the end of what looked like a completely vacant shopping center. Some windows were boarded up, and you could see the silhouettes of the signs of stores that used to occupy the empty spaces.
“Hey, I recognize this place,” I said. “I remember when all these stores were here when I was a kid. It closed years ago and sat vacant.”
Joe responded, “Except it’s not completely vacant anymore, because our store’s here. Your store, I should say.”
Henrietta said, “Wait. Do we have our money?” and pulled out her phone.
One thing we were sad about in Joe and Ellen’s world is that we didn’t have our winnings. They hadn’t gone on the show yet, and our money didn’t carry over to the other world.
Henrietta discovered her phone didn’t work because it had the SIM from the other world, but she dug her original out of her purse, swapped it in, and soon was able to log into our online banking.
She then reported, “We had our money, up until three days ago, when we spent most of it at once.”
She did some more on her phone and reported, “It looks like our producers canceled the home remodeling TV series we were hoping to be in. We, or I suppose some other copy of us who was here at the time, then bought this entire shopping center as plan B, using most of our winnings.”
Ellen said, “That’s a steal, if you can figure out what to do with it.”
Henrietta continued, “All the email I got yesterday was unread, so presumably they jumped worlds the night before.”
I suggested, “Obviously, they had decided to open the same kind of woodworking store Joe and Ellen had, but they were just starting out. Maybe the idea was to make a successful store here and try to rent out the other units? Maybe fix them up a bit?”
After first driving by the address where Joe and Ellen lived in the other world and seeing a different house there, I drove the four of us to the address we’d originally lived at, and found the house we’d originally lived in. Our keys opened the door. There was nobody else there; we didn’t find another set of Joe and Ellen. There was recently purchased food, presumably from the other us who briefly spent time here. We ate breakfast and discussed our situation.
“Clearly, though we didn’t sleep in the trailer, we slept close enough to it,” I began.
Joe noted, “The place you parked the trailer was immediately outside of the part of the store where our kitchen was. We might have been within twenty feet of it.”
Henrietta added, “We didn’t jump worlds when we slept in your house when the trailer was parked on the street in front. How far was that?”
Ellen replied, “I think about fifty feet. And Joe and I were equally far from it in our bedroom as you were.”
I declared, “OK, no more sleeping in the store at all. Or outside it, or anywhere within fifty feet of the trailer. If we are tired, we close the store and come home.”
We quickly found paperwork at the house showing the plan was as we had thought. The other us had bought the place Friday at a bankruptcy auction, and had managed to take the whole thing for a bid of seventy grand, the minimum bid, because nobody else bid on it. Nobody else was even interested enough in a whole shopping center to even bid the cost of a small house on it.
They had set up the legal documents to lease out individual stores in this shopping center, established our business in the first unit, and apparently spent Saturday getting our store set up, spending a bunch of the rest of our winnings. We had a glass company coming out today to replace broken windows in three of the units. Our own store was set up to have a grand opening a week from today, and the advertising for that was already going out. It indeed looked like the idea was to attract clients by putting one successful business in the center, along with making the others ready.
We decided to follow Joe and Ellen’s plan of scavenging items in the morning’s garbage pickup zone. But here, we decided we would be ourselves, that is, Angela and Henry. We didn’t pass completely, but we could wear clothes over the stuff we had on the show to look good enough. Ironically, the legal documents were in Joe and Ellen’s names, though, so if somebody needed to sign something, we were going to have them do it.
We took Joe and Ellen to their truck at the store so we could both go out and scavenge stuff. But we added more items to the shopping list. We’d pick up anything that looked like it might help us clean up and set up the other stores.
We came back and unloaded the truck and went out a second time. Joe and Ellen made a couple trips as well. We unloaded the stuff into our store, putting old and damaged wooden furniture in the workshop area, and tools in another. We didn’t worry about trying to fix any of them today. We had too few spare parts, anyway.
After we found a huge ring of unlabeled keys, which we correctly guessed were for the other stores, we started exploring them. We made a first pass just to assess the state of the stores. We used Scotch tape and a pencil to label the keys as we figured out which was which. Most of the units still had suite numbers above the doors, and where they were missing, we painted a number on a wooden sign and put it in the window. We also added locksmithing and keymaking tools to the shopping list so we could give out keys other people might not have 50-year-old copies of. Maybe electronic locks.
What they needed most was vacuuming. There were heaps of dust in every store. Fortunately, each of our groups had picked up a Shop-Vac. One had a damaged cord and the other just needed a new filter. We got both working again and managed to vacuum out two stores before we started getting hungry.
We went out and bought food to stock the workshop’s kitchen. Then we made sandwiches in the same assembly line style we had done in the other world.
Just as we finished eating, the glass company showed up. We went out with them, showed them the damaged units, unlocked them, and vacuumed the areas around the windows so they wouldn’t have to work in filth. Then we let them do their work while we worked on the other stores. We found a couple pieces of damaged furniture we took back to our store, and noted where there were metal store shelves in some of the units, but didn’t try to move them.
By the end of the day, all the units were vacuumed, all the broken glass had been replaced, and we had noted other conditions of the units. One unit was missing a doorknob on a door to a storage room. One restroom had a cracked sink that needed to be replaced. There were several places with minor damage to walls and missing floor tiles. And there were several other issues like that, but nothing we couldn’t deal with.
At dinnertime we locked everything up and went over to my house. Following our new rule, we stayed at the house after dinner, setting up a room for Joe and Ellen to sleep in.
The next morning, we woke up still in our house. Joe and Ellen were still with us, too. We continued working on gathering furniture in the mornings and afterward doing the basic work needed on the other units to make them ready. We put real numbers on the units lacking them, and fixed the doorknob, the sink, and the wall and floor issues.
By early afternoon Thursday we were done with that work on the other units, at least until we had tenants who might want more specific work done. We focused more on the furniture. We had gotten quite a bit of salvage and we designated all the more seriously broken items as scrap for parts. So little of the furniture repair work that was our counterparts’ main business in the other world had been done in this store that we didn’t even have bins for many types of spare parts, but we made makeshift bins out of cardboard boxes some of the things we had needed to buy came in. Through the weekend we made more than thirty pieces ready, most of them just bare wood, as customers could choose a color and style of finish, except in cases where the old finish was soaked so deeply into the wood we had to stick with a similar color. That was some nice stuff to have ready for the grand opening. And Friday, we received our order from a wholesaler of spare parts, paints and stains, and other things customers might buy along with an order. A separate order brought us lumber.
The grand opening Monday went smoothly, and we took in just over a thousand dollars from the first day’s sales. Considering we have no rent to pay for the store, and minimal expenses besides our own labor, this wasn’t bad. We got a similar level of sales through the rest of the week, though we had to keep scavenging, repairing, finishing, and delivering furniture to make that happen. Having four of us doing it really helped.
“I feel sorry for your customers back in your world,” I told Joe. “Unless another copy of us has dropped in there, it must just look like you up and skipped town.”
“Or got murdered, kidnapped, or deported by Trump’s goon squad he calls ICE,” he responded. “Your world is nicer in not having that stuff going on.”
We continued doing this, and pretty soon had the store full of inventory and even higher sales than at the opening. The jackpot, though, was getting our first interest from another company wanting to open a store in the shopping center. We had learned what retail space like this rented for in the area, and we were intentionally slightly under that to compensate for having a location that was long vacant. While we did some work to fix each store up for its new tenant, this was mostly free money for us, and would eventually exceed what we could bring in from our own store once we filled the shopping center.
Two months later, we had achieved that, with only two units still not leased, though most of the companies were still in the process of setting up their stores. By that time, we had noticed some small differences that made us believe that we weren’t back in our own world. There were 74 genders in this world, and All-Gender Day was celebrated two days later. We watched some of the episodes of our competition when they aired, and the Joe and Ellen who won weren’t transgender and never appeared as Angela and Henry. Some of the details of how they assembled their trailer were different, and not, we thought, due to editing.
Around that time, yet another copy of Joe and Ellen showed up with their trailer. The different details we had noticed matched the reality they came from, and maybe they were the right ones for this world. We caught them up on all that had happened, and they decided to go by their middle names, William and Susan, or Bill and Sue for short.
Bill and Sue told us about the dozens of other worlds they had been to, including the one they most recently left, in which people didn’t have different sexes. They both had the organs for both genders, and a generally female shape to the body. Everybody there was like that, as far as they could tell. There were clothes similar to both men’s and women’s styles of the kinds we were all used to, but that’s actually true here if you just look at women’s clothes.
Bill said, “The funniest thing, I thought, was yoga pants. The bulge from the male junk of the people wearing them was obvious, and it seemed like the pants were made with a pouch to contain them. The top half of the same person was just as obviously female.”
“That would be awesome,” Henry said. “No need for surgery, hormones, or anything. If you want to be male, you just dress male. To be female, just dress female. Everybody’s both anyway.”
I added, “Yeah, I wouldn’t need these things.” I shocked the other two couples by lifting my blouse and bra and ripping off one of the breast forms to show they were fake. They were so realistic that if I hadn’t done that, the others would never know.
When evening came, we realized there wasn’t enough room in the house for all three couples to sleep. Joe and Ellen offered to find one couple a hotel, but Henry and I decided otherwise.
“It’s time that we moved on,” I told the others.
Henry said, “This world is nice, and it’s a lot like ours, but we know now that it’s not ours. We also know there is at least one world out there we’d rather be in. So we want to go hook up our trailer to our truck and move on. Even though it means we might be waking up in a different world every day for a while.”
“We’ll miss you,” Joe and Ellen said.
There were hugs and kisses all around. Henry and I had never actually kissed Joe and Ellen before. Between the gender issues and the appearance of cheating on our spouses with their near-doubles, we had always decided it was better off not done. Now that we were leaving, it was clearly the right time.
Henry and I packed everything that belonged to us in our pickup. All six of us drove to the store, and we went through both the store and the trailer to make sure we were taking what we thought belonged to us and not to Joe and Ellen. And they gave us three thousand in cash so we’d have something in case we came to a world where we didn’t have any money, or one where there wasn’t even another us there to have money. We hooked up the trailer to our pickup, then drove to an open area of the parking lot far from any other cars, buildings, or people. The others went back to the house to sleep, while we set up to sleep in our trailer.
And we awoke in some other world. It wasn’t the right one. But we visited with a Joe and Ellen for the day and moved on. And again the next day. And the next.
Sometimes Joe and Ellen had different names. Sometimes they weren’t even there. About one day in every five was nothing like ours but resembled some work of fiction, usually one that one of us could recognize. Occasionally we visited worlds that were bad enough that we just drove out of town and camped out in the trailer all day somewhere where nobody would bother us. There were plenty of worlds that were just fine, though, just not the one we wanted. It didn’t have to be specifically that one if it had some other unusual feature that made it more appealing to us as transgender people. But we didn’t find that feature.
We visited hundreds of worlds, some of them multiple times. We encountered five other Joes and Ellens who had been to the world we were looking for, and only confirmed further for us that we wanted to get there. It took us five years. We woke up one morning and found ourselves in the bodies the couple who replaced us had described, with both sets of sexual organs on female-shaped bodies, and we knew we’d arrived.
We checked the address on our vehicle registration and drove over. It was the shopping center one of our alternate selves had bought at bankruptcy, but here, they’d built apartments above one wing of the stores. They had wedged a stairwell along one wall of their woodworking shop to put a door to the apartments upstairs at ground level. While we were trying to figure out how to get to them, somebody there saw us and came out to meet us.
The person, dressed like a woman, led us inside and introduced themselves as the couple who ran the woodworking shop. Her partner, who was eating breakfast, saw us and simply said, “Oh, another one,” but she went and fixed us some breakfast. She introduced herself as Sarah, and I noticed that she had a face similar to mine while her partner looked more like Henry. After she served our food, she sat down to her own plate of mostly finished food and explained a bit.
“We are never forced to choose a gender, but most of us do. For most people, the gender we choose determines the role we play in a relationship, and so at high school or college age we choose a gender, or at least consciously choose to swap between the genders. It’s forbidden to force children to choose a gender and children are given gender-neutral names. Mine was Pen. Those who choose a gender choose a gendered name at that time. You’ve already been using the gendered pronouns he and she with my husband and me, and that’s correct. We use it for people who have not chosen a gender, though that is sometimes not obvious, especially with strangers.”
Sarah’s husband Kenneth added, “We’re allowed to change our declared gender and our gendered name at any time, but apart from the genderfluid, few do while they are in a relationship. But even people with a long-established gender sometimes change. It’s allowed. The concept of transgender, though, is something that doesn’t apply among our people. There’s no wrong gender. But we’re familiar with it because we understand that other worlds aren’t like ours, and a bunch of our counterparts who are transgender in their worlds have come here.”
“How many?” I asked.
“You’re couple number ten.”
“Do you keep in touch with them all?”
“Yeah, they live in these apartments.”
“Really?”
“We built them for this purpose when we realized this was happening. Your reality show never aired in this world, but it’s clear that it aired in many of the worlds with separate male and female people, where being transgender is a thing, and some but not all of you are transgender. And we’ve come to know you all well enough now to recognize you among them.”
“I guess I can’t hide it from someone who knows my look-alikes as well as you.”
“The first two couples who came, we made space for in our home, though it was getting to be tight quarters. We were already exploring the possibility of building apartments over the stores when the third couple showed up. We made temporary housing in an empty retail unit while the eight of us all spent time involved in the building. We built four units at first, but immediately started work on a second block of four units, and we have since added a third. The arrivals have considerably slowed down now, so I’m not sure we are ever going to need a fourth.”
“What sorts of work do they all do?”
“Oh, they live here rent-free to help us in our various businesses. Many years ago, we rented the woodworking store at the end of the row here, and when the rest of the complex was empty and the owners declared bankruptcy, we bought the whole complex cheap. We rented out some of the stores at times, and expanded into others ourselves. But when the others started arriving, we took over all the empty units.”
“I hope you’re extending this offer to us.”
“Certainly. Oh, and one more thing.”
“Oh, what?”
“If you decide you want this to be your forever home, one of our friends runs a junkyard. All the others have eventually decided they wanted to remove any risk of ever leaving this world and they’ve sent their trailers to the crusher after removing everything of value.”
“We spent five years trying to find this world after one of the other copies of us that we ran into told us about it. I imagine we’ll be doing that pretty quickly.”
Henry was standing close behind me, and I felt something he never had before poking me in a delicate place. He said, “I agree with what she said,” and then kissed me on the cheek.