Status Updates From Curious Toys

"I knew you weren't really a boy," he said.

"How?"

"Because only a girl would be so brave."

No one had ever thought she was brave. She'd never thought she was brave. Girls never were, unless they were martyred saints, like Joan of Arc.

The role of gender in this story is fascinating.

Just another man out for a morning stroll, that was all, just another man.

Autism?

She felt neither girl nor boy but trapped in between. Like an out-of-focus but of film, one of those fragments where the sprockets didn't line up. She knew what happened to those damaged frames: they got burned up by the projector or edited out and thrown away.