Goblins and Ghosts in the Nebula of Ants by Steven Lebow

There are, of course, spooks and sprites, goblins and ghosts, on every habitable planet in all the galaxies. Even here, in the Ant Nebula.

Are they indigenous to those planets? Or were they brought there by the space travelers who journeyed millions of miles from the earth?

Who knows?

In any case, the dark realm exists on every planet that we know. Sometimes there were demons who possessed the elderly and at other times itinerant ghosts would plague the young.

There was no chance of getting away from them. They didn’t care if you were a physicist or a physician, an economist or an ecologist. The demons came out at night. They stole your keys or moved your small rocket transport.

It didn’t matter. They just came to bedevil you.

“Did you hear that Carpe Diem hears voices in her right ear?” asked Tzeitl, the tailor, to my grandmother while drinking coffee in her apartment.

“No, but my understanding is that Carpe Diem has always heard voices. That’s no new thing,”  my grandmother said.

“She’s only twenty-one,” said Tzeitl, “And already she stopped her periods. At this rate she’ll never have any children, even the ones that grow in the hot house.”

 I used to listen to my grandmother’s stories of Carpe Diem and her tragic history. And I have never forgotten them, even until this, my 60^th year.

“Stop telling tales of Carpe to everyone in the settlement,” my grandfather said to my grandmother that night.

“Is it her fault if she is asexual, or if they identify as non-binary? God forbid! No one chooses to be cisgender or heteronormative! We are what we are from the moment that we slip out of our mothers.”

“In fact,” my grandfather concluded, “There is an ancient legend that even before we are born our sexual orientation and our future spouse is already decided in heaven. God forbid that we should condemn someone who deviates from what we consider the norm. After all, doesn’t the Kabbalah imply that the choice chooses us, and not the other way around?”

After that my grandmother stopped criticizing Carpe in front of my grandfather.

Nonetheless, she was still fascinated by Carpe and continued to gossip about her with Tzeitl, the tailor.

“Did you hear that she is no longer a she?” said the tailor. “You must address her now as they and them. Maybe she has body dysmorphia?”

When she used the term “body dysmorphia” she automatically lowered her voice.

I could hear my grandmother chuckle as she said, “Yes, but that is one of a million possibilities when we talk about sex and gender.”

“However, there is an old Terran poet, Walt Whitman,” said my grandmother. “He once wrote “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes!”

“I understand,” said the tailor. “But what about the parents? Aren’t they devastated that their child will never have children of their own?”

“Who know what the parents think? They didn’t put that devil in her ear. Maybe it is a very small demon or maybe she is just hearing her own voice.”

I wanted to hear more. I had never heard the words “cisgender” or “nonbinary” before. I thought I would die if I didn’t understand them.

I was only 12 years old.

That was the summer that I accidentally discovered my grandfather’s ancient  psychiatric manual, the DSM 33, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual”.

The now outdated manual contained lists upon lists of “ mental diseases and disorders”. It was there that I found the phrase “body dysmorphia”. It was defined as a mental illness involving obsessing over one’s appearance.

I picked up from what my grandmother was saying that body dysmorphia meant someone who was not comfortable in their own skin.

Was it someone who hated who they were? Is such a thing possible?

A few months later the tailor came to our kitchen again, in order to bait my grandmother.

“Did I tell you that Carpe Diem has a boyfriend now. His name is Cogito Ergosum and he is cisgender, I hear.”

“Well, good for them,” said grandmother. “Everybody, irrespective of gender or sexual orientation, deserves a little happiness on this god-forsaken planet.”

Nothing could stop Tzeitl from tale bearing.

“Of course, I understand that the two of them might be inquiring about starting a polyamorous relationship with others!”

I was in the kitchen again. They ignored me while I pretended to do my homework at the kitchen table.

They had used a word that I had never heard before, “polyamorous”. I wondered what did it mean?

“What does that mean?” grandmother asked the tailor.

“Oh, you really haven’t heard? It’s apparently very popular in this part of the galaxy. It is common in a colony that has too few men,” said Tzeitl.

“Polyamorous means that four women share one man as a husband or a lover. It’s the inverse of the story of Jacob in the Terran Bible.”

Grandmother blanched. “Is it like a menage a trois?” she asked. “They all have sex together at one time?”

“No, that’s not it at all. Polyamory means that one night you’re with one wife and one night you’re with another,” said Tzeitl.

“It’s not exactly an affair,” she said. “It’s more like man-sharing. Everybody knows up front that they are sharing the same husband.”

“Polyamory,” said grandmother. “Oh how I wish we  were back in the 30th century when things were so much simpler then!”

Weeks went by and Tzeitl didn’t visit. Word around the colony was that she was sick. Some friends said it was Venusian Fever while others speculated that she had Jovian weight gain syndrome.

Several months later the tailor returned to grandmother’s apartment and it looked like she needed to say something to her.

I knew that something was going on by the look on her face. I kept my head buried in a book, hoping that protective coloration would keep my grandmother from seeing me, realizing the debaucheries that I had now been exposed to.

“I have something bad to tell you,” Tzeitl said to grandmother. “The polyamorous husband, Cogito Ergosum, had a devil in his head. Everyone knew that he was unhappy, but no one- not even his wives- knew how unhappy he was.”

“So you know how we always thought that the demons were in her ears?” said Tzeitl. “but in fact he was the one who was haunted all these years. In fact, he was thinking and plotting it for a while…”

“Enough!” said grandmother. “Get to the point!”

“He took his life last night,” she said. “He hung himself in Carpe Diem’s linen closet. She found him when she went to look for clean sheets. He was hanging there from the clothes rack.”

“Do you think he killed himself because of the non-binary spouse? Did he end his life because he could no longer live in a polyamorous marriage?”

“Stop,” said grandmother. “Nobody ever knows why one person and not another kills himself. There are lots of straight cisgender people who are married to non-binary spouses and they don’t kill themselves.”

“There are probably happy polyamorous people. Do they kill themselves?” said my grandmother.

“But don’t you think that the quirky pronouns cause…”

“Pronouns have nothing to do with a person’s happiness,” said grandmother. “A person takes their life? No one knows why! Life is a mystery, through and through. Sex and gender are a riddle from beginning to end. Pronouns matter, but who really know why someone hangs themself?”

And it was at that point that my grandmother finally noticed that I was pretending to study. She now realized that I had been listening all along to this salacious tale.

“Enough of demons who live in our ears!” she said. “Who really understands such things?”

“And you,” she pointed at me, “Get out of my kitchen and don’t come back.”

“Promise me that you’ll never tell anyone what you heard today!” she screamed at me.

And so it is. I have never told this story to anyone at all.

That is, at least, until just now.

Steven Lebow

Image: Pixabay.com – male and female gender signs in black on a white ground.