Excerpt: (untitled)

He was born on a distant star, far from Earth, on a star where gender seemed more like an option than a mandatory sentence. He was formed like a human, all his kin were – except for the additional phalange on each limb. Six long slender fingers, six long slender toes, graceful balletic legs, a smile that would almost be as sharp as a razor's edge if it wasn't so beautiful. His smile is like an accessory that compliments his face, the straight nose, close-to-flawless lips, and the oddly coloured eyes – purple, purple as the jacaranda blossoms that are scattered across his planet. They're not called jacaranda blossoms there, of course, but he's been on Earth so long that it's difficult for him to remember his mother tongue. Without his smile, his face and eyes seem serious, deadly serious – not dangerous, but very sombre. Like he is thinking of things that will require him to move quickly, and his mind will quickly switch his body from standby to wide-awake; he looks ready to grow wings if the need presented itself. The Earth children who first saw him grew confused and muddled, in their minds, gazing upon his countenance, they saw many things: the wolf, the reptile, the fragile beauty of a butterfly's wing, genies and magicians and wizards of old. He doesn't intimidate them, but he does confuse them. They're not sure what they're looking at. In Earth adults, it's even worse.

He is only a young man. He grew up in a city of blue and silver glass, under the gentle gaze of a weak sun, a place where beauty was not divided into boxes nor given labels. Beauty was beauty, and that was that. Beauty was sought after, his people would die for beauty. Beauty was everyone's and beauty was no one's. Beauty should be worn on the skin, taken deep into the body, made in every movement. Apparent in every sound escaping from the throat. Lived for. Died for.

He was beautiful. He still is. But there was something missing from the entirety of his beauty. The way his smile complimented his face, there needed to be something that complimented him wholly, he needed to find the missing piece...

Why he went to Earth, he didn't know. It was an extraordinary planet, prone to moodswings and natural violence, its skies were the strangest and most delicate shade (on his star, the skies were a deep purple like burning amethysts). The waters of the planet tasted like tears. And its people...they were strange. They didn't live for beauty, but some of them did. They were generally warlike, but some of them abhorred hurting others. It was a planet full of contradictions. Perhaps that was why he chose it.

When he first landed, the thing that frightened him the most was the binary genders and the strange, painful boxes that the Earthians forced themselves into solely because of their genders. Girls. Boys. Men. Women. Male. Female. Pink blue strong weak talkative quiet gentle violent – and these things were perpetuated from birth. His fear gave way to disgust, then sorrow. And then, it was apparent to him that he had to choose a sex. And for the time spent on Earth, stick with it.

It was unnatural! It was cruel! His people didn't have gender. It was necessary for procreation, but after procreation, the body returned to its natural state – here, on Earth, the word was androgyne. From the Greek words meaning 'man' and 'woman'. Even the word was strange. On his planet, the word for the body's natural state was derived from the sounds made to mean 'whole' and 'complete'.

He spent a week studying his face in a mirrored glass, carefully analysing the curve of his lips, sharp edges of his cheekbones, the settling of his lashes against his cheeks. He ran his hands across his collarbone, flexed his fingers, slipped them between his long legs – where the tell-tale sign of his gender would be if he was an Earthian, and damned to follow its rules. A slave to flesh! It was unthinkable. But it had to be done. He was here for a reason.

He chose to present himself as a male. He had taken stock of his features, and decided that on the spectrum that was so rigid and tight and unfair and awful, that he was most like a male. So he went out into the world as a male, and started looking for whatever it was that was missing from him. He had been wandering for three years, Earthian time – he'd learned to drive, learned to smoke in a way that would expel the chemicals from his lungs (and was startled to learn that Earthian bodies couldn't perform this function, and still insisted on selling cigarettes to their population), learned that he could only tint his nails if he was going out 'clubbing'. He knew his appearance still confused people, but it was the best he could do. It would be worse if he presented himself as female, he was fairly sure.

He never told anyone where he was really from nor what he was. Another thing he learned very early on was that certain things on Earth were Completely Unbelievable, and nothing he could say or do would convince anyone otherwise. So he worked within their lines. He was careful.

Until he chanced upon a cherub-faced blond beanpole with skytinted eyes, and the little slip of a sprite beside him, whose flame-coloured hair mirrored his own. And he knew.