Short Story: I Have Never

For the archives: I Have Never. This should be the most up-to-date and current version of this short story. Author's Notes follow at the end.

I Have Never

Backstage isn’t what you expected.  You hadn’t thought the short, wiry man serving bourbon behind the bar was also the stage manager, but after pocketing the bills you passed over, he’s the one that lead the way.  He brings you across the small stage with its raised dais, single pole, mirrored walls and coloured lights.  A nondescript white door behind the nearest booth leads backstage.  You wonder if any of your friends notice you leave.  They probably don’t.  They’re too busy drinking and laughing. Flirting, celebrating, playing increasingly rude rounds of “I Have Never”. There are pitchers of beer on the table and more beer on the floor.

              You drank heavily and quickly before approaching the bartender. Your ears glow hot with drunkenness. Nevertheless, stepping through that door still brings a swift, uncomfortable twist of the stomach. It is the sudden discomfort of abandoning the familiar.

               The room is small and cramped and smells of powders, perfumes and of damp.  The single dressing table, its mirror surrounded by soft lights, half of them not working, is sort of what you expected. The table’s surface is hidden beneath tubes and vials and brushes and accessories you don’t recognize. Overhead, a single bare lightbulb dangles from the concrete ceiling, its light harsh and unflattering. This you did not expect; surely, there should be more ambiance, more magic to this space?

              Clothes erupt from every corner: dresses and skirts and blouses on hooks and hangers, sparkly costumes and boas and scarfs, and from beneath the cascade of fabrics tumble shoes, all of them with slender heels, many of them ridiculously tall. There is something mesmerizing about their impracticality.

              Throbbing bass followed you through from the bar filled with your friends as the door closed behind you. Now the music thrums the wall, a heart hidden behind cold concrete and plasterboard. “Curious?” asks the performer in the room, preparing for the next act.  A loose robe hangs from their narrow frame. It takes you a moment to decipher what they said, your grasp of the foreign language young and uncertain.  You blush and shake your head, lacking the confidence to speak for yourself.

              “Birthday,” the bartender answers. 

              The performer holds your gaze for a moment. Then, they shrug and return to their preparations. They have already lost interest. You are not very interesting. But they are. You try not to stare.  Their naked confidence tests you. Their robe hangs open and you see breasts, small and well-shaped, with protuberant nipples.  Returning to the mirror, they are indifferent to your surprise.  Despite an almost painful thinness, their shoulders and back seem powerfully lined with muscle. 

              You are led into the opposite corner of the room and asked to undress.  You strip out of your jeans and t-shirt until you stand under that uncovered light, shivering, in your briefs.  The concrete floor is cold.  Your left sock has a hole through which your big toe pokes. The hole and the way your toe pokes through is embarrassing. Naked in a cold room behind a bar you barely know, and it’s your toe that concerns you. Why didn’t you wear decent socks today? Your thick, ugly toe and the rough, grey floor.

              When the bartender asks you to take the socks off, for some reason it feels a step too far. You don’t want to take your socks off and regret this drunken decision.  But it isn’t something you can argue, half-naked and in a foreign language, because suddenly you can’t remember the word for ‘sock’. You know the word, you have studied the word. But at that moment, the word escapes you. Therefore, you do as told and remove your socks and sit at the little stool the bartended pushes towards you.

              You lose track of the performer with the small breasts as the bartender dresses you.  He wraps something around your waist that is tight and uncomfortable and keeps your soft middle smooth.  Straps dangle from it, lying limp against your pale thighs.  He mimes pointing your toes and then rolls stockings up your legs once you do. He attaches them to the straps, catching a few hairs in the process. With each snap, the stockings draw more tautly, and your stomach does, too.

              Then, a bra; there is something pathetic about the deflated cups lying empty against your chest. You think of the performer, and their small, well-shaped breasts.  The man fills the cups of the bra with inserts of his own creation: a stocking filled with rice.  Doubled over and tied off, the knot resembles a nipple once nestled against your chest and arranged properly.  The weight pulling at your shoulder and the way the bra strap dig into your skin is a new sensation.  Everything this evening is a new sensation, as increasingly you wondered what, exactly, the fuck you are doing backstage at a drag bar in a foreign country while friends celebrated a birthday out front.

              The bartender then brings over a bundle of glittering fabric that reveals itself as a dress.  At his urging, you step into it. He tugs it up over your waist and up to your neck.  It is silver and short and tight as he pulls up the zipper and seals you in to the dress.  Your shoulders and arms are bare, yet you felt increasingly hot despite the cold floor.  The dress leaves you feeling half-naked.

              The bartender casts an appraising eye over his creation. 

              “Perfect,” he says. He smiles.  “Beautiful.”

              You have doubts.

              He leads you to the dressing table.  The tall, thin performer is done preparing.  They are stunning, wearing a full-length blue dress that glitters beneath the overhead bulb.  A long slit bares their smooth leg to mid-thigh.  A wig cascades brunette waves down their bare back, and their face is a pallid white mask.  Blue eyes glitters, and their lips are very red.  So are their nails.  They smile at you, and you imagined there is something cunning, something knowing in those eyes, before they float past, supremely confident in towering heels, and pass through the door and back into the room with all your friends.

              You take the performers place at the vanity and see yourself reflected in the mirror. Your own preparations finish quickly. The man works efficiently.  The unfamiliar heaviness of makeup across your skin feels like a mask pulled over your face.  You suppress the urge to squirm. You came back here for a bit of fun, as a silly surprise for your friend outside and for his birthday, but what you are doing and wearing feels wrong. It feels wrong in your belly; it feels like a big toe poking through a hole in a sock.

              Finally, the bartender drops a tousled blonde wig onto your head, arranges it, and guides you into a pair of high-heeled silver sandals.  You stand, tottering slightly in those heels. He leads you before a full-length mirror half-hidden under draped stockings and a dangling mauve scarf.

              With long blonde hair and a pronounced square chin, you are more Viking than Femme Fatale.  Your shoulders seem more prominent than usual in that tight silver dress, biceps and triceps better defined through contrast.  Rice breasts thrust out like pebbly hills.  But your legs look sexy, don’t they? And your lips, so red and moist. You stare at your reflection and feel both relieved and disappointed. You attempt a smile—coquettish at first, then embarrassed—and turn this way and that in the mirror. You lean close, pull back, toss your hair, pose with hands on hip, and then turn and cast a lingering glance over your shoulder. 

              Then led by the bartender, you follow in the footsteps of the performer with the small breasts and beautiful eyes and blue dress. Beyond this door are you friends. They are waiting.

Author's Notes

During that long break between abandoning Constant and starting it up again, I didn't quite give up on writing entirely. In fact, I took a few writing community-college style night classes. These classes were a lot of fun and occasionally very strange, as were the people in them. I don't know if they made me a better writer, but they did push me to try new things, including actually completing works of short fiction.

The above story is a slightly modifed version of a story I submitted to one of those classes. I believe the challenge of the task was to write in the 2nd person, and to keep it short. If I remember correctly, the teacher liked the story but found it confusing. She didn't quite "get" the cross-dressed performer and thought it was some kind of magical realist conceit.

I suppose it's not quite in the usual TG-fiction style. I hope you nevertheless enjoyed it. The next short story will be much more in the expected genre.

Further Notes (v2)

Taking another look at the story, I tweaked it a little further, rewriting it into the present tense and fixing a number of typos. I tightened up a few sentences and extended a few others. I reckon this is probably the final version.

Feedback always appreciated!