Chapter 4: The Ugly Apple Orchard
A tale of Oz, Trump, and gender enlightenment
As the three continued their journey on the Path of Gender Enlightenment, the sun was starting to set. My stomach started to rumble. Fortunately, there was an apple orchard on one side of the path and a hay field on the other. Neverknow was sitting on the fence to the hay field. He had obviously decided on where we were staying that night. Andi was delighted with the choice and Harley was just happy to finally be able to sit down for the first time in months.
Just off the road was a perfect pile of hay. We all thought to ourselves, as we threw ourselves on it, “AHHHH.” We were all tired. Andi lay back in the hay and used the opportunity to continue to add more straw to her bra.
Since I was the only one hungry and this was not the place to eat a talking animal, I was content to walk across the road to gather some of the apples on the ground under an orchard. As I worked, I noticed the trees seemed to twist and to follow me. Being rooted to the ground limited their perspective significantly.
They each seemed to have mean faces, and one was even uglier than the others with an unhealthy orange color. He seemed to be in charge. I heard them call him “Donald T” something or other. Someone had even carved an obnoxious “T” in his trunk and a few of the others like a monogram.
He pursed his lips and he spoke and stuck out his chin in a caricature of Benito Mussolini.
“Hey Teddy,” he yelled over to another tree that seemed to be able to bend any way he needed, “ever see something so ugly? Do you think it came across the border illegally?”
Teddy seemed to take a moment to decide what answer was in his best interest. His trunk seemed to have less of a backbone center than the others. He looked spineless. He turned to Posie, the tree next to him, for support before he expressed his opinion.
“What do you think Posie?” he said, “are they our kind of people?”
“Absolutely not!” she declared, “Look at IT holding our apples as if IT was one of us”, she said, her voice dripping with undisguised disgust and sarcasm. “You can tell that IT is not a real apple tree! How could IT possibly know what it is like to be us. “It” needs to be removed immediately from our turf.”
“Here! Here!” chimed in a particularly nasty tree called Peersmore. “Anyone not an apple tree is a contagion. Non-apple trees are just a massive new fad that needs to die out.”
With that all three trees started throwing apples at me. I noticed Don T wasn’t throwing apples but struck up the Mussolini pose again and shouted, “We need a bigger fence,” as he continued to egg them on from a distance like he was letting others do his dirty work. He seemed pretty cowardly to me.
Ducking and weaving, I retreated from the field ducking under the border fence and onto the Path of Gender Enlightenment. In their ignorance they gave me exactly what I wanted, more apples.
Even though they tasted a little bit bitter, Neverknow and I share a few and I packed the rest for tomorrow.
We walked away on the Path quickly. We wanted to be as far away as we could from the ugliest apple trees we had ever seen. Blowing bubbles followed in our wake.
End of Chapter Four.
Writers note: Yep, you guessed right. I crudely abused the names of some anti-LGBTQ people for characters in the ugly apple orchard. Unfortunately, it was a very big orchard filled with many uglier apple trees. I didn’t want to spend too much of our time exploring any more of that foul orchard than necessary.
I hope it shrivels up and dies.
Emma Holiday
In case you missed the first three chapters, here they are:
Writers note: This series continues. Sit back and enjoy the ride.
If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.
My writing has three specific goals:
1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.
2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.
3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.
Thank you for reading my work.
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