Rainbow Rainbow by Lydia Conklin

Rainbow Rainbow by Lydia Conklin

Author:Lydia Conklin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-03-04T00:00:00+00:00


Sunny Talks

HUNCHED OVER MY COMPUTER IN MY CUBICLE, I prepare for my nephew’s visit by watching one of his YouTube videos. His backdrop is his bedroom, the walls painted black, centaur and mermaid posters freshly hung. His mascots, he calls them. He pops into the frame, flaunting his naked, scar-free chest. He’s fifteen but looks ten. His wrists are so frail, his shoulders so narrow, that I worry that he’ll break his arms with his eager, sweeping gestures. His audience is ten or twenty thousand people who litter his page with rainbow emojis, kissing emojis, shining sun emojis, interrupted by trolls reminding him he’s a damaged and mutilated female.

“Welcome to Sunny’s channel.” He rolls his eyes like everyone knows already. Sunny was always his name, so when people threaten to publish his real name he has a laugh, thrusting his head back against the wall of his bedroom, which is beside my older sister’s bedroom in their little house in Shrewsbury, though Sunny doesn’t reveal where he dispatches from; he’s learned from millennial elders on the platform at least the basics of safe internet practices.

He lifts the rabbit my sister bought him and holds it to the camera, pink pads swelling to blot out the screen. The rabbit died a few months after this video, of nose cancer.

“My assistant,” Sunny says. “Almond Senior.” He bounces the rabbit’s haunches. “Pronouns: they/them.” He snorts. “Almond Senior’s nonbinary.” The rabbit’s cute, cancer-filled nose presses against Sunny’s cute, little boy nose. “So trendy, now, aren’t you?”

I pull back from the screen into the green light of the office. I’ve watched the video a dozen times, awaiting this moment, my breath so quick it’s audible, perking my ears for Sunny’s tone. Is the joke that the rabbit has an identity, or is the joke that the identity is nonbinary?

Sunny crops the frame at his waist, as though he has hips to hide. He updates his perspective regularly, on crucial queer Gen Z issues such as pansexuality, passing privilege, cisnormativity, he/him lesbians, PGPs, chasers, and demiromanticism. He applies gel to his hair so it crests sweetly over his forehead, a neighbor boy from a fifties sitcom.

I live hundreds of miles from Sunny now, but this evening my sister will drop him at my apartment in Trenton. Tomorrow Sunny and I will attend a convention of trans YouTubers in Philadelphia. Sunny invited me a few weeks back, explaining that it wasn’t cool to go with his mom, that he preferred me, his aunt, which was fishy, because he loves my sister, but I guess everyone grows up sometime. Last week, he sent a video message of himself singing “Streets of Philadelphia” with a plastic bell (the crack drawn in Sharpie) nested in his soft disc of hair and a portrait of Ben Franklin taped to the wall behind.

I pat my blouse to absorb the sweat from my palms. Tonight I’ll discuss my identity with Sunny, tell him what’s been true my whole life, though only now is there language for it.



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