We read to know we are not alone,

by Aarron Sholar

a wooden-framed chalkboard sign on the wall reads. On the way to this bookstore is when I first said I am considering having a baby myself to these people I considered friends, but we were really just school friends. But I told this car full of friends this truth I’d never even spoken to myself. In the bookstore, a friend calls hey Aarron, come here! And I wander to her. In that car, I remember the words pregnancy, uncomfortable, desire— and the book she shows me is on just that: transgender pregnancy. I recognize the cover, of the two men standing with their three children, two taken-on and one produced, because this is the book I’d ordered off Amazon only a week prior. I put it back and take another lap around the bookstore. An hour later, on the way out, I go back to the book, bring it to the counter, and pay an expected small-bookstore-price for it. I put this copy away in my desk, to be kept safe— until I have the idea to take it out again and give it to my boyfriend. And I do; look, we could have a baby like them.

Aarron Sholar is a transgender writer who has pieces forthcoming and published in The McNeese Review, Prose Online, Alien Buddha Press, The Under Review, Thin Air Online, Sunspot Lit (awarded the Quarterly Editor’s Prize), Broadkill Review (nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize 2022), and others. He holds a BA from Salisbury University and is an MFA candidate in CNF at MNSU, Mankato, where he is Head CNF Editor of Blue Earth Review.