Rapidly Evolving Creatures by Kumari Devarajan

Last month, Shamil’s younger brother Anand came to visit them. The day he arrived, he barreled through the door to Shamil and Maria’s apartment, dapped up his much shorter brother, then opened his arms toward the belly of his sister-in-law, to whom his first words were, “How’s my sperm cooking?”

Shamil and his brother are not close. Unlike Shamil, Anand can still visit their grandparents’ house. He has never endured awkward reintroductions or gaping stares from cousins and family friends. Never had to delete comments from confused aunts on his Facebook photos. Anand was not bullied in high school–he was the bully. He went to his prom with a date and won trophies in baseball tournaments. Shamil was always playing catch up, trying to build his own manhood with the leftover scraps he could find. 

The night after Anand left, Shamil told Maria he wasn’t sure any more about being a father. Maria told him it was a little late to be talking like this. Shamil said he wanted to be honest. “We should’ve waited. Or done it some other way.”

“You can’t be serious.” 

At their check up a week later, he was dispirited. He didn’t ask any questions or look their doctor in the eye. Didn’t say anything about the ultrasound. Maria had been physically uncomfortable for so long, and she had over a month to go. Patience was a thing of her past. But she tried, as best she could, to make room for Shamil’s frustration. 

“Is this about Anand?” she asked when they got home. 

He stopped looking at his phone, but he wouldn’t look at her. “I think so,” he said. “I know, it’s stupid. I’ll get over it. And no, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“It’s your baby,” she said. “Yours. And ours.” She moved past him quickly to the bathroom to take a shower. He moved out of her way to make room for the mass of her. 

Maria was growing a baby inside of her while her partner decided to have a personal identity crisis, abandoning her. When she got out of the shower, she decided she couldn’t take it anymore. “I need a walk,” she said to Shamil, whom she left standing in the kitchen holding a plate of scrambled eggs for her.

Grabbing some layers, she stomped her heft down the flight of stairs and out the door to the sidewalk, not pausing to pet the downstairs neighbor’s elderly mutt twisting herself against the grass. She squeezed her long down jacket around her baby bump, providing herself with the feeling of being held together, something that had been out of reach for months as she grew and grew. The holes in Shamil’s sweatpants that she wore allowed the wind to rip by her legs. 

After she began to show, Maria underwent a personality change. Before, she was wary of her surroundings, taking note of the space other people needed on the sidewalk or the train before she took up her own. Now, she charged, intimidating and bold. Once on the train, she walked up to a young couple necking and simply said, “I need the seat.” When they got up, she did not thank them. Maria was aware she had changed, and she hoped she wouldn’t revert back once the baby arrived.

She grabbed a bagel at the bodega along the way, which she ate plain in large bites. Soon, she found herself in a different but familiar part of town where a meager river cut the city in half through a deep concrete gash. Maria and Shamil used to walk this way Saturday mornings when they wanted to escape their chatty former roommate and be alone. The former roommate’s room was now a nursery for the baby with animal wallpaper and a secondhand crib from Shamil’s boss. 

More often than not, the channel was dry and empty except for gunky leaves, styrofoam, and empty plastic bottles. When it was sunny enough, she and Shamil could watch kids skateboard and bike up and down the sides, avoiding the detritus. Today, at the bottom, shaggy-haired teenage boys were throwing a tennis ball at the hard bank and tackling each other to be the one to grab it when it fell back down. 

Maria grew up with brothers, two older, one younger, who were loud and teased her, who shaved designs into each other’s heads and yelled with their deep voices. They were not big, but they were tall. They blocked her in the hallway, yelled Where are you going? when she ducked out of the house to meet her friends. 

One friend invited her to the Pride parade in their neighborhood to see the Quinceñera queens and the drag aunties in saris march and dance. Whole brown families stood behind the guard rails holding their toddlers up to watch the parade run down the main road because that was what was going on that day. It was the year of solid black platform sandals, big hoops bouncing off chins. Lip gloss. Space buns. Glitter. Every part of Maria’s physical being conversed with the sun. 

It was her clear, plastic backpack that drew Shamil’s attention. “I can see your whole life in there,” he told her. A big goofy grin was plastered on his face. He wore a backwards cap, a basketball jersey, and black Adidas shoes, and sweat beaded near his sideburns. 

“So?” She shrugged. 

“I just like how you let it all hang out. That’s all.”

She shoved him. Later, he would tell her that he thought she was mad for a minute, but a part of him knew that something big and right was happening, or was about to happen. 

Maria thought Shamil was gentle. Subtle. And nervous. And those thoughts made her smile involuntarily on her train ride from the house with her brothers to the apartment where her new boyfriend lived, Shamil. She listened to love songs and leaned her knees against the window. 

They had been living together for almost a year when he began to change. First, it was only his clothes, swapping his patterned tees and snapbacks for button up shirts. They made him ecstatic. But then they weren’t enough–he never felt settled about how his body fit in them, the way certain light and movements caused the fabric to catch on his hips or his chest or the underside of his stomach. 

Someone posted a photo from a party, Shamil’s arm around Maria, his other arm around their friend, Marco. Shamil pored over the photo, zooming in to see how the shadows gave away his body. It was like they were doing it on purpose. It didn’t help that Marco was wearing a black mesh spaghetti strap tank that clung to his torso, smooth and compact. The worst part–Shamil was smiling hard, that open mouth of happy that Maria loved, like he had no idea that his body was a woman’s. Like he was an idiot. When Maria woke up to the sound of his crying two nights in a row, she knew what they needed to do.

The ten months of waiting for insurance approval and for an appointment to be available for his top surgery felt longer than the previous three years of their relationship. He had longed for something like it since puberty, but deciding to do it made every second of not having it excruciating. From the outside, his yearning felt strong enough to break a wall, strong enough that she thought he might be a different person after it was done, after he didn’t have to wish for it anymore. The wanting had taken him over. 

And he was different. He was happy. He strutted. He sang. Danced. He took a lot of photos of himself, and of the two of them. 

“Let’s both take our shirts off.” He liked that they were different now. He didn’t own bras, but he loved hers. He bought her all sorts of lingerie in maroon, baby pink, indigo, and his favorite, black. He shoved his head under her shirt like a kid and nibbled on her nipples. He had the excitement of the little boy he never got to be.

Then he wanted to change further. He developed desires she never imagined him having because he never had them before, but there was always a next step, so he started testosterone, which brought a beard and a deep voice. When she pointed this pattern out to him, that he seemed to be on a perpetual hunt for what came next, that there could always be more to chase, he had already been thinking it. 

“It’s like that children’s book,” she said. “If you give a mouse a cookie–”

“He’ll want some milk to go with it,” he said. He put a finger on her nose. “Bingo.”

As long as he itched, she helped him scratch, slapping him with a band aid after his injections. 

He asked her once if she wanted her own fix. Something for her to chase and to take over her life. “Come on,” he said. “Lord knows I’ve used up my selfish credit. You’re allowed something too. Something you’d kill for. Fall completely apart over.” 

“I already have one,” she said. “You.”

He was quiet. She was right. She would go to the end of the earth to satisfy him, and he would not return the favor. She was not his Sistine Chapel–he was his own. He was sculpting a masterpiece, and when the project was almost finished, like any artist, he obsessed over details, even the ones that no one would ever notice. How the proportions were not quite right. How you could still see mistakes, the imperfections, the girl, still lurking, still haunting him. 

Then, as occasionally happens in long term relationships, a sex thing came up. When Shamil made the request, Maria hid her eyes in her hand and laughed. 

“What?” he said. “Is it a cliché? Is that what all the guys ask for?”

Her hand dropped. 

“Please tell me that’s what all the guys ask for.”

She caught herself before becoming too endeared by the boyish pleading and wonder on his face. She told him she didn’t want to, and he dropped it. A week later, she turned to him and told him she wanted to, she would be into it. But he became shy and told her he didn’t feel right about it. Two weeks after that, he finally said, “Okay.” 

So that night, as planned, Shamil turned to her and said, “I really want you to suck me off right now.” Earlier in the day, he mentioned that he wished he had uttered those words at least a few times to unsuccessful ends when he was younger. But late was better than never. 

She committed to the scene, and he did his part as well. He had studied boys his whole life and knew how to grin like a sleazy, horny frat guy. “Come on,” he said impatiently. “Do it like the porn stars.”

Though it was Shamil’s idea, Maria reveled in the queer retelling of a male fantasy. She was zealous. She preferred when she was able to participate in his yearning. She wanted to buckle into the roller coaster of Shamil’s life and ride the loops. She reached up through the leg hole of his boxers, and he came immediately. 

When they were going to sleep, she asked him if he wanted a real one. 

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. Whatever was possible through medical science, he could never ejaculate or impregnate. Nor would it put fear in their chests that he might. He could not surgically implant consequences to their desires, and coming up inches short on a masterpiece meant it wasn’t worth trying at all. 

Growing up, Maria never imagined having a child. She was more interested in having her dolls play-fuck than play mommy and baby. But in the domesticity that bloomed between her and Shamil, they both ached for one. In what she hoped was the final stretch toward manhood–fatherhood–it was finally her body’s turn to gestate the result. To morph and change. To host hormones flooding through her. To usher changes upon changes, but changes that would eventually end. She hoped that in a month, the baby would arrive, growing and changing, and that she and Shamil could more or less stay the same. Settle. There would only be room for one rapidly evolving creature in their family.

About two months before Anand came to visit, at twenty-one weeks, the nurse asked them if they wanted to know the sex. Maria sighed. Shamil held her hand tightly and tenderly and shook his head no to the nurse. 

On the way home Maria told him, “I hope it’s trans like you.”

“I hope it’s not, like you,” he said. 

She shoved him like she had the day they met, but inside she began to panic. She wanted to be prepared. When she was alone, she called the hospital back. Of course of course nothing was set in stone. It was only an arrangement of ink–M or F–on the page, an extra smudge on an already undecipherable ultrasound. 

Gender was ever expanding, becoming almost meaningless overnight. The teens were making sure of it. Long haired people with vaginas and cleavage who had walked into public women’s restrooms their entire life without anyone batting an eye were now saying they were trans? A true modern phenomenon. 

“Fem-thems,” Shamil called them. “The latest species to join the flock.”

Of course of course Maria supported anyone however they identified, but her mind still tripped over these people. To her, being trans meant you are suffering, your childhood was one enormous gut-wrenching heartbreak, you would sacrifice skin and organs and reputation and relationships and voyage to uncharted ends to find a scrap of yourself. Anything less would be a fatal betrayal of the self. 

And wasn’t the high correlation between fem-thems and witches evidence that the new phenomenon exposed what this really was, a grab for specialness, and that these kids had no business in claiming the territory of gender confusion? 

The logic in how Maria ordered the world was breaking and slipping, and Maria could feel the discourse creep toward her and push her to ask herself, who am I? The possible answers were endless and overwhelming. There was no way to begin to answer the question without saying it out loud, without inching toward somewhere, backtracking, moving in and out of colors, words, names, haircuts, practices, conversations, tears, triumphs, and brave acts of exposure. 

She almost mentioned to Shamil that she was thinking about her own gender identity, but then they got pregnant. There was no space. A being who sucked nutrients and energy out of its surrounding environment had entered their lives and her body. The question sat quietly, smushed among her organs and the baby, throbbing sometimes, alerting her that it would grow bigger and hotter until she tended to it. 

The massive sun rising ahead of her bounced on the concrete river and blinded Maria, so she hooded her eyes with her hand. The morning had begun cold, but now she was sweating under her coat. She removed and hung it over where her hand dipped into her pocket.

Maria wanted to name the baby Hector, the name her parents had chosen for her had she been a boy, a name they didn’t give her younger brother, which, Maria believed, meant it was stored away for her to use. 

Knowing she was carrying a boy allowed Maria to indulge in the feeling that she and the baby were the same. She felt she was the baby more than she was herself. Did they not eat the same food and use the same oxygen? Was she not acting in the baby’s will? Even when she spoke, she imagined the baby taking over her voice, demanding things without manners or courtesy. It was the baby boy pounding down the street, forcing others to give up their seat or get out of her way. 

What a relief it had been, to feel like not just a woman, but to be the baby as well–a little boy trapped in a woman’s body, waiting to emerge into the world as himself. 

The teenagers with their tennis ball were laughing in loud yells that bounced off the sides of the concrete river and reached her on the bridge. Their voices were newly rough and grave, she could tell. From her brothers and Shamil, she knew that stage of voice change. Like a baby’s scream, it was one of the few voices you could yell with in public and get away with. Young and deep. Little shits, she thought. They don’t know what they have. 

One of them was gearing up to throw their ball over the bridge she was standing on. When the boy threw it, the tennis ball flew through the bars lining the side of the bridge. Maria knelt and managed to intercept it before it fell over the other side. She had to pull on one of the metal bars to stand back up. She passed the ball back and forth between her hands. 

The tallest boy whistled. “Hey! Do you mind throwing that back down?”

She looked at them, then averted her gaze. She bounced the ball on the cemented bridge floor and caught it. She liked the soft thud it made, and she believed the baby liked it, too.

The second tallest boy, in a slightly higher pitch called to her in a louder voice. “Excuse me, miss?”

Maria pocketed the ball and walked across the bridge.

“Are you serious?” The shortest called. The boys’ arms dangled at their sides, their heads bent back, looking up at her, like she was a monstrosity in the sky. 

Much quieter, yet still audible in the echo of the concrete, the tallest whispered, “She’s pregnant,” to the others, as if it were a mental illness or another excuse for being a jerk. And she believed so. She thought, I’m sorry. It’s the baby. Not me, it’s just the baby.

When she got to the end of the bridge, she kept going toward the road. She ordered a ride home on her phone. The cold bagel turned in her stomach. The baby called up to her, it isn’t enough. 

Kumari Devarajan is a trans, Tamil Sri Lankan fiction writer from Washington DC. Currently, they are a Russell G. Hamilton Scholar at Vanderbilt University’s Masters in Fine Arts program in Fiction. Before Vanderbilt, they were an audio journalist at National Public Radio’s award-winning Code Switch podcast. 

13 February 2026