Monstress Read Online Free PDF Page A

big-haired and bright-lipped women, most of them taller than the average man. They worked the stage like strippers, bumping and grinding to the techno beat of the background music. The audience was on its feet, whistling and hooting, cheering them on.
    Then came Eric.
    My brother was different from the others. He was shorter, the only Filipino among them. He wore a denim skirt and a T-shirt, a pair of Doc Martens. His hair, a few strands streaked blond, fell to his bony shoulders. He was slow across the stage, wooing the audience with a shy girl’s face, flirtatious, sweet. But he wasn’t woman enough for them: they booed my brother, gave him the thumbs-down. So Eric fought back. He stood at the edge of the stage, fists on his hips and feet shoulder-width apart, like he was ready to take on anyone who crossed him. “Dare me?” he said, and I saw his hands move slowly to the bottom of his T-shirt. “You dare me?”
    They did, and up it went. The crowd screamed with approval, gave him the thumbs-up. Someone threw a bra onstage and Eric picked it up, twirled it over his head like a lasso, then flung it back into the audience.
    I looked over at Ma. It was like someone had hit her in the face.
    He put his shirt down, lifted his arms in triumph, blew kisses to the audience, then took a seat with the others. He told the audience that his name was Erica.
    He’d left a message the night before it aired, telling me to watch Channel 4 at seven o’clock that night. He said it would be important, that Ma should see it too. When I told Ma she looked hopeful. “Maybe he’s singing,” she said, “playing the piano?” She was thinking of Eric from long before, when he took music lessons and sang in the high school choir.
    I reached for the remote, thinking, That bastard set us up. I turned off the TV.
    That was the last time I saw Eric. Now he’s lying on a table, a sheet pulled to his shoulders. The coroner doesn’t rush me, but I answer him quickly. “Yes,” I say. “That’s my brother.”

    E ric’s life was no secret, though we often wished it was: we knew about the boyfriends, the makeup and dresses. He told me about his job at the HoozHoo, a bar in downtown San Francisco where the waitresses were drag queens and transsexuals. But a year and a half ago, on Thanksgiving night, when Eric announced that he was going to proceed with a sex change (“Starting here” he said, patting his chest with his right hand), Ma left the table and told Eric that he was dead to her.
    It’s 6:22 P.M . He’s been dead for six hours.
    â€œWe need to call people,” I tell Ma. But she just sits there at the kitchen table, still in her waitress’s uniform, whispering things to herself, rubbing her thumb along the curve of Eric’s baby spoon. Next week she turns sixty-one. For the first time, she looks older than she is. “We have to tell people what’s happened.”
    She puts down the spoon, finally looks at me. “What will I say? How can I tell it?”
    â€œTell them what the coroner told me. That’s all.” He had an asthma attack, rare and fatal. He was sitting on a bench in Golden Gate Park when his airways swelled so quickly, so completely, no air could get in or out. As a kid, Eric’s asthma was a problem; I can still hear the squeal of his panic. Can’t breathe, can’t breathe, he’d say, and I’d rub his back and chest like I was giving him life. But as an adult, the attacks became less frequent, easier to manage, and he deemed his inhaler a thing of the past. “The severity of this attack was unusual,” the coroner explained. “No way he could have prepared for it.” He was dead by the time a pair of ten-year-olds on Rollerblades found him.
    The look on her face makes me feel like I’m a liar. “He couldn’t breathe,” I say. “It’s the truth.” I go