I wake in a bare cabin. My mind is bare too. Who am I?

The only clothing in the room is a loud orange minidress, draped over the back of a wooden chair, like a huge, limp poppy petal.

What sex am I? I check. Male. I put the dress on. No choice.

There's an oval full-length mirror. I look into it. The dress is tight, but just long enough. I think for a moment I can pass as a girl. But when I see and judge myself as female, I immediately think "My butt's too skinny." Concave my lower back, thrust chest and ass out. Better but still too skinny. No breasts. Hairy legs. Waist not slender enough. Long horse face. Bony elbows. Big nose...

On and on the self-criticisms flow... till I notice these aren't my thoughts. Without realizing, I was unconsciously reading them off the dress--it's dyed with a thousand scrawled put-downs!

Not my thoughts, but I can't deny it's true: I'll never live up to this dress, never fill it up, never be as cool as a girl.

One wall has a picture window. I look out, sadly. Alaska, but an impossible panorama of a thousand miles, from the fjords of Sitka to the tundra of Nome. And in that vast expanse I see... three MORE of me! Oh, they're different ages, races, genders, but they're all wandering the wilderness, bewildered... in clothes like mine, dyed with hateful judgments! Their clothes say "Slut, stupid, drunk, lazy, illiterate, superstitious, weak, cold, sloppy, greedy, fat..."

There's MALICE behind this! Why are our minds so blank? Who cursed us like this?

I think it's lasted years. But now I'm waking up.

I can think of only one clue. I'm an artist; I know something about dyes. So I trace the dye-lot used on the dress.

It came from a small lab near Anchorage.

I head there, and late one night, I break in.

The lab REEKS of magic! Someone's been brewing curses like coffee. The source of our misery is here, all right! I flip through their lab notes and records...

Just as I find the data on our dye, the Dye Wizard bursts in.

My mind clears a bit. I know him! He clouded my mind with a powerful curse keeping me from thinking about certain things, including him. I got around it sometimes by thinking in other languages, but it left me lost, forgetful, ashamed. Even crippled as I've been, I've fought him a long time.

He says with distinct pleasure "You just keep remembering, don't you? You cause too much trouble, as a man. Let's you interfere with me as... a swan!"

I climb on the lab bench and grab flasks to throw at him--but my arms start melting as he chants "TEHANU, GOHA, TENAR!"

Wham! A cloud of steam, and...

The Dyer's net of words is broken, my soul flies free! And he doesn't even notice what he's done.

He laughs as I shriek in my swan-voice and fly from the lab... and out of his life.

And then... wizard-whacking time.

THE ANSWERS

• The curse of false labels = a while back, an official of the Bay Area Dreamworkers Group spread false gossip about me and got me banned, because my pagan pansexual dream-comics shocked her. But there's a deeper, internal curse, as the wearing of the Orange Dress suggests. Childhood bullies taught me fighting back never works, and that's not always true. Faced with real malice, I either endure it stoically, or walk away. But sometimes, you should fight.
• Wizard, malice, misuse of power = Ursula Le Guin's novel "Tehanu." A reactionary wizard curses Tehanu's foster-mom Tenar (nicknamed Goha). Curses her so she can't think straight--but he forgets she's a foreigner, a barbarian, and when she thinks in her childhood tongue, a tongue the wizard never deigned to learn... truths leak in.
• Caught in the lab = I retreated to reading old issues of Science News, today.
• Swan = intuitive (think of their migrational sense!), and assertive (swans take crap from nobody). I think the swan here means I feel like I'm losing my humanity when I fight back. But anger doesn't always cloud your mind. It can clear your mind too--burning off all the excuses and compromises.
• ACTION = fight back! They may curse you--but curses can backfire! It's WORTH turning wild and inhuman to free your mind. I know. I'm GLAD I'm a swan!

This tale is for all of us who were cursed, hit, split, labeled, or left to dye. You know who you are... if you're lucky.

Don't grieve for us, merely cursed to be wild and inhuman. Pray for the others--for those who NEVER wake... to read the writing on themselves.

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