‘Scruelcoming’: A Non-Binary Flash by Ashley
When Sash was twelve, they were told that they would be struck by thunder if they referred and asked others to refer to themself by anything other than he, him or his. Disbelievingly, they hissed, of course. They were far from superstitious, unlike all the adults here in Parentitilla, the most conservative of all the adult-centred countries in the world. And they were right, of course they were – no thunder struck them, at least not in a natural-consequential way, but they were thunderstruck by the collective cruelty of the punishing people around them, through the mobile apps those people used to strike their body into submission. The adults’ laughter was the opposite of drowned out when their body nearly sank, in a metaphorical sense, dragged down by the weight of the artificially-induced rainwater. All the while their head was nearly cracked by the thunderous cracks – those blasts were extremely loud-mouthed, the sounds the cracks produced, but even those could not drown out t