It didn’t happen like I always assumed it would. Walking home on a rainy night, noticing first that I’m being followed, looking behind me to glimpse a cadre of jacked all-American boys, their scruffy mouths snickering hey tranny faggot freak or something to that effect. I would walk faster. They would catch up. One would punch me in the gut and I’d double over, fall to the asphalt. Pain from all sides, work boots slamming into my crumpled body, then the taste of blood and scratch of broken teeth on my tongue as they would just leave. The darkest moment of my life, an ordinary night for them.

It didn’t happen like that.

No, it was almost disappointing how quickly it was over. No melodrama, no steaming asphalt, no portentous rain, no liquored-up gatekeepers of the Sacred Masculine.

It happened in the gym, in my own apartment building.

I always ran late, owing to my work schedule. Often I’d be alone in the fitness room—a great relief. No sweat-drenched jackals around to eye-fuck my tits even as they wore open disgust on their wretched visage. This night, however, I was not so lucky. Two of the four treadmills were out of order, and one was occupied by a plain-looking man I guessed to be roughly thirty.

Robbed of a choice, I made my way to the machine on his left, barely even glancing at him as I stepped onto the belt and put on my headphones. I thought him harmless, just a pudgy nobody trying to lose a few pounds. I could relate in that department. I didn’t even think he noticed me.

I started the treadmill and began my usual routine. Five minutes of power-walking followed by two miles of running, increasing the speed a few clicks every half mile. I settled into a comfortable rhythm, the sweet fog of an edible aiding my fried brain and letting me focus on the sitcom playing on my phone instead of the creeping agony in my legs. I reached the 1.5 mile checkpoint and kicked up the speed for the last time, just as the jogger next to me finished his cooldown.

That’s how it happened.

I saw, peripherally, a leg thrust in front of mine. Ever tripped on a treadmill? Something primal kicks in, possesses your body, scrambling to the surface to grasp at something—anything—to keep you from going down. It’s too instinctual to tell you to press the emergency stop button. It doesn’t communicate in words. You flail, fall, fly off like the end of a water slide. No joyful splash into a pool, though. Just an unforgiving carpet. Next thing you know, you’re splayed out, body twisted into some terrible parody that might be funny if not for the rugburn. A throb in my left shoulder, both knees vibrating with a cruel sting. I lay there for a moment, my brain catching up to what my body already understood. I didn’t notice that my headphones had been ripped off in the tumble until he uttered one word, dripping with salty blood and fascistic ecstasy:

“Faggot.”

Our eyes met. He sneered, grabbed his water bottle, and made for the door at the far end of the empty gym.

I had just one thought as tears threatened to slip mournfully down my skin: It finally happened to me. Here I was, another battered queer left to stew in trauma and pain while this . . . this whalecunt got to go home, laugh it off with a beer, and never think of it again. As I watched him walk toward the door, I thought of all the others before me. How many times “faggot” was the last word someone heard before dying a violent and meaningless death. How many survived only to later end it all because living in a world where this happens again and again and again and again and again was just too much to bear. It was my turn, and it would be some other faggot’s turn tomorrow. Despair called to me, calmly telling me to stay down. Play dead. But the closer he got to the door and the rest of his putrid life, something else called to me—or rather, spread through me from within. Rage.

You don’t fucking get to walk away from this.

I sprang to my feet, too intent on what I had to do to notice the pain. Convenient that the treadmills were situated right next to the weight room. I walked to the dumbbell rack and picked one up. Twenty pounds should do the trick—well, I am a runner, not a weightlifter after all. Quite unfortunate for him he decided to leave his headphones on. Otherwise he very well could have heard me coming and stopped me before the dumbbell smacked into his bigoted little noggin.

His eyelids fluttered and he went down—hard. The blood moved shockingly fast, practically foaming as it spread around his head and seeped into the filthy carpet. I dropped my weapon and grabbed his ankles. I dragged him back to the scene of the crime as he moaned and muttered. Poor brain.

My treadmill was still on, the belt whirring by at six miles per hour. I left him in front of it and kicked the speed up to ten. I returned to my attacker’s body, grabbed a fistful of hair, and yanked his head off the ground. He gasped and looked into my eyes, his unfocused but belying a horrid understanding. I shoved his head down, his nose nearly brushing the treadmill as his moans turned to screams, coalescing finally into frantic words.

“I-I’m s-s-sorry,” he stammered. I snorted involuntarily. Sorry?! As if it were just an unconscious bump of the shoulder passing me by on the sidewalk.

“Say it again.”

“I’m sorry!” once more, with feeling.

“Not that, moron.” Irritated, I slammed his head into the railing on the side of the treadmill, then returned it to its proper position. He sobbed, snot and tears dripping onto the belt. The dots of fluid came around again and again. In his hysterics I could have sworn I heard a resigned sigh.

“F-faggot.”

“Attaboy.”

I lowered his face to the belt.

The visceral screams were instantaneous as his nose went first. Red cartilage joined the tears on their little merry-go-round of hate, a sprinkler of blood dotting my face as I forced him farther down onto my makeshift sander. When all that was left of his nose was bone, his lips kissed the belt, beginning to shred as his brow transfigured itself into a crimson millipede. I watched in awe, flesh seeming to simply vanish. I started on the right cheek. When bone showed, the left. With each bit of flesh the machine consumed, my rage was replaced with triumph. By the time I finished with his right eye, the entire surface of the treadmill was a puddle of blood, pus, and flecks of bone. I lifted the featureless mound of red and white and tossed it to the ground, blood settling like mist over the deserted gym, and stopped the treadmill.

I stepped away from the brutalized corpse feeling no guilt, no shame. Why should I? Would he have felt any had I let him walk away? Would I ever have been safe again? Of course I had no illusions—this would send me to the slammer, no doubt about it. I didn’t care though, not now. Not yet. What mattered was that there was one less monster in the world, one less boogeyman for my community to fear. I began to cry, wishing desperately that no one would have to go through this again. I knew that couldn’t be the case. It’s seldom just one guy in an empty room full of potentially deadly machinery. I was lucky. Tomorrow it would still be some other faggot’s turn, and it would probably end just like all the others. But not tonight. No, I had beaten this cruel world at its game this time. Bizarrely, more than anything, I felt hope.

Until the door to the gym opened and a woman’s scream rang out. Fuck. I just hoped they would send me to a women’s prison.

They didn’t.