Ravyn pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter’s mechanism and set it, upside down, on the pile of finished sheets.
They picked up the stack and tapped the edge on the table to straighten it. Fifty-two pages. Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, but enough to be exactly what it was.
The pages were filled with people that had not existed when Ravyn had started typing weeks ago. Not even in pencil. Not even in thoughts. Although, Ravyn admitted, each character was a piece of them. Ravyn was the entire puzzle, broken down into these fictionalized facets.
Fictionalized faces. Face, facet, facade: Ravyn rolled those words around in their head until the words were a single ball of clay from which Ravyn could mold themself.
This story was complete: This draft of this story was complete, but now was the work of pruning and growing, because this draft felt complete but unfinished. It was just the first draft, after all, and while Ravyn had labored over every word in the search for perfection, they knew it was still a long way off.
When they were in college, they had made a little side money by modelling. This was after their top surgery, soon after the incisions had mellowed into scars, and it was part of their healing to be exposed, fully. Stripped down in front of strangers. They had shaved their body for the exercise, even their head. Every hair they could reach.
They sat there, on a stool, motionless in a pose dictated each time by the instructor, surrounded by art students who wanted nothing of Ravyn, who didn’t even know or care to know who Ravyn was, who were just laying their own assumptions and their own beliefs on top of Ravyn’s bare body. That was the clothing they wore, and as they walked around the art show gallery at the end of the semester, seeing their own nudity through the canvassed lens of strangers, each containing a piece of the artist and a piece of the model, Ravyn realized their existence was in the collection of the pieces, and in some sum greater than that collection. The intersection, the union, and the infinity of angles of perception.
Despite it all: In those stranger-filled pages now on the table next to them, in those paintings where they had been dissected and reassembled by strangers, there was just a pile of imperfect masks under which, still unrecognizable, the authentic Ravyn slept.