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Think of Me

by Lindsay King-Miller

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Sasha and Taylor are fucking and Sasha is thinking about me. She tries to stop, but the harder she tries to push me out of her head, the more space she makes for me there.

She thinks about the way I fucked her –things she still hasn’t worked up the courage to ask Taylor for. Things she could only do with me, because there was never any question who was the more damaged one in our relationship. Taylor is very pretty and college-educated and normal in that all-American tennis-scholarship lesbian kind of way, and Sasha doesn’t want to scare her off, so she thinks about me and the good ways I used to hurt her.

This of course leads to thinking about the bad ways I hurt her, and there are so many of those. She’s rocking her hips to the motion of Taylor’s fingers but the rhythm in her mind is me banging my head against our bedroom wall. An image of my body the way she found it, slumped over in the bathtub, flashes through her head in the moment before she comes. Guilt and grief and rage and shame and lust all at once. She hates it, and I hate it too, but I can’t look away. I don’t even have eyes to close.

---

I was halfway through the ceiling when Sasha found my body. Would it be different if she’d come in just a few minutes later? Maybe there would have been a point of no return, a point at which everything that made me Jess was so scattered, there was no gathering it back together. Maybe I would have been nothing; maybe I would have been free.

But the first breath Sasha took when she saw me dead was like a magnet, pulling the scraps of me back from whatever they were dissolving into. Before she even screamed, I was Jess again, except that I wasn’t in my body. It hurt. It hasn’t stopped hurting.

The more Sasha thinks about me, the more I am. I feel whatever she feels about me. It’s ingenious as a punishment: I get to experience every second of sorrow, anger, and loneliness that I’ve caused her. The night after my funeral, she lay on the couch, unable to bear our bedroom without me, and cried so hard she gave herself a nosebleed. I hit the floor with every drop of blood.

I don’t remember dying, but I remember wanting to. This is like that, but more so.

---

Taylor wants to marry Sasha, the real way, with white dresses and a license from the state. On paper, this will be Sasha’s first wedding. Sasha isn’t a widow, not legally. When we were together she still hadn’t changed her name and gender on her driver’s license, and she wasn’t going to get married under her dead name.

We had a bunch of our friends over and I wore a Bikini Kill shirt and a red tutu, and Sasha wore a white negligee and a tiara from the Halloween store, and we both cut our fingertips with this witchy girl’s ceremonial knife and bled into a glass of three-buck Chuck. Then we took turns drinking it until it was empty. The last sip, I swigged then spit into Sasha’s open mouth.

“I promise to love you until I die,” I said, and put a ring on her finger. I got it at a thrift store, heavy steel coiled like a snake, with yellow glass eyes. Later that night she rocked the snake’s head against my clit, her fingers deep inside me, whispering “You’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine.” I used to introduce her as ‘my wife.’ Her name wasn’t mentioned in my obituary.

She still wears the ring. I feel it on the memory of my own third finger, heavier than it could possibly be – psychic weight. It rubs me raw, as if it’s made of heavy rope, burning away the skin I don’t have.

The ring Taylor gave Sasha has a small sapphire, her birthstone. It’s real gold. She wears that one on her right hand, the engagement ring finger. When Taylor proposed to Sasha, she touched my ring gently. Bile and guilt burned the back of Sasha’s throat. “I’ll never ask you to take this off,” Taylor said.

Sasha cried and kissed her. I tasted stomach acid. “Please forget me,” I said, but nobody heard.

---

She used to ask me to bite her during sex. I was always careful, never broke the skin. I can feel the tension curled up inside her, like a lizard about to outgrow its egg. Taylor is so careful with her. She’s read some thinkpieces about how to respectfully fuck a trans woman.

At the beginning there was a lot of “Is it okay if I touch you here? What do you call this?” At the beginning Sasha was relieved because Taylor was so unlike me. She was safe. But now safe makes Sasha crazy. She masturbates in the shower before Taylor is awake, biting the inside of her own arm to hide the gasp when she comes. Taylor never asks about the teeth marks.

When Sasha’s not thinking about me, I’m somewhere else. There’s space between the molecules of me, and the world moves through it and I don’t mind. I’m still Jess, but only barely. Maybe this is what going into the light feels like.

But every time Sasha comes, she calls me back.

---

Sasha lost her receptionist job after I died because she didn’t talk for three months. She’d pick up the phone and just listen. People found it creepy. Now she makes coffee, mostly for college kids having study groups. When she’s bored she thinks about me, and about which of the college kids are going to fuck each other, or already have.

Sometimes I try to move things. I can feel what Sasha feels so strong it’s like I’m sharing her body, so I try to flex her muscles, to touch something because I want to, not because she does.

If she’d just left a note, Sasha thinks, and I flinch. She thinks it would all be easier if I’d told her why, if she could look at the words “It’s not your fault” in my handwriting.

She’s making a grocery list on her phone. I feel for the border between her hand and mine, try to visualize it dissolving. A message from the beyond will be comforting, right? It will soothe her, it will release me, at least for a moment.

It feels like pins and needles, and also like Novocaine, and also sort of like slipping my tongue into her mouth, but not in a sexy way. Like trying to kiss someone who’s asleep. It’s trespassing. I wait out the surge of revulsion that pulses through me, or through Sasha, it’s hard to tell. Does she know I’m here?

I flex her finger, stretch toward the I on her key pad. Her hand spasms and her phone drops to the floor.

She shakes me off. I’m still inside her, but out of place. The view through her eyes is wrong, like I’m staring through the shattered glass of her phone screen.

---

She has a dream about the time she found me in the bathroom, tears and snot on my face, meticulously pulling hairs out of my head, my hairline at the back of my neck red and raw. That was right before I shaved the bottom half of my head. It hurts more to feel Sasha remembering it than it hurt to actually do it.

Taylor rolls over, half awake, to kiss Sasha good morning, but Sasha doesn’t (or I don’t) kiss back. Sharing a body with Sasha is impossibly lonely.

“Everything okay?” Taylor asks.

“I had a dream about Jess,” Sasha says, twisting my ring around her finger. It scrapes.

“I’m so sorry, babe,” Taylor says, stroking Sasha’s hair. The only one who wants Sasha to forget me more than Taylor does is me.

But the weight of Taylor’s hand on Sasha’s shoulder is dulled by the thin sheen of me. Sasha sighs, whispers “Get some more sleep,” and rolls out of bed.

I try to say “It wasn’t your fault” so she can hear me. Over and over, while she’s brushing her teeth, getting on the bus, putting on her apron for her shift. I try to place the thought gently in her mind, then I try to scratch it in with my fingernails. Whenever I try to get her attention she stands still, her gaze wandering.

I thought I knew what unbearable meant when I was alive, but now there’s no way to scream or bleed or puke out the rage I feel. I don’t have fists, but the best I can explain what I’m doing is that I beat my fists against the inside of Sasha’s head, begging her to let me out.

Sasha’s heart hiccups. Her breath snags. She stumbles, freezes, grabs whatever she can reach to keep from falling. Scalding hot steam pours out of the espresso machine and her hand, my hand, it’s on fire, the skin murderously red, Taylor’s engagement ring cutting a line across the furious flesh as it starts to swell.

---

Taylor picks Sasha up from the emergency room and drives her home, the bent and twisted ring in a plastic sandwich bag where the nurse put it after cutting it off.

“I’m sorry,” Sasha says, her left hand tapping on her knee, her right in a mitten of burn pads. She’s going to have a scar.

Taylor must have been thinking about the ring already because she instantly knows that’s what Sasha is talking about. “It’s okay, babe,” she says. “We’ll get it reset.”

---

The coffeeshop gives Sasha a week off, but she doesn’t go back on the eighth day. Her hand itches like a motherfucker where it’s healing. That’s what she tells Taylor, and her boss over the phone, but really she doesn’t want to go back there because it reminds her of me.

How can it remind her of me? She knows it doesn’t make sense – she didn’t start working there until I was already dead, we never even went there together – but she thinks about me too much when she’s there. Maybe it’s the smell of coffee, the sense memory of the strong pots I used to brew in the morning after staying up all night, drank black and too hot. The way my burned tongue tasted when I kissed her. Taylor buys bottled cold brew at the grocery store, with almond milk already mixed in.

When we met, Sasha was tending bar downtown. Maybe she can get that job back, she thinks. Which is stupid, if her goal is to avoid reminders at me. We used to fuck in that bathroom while she was on the clock. Still, she’s going to put on a nice skirt and head over there while Taylor’s at the office, see if they have anything open.

In the shower, Sasha struggles to manage her razor with her left hand, her right still swollen and clumsy. She nicks herself behind the knee, a tiny cut that stings more than it bleeds. I used to tell her she didn’t have to shave her legs. “It’s patriarchal bullshit,” I said. “There’s nothing inherently masculine about body hair. We’re fucking mammals.”

“If you don’t shave your legs, you get called a dyke,” she used to respond. “If I don’t, I get called sir. It’s not the same thing.” Taylor never tries to convince her not to shave her legs.

The drop of blood behind Sasha’s knee, though, it bothers her. She runs her finger over it, comes away pink. She rubs the cut like you’d rub a place a fly had landed on you, to make sure it’s gone, that you’re clean. Razor blades make her think of me, though the only thing I shaved in all the time we were together was the back of my head that once.

Sasha’s been trying all this time not to wonder what it was like for me, why I kept cutting myself, going deeper and deeper until I fell down that bloody hole and never crawled back out. Did it feel good? Was it like the biting, but more so? The kind of good pain that hits right where you need it to, that so-bad-it’s-good sting like peeling off a scab?

She kind of wants to put the razor down, to slide her hand between her thighs, but that’s sick, she tells herself, that’s fucking unforgivable, to be turned on thinking about what your wife felt when she died. Besides, she doesn’t masturbate with her left hand, has never been able to.

It happens because her mind wandered, she tells herself later, because she was thinking about me and got upset, but I feel the moment she decides. She means to do it. I try to fill her hands with my hands, hold her back, but she digs the razor in and yanks it up – three deep parallel lines, one for each blade of the razor, diagonally across her smooth, round calf.

I want to cry, to scream, at least to look away, but I can’t because Sasha doesn’t. She stays in the shower staring down at her leg, at the red paisley patterns of blood against tile, until the water runs cold.

---

Sasha doesn’t go anywhere that day, doesn’t ask for her bartending job back or even pick up groceries. Taylor comes home to find her watching TV in her sweatpants, though it’s a hot day.

“I missed you,” Sasha says, and pulls Taylor into the bedroom. The window shade is closed and the room is dim enough that Taylor doesn’t notice the lines on Sasha’s legs when she’s pulling her pants off.

They haven’t fucked since before Sasha hurt her hand, and Taylor is the least polite she’s ever been, grabbing Sasha by the hair and kissing her greedily. They’re both only partly undressed, Sasha’s bra still on, Taylor’s business-casual skirt up around her hips. Sasha kneels on the floor, Taylor’s thighs around her head. With her injured hand, she grabs Taylor’s hip, anchoring herself. With the other, she guides Taylor’s hands back into her hair.

“Don’t be gentle,” Sasha says, and Taylor isn’t, and they don’t say anything else for a long time, and I shouldn’t be here, but Sasha’s left hand is between her own legs, patient, precise, waiting until Taylor is starting to quake and buck under her tongue before she lets herself go. They come at the same moment, and it crashes over me like being drowned. Sasha’s not left-handed, but I am.

---

While she’s sleeping, her mind adrift, her body feels lighter. I can shrug it on more easily. It doesn’t take more than a few tries, even with the ache in her right hand, to pull my cheap snake tchotchke off her left ring finger. I drop it behind the bed. She doesn’t need to be reminded of me whenever she looks at her own hand. She doesn’t need to wonder whether her hands could do what mine did.

---

It takes Sasha a few seconds after she wakes up to realize why she’s panicking, but the panicking itself starts before she opens her eyes.

“Where’s my ring?” It’s a whisper and a shout.

“Babe, it’s the middle of the night,” Taylor murmurs, rolling over to nuzzle against Sasha’s tense back.

“Where’s my wedding ring?” Sasha insists, shaking Taylor off and sitting up, feeling around in the bed, under pillows and sheets.

“I don’t know,” Taylor says, sitting up too. “Did you take it off last night?”

Sasha shakes her head. Now she’s on the floor, running her hands over the carpet. Her desperation is a sickening plummet. If I had a stomach it would be in knots. “I didn’t take it off. I don’t take it off. I never take it off,” she says like a chant, like a prayer.

Taylor knows better than to say anything about the other ring, the one they cut off Sasha’s finger and she hasn’t gotten around to replacing, but Sasha knows – or at least, she thinks she knows, and I feel it with all the fire and ferocity of a revelation – that she wants to. She reads it in the arch of Taylor’s eyebrow.

“What?” Sasha snarls.

Taylor’s hands go up defensively. “I didn’t say anything.”

Exhaustion, confusion, panic, and this persistent unease – like coming home to find all your things an inch removed from where you left them – are bubbling into something toxic inside Sasha. I try to blend into her, like I did while she was sleeping, to take a few deep breaths and calm down. But she feels me doing it. She doesn’t know what it is, just that for a terrifying moment her body is not fully under her control, and it only feeds her rage.

“Oh my God,” Sasha says. “Did you take it? Did you take my wedding ring?”

“What?” Taylor’s eyes go wide. She’s genuinely hurt. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re jealous,” Sasha says, and every word burns on its way out, like vomit. “You’re jealous of Jess. You hate that I was married before I met you.”

“That’s bullshit, Sasha,” Taylor says. She doesn’t sound angry, just sad. “I would never try to take Jess away from you. You know that’s bullshit.”

“Then where’s my fucking ring?” I feel it, the terrible hopelessness: if Taylor didn’t take it, that means she took the ring off herself – without even noticing she was doing it. That would mean she’s forgetting about me. She has to blame Taylor for the missing ring, she already blames herself for so much.

Taylor stands up and turns on a lamp. “I don’t know, but we can find it,” she says. “Is it on the nightstand?”

“No,” Sasha wails, and buries her head in her hands. The sobs shred her body, Taylor reaching out to touch her but never quite making contact. I can’t watch anymore, so I put on Sasha’s body and leave the room with it. She doesn’t help me, but she doesn’t fight me either.

---

I’m more and more of myself every day. I take up more space inside Sasha, and I feel more of her pain. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. In her sleep, I dug out the ring from behind the bed and left it on her pillow, a peace offering, but it scared her more.

She wonders if she’s going crazy. She’s ashamed to talk about it to Taylor, who is gentle with her in a frightened way, like Sasha is a sick kitten who also might explode.

Sasha writes me letters. She apologizes for not saving me. She begs me for forgiveness. She doesn’t know that I’m reading through her eyes; she’s having this conversation with the version of me who exists in her imagination, the avatar of her guilt.

I feel her fingers around the pen. I flex them. I write the letter “I.”

Sasha screams, or I scream. There’s only so much pain you can hold while you’re alive, because death is always the trapdoor at the very bottom of the worst thing you can imagine. This pain has no analogy to the human body I used to have; it’s bigger than my body could ever have felt.

Sasha only feels a flicker of it, but it’s enough to make her drop her pen and curl into a ball on the floor, tears and snot running down her face. She heaves and heaves until vomit is coming out of her nose. Taylor runs into the doorway and stands there staring, but doesn’t come closer.

---

Sasha’s dreams are hideous, so I try to stay awake, floating at the top of her mind. I’m possessing her, and I don’t want to be, but I don’t know how to stop.

I sit up in bed, suddenly, so abrupt that I’m afraid I’ve woken Taylor. But she doesn’t move. I wear Sasha’s body clumsily – I don’t know if it’s because I’m out of practice driving one of these, or because hers fits so differently than mine used to. I have to get out.

Sasha’s skin feels swollen, like an overinflated balloon. Feverish and hot. Too dry. I’m pressed up against the underside of her and there’s not enough air in here.

She wakes in the middle of a panic attack, my first since I died, her first ever. We stumble into the bathroom, splash water on her face. I don’t know which of us is in control. She feels feral, hunched over the sink, her hair in her eyes. I have to get out. It’s definitely my hand, the left one, reaching for the razor blade.

It’s me digging the blade into Sasha’s right wrist. She’s angry and terrified, but she isn’t trying to stop me. Maybe this is a kindness I can offer her.

I’ve barely broken the skin when Taylor’s grabbing Sasha’s wrist, holding on hard, twisting until I drop the razor. The twinge in Sasha’s arm is barely anything. What hurts is the rush of shame that slices through Sasha when she sees the look on Taylor’s face. Sasha hates being pitied.

“Why?” Taylor says, and her face looks like she’s been crying for hours, although no tears are falling.

“It’s not me,” Sasha says. She doesn’t know any other way to explain it. “I’m not me.”

I realize with a shock of horror what I might have done, what I almost did. What if Sasha’s death didn’t mean my freedom at all, didn’t mean the end of Jess, but just linked me to Taylor with another chain of grief?

There’s nothing I can do. I’m trapped.

“Don’t do that,” Taylor whispers, her arms wrapped around herself like she wants to be holding onto Sasha. “Don’t ever do that. How could you, after her?”

Sasha says, “I didn’t,” but even she isn’t sure whether she’s telling the truth. I’m slamming myself against the inside of Sasha’s brain, one last desperate rush for escape. If Taylor knows I’m here, maybe she can find a way to make me leave.

Am I here at all? Am I just a way of naming the feelings that are impossible for Sasha’s heart to hold, the grief that’s too big for her body?

The blood on my right wrist – Sasha’s wrist – our wrist – it looks black in the darkness of the bathroom as we reach for Taylor. Taylor turns and kisses the cut, and now there’s blood on her lips. She doesn’t let go of our arm as we move closer, kneeling face-to-face with her on the floor. One of us presses Sasha’s right wrist harder into Taylor’s mouth.

She hesitates, her eyes flickering to Sasha’s. Who does she see there? Then Taylor’s eyes flutter closed and she sinks her teeth into the soft underside of Sasha’s inner arm.

I press my thigh between Taylor’s legs, and she moans. She lifts her head and kisses me, blood on her lips. Sasha loves her and doesn’t want to hurt her. I bite her bottom lip until I draw more blood. Taylor kisses us harder, her fingernails digging into my back, sliding up underneath Sasha’s shirt. She’s trying to reassure herself of Sasha’s body, to convince herself that it’s still here.

I grab a fistful of Taylor’s hair in my left hand, yank her head back so she’s looking me in the eyes. She gasps in pain, but the way she’s still leaning toward me, it’s not just pain. “I love you,” she says, and she says it to me, whichever me that is. “Don’t leave.”

“I’m here,” Sasha says, holding her, “and I’m not going anywhere,” I add. Which of us says “I’m sorry”? Does anyone? Or do the words just hang in the air like the smell of sweat?

The razor blade is lying on the floor. I reach for it with my right hand, then use my left to pull Sasha’s shirt over her head. We put the razor in Taylor’s hand. We kiss her. Without words, we tell her where to hurt us.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 985

July 18th 2025

Think of Me by Lindsay King-Miller

Narrated by Kitty Sarkozy

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

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CONTENT WARNINGS FOR: Explicit sex, self-harm, transphobia, body horror, S&M kink. To be clear, this is a story with explicit descriptions of sexual activity from the first sentence. If this isn’t for you, then step out now, it’s FINE, everyone has different lines and we only cross them on our own terms.

 

This week’s story was first published in the anthology DARK RAINBOW: QUEER EROTIC HORROR (Riverdale Ave., 2018) and comes to us from Lindsay King-Miller. King-Miller is the author of Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls who Dig Girls (Plume, 2016) and The Z Word (Quirk, 2024). Her second novel This Is My Body is forthcoming from Quirk Books in August 2025. She lives in Denver, CO with her partner and their two children.

 

Your narrator this week is the incomparable Kitty Sarkozy. Kitty Sarkozy is a speculative fiction writer, actor and robot girlfriend. Kitty is an alumnus of Superstars Writing Seminar, a member of the Apex Writers Group, and the Horror Writer’s Association. Several large cats allow her to live with them in Marietta GA, She enjoys tending the extensive gardens, where she hides the bodies. For a list of her publications, acting credits or to engage her services on your next project go to kittysarkozy.com.

 

So, listen to the noises in the back of your head. Because at times like this you can’t help but wonder. Are their stories true?

 

Ghosts haunting each other, as two people, one dead but not gone and one alive but not functional dance around each other. This is a story about grief, and about love, and abuse, and neglect and dysmorphia and what happens when we can no longer tell the difference between any of them. When less pain is almost as good as no pain. When we don’t want it to stop because what happens after it stops is, we worry, much worse. Co-dependency as mutually assured destruction.

 

‘She doesn’t help me. But she doesn’t fight me either.’

 

There’s a moment I think about a lot. It sits, in physical terms, between the realisation you’re about to be hurt and the pain arriving. If you look closely you can see it in a lot of sporting situations. The second between the punch landing and the pain arriving. The moment you land the flip slightly wrong and know you’re about to feel it. I’ve been inside that moment a couple of times. You can live in there if you want to and the same is true of the psychological and emotional injuries we all sustain, and which these characters are defined by.

 

Grief is pain caused by absence. It’s, like the Vision once said, love persevering. The thing about grief is that the pain is often preferable to the absence. In episode 964 Kat referenced the U2 song, Fast Cars, and the lyric:

 

You should worry ’bout the day

That the pain it goes away

You know I miss mine sometimes

 

And it’s that. If you’re hurting, you’re feeling and the tattered fronds of the person you’ve lost still, just about, can be detected inside that pain. They’re already halfway out of the ceiling, but if you grasp fast enough, hold tight enough they won’t go any further.

 

But they won’t come back.

 

And that’s where the horror sits for me. In that moment, in the awful status quo of imminent injury, the white noise of trauma and the weirdly pleasant, blasted clarity it gives us. We’re hurt. We’re grieving. We don’t need to do anything else. And the truth is, we don’t. We can live inside the wound, and inside the pain. We can live inside abuse and neglect and decay. A lot of us have, and to borrow a line from the cheeriest, and darkest incarnation of the Doctor, sometimes there’s even a little shop in there.

 

What there isn’t is joy or growth. There’s no completion, just wounds stuffed with someone else’s bandages, as we throw ourselves headlong into relationships that didn’t work before the grief hit and now work even less. But the awful thing is there’s hope in there too. Because this wound will be a different shape. Maybe we’ll fit this one. Maybe working to make it tolerable won’t hurt as much as doing something new.

 

And it won’t. In the short term. In the long term it will destroy you in a way no one can come back from. Growth hurts. Stasis kills. Please, grow. As Kat put it:

 

Take some time, yes. It’s okay. But be mindful about it. Choose to put things aside for a little while, knowing you will come back to them later. Not buried, just… paused.

 

And then when you’re ready, or perhaps a little before that because, let’s be honest, we’re never ready, are we? But when you can tolerate it. When you’re a little stronger. Then, then, exorcise your demons. Before you give them the chance to put the razor in someone else’s hand.

 

What a fantastic story, thanks to all.

Onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you want that as much as we do.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t-shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs by E. Catherine Tobler, narrated by Essie Batz with Chelsea on audio production and me in the Serling Chair. We’ll see you then but before we go, PseudoPod wants us to remember Love… doesn’t have to be something that develops. The purest, most primal kind can hit you like a wave… in a moment … or over the course of one night.