There is a drawing by American artist Harry Dodge, Invisible (2012), in which the cartoonish outline of a bedsheet ghost is painted in black acrylic upon a white background. A speech bubble juts up from the ghost’s head, leading to the words “WITHOUT THIS SHEET I WOULD BE INVISIBLE.” As a trans person, I relate.
Before seeking access to masculinizing hormones at age nineteen, it was painful for me to engage with most people. I didn’t want to talk to anyone new and have them see or hear me as a girl. Trans people can have a sort of invisibility about them; we might know who we are or who we want to be, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world can see us that way. For much of my life, I lived vicariously through stories. I would consume novels and movies, anything I could find that had a character I wanted to be or a world I wanted to be a part of.
Published by LittlePuss Press on April 1st of 2025, Anton Solomonik’s debut Realistic Fiction is a collection of eleven (purportedly!) fictional stories that comment on trans experience (Solomonik himself is a co-host of the World Transsexual Forum), loneliness, the absurdity of governmental offices, and queer obsession. There’s a nostalgic fanfiction featuring President John F. Kennedy, multiple characters navigate their relationships with the works of Ayn Rand, one story circles back to a previous character to explore his trans-man experience of cross-dressing as a trans-woman. Refreshingly self-aware, dark, maniacal prose allows these stories to resonate. Solomonik’s characters are at once trapped by the form of fiction and freed by it. The book’s premier, oxymoronic, eponymous story—“Realistic Fiction”—makes clear the questions this sequence of stories attempts to ask: Can one experience be more real than another? Who decides what fiction is? What counts as a lie?
“Realistic Fiction” (the story) heads Realistic Fiction (the book). A brief four pages long, it serves as something of a thesis for the collection. The story opens on a first-person narrator confessing that he’s “always hated “realistic” fiction,” the kind of “slice-of-life-type writing” that feels like it’s just exploring a character’s feelings; there’s no plot, no juicy conflict. This immediate introduction to a narrator who is considering his own opinion of fiction sets Solomonik’s book up to be considered for its meta-ness, whereby the idea of a story—a farce or fiction—can be commented on.
The narrator relates an encounter with a date—his first time going out with a woman after pursuing masculinizing hormones and surgery. He feels locked out of himself, unable to connect with her, still experiencing the “humiliating, feminine instinct to please.” What finally breaks him out of that feeling is experiencing his own objectivity as if he were a fictional character.
The way she touched me, without regard for my subjectivity, as if I were an object, an obstacle against which to exert oneself as a result of one’s own ridiculous, feminine emotional needs, relieved me of my anxiety and triggered an elemental physical response. “It was like a weight he didn’t know he carried was lifted inside him.” A phrase from one of my father’s police novels. That was how the main character felt after he had sex with a woman.
The narrator begins to imagine himself as a character in a spy novel, a story with conflict and action and plot. He touches the woman in a “simulation of a porn gesture”—feeling, “for the first time,” that he could be somebody like his father. The “real” experiences in the narrator’s world are the ones that link him to the stories of the society he inhabits—stories of hardened male heroes with women to please them. The narrator’s father likes spy novels for their “good action and conflict, and a good understanding of the world, crime, and politics” which “shows the writer has experienced life. You wouldn’t know anything about that!”—the narrator’s father chides. In the narrator’s case, embracing the fictional gives him access to what his society values as a “real” experience. Embracing the bedsheet makes the ghost appear visible.
And we are being made into ghosts. According to an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on January 20, 2025—transgender people do not exist. (That is to say nothing of the fifteen countries across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East that criminalize transgender expression.) Solomonik reflects on what it means to read and write fiction as a person whose experiences are constantly being warped and fictionalized by society.
The collection’s third story “The Meeting of Minds” opens on an unnamed first-person narrator, an awkward nineteen-year-old college student (who, with intentional irony, signs her emails as the 1800s emperor “Don Ferdinand of Austria”) as she meets up with Geoff, a schoolmate similarly interested in the philosophies of Ayn Rand. The narrator is eager to connect with Geoff on an intellectual level, eager to have a companion to question existence with. The narrator explains she feels drawn to Rand’s books for the way “they imparted a feeling of clarity… a call to ignore one’s immediate world, the false world, with its unreasonable demands, its brutal, consensus interpretations.” And yet, the narrator feels unsure about the specifics of Rand’s worldview. Geoff is unsure of nothing; he has a confident explanation or rebuttal for each of the narrator’s ideas, equally diminishing her experience with a comment on how she’s much quieter than he expected. Frustrated and confused, the narrator tells Geoff he doesn’t exist—“You really don’t exist,” I felt compelled to repeat.” And, most pleasing to the reader, he doesn’t. Geoff is a character made up to enact a series of actions for the purpose of a story—Solomonik’s story. The narrator’s verbal reminder of this conception empowers reflection on the process of reality-making itself. The narrator’s interaction with Geoff “did not belong to the part of the universe that was intelligible.” The things that do feel intelligible to her—works of fiction, stories where the characters get to experience philosophically and sexually compatible partners, a popsicle she can taste to feel grounded in her physical form—all things her peer could not provide.
Ideas about existence and visibility echo through the entire book but solidify in the fourth story—“How to Run for Local Office While Building a Community Out of Nothing.” In the story, the main character, Ashton, is going on a date with a guy whose partner holds a connection to New York state’s “most influential left-wing third party,” in the hopes of boosting his chances of becoming the “state’s first, and the country’s third, transgender congressional candidate.” It is a goofy, satirical story, yet it is grounded by the realistic portrayal of Ashton’s loneliness, the disconnect between his emotional needs and his supposed career goals. Ashton and his date, Chris, head to Chris’s apartment to have sex. Upon seeing Chris naked, Ashton begins to consider the “masculine aesthetic” and realizes it has almost nothing in common with the actions he sees other trans guys perform.
No, thought Ashton. Real masculinity came from being powerful and uncaring. It was the peace of mind that came from knowing you were the most important person in your own life—the main character in a coming-of-age story that involved sympathetic girlfriends, coaches, and parents, people whose main function in life it was to support you and ensure you discovered the spark of manhood in yourself that would cause you to become a genius.
Even in acting out this persona, in crafting a life around the so-called “masculine aesthetic,” and during an encounter in which Ashton (to point to the meta qualities of the story)—“the main character”—is effectively using Chris—a supporting character—for career-boosting purposes, he is still sidelined for the way his physical sex characteristics present themselves. After giving Chris oral sex, Ashton asks,
“Would you want to try to, like… reciprocate the act? I mean the oral sex act. On my genitals.”
“Oh,” said Chris. His eyes widened. “Uh, I would feel really nervous about doing that.”
“Oh yeah for sure I get it,” said Ashton quickly.
“Like it’s a pragmatic thing. I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“Yeah totally,” interrupted Ashton. “I agree we should fuck instead.”
This story bleeds into the fifth in the collection—“Signs”—in which an absent-minded eighth-grader, Complicity, develops an obsession for both the “homosocial” Willa Cather novel Death Comes for the Archbishop and for her English teacher. Complicity is given a gift by the English teacher, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov—with the stipulation that, in order to make up for missing homework, she write a book report using the concepts in the text. Complicity becomes distracted and procrastinates, failing to complete the report by its intended due date. Instead of going to class that day, she sneaks into the English teacher’s car (which she knows to be unlocked) and spends the school day laying there, going through the teacher’s things. The teacher returns to her car and finds Complicity “stretched out in the back seat, her face covered in one of the teacher’s recently washed shirts.” The story ends on a note of mystery; there is no confrontation, no reaction at all described on the teacher’s part. Instead, the piece ends with a quote that Complicity recalls from Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father Joseph’s last assessment of his lifelong friend:
Doubtless Bishop Latour’s successors would be men of a different fiber. But God had His reasons… Perhaps it pleased Him to grace the beginning of a new era and a vast new diocese by a fine personality. And perhaps, after all, something would remain through the years to come: some ideal, or memory, or legend.
Ending the story here leaves Complicity tangled in a form of fiction in much the same way Solomonik’s explicitly trans characters are—trapped, freed, both, neither. Her story becomes another way of saying—there are ideals the world expects us to conform to. But what happens to those unequipped to comply? To the people who, lacking a bedsheet, can only find a shirt to cover their face?
Willow Campbell
Willow Campbell (they/them) is a fiction candidate through the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program at Cleveland State University. Their work has appeared in venues such as X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Gordon Square Review, and Your Impossible Voice.