She passed a dark field and saw them, tiny sparks flickering in the grass.
Mara had been coming to the Firefly Grove picnic for seven years, but this was the first time she wore a sundress.
So here she was, standing at the edge of the picnic, barefoot in the grass, feeling the sun press warm against her collarbones.
The thing about being trans, Mara thought, was that joy never felt simple. It came threaded with the ghost of before—the years of button-downs and silence, of watching women laugh in sundresses from behind a window she’d been told was glass. Now she was on the other side, and her heart was doing something between a gallop and a song.