At the Altar of Her
by Andrey Uzarski
He loved her from the moment he laid eyes on her: Hania, his little girl.
She laughed a symphony— this girl. She told stories that rivaled all fantasy. She had his skin and eyes and every Earthly part, so no one could mistake that they were blood.
She had his heart, sealed in a jar beneath her bed.
In the nights when she would wake, crying great storm clouds, he rushed to her side and wrapped her tight in his arms.
“You’re safe here,” he said. “Sweet girl, this is home.”
This was home, just the two of them.
He cooked her dinner by the light of the lamp, the sky outside a blue-black shroud, the smell of fresh liver and browning onions trapped inside their flimsy walls.
“So hungry!” she cried, draping herself across the table.
“You’re too young to be such a queen.”
She giggled at this, a subdued strings section. “But you’re a queen!”
“I’m a grown-up.”
He thought this was the truth; sometimes he wasn’t sure.
Sometimes his guts were too big for his body.
Sometimes he couldn’t remember which of them had birthed the other.
He spooned the meal onto her plate—pink, with hand-painted flowers—and served it with a flourish, a napkin over his arm, bending carefully to avoid his stitches.
“For the lady,” he said as he placed it before her.
She dove in with her hands and no hesitation, tearing the tissue apart to her liking, sharp teeth gnashing, throwing scraps across the room.
His mother would call her a beast of a girl. He smiled as he watched her instead. “It’s good?”
She nodded.
“That’s my darling.”
He wiped the grease from her mouth when she finished, revealing her glowing, grinning face— his face, his dimples. Her happiness set the room afire.
And come tomorrow when it grew back, he knew he could cut himself open again.
Andrey Uzarski is a transgender writer and student of English currently studying abroad in Germany. His fiction has appeared in The Crucible, the undergraduate magazine of Earlham College, where he also works as a co-editor. He will graduate this May. You can find more from him at andreyooze.wordpress.com.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “At the Altar of Her”? I wrote this in the final stretch of recovery after major surgery, having just received permission to resume normal activity. Every time I stretched, or moved my arms, or lay down in the wrong way, I still felt the seams where I’d been opened and then sewn back shut. Every time I took off my shirt, I gawked at the novelty of my own appearance. The body is a common focus in my writing— through transition, through pregnancy, through change and loss of all kinds— but it’s not so often that I get to work in the midst of my own nonfigurative body horror.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
12/15 • Isabelle Ness
12/22 • Catherine Bai
12/29 • Stephan Viau
01/05 • Allison Blevins
01/12 • Justin Ocelot
01/19 • Yejun Chun
01/26 • Mathieu Parsy
02/02 • Robert McBrearty
02/09 • Sarah Daly
02/16 • Wayne Lee
02/23 • Terena Elizabeth Bell
03/02 • Michael Mirolla
03/09 • Nicholas Claro
03/16 • TBD
03/23 • TBD
03/30 • TBD