Excerpt from Stag Dance by Torrey Peters, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Tipton, Iowa, seven years after contagion

I'm lugging a bucket of grain for the sows, using two hands to keep the weight of it, hung from that thin wire, from biting into my somehow never-callousing fingers, when Keith comes up behind me and hoists it away from me with one hand. He holds it up, still with one hand, and tsks at me. "Looks like you need some help there, little lady."

He's got the macho bravado of all the T-slabs, complete with the aggression and rages—plus he's six foot five if he's an inch. Our relative heights place my line of vision at his chest, so I'm able to observe from up close how he wears a pair of old Carhartt coveralls unbuttoned down the front to show off his hairy bitch tits. He's so proud of them that even out here in the country he shows them off, a bit of conspicuous consumption that even the most isolated farmers can read: I'm so flush with testosterone that I overinject. How about that, you low-count ration-dependent weaklings? I'm grateful he doesn't wear shirts with the chest cutouts, a recent fashion among the slabs.In business, the customer is supposed to always be right, but Keith takes as his due the notion that he's in charge, and I'm the little follower. He doesn't have any idea that before the contagion spread, I was already trans, already injecting estrogen. He just figures I'm another auntie-boy, one of those males who couldn't afford testosterone after all the hoarding during the Rift Wars and so began injecting poor-quality estrogen. Hence all the "little lady" stuff, which most folks would understand as a gibe about how auntie-boys were said to have survived the war. I let him assume that. I need the black-market estrogen he harvests from those ugly mutant pigs.

With estrogen tightly rationed and regulated, the provisional government allots the good E for women of promising fertility. An older woman would have to have a relative in government or have the money for a really well-placed bribe to get on the ration list. A trans woman? People still believe that we antediluvian trans women started the contagion. Even if we came out of hiding, there's no bribe large enough to get us estrogen.

Keith is doing curls with the bucket of feed, making the veins in his forearm pop like creeping vines. I wait for him to finish, but now the game is to show that his strength can outlast my patience. I gesture to the sows. "You want to feed the pigs yourself? Go right ahead."

He hands the bucket back to me. "Nah, I like seeing you prance and scurry away from them." Feeding the pigs means getting in the pen and scattering all the grain, hopefully before one of the freakish monsters knocks me over to get a whole bucket of feed to herself.

"F*** you, Keith."

"Ooh, sweetheart. You just let me know when and where."

I'm paying Keith extra to learn pig husbandry, a pretext, while I wait for an opportune moment to steal a few piglets from him. Then Lexi and I will be able to raise our own drove of sows. Unfortunately, I've come to hate the creatures—both Keith and the pigs. Keith for obvious reasons, and the pigs because they're genetically modified to overproduce hormones bioidentical to those that humans used to produce, back before the contagion. Industrial-grade hormones in my body make me a crazy bitch, and I'm not six hundred pounds with inch-long razors for teeth. A month ago, I broke a toe kicking one of those porcine tanks in the snout. She wasn't slowed for a second. Just barreled me over and bit a two-inch gash into my thigh when I didn't immediately dump the feed bucket for her gustatory delight. Another scar.

I manage okay this time—even get a short retaliatory kick in on the black-and-pink one as I hop the fence out of the pen. The monster doesn't notice, but Keith, leaning against the doorframe at the edge of the barn, does.

"Is it your time of the month or something?" he calls out. As if. He shakes his head. "You're bitchier than my pigs. Save some supply for the real girls, huh?" He assumes I'm just a typical dealer, selling to women desperate for fertility and pregnancy. That's what most of his stock goes for—the population is aging, dwindling.

Excerpted from Stag Dance by Torrey Peters. Copyright © 2025 by Torrey Peters. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.