Nightcrawling(17)

I cross the street to Tony’s side and stop. He walks out of the shadows of a maple tree and his hands are stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie like a frustrated child. I take the cash out of my bra and hand it to Tony, knowing he loves me enough to watch me survive, to give him my everything without worrying about him running. If that ain’t some shit my uncle would be ashamed of.

“Kiara, can I ask you something?” Tony’s voice is a shudder in a tornado of quiet. His hoodie has the name of a college I’ve never heard of in blocked letters and I realize I don’t even know if Tony been to college.

I nod to him because no is not an answer to this question.

His bottom lip moves side to side.

“If I, uh, got me a job—a real one, you know—and saved up for a while, would you let me take care of you? Like real talk take care of you, like a man takes care of a woman?”

He drifts into a mumble and I wobble on one of my heels, trying to balance, trying to find an escape. It don’t make sense to me why he’s asking this now, when I am still tender from Davon’s thrusts, barely clothed and vulnerable.

“We both know it ain’t like that. It ain’t that simple. I got Marcus to think about.” Marcus doesn’t even realize how his life would dissolve without me paying for rent, his phone bill.

“Just ’cause it ain’t simple don’t mean it gotta be complicated.”

“We talking blood, Tony.”

“That ain’t everything.” His fingers start to grasp for mine and then still.

“When everything else goes to shit, he’s all I got. And me and you can’t never be that, you know?”

Tony don’t even nod this time, don’t say a word. Instead, he reaches into the pocket of his hoodie and pulls out the cash, pushes it back into the creases of my palms. He shadows himself until he’s nothing but dark and I know he’s not even there no more but I can’t help thinking that he’s watching, waiting. If Tony don’t wait for me, then no one will.

I spin around, back to International, solo walking. And, God almighty, when it all goes to shit, Marcus better be my shadow. He better be my everything.





The sound of splashing wakes me up at noon. It’s foreign to me here, the water thrash noises both recognizable and out of place. Something’s always waking me up in the height of my happy, right when my dream begins to dance. During last night’s sleep, which really didn’t start till four a.m., I dreamed up this meadow with flowers that exist in colors I’ve never seen in person. I could hear this melodic soundtrack, this Van Morrison kind of blues, and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until I lay down in the flowers and realized it was coming straight from the sky. And then I was laughing because the sky was singing to me. God walked out the clouds like music. I was naked. I am always naked. And then there was a splash, bright midday through the shades, this empty apartment.

I stumble up from the mattress, swinging open the door and hanging my torso off the railing, so my body splits in two at the stomach: legs and breasts. Crust crumbles out my eyelids as I stare down into the pool, the scene materializing like a television turning from static to moving image. Trevor’s head bobs up and down, in and out of the water. He’s tall enough now to stand in the shallow end, but continues to dip his head under, moving it around; circles of boy turned fish.

“What you doing in there, boy? There’s shit in that water,” I call down to him. Though the brown of it has disappeared, probably through the filter, I swear I can still smell the feces lingering in the air. As far as I’m concerned, Dee’s man’s dog shit and the pool are interchangeable.

Trevor’s head comes up, bends back to look at me. He has a birthmark on the top of his head, a dark spot in the shape of a spilling circle and I can see it as clearly now as I could the day he came out his mama. The whole apartment building went into labor with Dee when her moans found their way through the vents and out the windows. We all sweated with her, paced around and counted the minutes between each choke of her body. Mama was looking at the clock in our apartment, waiting for a couple hours until she turned to me and said, “It’s time. Come on, chile,” and just like that we were out the door and knocking on Dee’s apartment, in a flock of women all joining the stampede of this birth, my eight-year-old shoulders shaking. Every woman in the Regal-Hi crammed into Dee’s studio apartment, where she was splayed on the floor, gaping like the pocket of sky before the rain starts to pound, ready to bust open and release itself.

Dee kept saying, “Give it to me, please, just to get me through, Ronda.”

She repeated this like a mantra between contractions, referring to the rock and pipe on the kitchen counter, ready for her. She said she had quit her habit after she found out about the pregnancy, but by quit she meant she used only on occasion, only when the morning sickness or the back cramping got real bad. Ronda, her childhood friend, refused to give Dee the crack, and a group of women stood in a line between the counter and Dee’s body, guarding the child from its mother.

Mama pushed her way through the crowd, her arms long and spread out, me trailing behind her toward the center of the room, toward Dee’s pounding.

“We got a little longer till he’s out, alright, baby? It’ll be over in about one hour. One more hour, one more hour.” Mama repeated this, dropping to the floor by Dee and humming until the whole room was one rumble of my mama’s lungs, intoxicating and heavenly, and I couldn’t help but want to climb back into her body, feel those vibrations like my own breath.