fiction
It’s the magic point between sunset and setting and the sky is a bluesy purple, the street is all wet with hours ago rain. I finger a rusty nail in an electric post and let Tanisha go on about Betty Davis and ordained journeys and black girl magic. There’s no real use arguing with Tanisha’s logic. It’d be like talking to the radio.
“When you sleep your life away,” she continued, pointing at me with her garden gloved pinky, “you miss the world, you go someplace else.”
But the next day, against all expectations and formalities, she grew, her limbs narrowed, her torso expanded, her chest widened, her mouth opened, her tongue saw the light and her voice made itself heard.
One day she flew to Australia. She understood that there was no such thing as an island. She returned. She felt better in the air, out of reach and already deafened.
Cecilia once told me she had to choose between poetry and painting, but she no longer believes this and is recovering what was stolen, rejected, lost. You bequeath to your daughter what was left of the flag, and rejecting its unflattering form, she refashions it into a crop top to show off her midriff. She’s on the verge of something, that beautiful precipice.
Their rage so loud she stopped hearing it. Telephone wires ran through her body and tugged her in different directions the way exile does. The way the world falls and the sea begs when love limps. The way numbers climb the wind like death tolls when oppressors are free.
With each impulse, the current your heart siphons from the phone line will slowly render the vision of Self in vibrant color. Your grey tongue will begin to blush, too. When it swells with the metal-sweet taste of saffron, you will know that this vision of Self is real enough to power its own flow.
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