“Your BMI is high,” the doctor says as she scrapes and swabs. “You need to lose weight.”
“Uh huh.”
“There are other health implications . . .” she prattles on, and I zone out. She doesn’t understand. If I shrink myself, I will be crushed.
“Well, things seem normal enough down there,” she says as she emerges. “They say that once the initial trauma passes, women like you can live quite normally with . . .” she hesitates to find the words, “. . . the remnants,” she concludes.
Women like me?
I want to grab her and shout, PLEASE, I’M A SUPERWOMAN! But I bite my bottom lip instead. None of this feels like superhero treatment. I promise to walk every day and drink more water. I dress quickly and head across the street for a venti iced mocha latte, extra whip.
There are five people in line when I arrive. A young Black boy, maybe fifteen, struggles with large hands to dig coins out of skinny jeans.
The barista sighs impatiently. “Five fifty. You got it?” Her name tag reads “Brandy.”
The boy digs deeper into his pockets, pushing the tight denim further down his ass, revealing more of his crisp white boxers. There are sneers of disgust from the other customers.
“You don’t have it.” Brandy cancels the order and gestures for the next customer.
I step forward. “I can pay for him . . .”
“I said I got it, bitch!” the boy shouts at the barista.
Brandy gasps.
At that moment, two cops enter the coffeeshop, and a stillness descends.
“What’s your name?” I whisper to the boy, eyes planted on the officers.
“Dante,” he responds.
“Dante, baby, please take your hands out of your pockets now. Slowly.”
The officers’ hands hover over their guns. They take in the frightened, nervous faces of the patrons, the baristas nervously ducking behind counters. It doesn’t matter that they are the ones creating the fear. Their eyes hone in on Dante.
Dante stares back, wide-eyed but defiant. “You gonna shoot me over some coffee?” he challenges.
Brandy tries to speak. “It’s okay . . .”
I push the boy behind me.
Patrons and staff drop to the floor.
The first bullet hits like a punch to the gut. It slams my liver into my lungs. Belly fat absorbs the impact and enfolds the bullet before it can pierce my skin. I double over as breath is pushed violently from my body. My knees crash against the hard linoleum, threatening to shatter. The second bullet hits my shoulder blade, and the impact sends me sprawling across the floor. The bullet bounces away and is lost in my mass of hair. I crawl towards Dante to shield him with my body. But I am slow, and I am tired.
Two shots later, the trigger-happy cop is restrained by his partner. The echo of gunfire rings in my ears, joined by the screams of frightened bystanders.
“You feared for your life,” one cop coaches the other.
Dante sits frozen, back against the counter, shaken but unharmed. I reach him and wrap my arms around his trembling body.
The officers notice me now. “Shit, how are you still standing?”
“I’m unarmed,” I respond.
“She’s one of those,” scoffs one.
“No paperwork,” the other replies with a shrug. They shove me out of the way to cuff the boy.
As they drag Dante away, he looks at me, perhaps for the very first time. “Hey, lady, I don’t even know your name!”
I know you don’t.
Not for the first time, I watch cops stuff a teenager into a squad car, decidedly better than a hearse. As they drive away, I help myself to a cup of drip before staggering home for a bubble bath and some Ben & Jerry’s.
I pass the thicc sistah from the waiting room. She gasps at the bullet holes in my clothing, the scent of gun smoke and death dripping from my pores.
“I’m off duty now,” I tell her. “You got this?”
She doesn’t answer.
27
“Penultimate” © ZZ Claybourne
Originally Published in Community of Magic Pens edited by E.D.E. Bell
(Atthis Arts: May 4, 2020)
There was power in her pen but she dared not use it. There were stories in her head she dared not say. She walked the Earth stealing pens from hotels and banks, writing no more than three words at a time on slips of paper here and there, tucking the parts of a story meant to be discovered long after she was gone into books, between the cushions of bus seats, cracks in trees, and—very specifically—the tables of lovers looking for something to be rekindled, looking to be re-born.
She’d been born seven times within one year once, always with that pen nearby. A fountain pen. Casing black with white dots like random stars, the nib as golden as first light, the band the gold of a ring. She was born married to the pen. She was in love with its hidden stories.
She had forgotten their strength once.
A long time ago. She can’t remember any of the people’s faces although she’d loved them and knew them. The pen was an odd thing. When she’d found it in the lee of a tree and touched it, everyone went away. Everything went away. The world was changed…except her.
What had been a field, now contained structures. Huge buildings and noise all around.
She’d dropped the pen to immediately return to her world, the pen at her feet. She was relieved to find that birds sang, that insects struggling beneath her tickled the soles of her bare feet, and in the distance were people, people whose conversations flowed as though never interrupted.
No one was dead. Nor had anyone noticed she was gone.
“I want to stay,” she told the pen, hesitantly bending for it.
It obeyed. It was patient with her. Memory was sometimes tricky.
In the earliest days it showed her there were more uses for a pen than lists. It gave her new words; the words became stories; the stories became…reality? Sometimes it was hard to know which dream was hers and which belonged to all the world.
She would write, then glance around, and notice things had changed. Small things. The arguing lovers across the way, now kissing. A hornet prepared to sting, now content to laze among the many flowers that grew uninterrupted.
One day she got bold, very bold; she wrote a tale of new love, designed specifically to change.
Which it did.
She unwittingly wrote everyone out of existence.
Even the world: gone.
She looked for her hands and they weren’t there. Her body consumed stars as a galaxys-wide nebula thrust into the universe mere seconds after the Big Bang; she was the first touch of consciousness and wonder and delight and fear and wanting ever to exist.
She was love.
It had taken a huge effort of will to pull herself together. Billions of years. In that time the world re-formed, people returned, life evolved on track.
And the pen lay nearby.
She didn’t fear it. She picked it up, willing everyone and everything to stay.
They did.
She knew the story of love. It involved destruction, tearing, rebuilding, reimagining, becoming—all things the world wasn’t designed strong enough to hold in its hands for very long.
It was a story to be told in whispers, in slips, in sudden findings.
In epiphanies or words stopped solely by kisses on lips.
After several lifetimes she realized she was not separate from the pen; it was not separate from her.
She hadn’t found it. She’d forgotten she’d created it, knowledge which created a nomad of her. As she walked the Earth pretending to be smaller than anyone ever truly was, for the world, the stars, the universe was a story of love, a tale which erased entire existences to rebuild them anew, she felt more emboldened at leaving parts of the mystery much more often in full view.
She remembered loving the summer, the sounds of lovers, intertwined stories erasing solitude, erasing separation.
Strips of pape
r on the wind, blowing toward you.
28
“Love Hangover” © Sheree Renée Thomas
Originally Published in Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire edited by Nicole Givens Kurtz (Mocha Memoirs Press: October 13, 2020)
That night disco records weren’t the only things that burned. I lost someone irreplaceable, a creature that lived off blood and music, the lifeforce of a people, but a creature that was also my friend.
Delilah brings it, and I mean she brings it one hundred percent! Delilah Divine! Sang, girl, sang!
Delilah teased death the way she teased her fans. Her voice, an odd constellation of sound.
She had tasted death and knew she would always live, in one form or the next, like the singer resurrected in the record’s groove. Every night was a different club, one after the other. Sixteen on a hi-hat, four on the floor, two and four on the backbeat, that was the sound that announced her arrival and all of Disco. Like Delilah Divine’s voice, the music was sweet water finding its own way home. It was going to get through, just a matter of time. The challenge was finding a way to listen and not get drenched. With Delilah you drowned.
The first night I met Delilah, she danced on a speaker box. Bianca Jagger rode by on a white horse, her black locks shining ebony waves, but all eyes returned to Delilah. To say she was a vision is to insult the very nature of sight. Beauty is internal and eternal, and Lilah’s beauty came through in her songs. Motown, funk, soft Philly soul and salsa. It wasn’t what she said. Not the lyrics nor the music with its lush orchestral arrangements, her soaring vocals with reverb. It was the story that was beneath her words and music, the message she carried within.
The message was about freedom. That’s what the sound was and the movement. We danced to be free. Candi Staton sang from her heart and that’s why we loved her songs, too. I had no idea how true her lyrics would be.
Self-preservation is what’s going on today. Delilah started off singing jazz, top 40 hits. When deejays arrived in clubs carrying crates between sets, she and the other vocalists sang for their own survival. And sing she did. I loved the way I moved when her music was on, the way we dove and split from our old selves into something sensual and new. The way the dance floor took us in, wet and holy in its mouth. We were all glitter and steam, blurred blazing bodies spinning in the music’s light. If I turned away from the hypnotic rhythm and the beats, from Delilah’s seductive song and dance, I could have saved myself and a lot of dead people a whole lot of trouble. Heartache was Delilah’s last name. Nothing else was fitting.
Young hearts just run free. Delilah only had time for the young and none of us, not a single soul could run away or leave her embrace. She was like Diana’s song. If there’s a cure for this, I don’t want it, I don’t want it. I thought about Delilah all the time and she gave me and all her fans the sweetest hangover. When Delilah got into your bloodstream, she controlled lives, heartbeats. I practically lived in the clubs to just to see her.
The club’s appeal was that the ultimate rocker lifestyle was available to anyone who could manage to get in. When I first met Delilah, it seemed like she was always in the club, as if she emerged from beneath the parquet floors fully formed. Dressed in slinky, silk dresses that wrapped her curves in silver-tinged moonlight, Delilah was a vision. You could not turn away from her and believe me, many tried, only to find themselves in her thrall.
Music was her spell. Deejays played with minds. Stories told with songs seeped into your soul. Walk through a door in the forest. No confidence at all, but in music spirits take shape. I became who I wanted to be, what I needed. Dancing with Delilah Divine was like that.
Five a.m. when the club was closed, most others would stumble their way home or fall into the faded booths of a diner. Delilah wouldn’t want rest or breakfast. She wanted to be near water. Delilah would sit next to the ferns and bulrushes. She said unlike the clubs, the green life formed a wall of kindness. She would bend her ear to the waves that lapped up against the shore, whispering to voices I could not hear. I tried to reach her with a joke, some laughter, or a bit of gossip, anything that might hold her attention, pull her from the faces, the arms I could not see. But she was lost in the waters, in search of depths where she could drown her weight of years. What she sought to drown was not a name but her history. Sometimes she spoke as if she lived beyond her twenty odd years.
Lilah lived for the rust of songs, for the scars and cutting parts of choruses, the hooks that dug in your soul and made you cry from recognition of depths. She wanted to laugh with the joy of it, and dance and dance until she could reach the gray vaults of sea. She said her sisters waited for her on the other side, but she could not swim her way back to them. Said she was already drowned. Each night at the club I watched her struggle to breathe. They played her songs before I knew they were hers. String sections and synthesizers, syncopated baselines and horns, and that voice, that incredible voice. She danced as if the music was a stranger. As if the songs were notes that came out of another’s throat.
“Where did you learn to sing like that?” I asked. She looked at me with dead fisheyes that should have run me away, but I was already hers before the first time we even touched or danced.
“From the throats of a thousand, thousand men and women. But the children,” she said, closing her eyes as if the memory pained her, “their voices are too sweet. I cannot bear the taste of their songs.”
I thought she was high. I’d seen her with blow and biscuits, poppers and whippets—whatever made the music and lights, the dance and the tempo last longer.
“What do songs taste like, Lilah?”
“Like ambergris and champagne.”
She spun around, eyes staring straight up. “They’ve come back.” She pointed. The disco ball was the largest in the studio. It reflected the jewel tone beams of the strobe lights. “We used to party with these in the 20s, back in Berlin.”
“Berlin? Lilah, you are only twenty, if that. How would you know how flappers partied then?”
She stopped spinning with a shrug. “Saw it in a movie?” she asked. “Mirror balls. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Die Sinfonie der Großstadt!” she shouted, then repeated her spinning top dance. Her nipples brushed the sheer fabric of her teal, jewel-toned dress. I forced my eyes from staring. Instead I watched her sleeves flutter and float, gossamer moth wings. Lilah favored dresses that made her look as if at any moment she could fly away. She was always so restless, like a hummingbird, a kind of lightning flowed through her, even without the drugs. She was never fully present. Her eyes, her mind, the random stories—her memories, she claimed—would burst from her at any moment. And the voices no one heard but her. I thought she was schizophrenic and mentioned it to a doctor friend, a shrink who frequented the clubs. “No,” he said, after chatting with her, drink in hand. “Frankie, that one’s very clear.”
Lilah was like standing on a hill with the weeds and the wildflowers. The wind blowing through me. If I wasn’t so determined to pretend that I didn’t imagine her breasts in my mouth, the soft curve of her belly beneath the silk skin, I would have seen the tell-tale signs of the monster she really was, the creature she hid.
* * *
The garage on 84 King Street became our paradise. The club was like church. More than gospel piano riffs threaded through twenty-two-minute extended versions of songs. There we had chosen family. Delilah was mine. I didn’t know who I was until I came here. Then I found out I was everybody. Everybody was me. No judgments, everyone enjoying themselves. Love, peace, unity, unforgettable happiness, and then there was blood.
Though I wanted her more than my own disappointing life at the time, Delilah never wanted me. She said there wasn’t enough music in my blood to sustain her, not enough firelight and smoke.
“You’ve made up your mind to die young, Frankie,” she said one night, after we left the dance floor, having spent hours studying the power of sweat. She would dance with other bodies, take one or two back into the VIP rooms, b
ut she always found her way back to me. When she returned she was uncomfortably clear, her edges more precise. Before she disappeared with her various lovers, she was like a channel on the television or radio dial that you can sort of see and hear but doesn’t quite come through. You would try to turn it left or right, experiment with various degrees of movement, but there was always a kind of distortion, a slow rupturing of meaning, of sound—and feeling.
Lilah was mercilessly blunt.
“It’s your choice, of course,” Delilah said, no judgment or pity, just straight no chaser with Delilah the Divine, “but if you do, you’ll never find your song then, Frankie. They’ve run out of music on the other side,” she said. “And I ought to know.” The sadness that shadowed her eyes deepened as she spoke. “Sorry, but you’ve got to live a while longer,” she said, throwing her head back. “Until then, there’s nothing there to take from you.”
She didn’t want my heart, so I offered my body. She laughed.
“No love, I like you fine, Frankie. There’s just not enough song in that stream of yours to make it worth the while,” she said slowly, as if explaining to a very small child. “As they say, you couldn’t carry a tune.” She stroked my collarbone. Her touch felt like red streaks of fire. I wanted to kiss her and never, ever stop but her eyes were a warning. I thought her obsession with musicians was weird but nothing my musical inability couldn’t allow me to overcome. “Ironically,” she told me later, “your lack of talent, my friend, saved your life that night and every night since. So, don’t feel so bad. It’s a blessing in disguise.”
Mother said I looked sad in childhood pictures because I was an old soul.
I looked sad because I knew what lay ahead.
* * *
The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) Page 34
