Two weeks passed without hearing from Esperanza, and I’d mourned her by losing six pounds plus gaining a basket of bruises and scratches from anyone and anything Sensei put in front of me. People think emotions are what separate us from the animals, but they’re wrong. It’s winning (and thumbs) that make our species nearer to God than ordinary beasts. The stakes might be high or low or nonexistent, but victory and defeat are everything. Competition inspires improvement. We make better food, superior tools, gain insight, develop the art of strategy, wage war, topple empires, invent prejudices, form tribes, implement branding to enable us to fight, cut, kill, and defeat. It’s also really fun. Without competition we stop moving, and I’d rather be dead than stand still forever. I forget all the times I poured salt on snails just to watch them bubble up into hot soup. There was something primal, intentional, mystical about that—a life for a wish, a summoning of something dark and old. Glancing at Esperanza was wonderful and cruel like pouring salt on a snail, but I couldn’t tell if she looked at me like that with intention or by accident. To just take a life on accident seemed like a different kind of mysticism, a poorly timed joke from small-headed gods reminding us that nothing is in our control, especially death and love.
I found out Esperanza wasn’t dead or cruel, just sick. Sensei Reyes paired me that day with Noemi, who put me in an arm bar eleven times before I bit her. After I bit Noemi out of loneliness and desperation, she seemed to think we’d become bonded somehow and started telling me her life story and national statistics for violent crime. I struggled to keep her forearm from sinking in around my throat while she said she dropped out of college because her chemistry professor was a sexual predator. She went to art school later.
“Nine out of ten women experience some degree of sexual assault in a lifetime,” Noemi said, putting the squeeze on me even harder.
She was two-thirds of my weight, twice my age, all bones and muscle like a skinless chicken on steroids. I finally got free, only for us to start all over again.
“This used to be my only stress relief,” Noemi continued while wrapping her legs around my waist and crushing me tight. “Now I draw cat heads for people.”
I tapped out. She let me go.
“Cat heads?”
“Cat heads. Heads of peoples’ cats. Custom jobs. They pay like forty to fifty dollars each. People love their cats more than other people sometimes, or themselves. Cats are like the best of us. I’ll send you the link.”
I almost said that all cats look alike, but I didn’t because Noemi would probably think that was racist. I just nodded and finally surprised Noemi with a takedown. She giggled like it was the funniest joke ever, and I knew she’d gone crazy a long time ago but was fine with that. With my arm pulled to near-point-of-break in the vise of Noemi’s whole body, I believed Esperanza’s claim of me meant a promise, an understanding of our whole selves.
I only joined the class for Esperanza, even though she technically never asked me, never gave me a real choice, just led me there and suddenly I was staving off choke holds and grappling barefoot in a poorly air-conditioned warehouse. Maybe it was a gift, this personal, physical thing she did with her family. Maybe it was nothing. I went to her house and knocked on the front door for the first time to check on her. You never really know a person until you see their house, where they keep their eggs and take all their shits. That’s how you can tell if their soul is broken or locked up tight or sitting at that perfect Goldilocks temperature of well-adjusted human being. When we were teammates Esperanza seemed at odds with her own body, like she wanted it to do things it had no interest in. When we had no team I knew we might be friends, might be more, but her grandmother answered the door, and I realized I knew nothing at all. The door opened and a wave of dust slid over my face. Skillets. Unopened Barbie doll boxes. Two dozen cans of mosquito repellent. Chairs stacked high to the ceiling, useful as a sculpture made of butter in a rainstorm. Magazines piled so dense and high their spines looked like thread in a tapestry. Tiki torches. Remote-control cars. Posters rolled up. Star Wars collector’s edition mugs. Candles of the Madonna in fragile rows like a carnival game. Little green baskets that once held berries: emptied. Garden hoses. PVC piping. Mattress foam stacked like pastries. Military-grade ration packages, hollowed/consumed. A box of tire irons. Board games probably missing pieces. Lampshades. Everything. There was everything in that house.
“She’s got mono,” her grandmother said, “sleeping it off. We can wake her up.”
She pulled a tissue from her apron pocket and blew her nose like a tuba.
I didn’t know Esperanza was being raised by her grandmother. I didn’t know she had no parents in a wholly acceptable way. I had no parents because one was dead and the other was, well, I didn’t know what to call Mama then other than high. Grief is like that; it walks upright sometimes and crawls slowly for other people.
I looked up symptoms of mononucleosis, aka the kissing disease, which include fever, sore throat, and fatigue for weeks. It is often caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, which can result in cognitive impairment over long periods of time. I wondered if that meant she would forget my name, my face, and the rest. I told Esperanza’s grandmother not to bother her and turned away. Esperanza had avoided me so I wouldn’t visit. She didn’t want me to see her house for a fairly good reason. There was a lot to see. I should’ve texted like a normal person, but I was angry and impatient and ready to forget her if I had to. After seeing the house, I figured she’d want me to forget her, forget their densely packed archive of advertisements, dolls, and all the other remnants of human garbage/memory.
It was safe to assume Esperanza had been tongue-kissing a bunch of people from school and her church, though we’d never kissed. She’d been hiding from me. I apologized to her grandmother and told her to forget about it. I didn’t bother responding to Esperanza once she started feeling better and texting again.
On the day of the tournament something strange happened. A lot of people came to see us. It was at a gymnasium, brightly lit and clean. The different dojos sold merchandise at tables. They made it look easy and safe and people signed up their children for sample lessons. A big part of being any good at sports is just acceptance, working very hard to be uncomfortable and living through it.
My first challenger was from Hawaiian Gardens, Samoan, and skinny. He wanted to win. I appreciated that but knew he didn’t understand how much he would have to give up. We started in neutral where anything is possible, both of us standing in front of each other with arms open.
I was up two points and in bottom position. He scooted behind me and tried to grind his head into my shoulders, push hard against my bones nearest to the surface of my skin. I had to accept the pain he gave and not be moved by it, not shift my hands to avoid it, not bend my legs to deny it. Let it happen and hold.
The hard plastic of his helmet pressed into the bony part of my neck. It would bruise and tear like dropped fruit. I was fine. I went to the future. Esperanza and I didn’t have names for each other, but someday we might. Someday is a place where the lost and the dead come back to us, where promises happen on the hour and the impossible sits on windowsills to be petted and fed. My opponent was in an arm bar and didn’t want to break a limb, didn’t want to feel the strain in his hamstrings from his foot wedged under his body. It’s not about wanting the pain, and if he could accept it for just a little longer until the timer ran out he could start over and try again.
When I looked to the crowd and didn’t see anyone I knew at all, I went to a highway in a desert I’d never seen, in a car I didn’t own yet with someone I knew I loved asleep in the passenger seat. It wasn’t a big crowd and there were no flags or painted faces or pom-poms. I thought about letting him go, giving him another chance to win in a world of losses, but that thought didn’t last long. I didn’t go to the future or the past and pulled hard enough to hear a scream and feel the tap of surrender against the mat. The crowd began to cheer. Their feet made the floor quak
e just a little, and I didn’t leave. I stayed there.
Then she was back. Esperanza was fully recovered and back at school and jiujitsu class, I couldn’t ignore her anymore. I didn’t have the words to say that I understood that we were impossible, that we didn’t fit together, so I didn’t say anything. She walked over to me past the punching bags and I had an instant urge to hide behind one but held my ground. I knew that walk, the one with purpose, the one that said she would bottle me up or destroy me and nothing in between.
“Can you come to my house tonight?” she asked.
As if no time had passed at all, I gave her a sad yes cracked around the edges and felt stupid. Sensei ordered us to run around the building. During sparring I had to give Noemi back to Esperanza. The three of us were the only women left in the class except for the occasional trial sample attendant who never lasted more than two visits. Sensei let me work on kicks via Band-Aid Man for the sparring session. I kicked it so hard the neck tore open, a gash of yellow foam revealing itself. I quickly held the head back in place in a slight panic, worried for little Ana, thinking I’d killed her best friend or her lover or her daddy, then remembered he wasn’t real. No one was hurt more than usual. I did front kicks to the sternum just to be safe.
Esperanza didn’t talk all practice after confirming I would go to her house. In silence we rode our bikes back, her heavy eyebrows low and serious. Not saying things in the evening was our thing, but this was thicker. We were mad at each other.
Right as we approached her house she nearly veered her bike into mine. Her eyes were invisible in the hollows of her face like always, but there was something else. I’d seen the inside of her home on accident. I’d seen the piles and piles of useless garbage, the musky smell of incarcerated time, cardboard, and insects. People who lose their most valuable possessions will start to collect all things trivial as a substitute. I didn’t know what Esperanza’s grandmother had lost. Esperanza found shame in it all, and that made me very angry. I wanted to hate her for hating her house and I think I managed to do it, hate her for just a minute.
She announced herself to her grandma by shouting up at the ceiling, sending the sound over the columns of junk. Her grandma shouted back an acknowledgment, then sneezed like a soprano from her bedroom, a scream in the shadows.
I wanted to grab Esperanza and throw her down and pick her up and throw her down again, yank at her bones and twist them in, make her my height and even smaller, collapse her skin and muscle into light and press it into my chest, keep her there with nothing to do but bang against my ribs to remind me that I still had her for as long as I could stand it.
We went to her room, both tired, she more than me, and the buzzing of endorphins and the hurt of being ignored in a way that I wasn’t entitled to left me almost high. She hugged me. Esperanza Duarte put her arms around me and held me to her like we hadn’t seen each other for years and had been waiting for this day. I felt her ear slide against mine and her breath on my shoulder from above. It was a long hug. When she let me go I thought I might pop like a soap bubble, but I stayed whole and she just sat down on her bed. I could see the tiredness from being sick for so many weeks and suddenly working out again, but she smiled and made room for me. Her legs stuck out inches past mine and she pulled a protein bar out of what seemed to be the air and started munching. After I laughed, she offered me one. We ate them together, staring at the ceiling fan. Not long after, she got halfway under the covers next to me, then motioned for me to do the same. I had on my street clothes, but she didn’t care. The lights were on and her grandma’s allergies kept kicking up in the next room. I had lied to Esperanza when I said my mother told me to wash my hair after coming out. More came after. “You can’t be gay,” she told me. “Either way, you can’t be gay.” She said it like a joke, like the idea of me was so preposterous, as if being intersex meant that I did not belong to any other idea at all, as if I weren’t really there, just a cartoon pig or a toy on a shelf. Half-amused and half-terrified, she turned away from me, and then that truly was all.
I hadn’t put much thought into how bodies are supposed to love each other. Maybe we had been lovers all that time, and I didn’t recognize it. We’d grappled in class, held each other down, tugged at our joints to the brink of the unbearable.
Esperanza took off her pants and underwear from beneath the covers so I couldn’t see anything. Then she slid her legs around me sideways. I lay there for her, flat, still fully clothed for a while, then she tugged everything off of me. Esperanza didn’t touch me like I was an anomaly but like I was a memory, a place she’d forgotten and missed deeply. It felt like being wrapped in hot dough, then boiled alive. She shuddered and stopped moving, the salty sweat from her head and mouth warm against my neck. When things hurt me, time opens up and shatters, but this was the opposite, this was being pitched through the universe and back, violent and swift without any pain at all.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all my teachers—those intentional, occasional, and accidental—for your inspiration, especially to those who threw erasers at me for flapping in class. My agent, Jin Auh, deserves hefty bags of gratitude for being such a sharp, dangerous treasure. Thank you to Emily Bell for selecting this collection and being such a boss, along with Jackson, Sean, and the team at MCD. Thanks to my Fresno fam, including Roman Wilkey, Ginny Barnes, and Romaine Desclos, for providing such queer feminine chaos energy. Thank you, Joseph Cassara, Brynn Saito, and my extended family of colleagues and friends, for walking with me (literally, on my writing rants through the park). All kinds of love to my Live, Write crew—Ros, Greg, Jia, Jen, and Lorissa—for reminding me that people all over the place care about words. Thanks to my brothers, Donald Blackburn and Derek Blackburn, as well as my nieces, Iyanna, Kennedi, and Kendall, for providing lots of content (smile and wink), and my beautiful aunts, especially Susie Green and Venissa Horrington, who have supported me in both writing and survival in this wild world.
ALSO BY VENITA BLACKBURN
Black Jesus and Other Superheroes
A Note About the Author
Venita Blackburn is the author of the story collection Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 Young Lions Fiction Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program at California State University, Fresno, and is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
PART I
Fam
Bear Bear Harvest™
Biology Class
How to Wrestle a Girl
Easter Egg Surprise
Inappropriate Gifts
Lisa Bonet
Live Birth
Thirteen Porcelain Schnauzers
Not for Resale
Smoothies
Blood, Guts, and Bile
Young Woman Laughing into Her Salad
Side Effects Include Dizziness, Ringing in the Ears, and Memory Loss
Difficult Subjects
Trial of Ghosts
PART II
Grief Log
Fat
Lizard Sex
Dick Pic
Black Communion
In the Counselor’s Waiting Room with No Wi-Fi
Quiz
Menstruation
Ambien and Brown Liquor
Parthenogenesis
’Tis the Season
Answer Sheet
Ground Fighting
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
MCD × FSG Originals
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2021 by Venita Blackburn
All rights reserved
First edition, 2021
These stories previously appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: Ploughshares (“Ambien and Brown Liquor” and “Black Communion”), The Paris Review (“Fam”), Virginia Quarterly Review (“Bear Bear Harvest™,”), SmokeLong Quarterly (“Easter Egg Surprise”), Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal (“Lisa Bonet”), Split Lip Magazine (“Smoothies”), The Spectacle (“Side Effects Include Dizziness, Ringing in the Ears, and Memory Loss,” as “Side Effects Include Dizziness, Ringing in the Ears, and Loss of Memory”), Electric Literature (“Grief Log”), Story (“Ground Fighting”), and DIAGRAM (“In the Counselor’s Waiting Room with No Wi-Fi,” as “In the Counselor’s Waiting Room with No WiFi”).
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-60280-2
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How to Wrestle a Girl Page 14
