A Phoenix First Must Burn

by A Phoenix First Must Burn (retail) (epub)

  For Abigail it had happened early—the finding of her love. She was still in college when she met a boy named Clark, who changed everything. She was young and beautiful until she fell in love, just as they all were. She would have been young and gorgeous forever if she hadn’t.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “My mother and my aunt Giselle were the last two Dunn women left,” I explain. “When my mother got pregnant with me, Giselle was sure that would be the end of her. But my mother, her name was Josie, she didn’t love my father. And so she stayed herself: young and lovelier than ever.”

  “Until last year,” Talia says, really listening now, filling in the part of the story she knows.

  “Yeah. Until she met Marquez.”

  Until then, the Dunn curse had only been a story. That my grandmother, after having a stillborn child, had traded something unimaginable to have children who stayed young and beautiful forever, and how there had been a curse wrapped inside the blessing.

  “But with my mom, I saw it happen. Hell, you saw it happen.”

  “She was in love,” Talia says, and I nod.

  “And so, once they kissed, she began to age quickly . . . almost instantly. And I don’t know for sure, because I’m a daughter of a cursed daughter, but I think that’s what will happen to me the second I kiss your brother.”

  “The Dunn women was all beautiful and eternally young. And people was always falling in love with us. The curse only worked its dark magic if we fell in love back.”

  I jump at the sound of Aunt Gigi’s raspy voice, as it fills the room like a thin veil of smoke. It’s full of disappointment. It’s full of something else, too.

  “Aunt Gigi,” I say, standing. “I was going to talk to you about it all tomorrow.”

  Gigi levels Talia with one of her serious stares like I haven’t said a word—like I’m not even in the room. “Me and Bree? We the only two left.”

  Gigi sits down, like she’s tired, and starts to peel off her pantyhose. And that’s when I realize that my aunt is home hours earlier than she usually is.

  “I ain’t want us to end up like my sisters,” Giselle says simply, sadly. “I thought if I ain’t let love take me, you’d be safe.”

  “But wait, Gi,” I say. I look at Gigi more closely and notice a streak of gray in her hair that wasn’t there this morning. “What are you doing home?”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Just then, the doorbell rang. Giselle looked at Aubrey, and Aubrey looked at Talia. No one visited the strange, beautiful women—no one but Talia—ever.

  The three of them walked to the door together slowly, Giselle still holding her pantyhose in the ball of her loose fist. Aubrey peered through the peephole, while the portraits of all the other Dunn women watched.

  Vince was standing there, and everything about him was bronze and beautiful. But just behind him was another man, tall and dark as a shadow, who Aubrey had never seen before. She looked up at Giselle, and there was a kind of gentleness to the expression on her face—a kind of peace. Aubrey thought maybe this man was the reason why.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Aunt Gigi swipes on some red lipstick. She looks at me and winks.

  “He betta be worth it,” she said, but I can’t tell if she’s talking about Vince, the love of my life, or this shadow of a man, who is clearly the love of her own.

  ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD

  By Charlotte Nicole Davis

  You’re on your way home from the bus stop when you realize you can stop the rain just by thinking about it.

  The weatherman said there would only be a 20 percent chance of scattered showers this afternoon, and you liked those odds. You left your umbrella at home by the door. But now the ankles of your jeans are soaked black and your Steele City East High hoodie hangs heavy as a wet blanket on your shoulders. The water is cold, thinks it’s still winter. It drips down your chin, seeps into your socks, wrinkles your fingers and turns them numb. The trig homework in your backpack is probably dissolving into gray paste right about now—maybe there is a God.

  You wipe the rain out of your eyes, slick it back into your hair. Your mother cried when you came home with a buzz cut last month—you’d had such beautiful hair, she said. Good hair, your grandmother’s hair. Weather like this always ruined it. Now it just freezes your bare skull.

  You’d put up your hood to keep dry, but you know better. People who look like you have been killed for less.

  Fuck this shit, you think, and even the voice inside your head is shivering.

  And that’s when it happens—the rain stops, drops suspended in the air like the jeweled strands of a beaded curtain.

  You blink. Look up at the slate-gray sky. It’s not just the rain. Birds are frozen mid-flight. A plane hangs suspended like a bug caught in flypaper. Back on earth, in the trees, the squirrels are still as stone.

  You glance around, wondering if anyone else is seeing what you’re seeing. But the street’s empty. It’s just worn-down houses with peeling paint and yellow grass. Some of them have been abandoned, windows boarded up. Others still have signs of life. A bicycle on the lawn, or a basketball on the porch, or a truck in the driveway with a Jesus fish on the back bumper. These houses have pitchers out front to catch the fresh water—once that would have seemed desperate, now it’s routine.

  Then, as suddenly as it started, the spell is broken. Time starts up once again. The birds and plane resume their flight. The squirrels scatter. The rain falls.

  A chill creeps over your skin, and it’s not from the weather. You run the rest of the way home.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  You are Black, and you have been Black your whole life. But some of your white classmates seem to have only recently noticed.

  “Did you see in the news last night about that guy who got shot to death by the National Guard in Springfield?” Emma asks your group at the lunch table the next day. “Just because, he, was, you know . . . Black . . .” She trips over the word, like it’s a crack in the sidewalk. Bad luck. “. . . they decided he must be dangerous. That’s the second one this week, just in Missouri. It’s such bullshit.” She shakes her head and sips her iced coffee from a straw. “This isn’t who we are.”

  You and Simone exchange a look. The Look. She’s the other Black girl in your grade. A recent transfer. You don’t know her well. She lives in your neighborhood, but you never went to the neighborhood school—Steele City West. But now that she’s here at East, you have a few mutual friends. She nods at you when you pass in the hallway, meets your black eyes with her brown ones, dips her dimpled chin, lets a brief, knowing smile spread across her honey butter face. Your stomach flutters every time.

  “Who are we, then?” Simone asks.

  “I don’t know, the country that elected Obama and legalized gay marriage?” Emma answers. “Not . . . whatever the hell we’ve become now.”

  “Mhm. A shame no one saw it all coming,” Simone says dryly. She’s finished with her lunch, or this conversation, or both, because she balls up her napkin and stands to take her tray back to the kitchen. You watch her go, your eyes lingering on the curlicue of gold thread stitched across her back pocket.

  The others keep talking about Springfield, but you’re too distracted to join them. You can’t stop thinking about yesterday, how you made time stop. You’re not entirely sure, after sleeping on it, that you didn’t imagine the whole thing. That you aren’t losing your mind. That was one of the more severe reactions to the Contaminant—psychosis, memory loss, violent mood swings. Other people lost their hair or their fingernails or their teeth. Other people broke out in burning red blisters all over their bodies, or they vomited their insides out. You’ve been careful not to use the water at home since the story broke, but still, until then, for two years and eight months: you drank poison.
>
  Your stomach churns. You push the vegetable medley around your plate. You aren’t close enough to Simone to talk to her about this, and there’s no one here who would understand. Steele City East is the good school, the white school. There’s no Contaminant poisoning the water in this part of town. There’re no blisters splitting these kids’ faces. For them, it’s just a news story, and not even one of the big ones. There’re four different wars to cover, the nationwide emergency instatement of martial law, the ongoing uprising in D.C., the Cat 6 hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast. The Contaminant is nothing. It’s a footnote crawling across the bottom of the broadcast.

  You’re only allowed here at East because your dad is one of the custodians. It makes your friends uncomfortable when you mention that, makes them uncomfortable when you talk about the water, makes them uncomfortable when you remind them that you’re Black.

  So you don’t. You need friends. Even in a place like this. Especially.

  “Look, you guys are starting shit for no reason,” Sophie is saying now. “They didn’t shoot that guy because he was Black. They shot him because he was out after curfew.”

  “Only because his car had broken down. They should’ve helped him,” Emma argues.

  “I mean, yeah, it sucks, but laws are laws.”

  “The curfew didn’t even exist two months ago,” Trevor mutters. “They’re making this shit up as they go.”

  “That’s not the point—” Sophie says.

  “What if it had been Jordan?” Emma interrupts then. “Is that all you’d have to say then? ‘Laws are laws’?”

  What the fuck?

  Everyone’s looking at you now. You are a butterfly, pinned and squirming. That sick feeling in your stomach swells.

  Oh, that’s RIGHT, they’re realizing. It’s in their eyes, like when Dorothy gets to Oz and suddenly sees everything in color. She’s BLACK.

  I don’t want to be here, you think.

  And then it happens again.

  Time stops.

  You sit up straight, grinning a little with disbelief as you look around. This can’t all be in your head. It’s too real. It’s as if you’ve stepped into a photograph. The silence is complete. No chatter from your classmates, no clatter of plastic silverware. The ticking of the clock behind its cage has stopped. Your friends’ expressions are frozen, too, Emma’s red with embarrassment on Sophie’s behalf, Sophie’s face set in determination. Trevor looks like he just wants to disappear.

  So do you. You stand up, careful not to bump into anyone. You’re not sure what would happen if you did. And what will happen when time starts back up again? Will it look like you just vanished into thin air?

  Only if you hurry. You don’t know how long time will be stopped. Yesterday it had felt like only a minute. You have to document this.

  You shake up Sophie’s unopened can of Coke, just on principle, sling your backpack over your shoulder, and run out of the cafeteria.

  The hallways are filled with students caught on their way to and from lunch, pea-green metal lockers running up and down either side, gleaming white floor tiles reflecting the harsh light overhead. The sound of your footsteps echoes emptily through the silence as you weave between people, filming it all with your phone as you go. That way you can show it to someone later, if you have to. Prove it’s not all in your head.

  All right, but if it’s not in my head, then what the fuck is going on? you wonder. You push open the front doors and continue outside. Flags caught flapping in the wind, cars stalled on the road. The fountain in the courtyard looks like a glass sculpture.

  The water, you think, walking over to it. You cut your hand through the spray, watching the drops scatter without falling.

  Maybe the Contaminant does have something to do with this.

  The Contaminant comes from a military lab uptown that dumps its chemical waste in the river. Trace metals, man-made. They haven’t even added them to the periodic table yet. You still don’t know what, exactly, they’re cooking up in there. You don’t expect you ever will.

  But you know Simone’s dad is one of the scientists.

  That’s how she ended up at Steele City East in the first place—once the story broke about the water, her father was able to pull some strings and get her transferred. You could pay her a visit, maybe. See what she knows. She must know something. More than you, at least.

  The spell breaks. Time starts up once again. Your breath catches a little. You glance down at your phone, stop the video. Seven minutes and twenty-three seconds.

  You’re getting better at this.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  You decide to skip the rest of school, spend the afternoon practicing and recording your progress. You take the bus downtown first. It’ll be the perfect staging area. The city may be dying—the mall a glittering carcass, the roads cracked like parched earth—but there’s still some life left.

  You’re cautious at first. You bring the cars speeding across an intersection to a halt, but you don’t run out into the traffic right away. You don’t need them starting back up just in time to flatten you. You also don’t want to be seen. But you’re starting to recognize the subtle changes that come over you when you use this power: a chill across your skin, a humming in your bones, a tingling at the base of your skull that increases the longer you’re suspended. You’re hoping you’ll know when your strength’s about to give out, in the same way that, when you’re in the weight room, you know when you won’t be able to lift another rep.

  So you work up your courage and step off the curb, skimming along between the cars, following the broken white line like you’re walking a tightrope. Catching it all on camera. Next you duck into the crowded train station and weave between the people. Then you run along the pier, the wood clomping hollowly beneath your feet, and burst through a flock of seagulls. They explode into flight around you, and when you stop time an instant later, it’s as if you’re caught in the middle of the firework.

  You will have plenty of evidence for Simone now.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “I have to go to a friend’s house to work on a group project,” you tell your mom later that night. You’re already shrugging into your jacket, getting ready to walk back out the door. But of course it’s not that simple.

  “What project? What friend?” she asks, looking up from NCIS. She’s sitting on the swaybacked couch, in her nightgown and bonnet, sipping tea she made with bottled water. Your family brushes their teeth with bottled water, too; you cook and clean with it. You shower out of a bucket. You have to. The water that comes from the tap runs black and smells like metal.

  “It’s a history project, and Kristen Bennet,” you lie easily.

  “Do I know her?”

  “Probably not.” Because she doesn’t exist. “Can I take your car?”

  Your mom pauses the show now. “I don’t know, Jordan. It’s getting late. When will you be back?”

  “Before curfew.”

  “That boy in Springfield—”

  “I know.”

  “Hmm.” Your mom eyes you up and down, watching as you hop into your knock-off Timbs. “Don’t you have anything nicer to wear?”

  You threw away all your “nice” clothes around the same time you cut your hair. It’s all baggy jeans and boyfriend shirts now, bought with your own hard-earned money. That way your mom can’t say anything about it. Though she does anyway.

  “It’s fine,” you say, and you slip a beanie over your head.

  “All right,” she sighs. “Text me when you get there.”

  “I love you,” you say, blowing a kiss, and you grab the keys and run out the door.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  This seemed like a better idea when you were riding the high of your godlike powers. Now, standing in front of Simone Mitche
ll’s front door, the rain beating down on your umbrella, the glare of the streetlight beating down on your back, you’re less sure about this whole thing.

  The door swings open on squeaking hinges, and a light-skinned Black man in dress jeans and a sweater stands in the doorway.

  “Mr. Mitchell—Dr. Mitchell—hey,” you say, fumbling over your own words. “I’m—uh—I’m here for Simone? My name’s Jordan Carter. I’m here to help with a project we’re working on together at school.”

  He furrows his brow, looking down at you through his bifocals. “She never mentioned any project to me. She just went up to her room. Simone?”

  Shit.

  Dr. Mitchell steps aside to let you in. If Simone doesn’t play along, you’ll be back out in the cold shortly.

  She strolls downstairs in pajama pants and the same Steele City East High hoodie you were wearing yesterday. Her thumbs stick out of holes cut into the sleeves, nails painted cherry red. She’s pulled her curly black hair into a ponytail, and she’s traded her contacts for round, gold-rimmed glasses. She is as dressed down, and as cute, as you’ve ever seen her.

  She’s obviously not expecting company.

  You weren’t expecting to be caught this off guard.

  “Jordan?” she asks uncertainly when she sees you, stopping at the bottom stair.

  “Hey,” you say. Your mouth is suddenly dry. “I’m here to work on the history project? Sorry, I should have reminded you . . .”

  “No, it’s fine.” She smiles. “I should’ve remembered. Come on upstairs.”

  “Thanks,” you say, relieved. You nod at Dr. Mitchell and follow her, trying to ignore the way your heart’s started jumping in your chest. This isn’t exactly how you fantasized about being led to Simone Mitchell’s bedroom, but the fact that it’s happening at all has you wound up tight.