Neither me nor Nakesha felt like talking after that; our trip to the clinic was abandoned without either one of us having to say why, and at the Green Line near Fifty-fifth and King Drive we went our separate ways, knowing we would never, ever put our arms around one another again.

FROM THE VERY first dream I had inside of Shivana, I was scared her story would end just like all the others. And that the end of her story would be the end of me.

A new memory …

All around me, women hold hands and sing under a sky brimming with clouds waiting to break. This is something I’ve dreamed before, many times actually, though today I see the women standing on city concrete and not country road or a crop field’s soil. There must be colors, but shades of gray are all I see. Six men appear at the mouth of a huge stone church with iridescent white crosses glowing on its graffiti-covered sides: portraits of Martin, Malcolm, and Mandela, a collage of images similar to ones found on a wall in the home of every grandmother who made it through the sixties. Framed by a light on the other side of paned doors, the men stand out of the gray and force me to look, though I’m not sure I want to. Their faces are grim with struggle because they are working hard, and together, to hold up the thing in their hands. I can’t take my eyes off of them. I’m fascinated, like I am with all things in the real world. Their labor is like a careful dance, improvised more than choreographed. Their bodies are on one accord. As if their minds are connected, they move, flow, and adapt to one another depending: on whose hands get so sweaty they must let go to quickly wipe them to hold their grip, on whose weight must shift to accommodate another’s laxity, on who must push and who must pull, on who must twist or lean as they change direction. Their compass—a heart no longer beating—lies inside the thing they carry. It guides each of them toward the correct maneuvers to accomplish their task. This rested heart is the axle around which the men pivot, slowly and silently out of reverence. Pallbearers never realize how heavy a coffin carting death will actually be, until they must keep it from falling.