She grabbed all the food she could load into her bike’s saddle baskets. She was trying to balance a massive squash on top when two men walked around the corner, laughing with each other. They were unhurried, at ease with each other. Black men in Detroit gave off a sense of being unflappable, adapting to the changing conditions with a shrug and a swagger. When these two saw her, they paused and she froze. She wasn’t sure if she was stealing.

“What’s good?” she said, tentatively.

The taller of the men laughed out loud. The other one shook his head saying, “Don’t trip. This ain’t our shit.”

The tall one, still laughing, said, “I mean it’s all our shit now. Losers weepers.”

She nodded, waved an odd salute at them and pushed off. She kept turning her head to the side just enough to see them in her periphery, half wishing they were her boys, that she could move with men like that. Soon they were inside the garden fence, loading up their arms.

Etta James took the stage in Dune’s head, singing about a man as an object that could be lost, found, mistreated, cherished, wept over.

I been in love with your man for a long, long time

Yes I have, you didn’t know that did you?

I been trying to think of a way to make him mine

Now listen, I will still be your best friend and do all, do all I can

Sure enough, but I’ll never, never, never let go of that man

Because it was a case of

Losers, weepers, finders, keepers

In Detroit though, the losers didn’t weep. They panicked, they evacuated. The lost? They became both object and weeper.

She wheeled her bike around to the back of her house, unloading her small harvest. She put away things she recognized, leaving piles of green leafy mystery on the table to research.

In spite of Kama’s best efforts, Dune had never been a particularly healthy eater of her own volition. She was a graduate of DPS, meaning she’d grown up eating chicken nuggets, pale sweetened vegetables, and pizza on Fridays.

Marta had sometimes been a good influence during their years together, had talked Dune into only eating raw foods for a month, juicing, making a salad be a whole meal. Luckily Marta was as inconsistent in food as she was in love, so they still got to have hot cheetos and brownies when they were high.

It had been a month since Dune had seen Marta. She wondered if Marta had made it to Miami, if she was staying with her parents, if she was living a normal life, if she was… Dune caught herself. She couldn’t keep giving any seeds of attention or longing to Marta’s infertile soil.