Dune felt a sting, hearing her mother’s name out loud. Others in the room shifted, giving her, Kama’s grieving daughter, their attention. Dune felt the weight of her blood. She remembered something that had slipped away in her months of private grief: her mother had been a powerful teacher in the movement. Now she was a convincing reference.

Dune was ashamed amongst these people. She had tuned out her mother’s precious last words until recently, and she didn’t know how to insert the directive, “wage love,” how to explain the kind of fight her mother was calling for. She hadn’t considered any of these people, this beloved community, in Kama’s dying, in her death. Hadn’t allowed them to honor her. Kama had only been hers.

She waited until the crowd returned their attention to Elouise, slipping out the door as they all started to take to their feet with shouts of affirmation.

She agreed with everyone about Detroit. They should leave, they should stay. They should quarantine, they should evacuate. It all seemed viable in this new world. She didn’t want to see this horrible death spread to any other places.

She agreed with Elouise in theory, somehow it was the city itself that was sick, both source and victim of this endless loss. She just didn’t have somewhere else she wanted to be. She couldn’t imagine leaving the cocoon of mother-grief, the house where her memories were shaped, the streets where her parents loved her out loud.

The hallway of the old hotel had unreasonably high ceilings dripping with chandeliers, meant to give a grand impression to bustling, important guests. Mama Vivian had told her many times the story of staying at the St. Regis the first time she visited the city in 1967, feeling glamorous, piling her small luggage on a velvet lined cart.

Today the decaying glamour was unsettling, a dry Titanic. The walls were papered in a way that had once been fashionable, and now looked faded, printed dappled gourds with grapes pouring out, one after another, in a diagonal pattern as far as the eye cared to look.

Dune slunk out between art deco doors thick with glass panes. She looked in both directions. The early fall day was gray, cool, damp. The hard cold was still about a month out.

Dune blurred her gaze until she could see through the present, her time traveling eyes laying a city onto the city. Her soft gaze saw lanky Black boy bodies with faded faux-hawks or tiny loc starters, on bikes whose spokes strobed the sunlight as they turned fast off of Grand and pumped north on Second. Young girls full of chicken and waffles from New Center Eatery, holding hands, a rainbow of barrettes in newly plaited hair under trees brash with tangerine and beet-colored leaves on the branches.

Not this year.