“I’ll go with you,” Elouise spoke to the doubt on Dune’s face. Her mother had been the one who could normally do that, read her, respond to the unspoken in her. “I’ll do it for a week and if that works then we can invite others.”

Elouise sounded excited inside the risk and Dune understood it. Purpose yielded bravery, or at least reframed survival.

“Ok,” Dune said. “Come by tomorrow, I’ll show you what I have so far.”

The women hugged each other close. Elouise loaded her bags and papers into the vegetable crate strapped on the back of her bike with bungie cord. As she mounted the wide seat, Dune thought she looked like a Black Gilda, a good witch, skin shimmering with sensible magic.

Elouise biked east down the middle of the road, looking neither left nor right as she crossed Woodward.

Dune started the isolated walk home along Grand, glad she had chosen to use her feet today, move a little slower. She wanted to move slow enough to keep this little flame lit in her heart.

She’d been so lost in her grief, getting through the days, seeing only the sick people—she hadn’t tracked the emptying of the city, the closing up of businesses. When had the St. Regis closed to guests? Of course, who was coming to visit this place anyway? She could feel the absence of life here, but felt like she had blinked and missed the actual change happening. Now the city was becoming the apocalyptic wasteland others had projected onto it for years through their selective reporting and photography.

She could see almost all the way to the river, so many boarded windows beneath black and gray buildings, no buses running, no light rail. Just the wide road, cut for Cadillacs, Packard Clippers and Model-Ts.

Woodward was a mixture of buildings abandoned both for a long time and quite recently. The difference showed in the age of the wood over the windows, the amount of graffiti, the state of the signs above the doors.

People had called Detroit a crisis most of her life, disaster capitalists indulging in ruin porn, finding beauty in the disintegration of the city’s dreams. Dune knew the way it looked when only every other building was boarded up, the ones in between teeming with life, women praising Jesus, cursing Republicans while getting their hair done. She missed old men walking into soul food spots that doubled as bars in the evenings, walking out with plastic bags tied tightly around styrofoam containers brimming with fried catfish sandwiches, crusty mac and cheese, collard greens and packets of tartar and hot sauce. She missed live music everywhere. She even missed frustrated lines out the door of the precinct up ahead of her, Black faces with fierce eyes ready to battle bureaucracy.

She missed the vibrant half city she’d known and taken for granted.