I took off my shirt and pants and stood in my underwear and Ralph said, “What’s that?” and I handed him the spoon, told him it wasn’t his but it’ll do and he looked at me and laughed. He took the spoon and threw it and it clanked and bounced off the pile of sheet metal. “Grab some wood,” he said, and I did. I followed him down the spiraled earth stairs to a hot molten core. Ralph held a small handmade drum, and when I asked him how he made it, he said he’d show me another day. “Today we sweat,” he said, and down in the earth’s chest the red glowed unbearable and Ralph beat the hand drum and he sang songs I didn’t know if he made them up but they sounded and felt as real as the heat between dirt walls and in my windpipe, and right then my body sweated all that was left in it, which really wasn’t very much at all.

Night of the Living Rez

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ

When the bus arrived in Overtown, it parked and hissed and sank in the cracked concrete lot. The woman sitting beside me—thin brown hair, worn brown skin, puffy brown mole on her neck—did not stand, and she did not look to want to leave the bus.

From South Station in Boston to Overtown—through dark tunnels lit by passing headlights and orange bulbs, through highways green with pine and pressed below gray sky—the woman had sat in the same position: upright, hands folded over the blue-and-white-striped handbag on her lap, and her eyes set straight ahead much like a driver, like in her mind she was traveling somewhere and could not take her gaze from it. She had a used Gatorade bottle. Cool Blue, the label read, yet the contents were not Cool Blue but instead looked to be apple juice. She didn’t drink from it, and every once in a while, my eyes shut, I’d hear her shaking the bottle, my eyes open, and then she’d set it back in the cupholder.