Cover

I would not mind

if I were

a sinner,

but as it is

—let me assure you—

I sleep alone.

ALICE WALKER, ONCE

THE CORD

We met on a bus. It is not an ideal place to meet, the seats are too close, and everyone is ashamed to be there. To pause so often. When we met we were ashamed. In those too close seats, the blue cloth seats, I noticed his fingers right away, the clean cuticles. The fingers of men remind me of how they can be inserted. So I shifted the cotton, I lifted my hips. I grabbed his wrist. The pleats of my blue skirt moved against my thigh. Up. I guided the clean cuticles; I inserted them as we sat side by side on a bus.

He didn’t wait for instructions, his fingers moved: the three that were free to roam or rest, the one that pressed against my clitoris, the last that moved inside.

After a short time the fingers were pulled away, out. He stood. He grabbed the cord with the same hand, the right hand, a ding, and the bus driver is pressing on the break with his right foot, and all the bodies are leaning forward, bodies on a bus jerking forward then slightly back in unison, another pause in our collective journey. And now I’m on the cord, and soon others will pull it, strangers will pull it, and some of them will carry me.

FREEDOM OF WHITE BOYS IN THE SAND

The girl was staring at the white men, the way their hair moved like the wind, too easy. In the middle of the busy field the girl called out to them, shouting obscenities. There were other people there too, a crowd of people, but it was the white men she had come to see.

The dirt shifted around the men and the crowd and the girl without discipline. All those standing in the field would later find the grains in the curve of their ears and on the tips of their eyelashes.

Emmanuelle came here every Tuesday afternoon to see them. It was her day off. There were only a handful of the white men left and they couldn’t stop coughing. Their hair moved like the wind moved and she let her hands brush against their thighs.

Ambulances skipped along, howling in the distance as they gathered the dead and the almost dying. Birds made bird sounds; the crowd talked among themselves. The Enflamed Mountain hovered over them all.

The white men never paid attention to the girl, but she saw them as they walked and coughed and walked, shuffling their feet. She smiled at them sometimes, between her vulgar shouting, to see some acknowledgement from their bodies. But no, they could not pause, or hesitate. They were moving.