Issue 19

Harford Hopson

I stared at the loose hair on the dash in front of me. It writhed, it shriveled. Cringed in the wind. But even with the windows open it buoyed to the dash. It was strong.

Without noticing, I’d already turned away from it.

Joe rubbed over his bleach locks as he drove. With one hand he groomed; with his other hand, several fingers rested on the bottom of the steering wheel. To be certain, his hair was not bleached—it had been canary from the womb. He’d been addictively reorganizing his hair, a crown of powder, for three summers now. Maybe longer than I’d known him. And his hair was exceptional all the time, that wasn’t the particular matter. “Idunno,” he said, half gathering a smile. “I just love the way white people politic the N-word around each other.”

I found that what had been underneath his crop needed … scalp focus, or scrupulous treatment.

“See that’s the issue,” I said. “Then some of y’all get, idunno, overzealous. Y’all go too far and say it in front of real black people.”

“Ah, yeah.” He plucked a damp bag of Copenhagen dip from his cheek, and stared it down. “There’s a lot of disgusting shit my people do that I can’t defend. How many KKK groups you think are in Virginia?”

Joe rolled down his driver’s-side window to show me what he was talking about, to smell what he meant. I think he felt his windows were tinted. Listening to Cam’ron while riding in a hunky Impala, as we were, could have him thinking a lot of things. The reality was, his rims were stock, seeming like hubcaps if dirty enough, and the passenger-side power-window function short circuited sometime before purchase, so he had to roll down the window behind me. The nylon seats were transformed into a smeared houndstooth pattern from the constant ash, and sugary glints of weed bits stuck in between his cracked iPhone screen were glimmering in the cup holder.

He pushed his Vineyard Vines hat further in between the windshield and dash, as the wind drew in.

Blue heat mobbed the inside of the car, and my own breath joined the balm mug. “Idunno anything about nature forreal,” I said, squinting to focus on the blurring twigs in the dense forestry. “Especially for having taken as much acid as I have.”

I closed my eyes. After a short period of closing my eyes, all I heard was Cam’ron deep into the second verse.

“Next time we come down here I should look at the trees on Molly,” I said. “Don’t tune this out.”

“Idunno, I think a college campus might be more racist than anybody could be around here,” I said, opening my eyes. “It’s a violent place.”

Joe rifled around in his hoodie pocket, while rubbing his tongue along the pocket between his bottom lip and gum. “College racism is just a fad.” Hands on the wheel, Joe flipped open a dented pack of Parliaments with his teeth. He continued to talk with a loosie seesawing between his lips. “College kids get the racism from their older brothers and social media. That shit is amateur b. What we have going on here in Virginia, and places like Arkansas! Racism out here is based on Protestantism and these people go as far as fucking their own to preserve it based—no, founded—on shit they think God said!”

“You’d believe it too if you thought God said so.”

“I’m forreal Harford. Even tobacco. Tobacco is the cause of all racism. All right, maybe some of it.”

His eyes drooped to the terroristic shock of a cigarette in his mouth, like maybe God placed it there and left. Joe then shrugged his shoulders and lit it, letting go of the wheel wholly and covering the flame with his floured, coarse knuckles. I was almost remiss that he successfully lit it with the windows down. Digging holes for ten hours a day made him impervious. He made a cocktail of being caveman-numb to conditions.

“You right,” I said, nodding. “Eric Garner … let’s say … perished in Staten Island of all places over some fucking Newports.”

“Why don’t you just say it, he got choked out and died!”

The car jerked left in one tear as he said this. The wheels straightened after he remedied the car, as firm as the Bridgestones could hold onto the road anyway. Smoke marred the civil air from Joe’s mouth, and it carried away in a yank after he gave. His shoulders were momentarily fixed to shrug. They sedated after the silence.

I reached to the back seat and tore a carton of Marlboros open, and pulled a Red out to smoke. I turned back around and lit the cigarette, burning my hand doing so.

“What the fuck you doing!?” Joe said, raising his voice.

“I want a cigarette.”

“We’re supposed to make money off this shit.”

“We will. You know my sentiment on this kind of shit. I’m not using black and death in the same sentence. It’s just a negative association, it really is.”

“See, I almost think it’s the best thing for cops to keep killing black people.”

I almost wished Joe really had been prejudiced—even that he was once, so that he could make sense for me.

I endured a bloated drag, as evenly as I could after I heard something so insincere, squeezing a scowl out my face, through the smoke. I ashed on his pants, something I think I knew to do because he only owned one pair of khakis.

“What the fuck yo!?” he yelled, lifting his hips to try and avoid it. He was a flushed baboon—half-stood, hunkered over, head craning as it bumped against the roof.

“Don’t say that shit to me,” I said.

“All of a sudden you want to be a martyr, you went to school in the burbs! There’s certain things you just can’t help. You’re blessed.”

He peered around the folds of his khakis and settled back into his seat.

“The fuck am I supposed to do now?” he said, softly. “These joints are the only pair I got.”

“My dad wouldn’t have choked him out.”

I scraped my limp cigarette into the cup holder. Joe reached for the knob to turn the radio down, then he rolled the windows up. He ran his eyes down to his pants a moment and brushed the rest of his cigarette there.

He then threw it into the cup holder, without even fussing to smolder it. I worried it might stroke fire to the Backwood intestines that had been sitting at the bottom of it. Joe didn’t consider shit, and that cleverly went for himself, too, probably so that he wouldn’t ever be pinned that he was hypocritical.

“Idunno,” Joe said after a while, breaking stare and rubbing his hair. “You rub your hair too much.”

He had a Mt. Rushmore type of cultivation to his face. Obviously, not presidential. Granite in structure. A protruding chin and jaw setup that had been omnipresent, weathered by dirt, rains and sadnesses that pressured me to evolve in his ivory flash. The ivory flash had to do with a sickly look he couldn’t rid of, for one the discoloration beneath his eyes. In Joe’s mind, death didn’t work. It didn’t last that long. But to contrast affections, he could get overly gnostic when it came to kin, as if I’d never returned an amiable stare from the opposite corner of his Impala, he’d regret that decision on his deathbed, which … would very likely be his Impala.

“We’re gonna make a lot of fucking money,” I said, turning around again. The well-recognized garnet and white boxes were stacked and spread across the nylon of the seats. “Either that or I guess now I’ll have to die trying.”

“You ever think people are watching us?” Joe asked.

“I hope not. I’d be blacklisted from the Ivy Leagues forever.”

Joe and I resold untaxed cigarettes from Virginia that we’d buy at relic 76’s, and ran them up to campuses like Penn University where the financially endowed kids got trashed and handed us crumpled bills for emergency packs. We wouldn’t be in Virginia for any other reason. Some people ran into Indian reservations to pillage for Dorals or whatever, and there was that legend about finding the “true” American Spirits. We could’ve taken I-95 down to Delaware to buy cigarettes, but that wasn’t the point. We were ignorant crop robbers, modern carpetbaggers: the last thing either of us wanted to do was slow down to calculate the worth of things, to go that way would’ve gotten inconsolable.

“When’s the last time you ate?” Joe asked.

“Idunno. What was the last thing you saw me eat?”

“Idunno if I’ve ever seen you eat, forreal. Barbecue sunflower seeds maybe.”

Joe continued to drive so that our bodies could entertain some food. We’d been poised to suffer dumbly off the Adderalls. We were a small famine away from dying, without the slightest hint of it.

All I knew was that Joe kept driving and rubbing his hair, and we kept talking for miles, according to Adderall pace. The fuzziness and edge fueled us on, and we were thankful that route 501 was at least paved, but it hadn’t been a contender for food at all. After a long bout of shit-talking, Joe and I agreed we hadn’t even been hungry to start with.

To celebrate the agreement, we halted at the sight of a barbecue stand in a clearing of the forest. Joe thought it was just a shed that someone left to rot.

“No,” I said. “Most buildings around here probably just look like rotting sheds.” My indication of “edible food” was my sighting of a pig grazing outside of the joint. Usually, I guessed that most joints might’ve used a caricature of a pig.

“I’m not sure about this place, I just had barbecue, you said it yourself,” I said. “It’ll be good. Just force something in you, then we’ll be back up and running.”

“Are hallucinations a side effect, or some kind of over-effect of these Addys?”

“No I don’t think it’s the Addys,” Joe said, swatting his hand once over. “If Addys cause sights, we have to figure some other way to abuse it. And forreal, I’d have to face the reality that I never had any good Addys.”

Inside, the barbecue joint’s staunch heat brewed sweat droplets everywhere, from the ceiling to our foreheads, until it seemed we were both crying, and sawdust spritzed the air. The sound of searing metal every now and then overlaid, and we couldn’t see a damn thing except for the shoes on our feet—Joe and I looked down to notice that we were standing upon gravel, the same gravel from outside.

“Maybe this is a shed,” I said.

Through the condensation of airborne flakes, a girl on her hands and knees in the corner smeared caulk in between stone tiles next to a power tool. The girl noted us, put the caulk gun down, and got up. The sole clap of her flip-flops rang off the boarded walls as she paced.

“Hi y’all doin’,” she said, appearing from the charcoal fog, teeth first. “My name’s Makeda.”

“Good,” Joe and I said, unsettled.

She stood behind the counter and rested her hands on the cash register. It was a cardboard box with ones in it.

“What am I fixin y’all for?” she asked, finger-combing her hair with ashy, pearly fingers. She’d been lightly caked in sawdust all over. Every braid on her head twisted to rope and hung low, like Medusa’s, august as they were in the illustrations. She pivoted open, as if she were in the way of the menu above, smirked, and rocked nervously back and forth with her tongue bulging behind her cheek. The Dijon-mustard-worn menu above her head ingenuously featured two options: chicken plate and pork plate.

“When chickens and pigs run around in the same farm for so long … they probably start to become the same thing,” Joe said.

“I don’t know if I like chicken anymore,” I muttered, aloud.

“Is the chicken fried?” Joe asked.

“If iss gotten right with God it is,” Makeda said, nodding.

“Ah. You got me. I gotta go with that then,” he said, rubbing his hair.

She’d wound up a lurid grin at Joe, sliding her lips back to uncover her overbite (that was how she managed to show up teeth-first).

She said we could sit anywhere we wanted, then she vanished through the door behind her. We took a seat at one of the booths, and it turned out to be the only booth.

We lit cigarettes—having considered the gravel perfume bogging down the shed, I thought no one would notice—and besides, nothing convinced me anyone else was even there other than Makeda and us.

She returned after periodical, rhythmic echoes of sizzling, carrying two lump plates of soul garbage heaved high in the air as she walked with them. She had been naturally bowlegged, pleasant and graceful in her dealing with it. The plates bent south, both with thick creases in the middle, severe to the point at which I thought they might falter. Hot brown and green juices splashed on the table from the plates. The Styrofoam itself was incendiary. She gave us several paper towels, and a flimsy fork for each of us.

“Thass okra, yams, sauerkraut, two biscuits, gravy, sautéed in chicken grease of course, and brown sugar, um scrapple cus iss breakfast still, and grits somewhere in there.” She lollygagged at Joe, and her toes warded a magnetism bound in Joe’s direction. Animalistic even.

“Where’s the pork?” I asked, as I maneuvered around the plate. “And the chicken?” “Oh … I musta forgot about that. Technically, I’m about blind.”

“Legally?”

She scratched her head, actually trying not to smile. “Well … it used to be illegal.”

Joe’s mouth broke open and his peacock-blue eyes fanned with dignity. Blue was the most unnatural color, and for that shit you shouldn’t trust him. Conquest flickered in his salivating pupils. I could see it. And victory, that was in his chest plate, and all I could think was how I saw this routine before. Imperialism, Tommy Hilfiger, Thomas Jefferson; it exhausted my servitude to sit and welcome this. And … all that stuff was innate and I knew it.

For him.

Yet even in his lour prognosis, me befriending Joe allowed for a closeness to an empire—access to it. It’s that that had seemed dangerously wonderful to me.

Makeda turned off in a bashful sway, exposing her clumsy stride once again, returning to the covertness of the sawdust. It was a shame they didn’t speak the same language.

“I’m not even hungry,” I said.

“You’re right,” Joe nodded, absent of his place, I think. “I’m gonna hit the bathroom first though.”

He zipped over to the only door in the joint with something yellow painted on it. Then the girl followed him in.

I spooned a mouthful of grits and scrapple to my mouth. Swallowing that bite had been a difficult haul and without rationale, the hardest thing I’d ever done.

Before we left, Joe folded a fifty and slid it halfway under his tepid plate. I hadn’t even processed the fact that neither item on the menu had been priced. What was he paying for?

“I think we gotta go to Jerusalem bro,” he said as we got in the car.

Early afternoon we arrived at the day rager in West Philly, at the lacrosse house somewhere past 40th. A broad porch wrapped from the front of the house to the back. Scant gables indicated where the stacked windows of the rooms had been. Rickety balusters in drab colors, molded and splintered, supported the house. Very Queen Anne all over with the clear exception being Natty Light cans loitering around the rails and front yard. Joe and I mobbed up the porch and into the house, and the lyrics of vulgar patriarchy grew. We passed two girls in the vestibule: one in blue and the other in a lightweight blue. The one girl in blue had dried blood covering some of her hand, and she hissed at me. In the obstruction of the light, the way both girls leaned pelvis-forward on the wall, and their trampy seasonings addled me. I feared them.

An emanation of cheap suds clotheslined right where my nose was, and fried frat guys in chubbies indented themselves on the dilapidated couches. None of them even moved as we passed them.

“The chubbies are attached to the couch,” I said. “When you black out you just slide into a pair and wake up later.”

“You think they want any cigarettes?” Joe asked.

After searching the first floor, we found Joe’s buddy Ty, an intern for Cisco. He wore a 76ers jersey. The three of us embraced and went to business.

“Where’s the keg?” Joe asked.

“Fuck that, we got beers upstairs,” Ty said, then he turned toward me. “For homies only.” So we hit a bathroom on the second floor. I knocked before barging in. The tub was loaded with ice cubes and Miller High Life cans were shoved into the iceberg.

I took two.

Joe stuffed four into his pockets.

“For A.I.,” Ty said, as we all stretched our necks to shotgun the beers.

Without saying another word, Ty mobbed up to the fourth floor and we followed him. He led us to a steely room that had a feeble balcony outside, attached to the eaves of the roof overhead. Once we all teetered over the balcony rail outside, something by Bobby Shmurda exalted from the gramophones attached to the corners of the house, and the parking area below was crammed with wiry, giant drinkers.

Someone from the crowd below noticed us. Then it was another three people. Hands tapped arms and shoulders, a terrible wave of paroxysm. Limbs had gone skyrocketing, and the smart denizens hollered until nearly every body had its head above.

“Should we tell ‘em Jesus is coming soon?” Joe muttered, breathless, running his hand over his hair.

He knuckled into his back pocket and with his fist returned to free air with a pack of Marlboros and loose cigarettes. He lofted the pack out into the pool of yapping clams. Joe and Ty laughed about it then went inside, and I lingered there.

Once Joe and I made it outside, we coalesced into a crushing of bodies and more beer. Everyone was a tall pint and balance-fragile by the features—a knock into someone meant beer wasting over cupped hands. Half of everyone there wore American this or that. On the shorts, wrapped around a dick and sodden in pre-ejaculate fluid, as Ben Franklin intended the democracy to be worn. Nobody actually did anything at these functions, and yet that was the primary function.

Ty set me up with some guys holding cups in front of their chests at the beer-pong table. Preemptively, ivory faces widened. I picked out an eager partner in a Gary Payton throwback and called next, while Ty and Joe went ahead. Not much time passed before pale boys in NBA jerseys were stacking up behind each other to buy packs and loosies from me. By the time I’d started on the pong table I held the game up to serve several customers. A few hours passed, and the entire operation turned into a dice game off in a corner of the parking area somewhere. One of the LAX guys had to go up into his room to find a pair of dice he used for a physics lab in the spring. Dice is sophisticated if you play it like a gentleman. Instead, it turned into a “gangster” imitation, how they all blew their halitosis on the dice before it danced on the concrete.

This wispy kid with beetroot eyes, who never crouched down with us, threw a Citibank card into the pile, and said, “My dad finances it, I have nothing to lose.” I sympathized with his assurance. In the scrum, a stumpy guy, who was only a pair of Air Max 90s, head, and arms in body, held a blunt in my sight for the first time today. He never turned his sinewy face toward me. I crashed into reality, or out of it, I’m not sure I knew which. I erected myself from the huddle, observing how the cottonbodies around us congregated. Wild as Africa, it was. They all vibrated, and straightaway everyone in the pit had been painted in form-fitting neon articles, pong balls flung as flirtatious weaponry, and several people had their pants down, butt-chugging wine boxes. I was smoking all along.

Masterfully, the blunt got to my lips again … Backwood paper. Spit-wet, and piping hot.

I panicked when hearing the whine of a police siren, yet I knew the police would never show up here.

Behind me, the girl wearing blue, the one from the vestibule, she’d been staring at me as she danced mainly with her hands. She wasn’t wearing blue this time, though. And when she noticed that I noticed her, she stopped dancing regressively. The dance was more of a pollen curve slipstreaming through winds, sputtering to power down. We looked at each other again and I looked away, only sort of. She’d thrown a downy arm filled with opaque fuzz toward me, making a pinching motion with index and thumb, then drew them to her puckered lips—lips thinner than mine.

Smoke rose over my eyelashes like combusted gunpowder fire placing the butterflies up. She diverted me from the fact that the blunt was reduced to a roach and had been burning in the inside of my mouth.

I ambled over to her and gave her the roach. A pimple bubbled the ridge of her mouth. In her bloody clawing, she sucked down the roach and her breastbone swelled. I’d been taken by a sticky glister over her body, and her pimple too. Someone that impressed me. She tucked her chin in and perched a smile on the bottom of her face, scrunching her eyes. “Would you like me if I could dance?” she asked, and laughed deliriously.

“Don’t know.”

“Your lips,” she whispered, sidling closer to me. “They’re burned. You shouldn’t smoke you know.”

I canopied over her, and her pheromones plugged my cavities—and she infiltrated me knowing this would happen.

I lowered my head, and ran my hand over my hairline.

She ran her thumb over my lips, and I wondered whether her thumb could be clean and probably not, but I was too high to resist anything. She stood erected, with her chest poking out and arms back royally, and the healthy fat of her armpit spilled slightly beyond her tank-top strap and the tank top hung from her nipples rather than her shoulders.

“Do you want this back?” she asked.

“Naa. Why do you have blood on your hand?”

“Raspberries,” she said, in between licking her fingertips unruly and leonine in manner. “You want some?”

“Yeah. Sure. I haven’t eaten all day.”

Her boyish, columned hair veiled her face as she’d looked down to rub her stomach, giggling as she caressed her navel.

“Hm. I don’t think I have any more. If you want ‘em I guess you’ll have to dig ‘em out of me.”

“Didn’t you have on blue before?”

“No, no that’s not right see I was wearing blue raspberry, not blue.”

“Isn’t that—”

“Ooo!” she exclaimed. “I know where we can get some better weed. There’s a room of guys upstairs hotboxing the whole room. The one guy in there wants to … well he hits me up a lot. I don’t wanna go in there alone. They’d all buy cigarettes from you. I get half of whatever you make though.”

I peered around at the troupes associating, pinning off each other, the beer lilies that were beating amongst themselves and hardly processing the effacement. In the short time I knew the girl, her immediacy made me so smitten I wasn’t able to slow down to notice anything else. The esoteric cahoots of a new barter forced a smile on me; the next mob was established. That I hadn’t known her made me more likely to do it.

We left the mosh, and went through the kitchen to the stairs’ corridor. Navy shadows shut the interior into a gloom-fed anxiousness as she led. Her dainty calves had popped, but the bottom hem of her shirt did not move while she ascended. I was desperate to sober up. I felt passionate about lying down, independent of whoever this girl was.

We’d heard music behind the door as we stood before it. She pivoted toward me with aloof and tasteful eyelids, all together somehow.

The girl banged on the door, with her head down.

Go away! The fuck is it?

A few voices wiggled from beneath the door. “Maddie!” she yelled as she laid her ear on the door. “Who?” a voice asked back.

“Madyyy!”

Here I think she hissed.

Mady reached behind, with her palm exposed. I gazed at it. She recoiled back and thrust it once over, turning her head to the side and I fixated on her spouting lips, what she had of them. I caught the sapphire flicker of her eye against the gray and slid my fingers between hers. The door flung open and Mady trampled right in, familiarly. I harbored at the doorframe to look around the room, and as she marched off, our arms stretched as far as they could before she let go.

Mady bypassed three guys sitting on the edge of the bed, and over to the reedy black desk where an Alienware dual monitor sat, along with a MacBook atop the desk. A guy with anchors on both his shorts and shirt sat in a swivel chair in front of the desk. Mady hopped onto the desk next to him.

Everyone looked at me.

“Who’s he?” the guy in the chair said.

“Oh,” Mady said. “He just wants my raspberries.”

And she kind of waved in my direction. I couldn’t see so well. A giving off of haze camped at about eye level and the stench of socks elasticized across the room. I’d have really believed if she might not have been there.

“Harford,” I said.

“That’s the whitest name I ever heard,” the one sitting next to Mady said. “Gimme the bong,” Mady said, before I could respond to the room myself.

Mady turned to one guy sitting on the bed who certainly stood out because he held a three-foot Illadelph bong in his clutch. She pinched at it with her pointer finger and thumb, just like earlier.

The room had been poky for a wealthy insider’s type of school, and I wondered how whoever housed this room ever moved in. If there had been a Soho option in the Penn catalogues, this joint would be a finalist. The room was the bed and it fought me to get places. I moved around the room with liberty I thought, but often kept back in the doorway where I started, having given up the struggle.

The three guys on the couch were named Jonathan, Mark Rota (junior of accounts, somewhere), and Spencer, all of whom had been swinging lacrosse sticks, in no dire importance to distinguish one from another. In fact, that they’d been white was by default the utmost source of variation, and they all chuckled as they checked each other with their sticks, amplifying on aggression until one or two of them submitted, only to start over again some minutes later.

Mady nursed the bong for what I experienced as an hour, and when she passed it to me, she came less than halfway across the room, so I had to meet her in the middle. The bowl had been kicked.

I was mandated to ask for more of their weed to re-pack it.

I sucked a weighty rip, assuming those after me might carry it for an hour apiece. I couldn’t even remember liking weed so much that I was ever stingy about it. I shoveled the bong off to the next and stumbled into a vast common area of talk about Jordans. “Oh naa I don’t like the 5’s anymore,” I said. “Some of these kids are dying over a basketball player they never even lived to see play.”

“Harford,” she said, skittish beyond the mood of the room. At some point she moved to sit on the guy’s lap in the swivel chair. “Can you give me a cigarette?” Then she hissed. I wasn’t convinced at first, but I really did hear her hissing all this time.

I threw the pack across the room to her.

“You don’t smoke,” the guy underneath her said, skewing his mouth.

“I’ve reconsidered,” she said, reeling the cigarette away from her mouth to talk. “I’m gonna say it’s only a problem if you do it in bad company … because Harford changed my mind. I mean you’d smoke with Obama wouldn’t you?”

“Fuck no I didn’t vote for—”

He stopped there, and another guy on the bed atoned for the silence by asking, “Dude could I bum a cigarette off you?”

“I got something better,” I said, rising from the end of the bed. I suppose I found my way there, had made myself fit. “I could give you a whole packet for seven dollars. I’m picking up where Eric Garner left off.”

“Who?”

I started to go mad and blind and dumb, and the emotions cured in my loins. For where I unmistakably stood, at the epicenter of Quaker privilege, I must’ve loved it. I telecommunicated with the Biggie poster on the wall. He echoed. It was Unbelievable. But his droopy lids told me nothing. I asked him if he thought I was enough: no answer. Mr. Garner should be here. He’d have been off on a freshly wet sunny block after a sprinkle in Long Island somewhere, the first one to light a cigarette, with two in the other hand to sell, selling first come, first serve, to the salivating Yankees, as a juicy-lipped angel. I’d like to think God gets his cigarettes from Mr. Garner. And meanwhile these honorable, fair counterparts in front of me got to soak in the Afrocentric reservoirs of cognac and not asphyxiate from the pain.

I remembered to suddenly breathe because I could. I smiled to resume business.

“That’s who you look like dude,” the guy in the chair said, cutting up lines on the desk. “You kinda look like Booker T. Washington. I fucking hate gen-ed classes, they make you learn all this random shit. Did you know he was half white?”

“Booker T. was my favorite wrestler growing up,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“Hell yeah!” he said, ramming his hands together as he laughed barbarically. “That nigga was awesome!”

“… I wouldn’t say all that,” I said.

“He was,” he continued, “the way he flew off the top rope like a, like a fuckin’ wild animal and shit!”

“You don’t gotta say the N-word though.”

“Why do you care so much, you’re not black?”

For me, the music shut down and a gruesome missive dangled among us. I stopped, anticipating that celestial robes would ascend over their plainclothes, that they would smile underneath the hoods, that nooses would descend from the copper ceilings and that the copper would diverge to blood. My charge: treason.

Moonbeams ripped into my peripheral. Blinded me. I looked down. My skin had become alabaster, rich in it. I sighed a sigh of relief … then I smiled.