The Wilderness: A Novel

by Angela Flournoy

That morning she hadn’t told Morris to get a condom, and because she didn’t say anything, he never reached toward the dresser, as if engaging prophylactics was her duty alone.

There seemed to be a growing list of things that had become her duty alone, ranging in importance from folding the laundry to making sure he called his own mother on her birthday.

Morris gave her an older, more mature social circle, a group who shrugged off her missteps as newbie errors and allowed her to hang back and observe, the better by which to learn how to obscure one’s impoverished background or employ it strategically.

Morris would complete any task she gave him, but he had not yet figured out how to anticipate what needed to be done such that she did not have to be the task manager, which was its own mental load.

“It’s a feeling. I’m not even sure I dislike who I am with him, I just . . . That person? That person isn’t me. It’s like I’m squatting inside that person, I don’t know. And the feeling has grown with each birth. I have the kid, and Morris sees the baby and he loves him, like truly loves him, but there’s something that feels exclusive about it. Like he’s even more indifferent to me, cares less about me now that he’s got what he wanted, these sons.”

And I had the same thought: I am both completely necessary to this family in Morris’s eyes and always on the outside of it. The real me is on the outside of it, at least.”

A mysterious stranger, a “beggar,” walks up to a new baby and says something enigmatic—a curse or a benediction, only time will tell.

January felt guilty for trying to make Desiree feel guilty, but also didn’t feel like apologizing.

Yes, part of the problem might be chemical—she was no doctor but was beginning to understand that her friend tended toward depression—but what did happiness actually look like for January? It was important to have a clear sense of its shape.

Desiree remembered reading somewhere that turbulence, especially the severe kind, would likely become more frequent due to climate change.

Nakia had explained that there was better porn out there, stuff made by and for Black women and queer women, and even though January wasn’t queer, it would be more ethical, she’d said.

She had been thrust into the wilderness of adult life, frog-marched into a deep, hard-to-navigate forest of decisions and failure and hurt, sheltered by Nolan in name only.

It might not take much for her to end up in the wilderness once again.

Not the best of us, who is best? Just one of us, my sister, how gone, how gone, how did this happen, no. I loved her, she was my sister, I loved her more than her woman, I think, I loved her.

But the truth is her life does not have to represent anything. She just was.

She accuses me of giving in to despair. I didn’t give in to despair. I looked up and despair had already entered the room, made itself at home.

How could Nakia be at peace? She loved life too much.