Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

“Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.” It’s like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone. “It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”

I must have been Kayla’s age, but I could smell Leonie, too, smell her breath, the red cinnamon gum she chewed as she sang past my ear. Even when I grew older and she stopped giving me kisses, every time somebody chewed that gum, I thought of Leonie, of her soft, dry lips on my cheek. Kayla doesn’t care, even if the songs are patched together from my memory, pieces of a puzzle that almost fit: Old MacDonald has a llama, and there’s a cow on the bus, mooing as the wheels go around and around, and the itsy bitsy spider is crawling with a pout. I make up pantomimes for all of it, but Kayla’s favorite is a spider crawling upward, because I cross my thumbs and my fingers splay and segment and move, and there is a spider in the car, inches from Kayla’s face, crawling upward against the rain. Foolishly.

As I watched Sunshine Woman pull Riv away from me, I felt a stinging in my toes, in my soles, in my legs, up my butt, and through my back, where it burst to fire in my bones, licking all through my ribs, a loose powerful feeling, like a voice freed from a throat, a screaming note all through me, and it was then I knew I was going to run.

“You ain’t never here.” Birds are awaking in the trees. “Would you do it, Given?” They rustle and turn. “She’s giving up.” They chirp and alight. “Would you?” The birds swoop over our heads. They chatter one to the other. “Would you give her what she wants?”