Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

Sometimes he’ll tell me the same story three, even four times. Hearing him tell them makes me feel like his voice is a hand he’s reached out to me, like he’s rubbing my back and I can duck whatever makes me feel like I’ll never be able to stand as tall as Pop, never be as sure. It makes me sweat and stick to the chair in the kitchen, which has gotten so hot from the boiling goat on the stove that the windows have fogged up, and the whole world is shrunk to this room with me and Pop.

Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants.

This is where I was worked. This is where I was whipped. This is where River protected me.

the moue of his lips,

I’ve never had enough of this. After Michael and I got together in high school, I got pregnant with Jojo in just under a year: I was seventeen. Ever since then we had Jojo and Michaela around us, making those spaces bigger between us. I remember it in flashes, mostly when I’m high, that feeling of it just being me and Michael, together: the way I swam up and surfaced out my grief when I was with him, how everything seemed so much more alive with him.

It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.

I’m going home, Riv? he asked. I squatted down next to him, the dogs steady yipping, and I looked at him. He had baby hair on the edge of his scalp, Jojo. Little fine hair he’d had since he sucked at his mama’s tit. Yes, Richie. I’m a take you home, I said. And then I took the shank I kept in my boot and I punched it one time into his neck. In the big vein on his right side. Held him till the blood stopped spurting.

Like Baby Suggs. Kills her babies so they can’t take them back.

Casper barks again, a sound that shies up to a panicked yip.

“I can’t. Come inside. I tried. Yesterday. There has to be some need, some lack. Like a keyhole. Makes it so I can come in. But after all that—your mam, your uncle. Your mama. I can’t. You’ve”—he makes that breath-sucking sound again—“changed. Ain’t no need. Or at least, ain’t no need big enough for a key.”

How we call the ghosts.

a cat on the ledge of a nap.