Luster

by Raven Leilani

We both graduated from the school of Twice as Good for Half as Much, but I’m sure she still finds this an acceptable price of admission.

And while he has a light taste for libertarianism, he doesn’t ask me to do outdoor activities, so it kind of squares.

Haaaaa

but there is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed Atlas Shrugged.

Haaaaaaaa

and in general if you need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch

This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man. I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

a totem of a realm where sticker price is incidental data, a realm so theoretical that when I consider what I would have to do to enter it, I can only think of my debt, an aggrieved Sallie Mae representative standing above me while I sleep.

even though I can’t sleep and I can’t shit, and someone is dying but that one song tells you to slide to the left and you have no choice.

I load up on the free hand lotion the publisher started putting out after it was revealed that the women in the company (a whopping 87 percent of the employee base) are still making less than the men. The hand lotion has slightly increased morale, even though the quality is on par with that diabolical drugstore cocoa butter that leaves you ashier than before.

because sometimes you see a black person above the age of fifty walking down the street, and you just know that they have seen some shit. You know that they are masters of the double consciousness, of the discreet management of fury under the tight surveillance and casual violence of the outside world. You know that they said thank you as they bled, and

she is moving toward her most natural conclusion, which is to engage me not as a person who has just watched her dissect a man but as a person who is black, and who is, because of that, available for her support.

My desire to deny Rebecca this attempt to create a link where there is none is less pressing than my embarrassment for their daughter, who may or may not be the kind of kid who wants friends, but who almost certainly would hate her mother talking about it.

so competent that any adjacent failure becomes her own. Obviously, I don’t relate.

I take a moment to revel in the schadenfreude, but mostly I feel suckered into admitting it, that it matters, that I have thought about it, the apparent isolation of their child,

immediately recognizable to me for being myself that thing which is both hypervisible and ...

drapes the same shade of mauve my mom used to paint the kitchen the day she killed herself,

degradation something I want to hate but actually relate to, the ficus, wicker, and ornamental glass all cherries on top, a cohesive domesticity that I find weird and a little threatening, but that fills me with the yearning to retrieve my toaster oven from storage and find a place to plug it in.

She says she is an evolved woman, that it is debatable whether monogamy is biologically sound, and an open marriage can be good in theory, but Eric is not great at time management and could this thing with her husband please stop.

He may be the only man in recent memory to make me come, but he is not even on Twitter.

Haaaaaaaa

What matters is that there is a record, of a call, of a conversation, of a girl on the other end.

Tragic

Us being kinfolk notwithstanding, it is hard for me to empathize with a child whose footsteps are nearly undetectable.

Hilarious

However, it is a massive, two-foot condemnation of her limp-haired parents, who had clearly made some previous effort that did not pan out.

Lmaooooi

the only way I can repay her charity or leave this place with any semblance of dignity is to touch nothing and be as scarce as possible.

More invisibility

It makes me think of my own mother during the first years we lived in Latham, the way she was always too warm. The way a foot of snow would fall and glaze under freezing rain, and she would take the car and do doughnuts in the Walmart parking lot. Even sober, she was always sweating and keen on activities that made it worse, QVC tapes for capoeira, judo, and diaphragmatic circles.

For most of my life, I have not had to tell anyone where I planned to be. I could walk the length of Broadway without a face. I could perish in a fire and have no one realize until a firefighter came across my teeth in the ash.

the comfort of audience subjectivity pretty much

null

when the audience is everyone, and everyone has decided, subjectively, that the...

When I tell him I don’t he smiles and says that’s because clowning is about interrogating the human condition, that it is art, and that these are serious things.

He tells me that the art that matters is the art that is wrought and consumed with great difficulty. He tells me a laugh is easy, and when there is a prioritization of fun, clowning ceases to be art and becomes entertainment.

and there is no fluffy alternative word for what I’m trying to convey, no way to effectively explain violations that are not overt. It is a rhetorical hellscape.

A casual reduction so frequent it is mundane. Almost too mundane for the deployment of the R word, as with a certain sect of Good White Person the accusation overshadows the act. Racism! I should yell, because I’m sure Rebecca will receive it in the uppercase regardless, and already I feel her seizing on the drama of its implication, even though racism is often so mundane it leaves your head spinning, the hand of the ordinary in your slow, psychic death so sly and absurd you begin to distrust your own eyes.

I find it very rich, to have been invited here partly on the absurd presumption that I would know what to do with Akila simply because we are both black, and now be rebuffed when I have not performed the role of the Trusty Black Spirit Guide to her

I compile everything I could have said if I were faster, smarter. By midnight, I have a carefully footnoted Spike Lee joint, an entire treatise on the conspiracy of oppression, though at one o’clock when I have rehearsed my supporting data and reimagined our conversation as one in which I don’t let Dr. King down, I suddenly feel that she can go fuck herself, that my intellectual labor should be subsidized and the onus is not on the oppressed to consider the oppressor,

Haa

becomes clear to me, how keenly she is alone.

I creep around the house and try to be racially neutral. I avoid her as best I can, though I hear her

Mostly he just reads the paper, but then he folds it up and sends a message through the chat that says kill yourself, nigger bitch. I log off and think about the clown nose.

I’ve had little choice. The moment I left Clay’s house, my vagina was a cunt.

unnatural look of a soldier’s smile, the look of the incomplete synthesis of fight or flight and the limbic system when it cannot compute. My father only ever smiled like this, like every morning he had to put on his skin and adhere to a code of behavior he could no longer understand, a highly functioning collection of pathologies with shrapnel in his back.

the Fourth of July or a person entering his room too silently grounds for a survival response so disproportionate that as a kid you struggle to understand the blind anger and periods of profound withdrawal, though when you go to see the fireworks with your mother and he isn’t there, you understand that whatever keeps him away is scary, that it is sad.

I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men. I go to my room and get stuck in a Wikipedia hole about religion on Tatooine. I finish my costume and sit in the dark in my metal bikini, and in the morning I stumble to the bathroom and take the pregnancy test. I am inclined to pray, but on principle, I don’t. God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die.

hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead.

This is my home, Akila says, and I know that the moment between when a black boy is upright and capable of speech and when he is prostrate in his own blood is almost imperceptible, due in great part to the tacit conversation that is happening beyond him, that has happened before him, and that resists his effort to enter it before it concludes. I know that the event horizon is swift because of the gulf between the greeting and the pavement, but in real time, as they press Akila to the ground, every second is long.

But when she fills out the details of my medical history, sends the paperwork back with her credit card, almost as if it is nothing, I feel held.