A Phoenix First Must Burn

by Patrice Caldwell

I preferred creating and exploring fictional universes to living in my real one.

Where is my fantasy, my future? Why don’t Black people exist in speculative worlds?

You can’t keep doing that, I’d say, but we both knew what I was really saying: Keep this up, and one day you won’t come back. But he’d shake his head. Lil Bit, you know I can’t stay up in here while people out there need food, water, a ride, a shoulder.

I can’t sit in that place knowing everyone else is left out in the cold.

There’s a reason they use certain words in the military, words like eliminate and target instead of kill and person. It’s so you gain distance. It’s so you don’t waver. It’s so you don’t see your enemy close enough to see yourself.

“And it probably won’t work.” “We can only try.” A familiar sentiment. I think of Uncle June heading out to save the world one person at a time.

But these men did not know I was a girl formed by impossibilities.

From sunup until the stars are twinkling I slash, and carry, and peel, and boil, and churn, turn my arm around the molasses vat, and heal the broken, and dream and dream and dream of belonging to no one but myself.

Khadim makes a sound low in his throat. “Could you live knowing you had a chance to free many more than yourself, but you refused?” I want to swat away his words like the pest they are, but they bite me nonetheless.

If Abigail was honest with herself, the life she’d led so far was just as likely to land her somewhere a bit hotter anyway. Good, then. Hell suited her just fine. Just fine, indeed.

It went without saying that hate and vengeance were not sentiments she’d learned from the nuns at the convent, so their God did not hear her. But there were other things in the desert, listening. They did not mind hate; they held no fault with vengeance. They found her offering pleasing and struck the deal.

She’d put the gun in a box and put the box in her steamer trunk and forgotten about it, mostly. So when the predators did come for her, she hadn’t been ready.

“Safer for whom?” Abby asked, unrelenting, even though Mo was beginning to droop. “Not us, Mo.”

Smalls was the reason she knew lawmen couldn’t be trusted, that you couldn’t find safety in towns. That maybe there was no safety but the kind you made yourself, and even that had a way of failing sometimes.

Years later now, when I look out over the mangroves at dusk and hear the gray waves whispering in my mother’s tongue to return, to return, I think of my father, who took from the sea and was taken in his turn, and whose failures haunt me as much as his love.

He was so scared. I wanted to ask Mami what she’d done, but she stayed staring at the hollow space he had left, and I knew she could not see me. I cried for her, instead. I cried for the child they had never let me be.

She remembered me, with Daddy gone. She smiled more, but not as wide.

But when I hovered in secret over a noontime pool of still water, the haunted eyes of a little girl stared back at me; her face faded into the scenery, like a ghost in her own life, barely there.

I felt it again, as though I were losing myself, drowning in the storm that raged between them, as though I were not their daughter but a bit of seaweed, a tossed spar splintered from a wrecked ship.

“You cannot ask for that which you have already compelled.”

A wiser council would’ve considered that perhaps there was some intent behind Councilmember Guth being attacked by a basilisk right after accusing the High Sorcerer of murder, but the rest of the council were so enamored of the man that it never came up again. Once they’d managed to move the stone that had been Councilmember Guth into a courtyard, that is.

I had, it seemed, unwittingly unleashed a bloodbath. Whoops.

Ms. Mildred’s eyes found Etta in the back seat, and she watched as her grandmother’s forehead creased, fold upon fold, an accordion of thought and feeling and memory trapped in brown skin.

“What if I gave my heart to a girl instead?” Etta asked. “That would be better. Women are much better about taking care of hearts. But the point still stands.”

“Will it hurt if you fix the one I have?” “It’s never easy. I suppose like love itself. But if I do, you’ll have to relive the relationship—the high and the low, the sweet and the sour, the light and the dark. It’s what conjure requires.”

“Women don’t lose men. There’s nothing you could’ve done. Men leave women for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it’s too hot outside. Other times, their bellies ache. It could be too windy that day. It’s when women tether their hearts only to the whims of men that they turn to ash.”

You can, but hearts are your own to keep. They’re to keep you alive. Give your affection. Give your love. Give your time, but nothing so vital to your own survival. Be careful with giving away parts of yourself before you understand them fully.

A vampire stands outside my window with a question on her lips.

They think you’re stuck up. That you like being alone, when really you’re barely hanging

I only wished my parents could work on themselves, too, so I didn’t feel like I was carrying my problems and theirs.

When she looked back, her full gaze was on me. I cleared my throat. “May I kiss you?” “Yes,” she said. I kissed her.

Jayleen’s hands feel cool, the way Akilah knows it’ll feel when the sun finishes going down.

Vengeance is the game we’re playing tonight. Our lives have become all about this game.

“But I’m sick of consuming old rich white men,” Veronique whines. “I think they give me a rash.”

Old rich white men and the word innocent don’t belong in the same sentence, Solange.

“Ugly is what the imbeciles on this island say. They all want to be drunk from the rum of the world—white beauty, wealth, shiny things that will choke them if they put them on too tight. You know that is not true-true. What is real is what we are. We are fire, Giselle, and this skin is what protects us, is what gives us our light, our life.”

Aunt Gigi always told me that for women in our family, red lipstick was a weapon.

There’s a venom in her tone that poisons the comment, turning the would-be tease toxic. I wish I could laugh it off, but I can’t.

the rain stops, drops suspended in the air like the jeweled strands of a beaded curtain.

You think of the houses on your street that have been abandoned, the neighbors you’ve watched grow sick, the protests that gather outside City Hall every Sunday, smaller and smaller as people move away or pass away or simply give up.

Nalah couldn’t remember when their friendship had turned into something more. The feelings had been so gradual but also inevitable.