When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

Not the label politicians use to place our concerns into a neat box full of worries they don’t have to attend to immediately or ever,

welp

People bury the parts of history they don’t like, pave it over like African cemeteries beneath Manhattan skyscrapers.

Cranes loomed ominously over the surrounding blocks like invaders from an alien movie, mantis-like shadows with red eyes blinking against the night, the American flags attached to them flapping darkly in the wind, signaling that they came in peace when really they were here to destroy.

Scaffolds cling to buildings all over the neighborhood, barnacles of change,

It’s gotten to the point where I feel a little twinge of dread every time I see a new white person on the block. Who did they replace? There have, of course, always been a few of them, renters who mostly couldn’t afford to live anywhere else but were also cool and didn’t fuck with anybody. These new homeowners move different.

Jenn and Jen, the nicest of the newcomers, whose main issue is they seem to have been told all Black people are homophobic, so they go out of their way to normalize their own presence, while never stopping to wonder about the two old Black women who live next door to them and are definitely not sisters or just friends.

It’s cool to say the princess should save herself nowadays, but I don’t think I’ve experienced that sensation outside of children’s games—of having someone willing to risk life and limb, everything, to save me.

I’m not faking my pleasantness. I want them to know that if their presence bothers me, it’s not because they’re holding hands. It’s because of everything else. I wish I didn’t have to think about everything else, but . . . Miss Wanda is gone. The Hancocks. Mr. Joe.

I know she often enjoys a glass of wine and, sometimes, twerking in front of the mirror in her living room.

Lol

I had no idea what a good relationship was supposed to look like, either. Mine and Kim’s seemed so normal, like in sitcoms where the wife nitpicks and the husband is slightly dismayed with the state of his life and that’s fine. That’s just how things are.

She rolls her eyes and it’s almost like old times, which makes me wonder whether the old times were ever really that good.

Yikes

No more panning in Fuckboy Creek, and most definitely no climbing Cheating White Guy Hill.

Kim says my name how she used to. Before we moved. Before she detached so hard she took a chunk of my flesh with her.

These were the kind of people who called people trailer trash in one sentence and complained about leaks and thin walls in the next—the same problems that’d plagued the trailers I grew up in. My mom now lives in a beautiful trailer that beats most of these condos, and it didn’t cost half a million bucks, either.

The police came for Preston. The knowledge that it can happen just like that, that they can show up and ruin your life, feels like an itch in the middle of my back that I can’t reach.

Awkward silence descends upon us again and I sip my coffee, trying to figure out why I keep dunking on him like this. I want to have a conversation, but I’m annoyed at literally everything this perfectly nice and normal man is saying.

“Sometimes you have soil that isn’t good for growing things in anymore. It needs time to become fertile again. So you cover it with the shit, and then you wait. You let the shit do the work, then you come in and plant your crops. My grandfather taught me that. His grandfather taught him that.”

And there it is. ew