The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

To preserve history, he said to the public; to capitalize off of renewed interest in the disaster, he said to his investors.

God shows up with a whimsical promise that he will not destroy the world again with water, which seems like a hell of a caveat.

The land of the blind would be built for the blind; there would be no expectation among its citizens that the world should be other than what it was. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or a heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.

Rena assumed she was the group’s ringleader, but now she can see that this is not true. Dori is the caretaker.

the weather report to comfort her, and the weather turned out to be beautiful, and her sister turned out to be beautiful, and Connor turned out to be the man who, a year later, suspected Elizabeth of cheating because he’d seen a repairman leave the house and she’d forgotten to tell him anyone was coming that day, and so he put a bullet through her head. She lived. Or someone lived: it was hard to match the person in the rehab facility with the person her sister had been. Rena has not been to visit Elizabeth in three years. Her mother says Elizabeth is making small progress toward language. She can nod her head yes. She can recognize again the names of colors. Rena’s sister was a middle-school drama teacher, a job she had chosen because pursuing a theater career would have taken her too far away. When Elizabeth was in college, Rena had come to see her in Antigone on opening night, and though the show was not only in English but staged, at the director’s whim, to involve contemporary sets and

The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.

She thought that if she saw things plainly enough, she could skip deception and disappointment,

She wasn’t wearing the bikini to bother Black people—for Christ’s sake, there were none in her father’s new neighborhood to bother even if she wanted to—but to bother Puppy, who is half racist anyway,

Claire has come prepared for an argument. She does not know how to resist this enveloping silence. It is strategic.

wonder what she wanted me to do with a cautionary tale in which the caution was against growing up. —

It was their faith in me she didn’t trust, and I didn’t like it, the way a group of strangers had the power to shake my mother’s confidence.

even after I had stopped thinking of the world as a place that kept track of what it owed people, even after I stopped thinking of myself as a person who had the power to make demands of the world and learned to be a person who came up with her own small daily answers like everyone else. There

He thought the Forgiveness was his to declare. It was right there in the title.

It meant being told each year in a celebratory fashion that the faculty was now more diverse than ever, and then, at some more somber meeting a few months later, being given a list of all the acts of self-governance faculty would no longer be trusted to do and all the evaluative metrics that would now be considered more strictly.

shared an urgency about the kind of work we were doing, a belief that the truth was our last best hope,

She thought the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others.

Midwest nice was a steady, polite gaslighting I found sinister, a forced humility that prevented anyone from speaking up when they’d been diminished or disrespected, lest they be labeled an outsider. I was bewildered by the pride the region took in these pathologies.

The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they’re wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porch with a quilt behind them in a museum. There’s always a white person out there who wants to overpronounce a foreign word, or try an exotic food, or shop for crafts, but no one wants to do that for Black folks. Once white people started thinking they were better at urban Blackness than Black folks, it was game over.

That my country might always expect me to audition for my life I accepted as fact, but I trusted the public charter of national government more than I trusted average white citizens acting unchecked.

had abandoned the actual religion I was raised with as soon as I got to college, but when in moments of despair I needed the inspiration of a triumphant martyr figure who made me believe in impossible things, I thought not of saints or saviors but of my mother.

“Do you really think it’s a good idea for the government to be in the business of telling people what the truth is?”

“But so can anybody,” he said. “What happens when you leave and the office is full of people with a different agenda?”

boys my color, to whom I had to insist that no one else’s disrespect of me was worth a fight, was worth what a fight would cost them.

you know how white people love their history right up until it’s true.

cheerful way of saying the shame of the U.S. past wasn’t genocide or terror but the fact that it hadn’t completely worked yet.

It seemed characteristic of the present that everyone, even the worst of us, was practicing being famous.

the innocence of white women who never saw the damage in their wake,

tried to remember whether painting your porch haint blue was a Black tradition or just a southern one.

“What would it matter? The thing about one drop of blood? It’s only you people who believe in it now.”