The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

A town always looked different once you’d returned, like a house where all the furniture had shifted three inches. You wouldn’t mistake it for a stranger’s house but you’d keep banging your shins on the table corners.

He wasn’t a settling man. He was only good at getting lost.

The key to staying lost was to never love anything.

“White folks kill you if you want too much, kill you if you want too little.” Willie Lee shook his head, packing tobacco into his pipe. “You gotta follow they rules but they change ’em when they feel. Devilish, you ask me.”

If nothing could be done about ugliness, you ought to at least look like you were trying to hide it.

People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.

That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath.

“You tell yourself no before anyone even says it to you.”

There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.

Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.