The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

“White folks kill you if you want too much, kill you if you want too little.”

the passe blanc were a mystery.

You could

find just about anybody if you were good at lying,

She was black. Blueblack. No, so black she looked purple. Black as coffee, asphalt, outer space, black as the beginning and the end of the world.

Eventually remembering turned into imagining. How slight the difference was between the two.

That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise.