Nightcrawling

by Leila Mottley

Sometimes I think this little kid might just save me from the swallow of our gray sky, but then I remember that Marcus used to be that small, too, and we’re all outgrowing ourselves.

Her family’s restaurant is a neighborhood staple, and even though they can’t afford more than the one bedroom above the shop, she’s never been hungry a day in her life. It’s all degrees of being alive out here and every time I hug her or watch her skate down the sidewalk, I can feel how strong her heartbeat is. It doesn’t matter how lucky you are, though, because you still gotta work day in and day out trying to stay alive while someone else falls through the cracks, ashes scattered in the bay.

She is an infant, a small person bundled in what looks like a tablecloth but is actually a onesie: red and checkered. Neither of them smiles, drooling in the intoxication of a bond too intimate for me, a stranger, to watch. I want to look away, but the infant’s nose keeps calling me back; it is small and pointed, brown but slightly red, like the baby has been outside for too long. I want to warm her, make her return to her color, but she is so far behind this cardboard and you cannot resurrect the dead, even when they have so much life left over.

I taste my tears before I feel them and this is funeral day: touching death and eating lunch. Pretending to cry until we are truly sobbing.

It ain’t my place to have a problem with somebody else’s survival.

Tony’s had a thing for me for months, ever since he and Marcus became friends, and he’s the only guy who has ever asked me a question and wanted to hear my answer. I let him try to hold my hand when he comes over, but I still don’t understand him, why he can’t seem to let me go when I’ve never given him a reason to hold on.

He’s standing there, tilting side to side, beginning to rhyme, and I catch only one thing before I exit: My bitches don’t know nothing, don’t know nothing. I am trying to decipher the fallacies in that, the torn edges of memories that may belong to his words, but all I find is nothing, don’t know nothing. Nothing.

Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up. I don’t say goodbye to Shauna and she doesn’t even turn around to watch me leave, to head back out to a sky that sunk into deep blue while my brother asked me to do the one thing I know I shouldn’t, the one thing Shauna cared enough to warn me about: hollow myself out for another person who ain’t gonna give a shit when I’m empty.

Mama was like woman grown out a seed, arms twisting, fruit and breasts and all things hard to resist. Daddy wanted to wrap his arms around her trunk and Mama knew he would.

An orchestrated love is almost more precious than a natural one; harder to give up something you spent that long making.

I didn’t. I do now, though, almost the moment she says it, memories of sitting on the floor, scalp bruises, Mama saying she’s putting a spell on my head gonna make me so pretty. Or maybe I don’t remember any of this because Mama is reciting these stories and memory is really just the things we trust to be ours and I guess I want this to be a story of Mama and me, so it is.

Mama reaches back and rubs my knee with her fingers. “And now you want Mama to help you.” I can hear how hopeful this whole thing makes her, giddy to be needed.

Strut, fly, gallop. There are so many ways to walk a street, but none of them will make you bulletproof.

I’ve never wanted to reverse a decision more than I want to right now.

The difference between the cops and street men is that the cops like to make it a game. They wait to fuck me, instead watching me, salivating, trying to figure out how to make me just scared enough that the fear swallows me and leaves a body worth getting on top of, hands to clasp behind my head, fear to lick away.

Marcus comes right up to me and picks me up from the waist, does a spin. Coming down, I’m dizzy, don’t remember the last time he spun me like that, like I’m his little sister and we might still be young.

Marcus winds us through streets I don’t remember being on before, which is funny because I swear I’ve walked every inch of this city. Maybe I never looked up. Maybe I’ve been too busy searching.

art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us.

The day he’ll put his head in my lap and let me cradle him. He might even hold my hand or ask me why there are bruises tracing my chest. Some days it feels like I’m stuck between mother and child. Some days it feels like I’m nowhere.

As kids, we thought Uncle Ty was magic and Mama thought it’d be best we didn’t talk to him much. Stopped coming to Christmas when I turned nine. Marcus cried that whole first Christmas without him, rolled on the floor of our apartment clutching his stomach like the distance bred physical pain. Maybe it did.