Razorblade Tears

by S.A. Cosby

didn’t seem fair for a man to mourn someone abundantly that he had loved so miserly.

“When you or some other white boy says ‘your kind’ it’s like I’m some fucking animal that you trying to put in a cage. I don’t like that shit. So that’s your one,” Ike said. “My one?” “Your one. I’m gonna let it slide because, like you said, we both might be in a weird state of mind. But the next time you say something like that I’m going to chin-check you,”

Human beings were wired to get used to just about anything. That didn’t make you hard. It made you indoctrinated.

So we should be alright there, but Detective Egg Roll told me if he hears about us kicking any more millennial ass, he gonna put us both in a holding cell until daylight saving time is over,” Buddy Lee said. Ike frowned. “Why you call him Detective Egg Roll?” “What? It’s just a joke. Ya know, because he’s Chinese,” Buddy Lee said. “I don’t even think he’s Chinese. I swear you white boys got a joke for everybody, but if I said your family tree ain’t got no branches, you’d be ready to fight.”

“You’re just projecting your fears about your own masculinity, Dad. It’s called overcompensating.”

This conversation showed him that there was another side to the barbershop. A side he’d always known was there but had dismissed. It could be a place of circular logic, where obtuse thinking was confirmed and reinforced by a pervasive groupthink. Yeah, you had some brothers like Lavell going against the tide, but for the most part everybody got in fucking line. Did they really think boys were gay because you weren’t a good father? He might not have been there for Isiah the way he wanted to, but even he knew that didn’t make his son gay. He didn’t pretend to understand Isiah’s life, but he understood that much.

ain’t trying make no excuses, but when you grow up around people—your aunts and uncles, your grandparents, your brothers and sisters, your friends—all of them saying things that you don’t even think about being wrong or right, you don’t put that title on yourself.

on my mama’s side would always make this joke about them not being Nubians, they just, well, you know what he said. And I used to laugh at that joke because it was my granddaddy saying it. I never thought, I never had to think how somebody like you would feel about that joke. Then when I got older I stopped thinking about it, because if that joke was fucked up, then what did that say about my granddaddy? What did that say about me that I laughed at it?” Buddy Lee said.

“It’s easier to keep your head in the sand than it is to try and see things from somebody else’s point of view. There’s a reason why they say ignorance is bliss,” Ike said.

“Get that what’s normal ain’t up to me. That it don’t fucking matter who he wanted to wake up next to as long as he was waking up,”

When the people you love are gone, it’s the things they’ve touched that keep them alive in your mind. A picture, a shirt, a poem, a pair of baby shoes. They become anchors that help you keep their memory from drifting away.

A good father, a good man, loves the people that love his children.

This time they didn’t feel so much like razorblades.They felt like the long-awaited answer to a mournful prayer for rain.