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You fucked around—and you found out.
Hold on, holiday
Why couldn’t she have it all?
Oh my God
Because promises are potato chips. They’re cheap. Easy to break. Too many hurt your heart.
Investors and B and B–ers keep the island vibrant, I guess.”
“Stupid rumors going around to make Avalon more exotic than it is. Making hay outa blades of grass.”
“You have to stop and face your demons before you can win the game. You may get a little bloody, even lose a limb—or a few fingers—but know this.” At a stop sign, he looks over to me. “Running ain’t gonna make it go away.”
Twenty years ago, my family and I moved from our home in View Park—the heart of Black Los Angeles—just so that 75 percent of us could be murdered on an island that has more bison living on it than Black people. I’m only alive today because I’d snuck out that night.
The Department of Adult Protective Services
“I zoned out,”
You gon’ have to drag my dead body off this piece of rock.”
deadly poison nightshade? Why is it in my backyard?”
Keeping my head above water . . . trying not to make any waves when I can.
Moving forward. Like a snail with a broken shell.
I’m old but I’ll still cut a bitch.
“People’s dogs been disappearing.”
Running and hiding will keep me alive. It did before and I survived. And isn’t surviving the point of the game?
“Your hair looks like you’ve been living on a plantation.”
Who says this!!?!??!!!
Every window in every third house displays a FOR RENT and CUTE VACATION RENTAL sign. Every fifth telephone pole has been stapled with HAVE YOU SEEN MY DOG? and MISSING posters for a schnauzer, a Chihuahua, and Amy the Friendliest Mutt in Avalon. Also weird: I have yet to see one Black person power walking or sweeping their front porch.
Beware, there be monsters up there. Enjoy the quiet.
I will visit that museum and see if my family’s murders made the history books or if we’ve been erased like we were in those summer 2001 issues of the Breeze.
benefactor,”
“He wants to keep a low profile.
Harper Hemphill
inconclusive.
I smile and follow Maddy to her office. Ha. This bitch really thinks I trust her.
Glad she knows
The stranger wears a hoodie and a baseball cap.
Boom!
he’d changed our banking account passwords,
Somebody needs to harm him
No idea who Jackie is.
“Harper’s getting out of jail.”
“The tests came back. His DNA doesn’t match the DNA on that knife.”
Why would he?
But that knife blade had been missing for nearly twenty years until it mysteriously reappeared months ago.
“But if he didn’t do it, who did?”
The will is inaccurate.
I’m coming over there, Colette, and I’m taking back what you stole from me.
A photograph has been slid beneath the landing strip. I peek out the door’s glass pane—no one’s there. I snap up the picture . . . . . . of sixteen-year-old me, wearing a Popsicle-colored bikini top and white jean shorts, biting into a candy apple as the blue ocean sparkles behind me.
To the one who survived WELCOME HOME
Crème de bananes, Kahlúa, and half-and-half
poison swirled through her veins.
she knew that smirk, those flat eyes. All sociopaths in that family. Destroy land. Destroy people. Forget about heritage. Forget about respect. Bones are for museums—only the strong survive. Not as crass as that huckster back in the 1950s but just as evil. Not selling giants but selling another lie: this island was Paradise.
Danny, dead now for a month,
She could see that smirk and those dead, flat eyes up close. Of course it’s you.
She scraped her fingernails along the monster’s neck.
The pink dot that represents my aunt’s geolocation hasn’t moved from Dee Dee’s house all night.
Catalina nightshade,
it’s 11:45 p.m., and the person who murdered my family is out there, watching me. Maybe.
Someone had been watching us that afternoon and had taken my picture. Whoever that was knew that I had just returned to Avalon . .
DO NOT LEAVE!!!
??????
