Jackal

by Erin E. Adams

Danger didn’t need a place to hide, it preferred to fester. First it would smile and bring you German chocolate cake. Then it would wait out in the open on your front porch until it felt good and ready.

Tanisha hadn’t lived in Johnstown long enough to have mastered the adage “if you think you saw something…no, you didn’t,” but she was wise enough to glean the truth behind the lore. Shadows hid danger. Danger for Black girls was different. It didn’t obey the boundaries of stories. For them, it was always real.

my mother pronounces every letter of her English. She paid dearly to learn those words, and she’s going to make sure you hear all of them.

Why don’t you ask what he did wrong? Would you ask me to work it out if you knew what he was like when we were alone?

Her love is overwhelming. If she learned that I’ve come home with a broken heart, she would pry my chest open with her bare hands to fix me.

Men don’t have to be kind the way women do.

She held on to a well-rehearsed lesson from after-school specials in the 1990s: I don’t see color. Mel would say that instead, she saw me. Teenage Liz loved that. From what Caroline said last night, Mel is still avoiding the truth: Being blind to color only makes you blind.

A luxury of girlhood is being able to play on other people’s anxieties without consequence. If you make a girl cry, you must be sorry. If a girl offers you an imaginary phone, you answer it. If a girl reaches for your hand, you take it. In womanhood, all those exchanges become contingent on her ability to pay a price.

Like me, she’s been searching for the missing thing. The piece that would make everything make sense. I’m looking at license plates, tracking down flyers and a missing girl from high school. Mel is searching through her daughter’s art. If she can’t find Caroline in the trees, she’ll find her here.

Over time, I’ve learned to suspect men who are kind without reason. No one operates from the goodness of their hearts.

Everyone thinks they know what my anger looks like. They think it’s screaming and yelling and fighting. Sometimes anger is a low vibration, the coil before the spring. Sometimes it sinks inside me and paralyzes

Being a Black girl is inhabiting a cruel riddle: Your beauty is denied but replicated. Your sexuality is controlled but desired. You take up too much space, but if you are too small, you are ripped apart. Despite the wash of it, that’s one thing you can always count on whiteness to do: destroy a threat.

is a matter of who gets to be angry and who gets to seek vengeance or claim justice. The anger here is not the kind that starts revolutions, it is the kind that wages wars.