All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

A barely familiar voice called out my name. Are you okay? it asked. At the wheel: Pulp Fiction. Her doll’s face, her swollen mouth. In the passenger seat was a disinterested-looking man in his forties, his hair a wispy nest. The married doctor. Are y’all okay? Pulp Fiction asked again. A smile cracking her face like an egg: a sweetness concealed in it. We’re just headed home from the airport, she said. Do y’all need a ride somewhere? — What I found difficult to explain in the years after was how much the people I knew in Milwaukee would ride for each other, for strangers even. A true neighborliness, this in a city with so much ugly, people getting flung out of their apartments by landlords, a city so segregated that I could walk four blocks from my apartment where older blond people nodded like their begonias and told me to have a nice day, and at the end of those blocks would find myself in a neighborhood five times as poor, not a white face to be seen.