By Damieka Thomas
That summer, we were living in Grandma’s old run-down trailer in Olivehurst, California, which Mama deemed Meth Capital, U.S.A. It was painted an ugly off-white with sky blue trim. For months, there was no shower because the trailer was under construction that never seemed to end since our uncle from the Bay worked on it for free and he could only get to town once a month. My brother Elijah and I had to bathe in the small shed out back, which had a sink just big enough for us to fit our bones into and scrub until we were red and raw. We had a giant yard, or at least it seemed giant to my nine-year-old eyes. My brother and I were only allowed to play until sundown, and when it got dark we’d lock ourselves in the house and listen to tweakers rummage through our garbage cans in between snippets of our stolen five-channel cable TV.
Daddy came back that summer. It wasn’t the last time that he would come back, but it was the first. That day, I was lying in the backyard, languishing in the heat of the sun. It warmed me to my bones and sweat dripped from my nose onto my lips. It tasted salty. My eyes were half-open, and I was thinking about going back inside. But I knew that Mama would be angry with me because I had gotten dirt all over my jeans. She would make me go take a bath in the small sink in the shed, and I didn’t really want to be clean, anyway. So, it was easier to continue laying in the heat, even if it was uncomfortable.
That was when I saw him. At first, I thought that the heat was giving me visions. His brown arms were thin and littered with scars, and his ‘fro was shining in the golden afternoon light of the sun. It illuminated his head like a halo. His mouth was in an almost-smile, full lips rounded like a half-moon, and his dark eyes were glittering like rusted diamonds.
“Daddy?” I said, uncertainty lining my voice. Maybe this was a dream. I dreamt of him so often since he had left. His shadow permeated everything since that day last year. Mama told me that he was never coming back, but I still held out hope. Hope was dangerous and intoxicating.
He smiled. His teeth shined in the fading sunlight, and that piece of sunshine was still illuminating him, bringing out the amber glints in his dark curls. “Girl,” he said, clucking his tongue a little and shaking his head in that begrudging way that he always had when I did something stupid. His Georgia twang hadn’t faded even after years in California. That accent made my bones warm in a way that even the sun couldn’t. “You better get your ass back inside soon. You gon fuck around and have a heatstroke.”
That’s how I knew it was really him.
“Daddy!” I yelled. I was up in a flash, barreling at him. He opened his arms wide, enveloping me in his embrace, and I soaked up his smell. Sweat and stale cigarettes and something all his own. My daddy.
He spun me around, sighing loudly. “Damn girl,” he laughed. “You went and got all tall and shit. Pretty soon I won’t be able to pick you up no more.”
I laughed as he gently set me back down, my feet creating dust plumes in the dirt. That was when I saw the other man. He had chin-length, greasy dark hair, and dark eyes shaped like almonds. His face was all hard angles, the slope of his high cheekbones, sagging skin around his jawline. His mouth was lined with wrinkles. His skin was a light shade of brown. Whereas Daddy’s dark eyes were all softness, like being wrapped in warm honey, this man’s eyes were foreboding, bitter like dark black coffee. I instinctively darted behind Daddy.
“Hey,” Daddy said. “C’mon, don’t be like that. You too old to hide.” He gently pushed me forward with one rough palm. “This is my friend, Alejandro. We gon’ see if Mama will let us both stay here for a while, so you best get used to him. Now, say hi to Alejandro, Kessie.”
I softened. I loved that Daddy called me Kessie, instead of Kassandra like everyone else. Slowly, I stepped forward. The man dropped low, resting his elbows on his knees. He put one hand out. There was dirt under his nails. Reluctantly, I shook it. The palm was cold despite the heat, and the lines of it felt rough and worn, hard and shriveled up like old peaches from the nearby orchards. It hurt to touch.
“Hi Kessie,” Alejandro said. He had a Spanish accent, soft and lilting, but there was no warmth to his voice. I hated the way Daddy’s nickname for me sounded in his mouth. “You sure are a pretty little thing,” he continued as he dropped my hand. “I hope you don’t mind me staying with your daddy like this.”
He grinned. His teeth were yellow on the edges, his gums the color of ripe strawberries. “I don’t bite,” he said. “I promise.”
***
We walked up the front steps to the door. Daddy’s hand was warm in mine. Mama was in the kitchen finishing dinner. I could smell the chicken from outside. She must’ve heard the front steps creak through the thin screen door as I walked up because without turning around, she said, “Hey, baby, one or two pieces?”
“Hey, Ana,” Daddy said.
Mama turned around with wide spectral eyes. She was holding a piece of fried chicken in her hand, which she dropped on the tile floor. I knew she was really shocked then. Mama didn’t waste food.
Mama had sharp cheekbones inherited from a Choctaw grandmother and lively dark eyes. She wore her long dark hair in a braid that swished like a tail wherever she walked and always smelled of the lavender-scented shampoo she bought at Walmart. I thought Mama was the one of the prettiest women I’d ever seen in real life. She was younger than a lot of the other moms, but she also carried herself with a grace that was beyond skin deep. Her light brown skin was smooth and unwrinkled, which she credited to her nightly usage of Cetaphil and cocoa butter. She accentuated the curves of her petite body with tight jeans and crop tops that kept men’s eyes on her, but her own eyes got a little sadder every day. Her body was beginning to deflate, shoulders sagging as though the weight of her bones was too heavy to carry. That tiredness left her in bed for days on end. Days where she forgot to use the Cetaphil and cocoa butter.
Now, her eyes were narrowed at us. She said, “Kassandra, get inside now.”
“But Mama,” I started.
“Get in the house,” she repeated.
Ruefully, I dropped Daddy’s hand and opened the screen door. I didn’t walk away, just stood in the kitchen, the heat from the stove making me sweat. “The fuck you want?” Mama asked, eyes still narrowed on Daddy.
“I just wanna talk,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender.
Mama’s eyes landed on Alejandro. “I ain’t letting that bum in my house, DeAndre.”
Daddy knew when Mama used his full name, she meant business, so he didn’t argue. He nodded once to Alejandro, who nodded back, the way men do. Alejandro stepped down the porch and stood on the front lawn, picking at his dirty fingernails. Daddy stepped into the kitchen, shutting the screen door behind him.
Elijah walked from the bedroom into the kitchen. He must’ve heard the noise. When his eyes landed on Daddy, his mouth peeled back into a wide grin. “Daddy!” he said.
“Hey there, squirt,” Daddy said with a grin, kneeling and fist-bumping him the way they used to back in the day.
Mama turned her back to us, quickly throwing piles of food onto red plastic plates. She must’ve been distracted because she never gave us so much. She shoved a plate steaming with fried okra, mashed potatoes, and chicken into my hand. My stomach growled. Unable to suppress the question, I asked, “Is Daddy gonna stay?”
She went and took my sister, Jasmine, out of her high-chair. She shook her against her hip as she said, “Go eat your dinner in the bedroom and stay outta grown folks’ business.”
Elijah and I walked a few feet to the bedroom. Of course, as soon as we were in the room, we pressed our ear against the door, leaving our food to go cold in the corner near Jasmine’s crib. The room was just large enough to fit Mama’s twin-sized bed, mine and Elijah’s bunk bed, and Jasmine’s little white crib. It was all crammed together, though, so Elijah and I pressed our back to the navy blue bunk bed as we strained to hear.
“What are you thinking coming up in here like this?” Mama said.
“I thought that you and the kids would appreciate having me back,” he said.
Mama laughed without humor. “Oh, did you, now?” She scoffed.
“Look, Aiyana, I know I was wrong before,” he said. “But I’m tryna do better.”
“Okay,” she said. “And what about it?”
“C’mon, baby.” Daddy took a sharp breath as though her words physically wounded him. “Don’t be like that.”
“I ain’t being like nothing,” she said. “You come up in my house asking for a place to stay or forgiveness or whatever the hell it is that you want? Uh-uh, go ask for that shit in church. Don’t come looking for it here.”
“That’s not what I’m asking for.” There was a hard edge of annoyance in his voice.
“Then what the fuck are you asking for?”
“If you would just let me fucking talk.”
Their voices were getting louder. Jasmine began crying.
“Well, then talk,” Mama said.
“I’m asking you to give me another chance,” he said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know I’ve made mistakes, and I’m sorry. But I’m off all that old shit. And I’ma stay off it, too. I promise.”
“Goddamnit, Dre, why you always gotta make promises you can’t keep?”
“I can keep this one,” he said.
For a moment there was just the sound of Mama quietly cooing at Jasmine, who continued to cry. I heard her swallowing around something heavy in her throat. “And what? I’m supposed to help your little friend too?”
“Alejandro is a good guy,” he said. “You’ll see.”
“God damn it,” she said again, quick and sharp. The heavy thing was in her voice again. Against Mama’s hip, Jasmine continued crying. Daddy began cooing, and I could imagine him taking her from Mama, settling her in his arms. Jasmine’s sobs softened.
Mama was softening out there, too. I could feel it. Could see the dark eyes deep-set in the light brown face warming as she sighed, her thin hip pressing to the side of the kitchen table, crossing her arms as though that could protect her from Daddy’s charms. Her high cheekbones and sharp jaw jutting out in defiance, collar bone expanding as she wrapped her arms around herself tighter, thick braid hanging over the curve of her waist. But it was no use. Eventually, she’d uncoil herself, fiddle with the end of that dark braid the way she did when she was thinking. She’d make a big show of it all. Make him beg and plead to stay. But deep down, she wanted to believe that this time was different, and so she did.
***
The first vision came that night. I was in bed, but I was too happy to sleep. I was smiling and staring at the top of the blue bunk bed, listening to the sounds of everyone else in the room breathing evenly.
At first, it felt like being pulled into an undertow, dark black, my heart racing and stomach sinking as I struggled to stay afloat. Then I succumbed to the vision, letting it overtake my body. It became a soft numbness, a peaceful final sigh.
A wolf was sitting at the end of my bed.
His fur was the color of a starless night. He paced back and forth. His eyes landed on mine. They were dark and lifeless, an abyss calling my name. He opened his mouth. His teeth were pointed and mostly white, except for their golden tips. The gums were bright crimson, painted with someone else’s blood.
You look good enough to eat, he told me.
His dark eyes lingered on mine, and for a moment it felt as though he could see all of me. The way that I cried every night for weeks when Daddy left last year. The way I sometimes forgot that I was a person because I was too busy helping Mama. The wolf saw all of this. He knew, and he smiled at his knowing.
He pounced, and I let him devour me.
I was sweating when I came to. My fingernails left crescent moons on my palms. It’s just a dream, I told myself. Daddy was home, and we were going to be a real family now. But I couldn’t shake the vision.
When I finally fell into a fitful sleep, I dreamt of nothing but kohl-black eyes and yellowed fangs in gums the color of watermelon Jolly Ranchers.
***
June passed in a haze of golden days. Drinking Kool-Aid on the back porch while Daddy and Mama talked and laughed. Daddy chasing Elijah and me around the backyard. Watching him change Jasmine’s diaper in the tiny table Mama had managed to shove into our living room. Playing Go-Fish with him on the kitchen table that was littered with stains from spilled cereal and old rusted outlines of beer cans. Cleaning the house with him before Mama came home from work. Blasting Tupac from the oldies station on our radio. “Oh shit!” he’d say around a cigarette, turning up the dial. “You ain’t know nothin’ about this, girl.” The little dances he did as he sang along, nodding his head, lips in a dimpled half-smile. Pretty soon, me and Elijah would be dancing and singing with him.
When she wasn’t at work cleaning houses, Mama would drive us in our old Volkswagen bug to Marysville. Since it didn’t have an AC, we’d roll down all the windows and re-circulate sweltering air. When we crossed the bridge, I’d watch the river beneath us, dreaming of the cold water. I’d watch people crossing the bridge, hands gesticulating wildly and lips speaking to no one.
We’d go on walks around Ellis Lake. We walked the uneven lines of concrete, the stone lamps flickering off and on even in the daylight. The water was only blue from afar. Once you got close enough, it was the color of mud, a gravel gray undertone to it. The ducks were relentless, bloated and begging, and they chased if you got too close. Sometimes, I saw used needles or rusted bits of tin foil or used condoms on the ground.
There was a tiny bridge made of wood and littered with decorative uneven stones along the side. It led to a big white Gazebo with a stone base and gray pointed peak that sat on the little green island all by itself. Early in the summer, there was always some addict standing there picking their skin while they waited for another fix, legs shaking and eyes paranoid as they darted around the park. Later in the summer, almost every weekend the gazebo was filled with couples getting married or engaged, some family member taking snapshots of the moment through the lens of a disposable camera, the water glistening blue behind the couple and their eyes still tender when they looked at each other. I watched them from benches painted with the names of dead people and gang signs. I wondered what it was like to be in love. Did it burn, the way my chest had after Daddy left? I wondered when one of them would leave. Someone always leaves. I didn’t know much, but I knew that.
Sometimes, when it was empty, Daddy and I stood on the gazebo while Mama and Elijah fed the ducks bread from the dollar store, Jasmine fast asleep in her stroller. The afternoon light would glint off Daddy’s fro and his eyes were more amber than brown when the sun hit them. A dimple popped out of his left cheek when he smiled at me, white teeth glistening against his dark skin. One day, he nodded to the lake. “They ain’t cleaned that thing out in a hundred years,” he said. “It’s a whole other world under there.”
From then on out, anytime we visited the lake, he’d make up stories about what was floating in there. Something new every time. Sasquatch. A sea monster. Mermaids. Buried treasure. Atlantis. Mama would shake her head. “Don’t be putting them stories in that girl’s mind. Her head is already up in the clouds most the time.” But I loved his stories. I’d rest my head on his broad shoulder, inhaling the scent of cocoa butter and cigarettes, closing my eyes against the heat of the sun, orange glittering behind my eyelids. He’d rub my shoulders while he talked, fingers light on my skin. I was so full of happiness that I was high.
Alejandro was there, too. Alejandro with those knowing eyes. Alejandro who smelled of something earthy, and who smoked like a chimney. Alejandro hung like a black cloud over those deliriously happy days, and sometimes I wished that I could plead with Mama to send him away. But I was old enough to know that she would not listen to me.
One day, Alejandro was sitting in the living room, watching an episode of Law and Order: SVU. He was digging through a bag of microwave popcorn. His legs were open wide, taking up the couch as though he owned it. I hated it when he did that. Mama and Daddy were in the kitchen. The golden days of June were gone, fading into the blistering heat of July. Daddy didn’t listen to Tupac anymore. He and Alejandro would disappear while Mama was at work, leaving me and Elijah alone with Jasmine. They were arguing, and they had sent me to the living room as though the sounds of a girl’s murder could cover their fight. Daddy was drinking again. Mama was accusing him of other things, too. He was denying them.
Alejandro had the TV turned up loud. I sat on the floor on the other side of the coffee table, as far away from him as possible. Elijah was sitting in Grandma’s old, beat-up chair, eyes glued to the TV. Mama never let us watch shows like this. She said we were too young for all that mess. Elijah was enthralled by it.
“I know what you’re doing,” Mama said in the kitchen. “You think I can’t tell? You think I’m fucking dumb?”
“No, I think you’re a crazy bitch,” Daddy said. “That’s what I think.”
“Fuck you.” Mama’s voice rose, crashing like a wave, eroding at our family— or the illusion of one that we had built over the last month. Jasmine started crying.
On the TV, someone’s mother was crying over her daughter. Someone had raped her. I wasn’t sure what the word meant, but I knew it was bad. “Poor little girl,” Alejandro said. He looked right at me as he said it, and I remembered the wolf with dark eyes.
I was glad when Mama called, “Kassandra, get up and deal with your sister.”
***
My vision came true one sweltering day at the end of July. Mama and Daddy had gone to Walmart to pick up a money order from my uncle. They’d taken Elijah and Jasmine, but I was taking a nap. They hadn’t wanted to wake me, and they must have thought that I was safe alone with Alejandro. They were wrong.
When I woke, he was sitting on the end of my bed, watching me with those dark eyes. He reached out and touched my bare knee, the coldness of his thick palm making me shiver. I wanted to kick his hand away, but I was frozen. “You’re so fucking pretty,” he said, his voice a little breathless. He smelled like beer. His other hand was resting on his inner thigh, beside the crotch of his blue jeans. They were already unbuttoned and unzipped, and I could see the black waistband of his boxers.
My mouth was dry. I swallowed and tasted nothing. His hand was clammy as it slowly crept up, inching toward my thigh, making a rough sound on my denim shorts.
He smiled, and all I could see were wolf fangs. “Such a pretty little girl,” he repeated. His hand moved higher.
His knowing wolf eyes met mine, that yellow-fanged grin biting into his chapped lips. I couldn’t move. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t get it out. It was suspended against the barrier of my lips. I would spend the rest of my life filling my mouth with whoever’s taste that I could to try to get that scream out of it.
I wanted to fight him, kick, punch, bite, scream, anything. But cold dread held me in place. He was predator, and I was prey, and I had seen Animal Planet. I knew what happened next. I closed my eyes against it.
***
The second vision happened when we were playing outside one hot day near the beginning of August, a few days before school started. Elijah and I were running through the sprinklers, relishing the respite from the staggering heat of a trailer with no A.C. Daddy was chasing us. He was never afraid to get dirty the way that Mama was.
When Mama crossed her arms and told us not to run through the sprinkler, Daddy just shook his head, laughing. “They’re kids,” he said. “Let ‘em have some fun while they can.” So, there we were, playing tag between the three of us in a sprinkler, falling over ourselves and laughing, muddy and euphoric.
The world suddenly tilted and turned on its axis. The grass flipped, and the blue sky turned hazy. Then all of it disappeared. It turned into the bleak gray of gravel. I recognized the road to our street. It sweltered in waves of heat, and the gravel burnt my bare feet. That big black wolf from before brushed past me, and I shivered, jumping back. His tail brushed my skin, wiry and rough. But he didn’t look at me. Just walked past, towards the lights of the city. Good riddance, I thought. Then I saw Daddy. He was walking in the same direction as the wolf, towards the cars that littered the bridge to Marysville, the sound of the dirty river flowing beneath it.
“Daddy?” I called. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t look back at me. His muscular brown shoulders were bare, and they were wrapped around something. He was still wearing the white tank top that he slept in and his face had a determined slant to it, jawline hard as though he was gritting his teeth together.
There was a figure clothed in light standing at our fence. The light was so bright that for a moment I couldn’t tell who it was. Then it faded and I saw Mama. That light surrounded her. Her full lips trembled. Her arms were crossed over her thin middle, cheekbones and jawline hard. “Don’t ever come back!” Her voice was faint, as though being heard through the static of an old telephone. Daddy never looked back. The wolf slipped in and out of his legs, long tail brushing his shins, but it didn’t trip him up. He knelt to pet the wolf’s fur one time; a quick, rough stroke. Then he kept walking, and the wolf followed. I watched them slip down the street together, swallowed into the sunset.
Mama began crying. Then she faded too, slipping into the whiteness of that light, and then it was just me alone on our gravel street, watching those cars pass over that bridge— people going anywhere but here. Then the bridge faded into the dark, cars dissipating one by one, falling away into nothingness. The sky fell around me, the sunset vanishing into the black. The gravel disappeared, and it was just me swimming in the darkness.
I fell back into reality, landing in a heap on the grass.
Daddy rushed over to me, brown eyes perplexed. “You okay, sweetie?” He asked.
I tried to jerk away from him. I knew what was coming. I knew what he would do to us. But his strong hands reached for me, concern glittering in his dark eyes, and I couldn’t be angry with him. But this vision would still come true, just like the other one had. The secret that I could never tell Mama or Daddy. I wasn’t sure it was my secret to tell. Alejandro had thrust it on me, and I’d buried the memory somewhere that I didn’t look. I was pretending that I was a normal girl. I had a Mama and Daddy. We were like the families from neighborhoods where they didn’t have to lock themselves inside as soon as it got dark. We were like the paintings that Grandma had hung up in the house, the families with dark skin and white teeth glittering as they ate around a table. But the painting was cracking. Daddy was leaving.
***
At the end of August, Daddy walked me to the bus stop at the end of the road, smoking a cigarette. The early mornings were colder now, and he was wearing the thick blue flannel that Mama said was ugly. We didn’t talk as we wandered the long stretch from our dead-end, gravel road to the bus stop. I watched the cars on the Marysville bridge, their headlights dull against the brilliance of the orange sunrise. A shirtless white guy walked past us, pushing his bike and arguing with the air. He had a tattoo of bloody Jesus on his shoulder.
I looked at Daddy again. His sores were getting bigger. One of the ones on his neck was bleeding a little. “Do you ever miss Georgia?” I didn’t know what made me ask it.
He quirked a brow at me, chuckling. The laugh didn’t meet his eyes. “Nah,” he said softly. “Wasn’t nothin’ for me there. Besides, it’s too fucking hot.”
“Hotter than here?” I couldn’t imagine anywhere hotter than here.
“Oh yeah,” he said, taking another drag from his cigarette. “Kind of hot that gets deep in your bones. Makes you see shit. And it lasts from April to October.” He chuckled, and there was something sad in the sound. “Ma used to take us down to the river to take baths at six in the morning cause that’s the only time the water was cold enough.”
“I wish I could meet her,” I said. I’d never met any of his family. He never talked about them except in passing like this.
“Nah,” he said again. He looked away, watching the cars on the bridge. “You ain’t missing much.”
We got to the bus stop. Daddy looked at me. I wondered what he saw reflected in my eyes. Everyone said that I had his eyes, but lately I couldn’t find him in them. My eyes were dark and empty as I stood in the bathroom mirror late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I tried to find my pupil inside the dark iris, getting real close to the mirror, my brows wrinkling in concentration, squinting in the dim light of the dull lightbulb. I’d stare at my eyes until they didn’t look like mine anymore, and I wouldn’t stop until I finally found the pupil buried in the glittering almost-blackness of my iris. You look possessed, Elijah joked.
Maybe Alejandro had possessed me when he entered me. Maybe that was why I could still feel his frigid hands everywhere, his ragged breath on my skin. Maybe that was why I dreamed of killing him, slowly, beginning with the appendage that started this, making him bleed the way that he’d made me bleed. I needed to cut the tether that kept me attached to him.
Daddy took one last drag from his cigarette before stomping it out. “Fifth grade,” he said. “Damn, girl, you gettin’ old.” He hugged me. I tried not to flinch. I held onto his soft flannel, his tobacco scent filling me up. When he pulled away, there was a strange vulnerability in the new lines of wrinkles in his thinning face. I was getting older, but Daddy was, too. He was only seventeen when he had me, just a boy-man. But now, ten years later, he was really a man. I knew there was a good man hidden somewhere inside the lines of his face, the hardened block of his heart. I knew that he loved me.
His features were bright in the morning light, his skin glistening in the sun, the sores around his mouth blistering. Something in his face made me feel like I could tell him what Alejandro had done to me. My mouth closed around the words, nearly pushed them out. But then he smiled and it didn’t reach his eyes. The words died in my throat the way that scream had, leaving the bitter taste of secrecy behind on my tongue.
Daddy reached for me, and his thick palms were rough and calloused when he brushed the box braids that Mama had done this weekend out of my face. He pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “I love you, baby girl,” he said against the rough lines of my braids. His Southern drawl made the words long and languid like the summer days we’d spent this year. He smelled of stale smoke and regret.
***
Daddy left in September. That weird space where summer had not yet ended, but nights were getting longer and colder. Despite the fairly hot days, at night there was a chill that our small space heater couldn’t quell. Elijah and I had both begun sleeping on the top bunk, huddling together for warmth. Mama made Daddy sleep in the living room with Alejandro a lot. I spent a lot of time trying to forget that Alejandro was there, his wolf eyes watching me when no one was looking, smiling at the secret we shared. On the day that he left, Elijah and I woke up to the sound of Mama and Daddy fighting.
Mama was slapping the counter the way she did when she got mad. “I know you stole my money,” she said.
“I didn’t take your money,” Daddy said, his words clipped and short. “Maybe Alejandro did. I don’t know.”
Mama laughed bitterly. “If Alejandro took my money, then you may as well have. You think I don’t see how you both come back all happy at the same time? He’s buying for you, too.”
Elijah and I huddled together, neither of us acknowledging that the other was awake. My heart was pounding. I was sure Elijah could feel it. We hid out in the room for as long as possible. Eventually, I got up to pee, climbing down the rickety steps that led to the top bunk. Elijah followed, waiting in the cramped hallway outside the door to the newly renovated bathroom. My uncle had finally had the time to finish it. Mama and Daddy were still fighting in the kitchen. Jasmine was crying again. She was in the living room. I knew Mama would make me go check on her soon.
Sure enough, when Elijah and I had both gone to the bathroom and emerged out of the hallway into the kitchen, the first thing out of Mama’s mouth was, “Kassandra, check on your sister.”
I just stood there in the kitchen for a moment. Mama’s brown skin was painted scarlet. Her thin arms were wrapped around her torso, as though it could keep her from falling apart. Then I looked at Daddy. His sores were crusting. For the first time, I noticed that his eyes were so dark that I couldn’t tell the pupils from the iris. Did he stand in the mirror late at night looking for his pupils, too? He looked away, scratching at his neck. This wasn’t Daddy. This was Dre. Dre, the drug addict. Dre, who would rather pick his scabs under a bridge, tweaking, than be with his family. I felt sick.
“Now!” Mama snapped. She looked at my brother, who was shaking beside me. “Elijah, go back to your room. This grown folk business.”
Elijah went to the room. I went and sat on the couch and bounced Jasmine on my lap until she stopped crying, listening to Mama and Daddy fight without hearing them. Mama threw something, and it broke on the wall. They fought all day until the inevitable came. Mama brushed past me like I wasn’t there and threw Dre’s stuff onto our front lawn with dried grass, cursing for all the neighbors to hear. I hoped they enjoyed the show.
“What the fuck?” he shouted on the porch.
Elijah and I sat in the living room. We watched through the screen door. Mama’s eyes blazed in the fading afternoon light. “Get the fuck out my house,” she said. “And take your piece of shit friend with you.” She gestured to Alejandro, who was smoking a cigarette calm as could be at our mailbox. Her eyes were full of tears, but she didn’t allow herself the release of crying.
Dre glared at her for a moment then shook his head. He looked past her to me and Elijah. “You gon’ do this in front of the kids, Ana? Seriously?”
Mama rolled her eyes. “You gonna steal my money, Dre? Seriously?”
Dre shook his head in disbelief. Then he sighed in resignation and brushed past her. He began grabbing his stuff off our front lawn, taking whatever he could carry. Then he walked out of the open gate, nodded to Alejandro, and they began walking, their feet heavy on the concrete.
Mama stood there for a moment, watching him, tears still lingering on the edges of her eyes. Then she barreled down the front porch steps to stand at the gate. “Yeah, you better leave!” She yelled. “Get the fuck out of here, and don’t ever come back!”
Elijah got up from the couch. “Elijah no—” I started but he was already out the front door. Reluctantly, I followed after him, standing on the porch.
He ran down the front steps and tried to barrel past Mama at the gate, but she wrapped her arms around him. He began crying, tears he’d been holding back all day. “Daddy, no,” he shouted at the top of his lungs between sobs, straining against Mama’s thin arms. “Don’t go!” His skin was glistening in the fading sunset, brown eyes broken in a way that I would never see again. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew that someday he would have the same scars as our dad. Someday he would disappear, too. Maybe it was my last vision of the summer.
Dre never once looked back at Elijah as he sobbed and screamed. He just kept his dark, muscular shoulders folded around his clothes, walking beside Alejandro, as though he couldn’t hear us falling apart. Walking towards that bridge, the river where all the tweakers hung out. Tears welled in my eyes, threatening to spill over, but I swallowed them down. Not worth it, I told myself. He’s not worth it.
Mama kept yelling at him until he got to the end of the street and turned without looking back, slipping onto the sidewalk and out of sight. Elijah was falling apart in Mama’s arms. “Daddy, come back,” he shouted. “Please. Please don’t go.”
Mama fell apart as soon as he could no longer see her. She let go of Elijah, who ran down the street as fast as his small legs could take him, chasing the sunset. Mama dropped to her knees and held onto our thin wire fence, which looked like it may collapse under her weight. She sobbed into the hazy evening. The warm wind blew her long braid behind her. Jasmine was crying inside.
I watched the horizon fade from a golden hue of orange to a navy blue, the colors bleeding into one another. I was no longer Kessie anymore. Kessie who let a wolf devour her and never screamed once. I could feel her struggling in my hands as I drowned her, buried her deep inside me, and I was Kassandra.
I lifted my head, my skin sticky with sweat and determination. I looked at the empty expanse of gray gravel. I watched Elijah chase his shadow until he stopped, bending forward with his hands on his knees, panting and sobbing at the end of our gravel road. I watched Mama’s shaking body. I held my head high and my gaze pointed straight ahead, and I walked from our porch back into the trailer. I walked past Jasmine’s crying. I sat on the couch. Everything seemed smaller. The ratty moth-eaten furniture, the old box TV, the chipped eggshell walls. It felt like a doll house now. I looked at my reflection on the TV, floating in the box. I didn’t cry. My tears shriveled up and dried in my throat. I said goodbye to her, this little brown girl floating on the TV screen.
I turned on the TV, turned it up so loud that I could no longer hear anybody’s cries. A little brown girl was dead. She’d been raped and beaten. They showed a picture of her uncle, a tweaker with wild eyes and sores on his shallow cheeks. He’d killed her. They found her body in Ellis Lake. She’d been there three days. The ducks swam right over her. People walked and played and fucked and fought and got high and got married and fed the ducks bread that would kill them, with her floating in the darkness beneath their feet, watching with eyes that didn’t see. I changed the channel.
Damieka Thomas is a current UC Davis MFA student in the Creative Writing program working on nonfiction and fiction work. In June 2021, I graduated from UC Davis English with a concentration in Creative Writing. I was the recipient of both the Celeste Turner Wright Prize in Poetry and the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize in Fiction from the UC Davis Department of English. I have been published in Boulevard Magazine, The Noyo Review, Glassworks Magazine, Poetry.org, Open Ceilings, and Rejected Lit Magazine.