Then a hypebeast made her an offer on the sneaker.

  She quickly traded that leather, rubber, and glue for a house with a backyard.

  Now I hear her kids are on the honor roll and that she’s happier than she’s ever been.

  The Love Letter

  He’d patiently write each line of the letter in his best cursive, his hand dancing with the page, caressing his notions of her, some words floating above the linen paper, all melodies born of his fantasy of what they could be.

  One page was not enough; he wanted her to spend hours inside his poetry, so he mined his mind of the verbal jewels that would ultimately pale in comparison to the simple beauty of her smile.

  Afterwards, he’d spray his cologne once into the air and allow the letter to catch the precipitation, before sealing it with a kiss.

  The Reenactor

  The reenactor moved about the colonial community, as one tourist gazed hungrily, offering his unsolicited commentary.

  “Hey, slave, you forgot to pick up that piece of trash over there.”

  Nathan blinked hard, but stayed in character. His character was free.

  “If you were my slave, I’d beat the black off your ass for disobedience,” the heavyset white guy added, his face glowing red.

  Nathan had once discovered an old cat o’ nine tails in a shack on the plantation. Appalled, he took it and started carrying it with him beneath his shirt.

  The tourist had no idea what hit him.

  Blackfishing

  The white girls began tanning their skin and braiding their hair, using lipstick to thicken the appearance of their lips, doing squats, rocking Jordans, and practicing their twerking. They knew the lyrics to the most popular rap songs and openly pined over Black athletes and actors. They swore it wasn’t a phase they were going through.

  As they masqueraded on into the night of the Negro Solstice1, they awoke the following morning to find they were unable to undo their hair and that their tans had darkened considerably.

  Terrified, they told anyone who would listen that they weren’t really Black.

  1 * December 21, 2020, was comedically designated the Negro Solstice by Twitter users, claiming Black people gained superpowers during the eclipse. Note: the author of this story is still waiting for his powers to kick in.

  Saxophonic Dreams

  He could hear the melodies in his dreams, his fingers fluttering against the mattress of his bed. His mind raced to keep up with the notes, his tongue darting against the backs of his teeth.

  His saxophone rested in a case on the dresser next to the bed, its insides cool, waiting, wanting…

  He sometimes walked around with a reed between his lips, the way a farmer might hold a blade of grass, occasionally moistening it, always anticipating the music.

  At night when they joined up with the quartet, he and his saxophone would recreate their dreams with euphonic bliss.

  True Crime

  She couldn’t explain her attraction to true crime podcasts. Maybe it was the mystery of it all, the chance to solve puzzles (or to see how they were solved). Maybe it was because she enjoyed a good story (always had). Most of the podcasts used a story structure that was equally, if not more, interesting than the syndicated scripted television shows she watched repeatedly.

  At the heart of each episode, though, was a crime—usually a murder. Often times the victim was a young woman, like herself.

  Maybe the podcasts were a way of facing her fears.

  She hoped not.

  The Wolfgang Jefferson Volume

  Deeply embedded in the library’s stacks is a bound leather journal containing the handwritten escapades of Wolfgang Jefferson, who escaped bondage in 1858 by flying back to Africa. Legend has it that as Wolfgang hovered over what is now Lagos, he saw that white men had infiltrated his home country. He eventually settled on Haiti, but his progeny gradually found its way back to American soil, the journal passed down from generation to generation, until it was acquired by an affluent collector and donated to the Ralph Ellison Library at Ellison-Wright College in Atlanta, a place now considered its home.

  The Book Club

  Cynthia started the novel four times before finally deciding to put it down. The novel had been her choice for the book club, a change from the usual romances and mysteries she felt were not serious enough for her tastes.

  She’d heard about the novel on NPR, and the group had accepted the recommendation without challenge.

  When they finally met to discuss the book, everyone had read and enjoyed the book, everyone except Cynthia, who couldn’t bring herself to finish it.

  As the club continued to read more challenging books, Cynthia had to leave the club to find another one.

  Lonely

  He was from a big city, where people were always on a quest to find the latest and greatest of anything, but she was from a town so small the local DJ, who’d had a stroke and his voice slurred heavily, held down the number one radio show in the county, purely based on the respect afforded him by his longtime listeners.

  She knew deep down that they saw the world too differently, but loneliness was a beast that forced her to look past who she was in order to become someone whose main attribute was that she wasn’t lonely.

  Searching for Water Where It Never Rains

  They fancied themselves the up-and-coming moguls, the ones who would take over the city, the recent graduates who populated the bars, the gentlemen puffing Cohibas, the ladies holding court on the finest of French wines, preparing their pretentious palates for a wealth that awaited them, like seven-figure gated estates, where their neighbors were top draft picks or music producers who were no strangers to the Billboard charts, but amid this atmosphere of affluence, they complained not of the money, but of their lack of significant others, the people for whom they’d left just enough space for their mahogany trophy cases.

  The Yearbook

  Hours after the school year ended, Kenyatta lay on his bed, the sounds of Troop’s “Spread My Wings” in the background, reading the beautifully rendered inscription left in his yearbook by Deja Brooks.

  He’d, over the course of several months, worked up the nerve to speak to her each day, often times trying to catch her in the main hallway between third and fourth periods, as if by accident. Now she’d written him five neat lines of cursive and used the closing “love” to top it off.

  He’d cherish it, knowing he’d never have the courage to go any farther.

  Wolfgang V’s Cabinet of Curiosities

  When Wolfgang V died, he left behind an unusual cabinet of curiosities: a blanket made from the skin of a manatee that had died of natural causes; the tusk of a walrus that had been transformed into some sort of flute; a Bible Wolfgang Sr. had handed down; a rusted chattel chain, also handed down from Wolfgang Sr.; a blunt axe, alleged to have been a weapon used during an insurrection; and an array of photographs and first edition leather-bound books that had been acquired over the course of a lifetime of international travel. Ellison-Wright College acquired these objects, too.

  The Seasons Know Exactly When to Change

  He wanted her to love him at least one day past the expiration date of their relationship. Not that it would have made a difference. He now understood that he couldn’t will her to feel anything she wasn’t already inclined to feel. There was someone else. Someone better.

  He didn’t want to be one of those men wallowing in self-pity, wondering if his calloused hands and work boots could ever measure up to her new beau’s metrosexuality.

  People don’t belong to other people, and she was never his. Their time was intertwined, finite, like seasons that were destined to change.

  The Man of Her Dreams

  He’d never done anything untoward to her, in word or deed, so she found her dreams to be a bit of a mystery.

  He was a gentleman, a patient soul, always concerned with her feelings, cherishing her opinions—but as she slept, that same man, the man she believed she loved, haunted her in her dreams, chasing her with unusual weapons, like harpoons, bear traps, handheld gardening cultivators, steel meat tenderizers, and even a molten pot of grits.

  She knew he would never understand her “Dear John” letter (nor would she), but she knew she could never stay with him.

  Poultry

  Carlos and his daughter sat at one of the rustic picnic tables sparsely scattered around Bluebird Gap Farm. Trying to create an impromptu lunch picnic for her, since she was on spring break from middle school, he picked up chicken tenders and fries for them.

  As they quietly ate, a free-roaming peacock sauntered over to their table (perhaps hoping for a piece of bread that wasn’t there) and stood there staring at them.

  “Dad, don’t feed him anything. That would be, like, cannibalism.”

  Carlos considered this and quietly packed up their food, easing past the peacock back to their car.

  The Official Lyrics to “Gobbledygook”

  1Iguana tennis shoe/she commode jump the fire squad/dingaling game strong/Swayze stucko/fuckboy genius/mellow mojo no ho so fo’ real doe/dream like Tetris/Abbey crazy/but I love you like an upside down rainbow/roundhouse townhouse/micromania/she insanity like wallpaper/Chimamanda daze/Vasoline gasoline/but I love you like an upside down rainbow/Lennon lyric/spinal saltine/we surrender to the fog/fat boy dangerous wish/like sausage/but I love you like an upside down rainbow, an upside down rainbow

  1 These are the original song lyrics as written in Oblongata Jones’s notebook, circa 2019.

  All Deliberate Speed

  For Dad

  Terrell listened to his father talk about Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, thinking it odd that the subject had even come up.

  “The opinion for that case came down when I was starting high school in 1954. The school district in my hometown had finally integrated by the time I finished college in 1969.

  “Justice Black had warned the Court that places like Mississippi would take their time. And he was right.”

  Terrell listened, unable to imagine what that must have been like, but as he stared at his father’s pinched lips and furrowed brow, he could understand.

  We Been Livin’ Through Your Internet

  Tonya didn’t know what to think when her sixteen-year-old son, Lavell, revealed to her that the only thing he wanted for Christmas was to not be a hashtag.

  He had been watching a television show centered around the Black Lives Matter movement, and the final episode had concluded with a list of hashtags for unarmed Black men and women who were killed by police officers. The black background had turned white from the overlapping text of the hashtags.

  Secretly, Tonya wanted the same thing, even though it was the kind of thing they shouldn’t have ever had to wish for.

  Diaries of the Deceased

  Evelyn’s jaw dropped as she watched the bid on the used diary quickly approach $500. While she often journaled, it was only recently that she’d become interested in the used journals of other people.

  This particular journal had belonged to an award-winning poet who had lost her battle with breast cancer five years earlier. The journal was an Italian leather-bound A5 with ruled cream-colored pages. Nearly every page had been written on, and several early drafts of the poet’s published poems appeared therein.

  Evelyn would ultimately lose the auction, but, in that prior heady moment, she’d found herself genuinely inspired.

  Metal Clouds

  He changed the clothes he wore and the music he listened to, hoping to erase as many memories of her as he could, but there were days when the wind blew a certain way or the rain seemed to cry from the sky and he was left standing in a moment where love kissed his vulnerable spots and he could only mutter her name.

  But she’d moved on, as he struggled to do.

  Sometimes he hated himself for being so weak, for being unable to recollect those moments when she’d bristled at his touch, for not letting her go sooner.

  Talent

  On his death bed, Charlie Brogan revealed to his children and grandchildren a secret he’d carried around with him his entire life: he could eat metal.

  They looked at him confused, unsure of what to think.

  “I had a real life super power,” he managed, his breath sputtering.

  “Did you ever use it?” the youngest grandchild asked.

  “I never could figure out what to do with it.”

  Suddenly, he thought to cough up a silver dollar, which he handed to the child, who took it, smiling.

  Charlie’d found a use for his talent, and with that, he could now rest.

  Bearded

  Nala had politely asked Shemeik several times to shave his beard, but he had refused. He prided himself on being a great lover—of this, Nala agreed completely—but the beard sometimes got in the way. It also had the tendency to collect fluids, which, in and of itself, was quite embarrassing.

  He didn’t seem to mind, but Nala had trouble looking at him, his thick, shiny beard glistening with its glazed coating, as he tried, unsuccessfully, to kiss her mouth afterwards.

  One night as he slept, she shaved him.

  He liked it, which, unbeknownst to him, saved their relationship.

  The Monster in the Woods

  Anzel Collier had been the first kid to see the monster in the woods. He described the beast as an ape-like man moving rapidly through the thicket. Other kids would later report seeing something similar, so the sheriff’s department had no choice but to investigate it.

  After staking out the woods for a day, they finally saw this so-called monster emerge from behind a large clump of trees.

  “Hey!” shouted the sheriff. “Stop!”

  The monster froze in its tracks.

  “Dammit, Angus! If you’re gonna cheat, get a hotel room—and try shaving once in a while. You’re scaring the kids!”

  Glitter

  In the end, it was the glitter that saved her, those fine flecks of magenta plastic and aluminum that she carried around in her backpack for various art projects. That bottle was the only weapon she had, so when the creepy man from the van across the street from the school grabbed her arm, she flung it directly into his bug eyes and took off running.

  Unable to drive, he stomped and cursed while leaning against his van, and those minutes of incapacitating irritation were all it took for students to alert officers, who could then take him into custody.

  The 100-Word Story

  For Dr. Eugene Redmond, Creator of the Kwansaba

  She dared him to write a 100-word story using no word longer than seven letters, much like the Black poetic form that uses the same rule, and he said that he’d try.

  So he sat down at his laptop and began to write a very unusual story, a meta tale of a Black man who is writing a story using only words that are seven letters or fewer. The man in that story is also writing a story about a man, who is writing a story about another man, who happens to be writing the story that you are reading.

  The Castle

  It was the final thing on her bucket list: visiting the Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany. After years of her father taking her to Disneyland, he’d revealed to her the source of the Magic Kingdom’s inspiration, and in the years that followed, she planned how she would one day visit the castle.

  Now that the day had arrived and she stood before it, her eyes filled with tears, but not the tears that accompany the fulfillment of a dream; they were tears from the realization that this was the only time in her life that she would behold this beauty.

  Wolfgang VII at Ellison-Wright College

  On Saturday mornings, Wolfgang VII would walk from his dorm across campus to the Ralph Ellison Library to see his grandfather’s collection, as well as the other artifacts the college had secured in the past 100 years that had belonged to his ancestors. He might’ve attended Ellison-Wright College anyway, but the fact that it housed his legacy made his enrollment there a no-brainer.

  Every once in a while, he thought about taking back those items and fleeing the campus, but he knew it was better for those things to be protected and cherished, available for all to appreciate and admire.

  Wings

  On Saturday morning, Bria woke up to find that she’d grown a rather large set of wings on her back. As she stood before the mirror on her closet door, she allowed the wings to unfurl to their full length. She didn’t know if she could fly, but she felt that she could, if given the chance to try.

 

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