Already 2 p.m. I still haven’t killed the boy.
The day, drooped but antsy to unfold, feels like a Tuesday. Tuesday has no real reason to be. It sprints forward in spurts to keep us from noticing. I try not to fixate on the clock—a ticking, grinning google-eyed cat sweeping the room with its glare—but that old flea market find never says a damn thing I want to hear.
I am not ready. So I turn to numbing ritual.
I must clean my ripening body.
I must feed myself.
In the bathroom, I scrub forehead and cheeks and chin, careful not to make the mistake of mirror. I know my hexes by heart. The spread of oily, white-capped pimples that I never stop picking and pressing. Tweezer scrapes and scars. Fiery blotches left behind by countless 3 a.m. TV-ad cures. The broad landscape of nose my mother begged me to pinch and tame.
I could temper the scalding shower flow, but instead I clamp my teeth against the burn. Swooning under the cling of steam, I don’t touch the bath sponge or any of my mother’s old squirt bottles of squeaky-sweet gel soap. I just stand under the needling storm, my face tilted up until my breath is slapped away. I feel plumped, ready to thunder—maybe the heat will bring my blood down, and I’ll be too doubled with womanache to bother with killing.
I shower until the walls and mirror drip, until my chapped skin threatens to blister. I rub dry with a nubby pink bath towel, slowly treating the wound I’ve made of my body.
But as soon as I step out of the bathroom, dressed in the Old Navy sweats I began the day in, I feel filthy again.
The whole apartment still smells like the pork I mangled for dinner last night. I happened to spy the chops, brown and freezer burned, in the far reaches of the fridge and decided to go for it. I am not, and never have been, a cook. Lately I exist on slapped-together sandwiches, Chinese takeout, and anything an egg does. The giddy days of digging into my mother’s sluggish cream-laden potato-and meat-casseroles are over.
My days of having a mother are over.
The woman barely ventures out of her bedroom. Unless she’s plucking nutrients from Altoids and warm wine coolers, there should be nothing left of her. And how long has it been since she bathed or showered or even, well, wiped? On the rare occasions she does appear, she flits about like a sylph, sighs theatrically, and locks me in a stranger’s gaze long enough to remind me that I am one.
Then she ducks into dark again, leaving a perfumed stink in her wake. Self-loathing, swamped in spritzes of knockoff Chanel.
Sometimes there is sound on the other side of her door. Golden Girls reruns. Those old channel 9 westerns. Short electric tugs of a hairbrush. The window closing. The window opening. Snotty snoring. A name she calls out in sleep.
Or “prayer calls” from Pilgrim’s Rest, the church she claims as hers. The congregation has decided, and rightfully so, that Ms. Carolyn Haymon is “standing in need of prayer.” Ancient elders take turns calling to cram her ear with God. They are so doggedly righteous that I hear their swollen pleas through her closed door and all the way down the hall. They preach salvation. My mother, lying Baptist, whimpers surrender.
Sometimes the caller drills her in some sad little scripture, which she latches on to and works like a student struggling to memorize facts before a big test. A few days ago, I fastened my ear to the door until I was able to mouth the words along with her:
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
I felt scarlet rising in my body. So her heart’s cracked? That spirit got stomped? Maybe, dear merciful Father, maybe, God of Every Damn Thing, maybe, my Grace Who’s Amazing—just maybe—she deserved it. Maybe being such a hot mess is the only thing keeping her alive.
The Lord is close to the bro—
“Bitch!” I screamed. The chanting stopped short. I listened to her breathe. She listened to me listen.
That’s how my mother and I converse nowadays. She tries to forget everything. I try to make her remember me.
Kill the boy.
It pops into my head like a pinpoint of scream.
Kill the boy.
Soon it will loom huge. Huger. Then it will spill over its borders. Then it will have to happen.
Kill the boy.
If my mother ever hears me killing the boy, she never lets on.
I find something else to do to keep from doing that.
I take steel wool to the cast iron. A scorched shred of pork clings to the surface, a survivor of the hot scrape into the trash. I can’t figure out what I did wrong. I sliced away fat. I blanketed the meat’s parched skin with red salt. Then, remembering one old rumor about parasites hiding out in pork innards, I scorched that chop like I was trying to get it to confess.
Despite the smoke and charred stench, my mother never poked her nose out to see if it was the meat, the apartment, or her daughter burning.
After muscling loose the teeny sliver of meat with a dollop of Kaboom, I swipe the skillet with a dry dishtowel and put it away, but the faint greasy smell doesn’t go away with it.
It’s time—
I wipe kitchen counters, shelve the red salt, sweep the floor, and open the fridge—
to kill—
—to stare inside. There is food, mostly ancient unidentifiable Tupperwared leftovers, weeping to be released.
the—
Takeout it is. Time to reel off the number on my mother’s Visa to whoever picks up the phone at Jinli Sichuan. That would probably be Lei.
Lei knows my voice. And he knows the other thing, which always makes the call awkward. Conjured compassion doesn’t go well with dandan mian.
This time isn’t so bad, but it is bad. He takes my usual order, then I feel Lei’s voice go low even before he speaks again. I can’t stop him.
“How are you, Jackie? I mean, really? You and your mother?”
“Fine, Lei. Thanks for—”
“I—I can’t imagine—”
“No, we’re OK, thanks. I’ll tell my mother you—”
“Horrible. So, so horrible. Terrible. Some people came into the restaurant yesterday, and they were talking, and I wasn’t really trying to listen but I heard—”
I press the disconnect button on my Samsung, then power off entirely in case Lei tries to call back.
For a moment, I’d forgotten. I’m not Jacqueline Haymon anymore. I am a celebrity, I am her, I am that girl, I am poor thing, I am there but for the grace of God. My mother and I are guests of honor at a woe-is-them party that no one ever wants to leave. We are fucking famous. We—
It’s time to kill the boy.
I shake my head so hard my teeth click. No.
It is time—
But I have mapu tofu and dandan mian coming. I should probably scrub that skillet again. And I can practically feel poisons rising to my cheeks and chin. Maybe rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball . . .
—to kill—
Music. Music pushes the doomed boy back. After counting to one hundred to make sure that Lei has given up, I fire up my cell again to blast Migos and Lil Uzi Vert through the Bluetooth speakers in my room. Loud. Louder.
I don’t have to worry about anybody in the building banging on our door with a Turn that shit down! or a You’re out of your fucking mind, right? No one would dare. I can do anything I want, as long or as loud as I want. The ground around me is eggshell. And, for all practical purposes, I am unsupervised. The mother I had would have come rocketing out of her room, wholly pissed by the audacity of what she used to call “no damn music at all,” with its “dolla dolla bills,” gyrating asses, its gold-toothed grimace over everything. Its guns.
The woman now? Nothing.
I push the volume up with my forefinger until the walls of the apartment shiver. I want hammer. I want bedlam. I want clamor and freeze. The walls of sound rise around me as comfort. I lay back on my bed and close my eyes. The noise presses into me, holds me back and down as my body shakes with bass and boasting. Soon I realize that the vibration in my left hand is my cell.
My food is here.
After I inhale the noodles and nibble at the edges of the mapu tofu, I’m clean out of numb ritual, which has never failed to fail me. I open the blinds, hoping for dark, but the sun meekly illuminates the last of last week’s snow, now mostly gray slush splotched with soot. Before I can turn away, two passersby snap their heads to the window hoping to get a glimpse of—
That’s where they live.
I slam the blinds down and take the dishes into the kitchen, fill the sink with water, and drop them in to soak. The pounding music is now intruder instead of solace. I punch it quiet and square off against the silence.
It’s time—
I punch on my old laptop. It snorts and crackles before my screensaver—some nappy dog I once thought was cute back when things were cute—pops up. Then the screen fills with folders that used to be familiar: Geometry II. World History Notes. Adv Placement English. Back before celebrity. Before I stopped going to my high school. I couldn’t stand being the star in every room, and nobody bothered me about it.
The browser opens. I only have one bookmark. I click it. I don’t have to do anything for the video to begin playing.
The scene, snagged by a surveillance camera outside a convenience store, takes a few seconds to come into focus. Six young men, their heads bent in toward each other. The boy, although he can’t yet be seen clearly, is one of them. He throws his head back and laughs, flashing gold. It is night. No sound. The group moves jerkily, into and away from each other as they talk and gesture with their hands. I know the street. It’s lined with bodegas and liquor stores and little shuttered churches, and there is colored light playing on their faces. The boy is clearer now—lanky, loping, animated—living his best life, talking shit with his crew, mouthing his joy.
Then the group scatters. All except the boy, who doesn’t see what’s poking from the window of the dark car.
He falls in stages, like a black paper doll folding.
I will not pause the video.
The boy is alone, a glistening pool spreading beneath him.
Right away, it all begins again. Joined heads like the nappy center of a star. The sudden gilded tooth. Dark sedan pulling loose from the night. The runners. The only boy. I will not touch the pause button because—well, the boy dies anyway.
By doing nothing at all, I kill him. By not stopping the video before he falls, I kill him. By not being there, I kill him. I do not pull the trigger, but I kill and kill the boy. Every time I open my laptop, I log on and kill him. I watch as he dies and dies. I don’t even have to click anything before it all begins again.
I’m ashamed to be so addicted to the loop. I’m just waiting for the ending to change.
Maybe the boy will ridiculously resurrect, like Daffy Duck after Elmer Fudd blasts his beak all the way ’round, again and again, with a rifle.
Or, I kill him enough, maybe he will finally die.
It begins again.
I sense a wrong behind me. I wheel around in my chair, and my actual mother fills my doorway, wobbling in a sour billow of watery Chanel and despair. I try to take in everything, because I don’t know when I’ll see the woman again. She wears a long pilled nightdress with a smattering of joyless orange blooms. Her hair squirms lazily out of two silver-rooted braids. I don’t remember the silver.
Her eyes aren’t landing anywhere. But just in case, I swing my laptop away from her. On the screen, the killing repeats, repeats.
I say nothing, waiting. She stares. Her unmoving mouth says There is nothing to wait for. I suppress the urge to slap her. I want her head to spin all the way ’round, again and again. I want to knock her back into knowing me.
But she turns and drags herself back to her room. Her door closes. A moan becomes a snotty sniffle, then a deep weep. She calls on Jesus. If He’s coming, there’s no reason for me to go to her.
I kick my door shut to stanch the sound of sobbing and turn the laptop screen back around. Just one more time, I lie. Somewhere off camera, a black engine breathes.
I wait.
I watch.
I kill my brother again.
Nobody sends killed people off to their everlasting rest quite like Black folks. Not just killed people killed like my brother was—people who rot out their insides with brown liquor, people who die of lung cancer or a broken heart or dirty needles, people who veer into oncoming traffic, newborns who take that first breath then decide against taking any more. It doesn’t matter if the guest of honor drowned during a family reunion, was burned to bone in a house fire, or pumped a bullet into the side of his own head. A funeral’s not a funeral until the departed is declared perfect and holy and heaven-bound, and everyone present is rollicked and roused and whipped into flame. Nobody should be left sitting or standing is the measure of both a good sermon and a good send-off.
Everybody showed up to send my killed and holy brother home.
Members of the church made most of the funeral arrangements because my mother was less than less than capable. They showed up to admire their handiwork. Of course, nosy folks crammed the pews to see how crazily Jackson’s relatives—especially his poor mama—planned to grieve. Would there be fainting, Holy Ghost dancing, or someone hurtling toward the casket wailing Take me instead, Lord? Or if the casket was open (it was), they could search for the bullet holes and judge the quality of the makeup job. It was a good one—so I heard, over and over again, He looks just like he’s sleeping.
Some who came had seen a living, breathing Jackson only once in their lives—seconds before he became a viral sensation, before his end trended on Twitter, before he became a meme. They were anxious to check out the real-life boy they’d killed and killed, the boy whose death they could stop and start, the boy on the 11 p.m. news whose forever fall entertained and transfixed them.
The boys who were with Jackson that night showed. I saw them, shadowed in the back row. The shooter must have been there too. No way he could have resisted.
I felt on full display while everyone searched for visual signs of my crumpling. Perpetual weep? Maybe a wild, untethered eye? People kept their distance, even as they were holding me close. So many of them jumped back, shocked, when they felt nothing. The same nothing I felt.
I looked for my mother.
I looked for my mother.
I came to my brother’s funeral with a woman who was technically my mother, but we were not together. Well-meaning church sisters had volunteered to help her get dressed and ready for the service that morning, but she had refused. She had simply let the morning happen to her, counting on the fact that I’d get to wherever I needed to be whenever I needed to be there. When she just happened to see me, accidentally—as I cleaned myself, dressed myself, made sure I was presentable for the occasion—her eyes widened in surprise.
She entered the church with everything sheathed in a seemingly endless black collar and hem indistinguishable against her skin, everything covered that could be covered. She had donned huge movie-star sunglasses beneath which she bawled urgently and often.
I knew—and probably everyone else probably did too—that beneath her overwrought uniform of woe, she had not bathed. No Chanel, knockoff or otherwise, could keep that secret. She smelled like a too-slow clock. The ever-observant church ladies, collective jaw dropped, could barely contain their titters.
I did not doubt that my mother was hurting. I did not doubt that she was as close to dying as a living person could be. I did not doubt that the loss of her son had ruined her.
I did not doubt that she also had a daughter.
After the reverend deified Jackson to the rafters (“One of God’s most perfect children”) and my mother had collapsed several times at the sight of her killed boy, I ventured forth for a last look at my brother.
I was startled at the breathless bright of his skin, the slash of painted pink meant to give life to his mouth, his just-dreading hair mowed down to a more Baptist buzz. He wore what he would never have worn—a blade-tailored jacket and a starched white shirt buttoned over the holes in his chest. A tie.
I looked for my mother. She had been escorted to a side room where her uncomfortable display would be less noticeable. She was being church-fanned, prayed over, hydrated with weak church lemonade.
The room’s eyes were on my back, everyone still waiting for my wail and implosion. Wasn’t gonna happen.
I locked my eyes on Jackson’s shuttered ones and tried to remember the years I worshiped him, the years when I understood why my mother did too. His cracking voice taking on my gone father’s deep. Those gangly legs and that terrible singing voice and that snorty laugh and that prowess at soccer instead of hoops. So, so much of our gone father’s face in his. The loping stride that flicked at my mother’s heart. The comfortable cut of his jaw. The way he just knew to kiss my mother on the top of her head. As long as he was him, as long as he was that much alive, my mother could love me too.
But he grew up and grew past. Scraggly hairs sprouted on his chin. He stank with man muscle and spewed a sudden stupid. He found fathers his own age, and they manned up together, fighting whatever they thought was in the air. My mother tried to learn the lingo and the hardening, tried to be slick and understanding, tried as hard as she could to make him be right. She handled the frantic late-night phone calls, she bailed him out, she picked him up from this police station and that one, she arced over silent phones until dawn told her he’d found someplace better to spend the night.
Me? I was there. While she tried her best to save him, that’s all I was. There.
The good girl. Then just the girl. Then just.
I watched my mother shift her whole life to the troubled child, the one who sputtered expletives and stank of herb, who suddenly called her by her first name, who knew that he owned her.
I was just the just. I didn’t need saving. I was almost sixteen. I could take care of myself.
“You a’ight?”
It took me a second to pull out of my version of grieving. Suddenly beside me was Marcus, who’d known Jackson. They’d gone to school together and ran in the same circles until they didn’t. Boys find their tribes.
Marcus’s gaze was locked to mine, searching. He was beautiful.
“I’m good. I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m here for you. Always will be. Know that.”
I knew that.
You would think. You would think that healing happens. You would think that the loss of one would not be the loss of both. You would think that one day a mother would remember. Oh yeah, that other child. The living one.
You would think that a putting a whole body underground would signal the end of something, the beginning of something else.
Jackson’s funeral was weeks ago. Once it was done, the woman I live with walked deeper into her room. Way in there with her reruns and snot weep and pieces of Bible, she is beyond reach. Even the church folks, weary of her wide neediness, have moved on to more predictable prayers. I never see her, and now I see her less than never.
Another damn Tuesday. She doesn’t peek out when the front door buzzes, or hear the visitors brusquely and insistently announcing themselves. I open to two policemen, bland and blue and two-dimensional, like someone’s idea of policemen. Their faces are flat and knowing.
Marcus must have told them. He couldn’t hold on, couldn’t stand being someone’s dark ending, couldn’t keep killing and killing the boy. The night I lay naked and shaking beneath his hands and mouth, the night he said he’d do anything at all if I would only always be that for him, and I said Do this.
The two policemen move to my mother’s bedroom door and knock and knock and yell and yell. They’ve come to tell her what I’ve done. But she’s too far gone to answer.
Last night, I went into her room while she was snorting through a fitful sleep. I gave her back to her son.
Then I carved my mother a smile.
I’m a good girl.
I did it from memory. 
Patricia Smith, recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation, is the author of Unshuttered, Incendiary Art (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets), and Blood Dazzler (a National Book Award finalist). Her story “When They Are Done With Us” in Staten Island Noir won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best debut short story. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, an Academy of American Poets chancellor, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Illustration: Molly Crabapple.
