Raza

The future you shall know when it has come; before then, forget it. – Aeschylus

Kelsie and her smeary gray eyes, oily grape lipstick, skin tinged its usual shade of green, staggered backward, fingertips bright with blood.
This was the game they would play: Kelsie took a long sip of air through her nose and mouth and, leaned forward, eyes closed. At the same time, Javon blew out a long whistling breath. Their faces moved together, Kelsie’s lips pursed, Javon’s soft. Their lips touched. Javon sealed his lips around Kelsie’s mouth.
Several long giddy moments. Kelsie exhaled, slow and dreamy, into Javon’s mouth, as he inhaled. Sitting on the edge of his bed, or her bed at her mom’s, they would go back and forth like that, sharing air. They called it space breathing.
When Kelsie pulled away, somehow her lipstick would always make a greasy purple ring around his mouth. Sometimes it was smeared on his cheek. Javon wasn’t sure if he hated that, being imprinted, or if he secretly liked it. Space breathing was the wintertime game, before Christmas break, but the other game was springtime, was now. “I stabbed her because,” Javon told himself. He knew this only made sense to him, and maybe to Kelsie. It didn’t make sense to the sheriff’s department, or to community corrections, or to the Youth Offender Program, but none of that seemed to matter now, in light of other things that were happening. “In light of larger world events,” Javon thought, echoing the words used by his tutor at the YOP.
Like most of her friends and some of her teachers knew and guessed, Kelsie didn’t exactly have a personal permanent address at the moment. She saw it as a problem only when she was at a friend’s and her clothes bag and makeup were at her mom’s.
Today, after school, she was due at her mom’s, and Kelsie wanted to get her stuff out of there before her mom got home. If they met up at the apartment – a first floor one bedroom in a two-family that her mom had been living at for about six months, a world record for her – they were due for a fight.
Kelsie felt like something was pushing her between her shoulder blades, forcing her forward into whatever the next thing was, and she liked it. She couldn’t get in the side door but the basement window was open, so she squeezed down there, legs first, leaving her bag in the back yard. She wanted to be in the basement anyway, because that’s where the landlord’s stuff was. The coffee can on his old work table was filled with all kinds of saf-t-blades. She reached for one with a silver handle.
The first pass was always the best, a butterfly quiver. She already had a word in mind but it didn’t matter. The coffee can was painted a thick forest green and it had uncooked pasta elbows stuck all over it, also painted the same shit green. Kelsie made a similar thing for her father, when she was in second grade.
She drew the point of the triangular blade slow and sure across the soft whitish green skin on her inner arm between her wrist and elbow. Pulled the line through, making a curving J, her mouth already getting that metallic bloom. She and Javon putting their bloody arms together, space bleeding, haha, so they could be a part of each other. But not now, or not ever, could she ever cut with anyone there, even Javon.
The platinum foaming now, carbonating, ecstatic. An acrid smell of fear, the cat her mom hit and quickly wrapped in a towel and drove cursing to the vet as the animal lowed in Kelsie’s lap in the back seat, the hyacinth someone had planted outside, by the side door, the smell of wet early April, cold and shocked, what’s it called, that flower, she didn’t know the name of it, her thighs going weak, like she was kicked in the back of the knees, but nice, subtle, and she leaned against the workbench, the plywood edge jamming against her ribs, overcast, all parting way for a razor frond shower of sparkler sparks, incandescent, burning her forearms, as Kelsie pirouetted carefully and sat down cross-legged against the moist cellar wall. Her neck and armpits were soaked in sweat. She sat there for a while, and waited for everything to go back to being just regular.
Kelsie could see Javon’s eyes stray from her face. A tremor, a wobble, almost imperceptible; he was looking into her face, but for that breadth he was not. For a fraction of a second he was elsewhere. Javon was looking at someone else, someone behind her, or worse: He was looking at the space where someone soon will be.
The empty space will be filled by Raza. Raza, the cross country and track runner, who moved back to Pittsfield from Florida. She left Pittsfield as a 9th grader, pudgy and somehow immune to whatever taunt the rest of her schoolmates could hurl at her. Raza, who, at 14, was willing to run both the steeplechase, hurdles, and the two miler. Who was forgotten until she returned to Pittsfield in February, in the middle of Junior year.
Raza, with her swath of elbow-length tawny hair, tawny skin, and weird brown copper eyes. So beautiful and removed that no one could say anything. One day in between the March elimination tests, Kelsie secretly watched Raza in the hall, as she pulled things out of her locker, as she flexed her ankles, going up on tiptoe and settling her heels down.
I will never matter. I’m vanishing as you read this. Looking down at my palms now, a lurid, venous red, my shoulder blades banged against the wall so hard, the plaster cracked a little. I will never know the flower names, the two note bird call you always hear, who sings it, the constellations.
Kelsie looked at her arm. She could feel the stitches tugging under her sweater. She slapped at the stitches when they started to itch, but only in private. Raza meant “race” in Spanish. Kelsie looked it up. It also could mean “the people.” She had given Javon the knife, the stubby, half dull paring knife, and he looked at it, looked at her, and said, “with this? I’ll kill you if I do it with this.”
Raza had a scooter, which everyone thought was weird and stupid until they found out that all the stars and beautiful unknowns in South Florida had one too. Kelsie was still trying to learn how to sit up straight and not disturb the stitches when Raza asked her if she needed a ride home.
Kelsie was sitting on the steps outside the main door after school. “Do I look like I need a ride?”
The scooter spluttered and farted a puff of exhaust. Raza waited and didn’t answer, and Kelsie knew that yes, she looked like she needed a ride somewhere. In fact she looked like something that had been left outside and rained on repeatedly, because she was.
The lake was partially thawed out, and they stood by the shore, looking at the fog. When Kelsie said it smelled like shit, like long dead fish, Raza said she should have seen what Miami smelled like just before they left.
“How come you don’t speak Spanish?” Kelsie asked her after a while.
“No one spoke it in my house,” Raza said. “Do you speak Irish? Or Welsh?”
“There are no Irish or Welsh languages,” Kelsie said. “How did you know what my family was?”
Raza looked at her for a moment but didn’t say anything. Then she picked up a flat stone, and with a swift movement, bounced it across the surface of the water.
“Running is the future,” Raza said. This was later, the next day. “Soon, if we want something, we’re gonna have to run for it. Run to it.”
Kelsie was sitting on the bleachers, on one of the sagging lower slats, smoking a wet, half-broken menthol. Raza was standing on the track, shielding her eyes from the weak May sun. Kelsie tried to sit in a way that wouldn’t let the stitches – staples actually – pooch out over the edge of her tight jeans. She thought maybe she should take up running so she could look like Raza, whose hips and waist were in a straight, hard line.
When the scooter was running, which wasn’t very often, Raza would wait for Kelsie by the main doors after school, and they would ride to the lake. If they had to walk, they would meet by the back path. Kelsie’s mom lived on King Street, in Browntown, and Raza would walk her there before she continued on to her dad’s place on Daniels Avenue. The walk was long enough for Raza to tell Kelsie a story.
Raza moved back to Pittsfield because of “pollution contamination,” as she called it. One very early morning last December the Home Guard came to their street and said they had eight hours to clear out. Raza said her family knew this was coming, the Guard had been coming from the southwest, going street to street, in every neighborhood, and ordering people to push north because of the cloud. In fact Kelsie had heard about the cloud. She remembered reading it on her screen, almost by accident.
“People not in Miami thought it was a pain in the ass ball of smog but it’s way worse than that,” Raza said. “I woke up one morning and our whole front lawn was like three deep in dead white birds. Egrets. The whole street was covered. My dad was going to start throwing them in a trash bag but our neighbor came out of the house screaming not to touch them, because they caused cancer.”
Those who had a car that worked and could still drive and could somehow get the car to I-75 or I-95, that’s what they did. Those who didn’t, or couldn’t, Raza said, just started walking. Or bicycling. Their bodies and bikes were weighed down with whatever they could balance. Trash bags stuffed to the limit and lashed to their owners’ backs. Cans of food. Photo albums. That last one was the worst to see, Raza said. Fucking ancient photo albums weighed a ton. Her grandparents had a stack of them, passed down through the generations. Both the grandparents and the photo albums were gone now. Raza also said she saw an old woman, sugary white, riding on the back of another woman. They had a saddle, with stirrups and everything. The woman-horse looked like she was strong at one point in her life, but had moved beyond strong, and could walk forever. Her back half bent and racked beyond pain. Pods of runners, bodies cannibalized from hunger and fatigue, running in identical cadence. Someone on a bike dragging what appeared to be a black towel on a rope, and before she could jerk her glance away she saw what it really was. Raza said she only had to glimpse something to know it complete.
Raza said she rode her scooter next to her dad’s car. Lines for petrol were long and the trip, which normally took her dad 22 hours, ended up taking almost three weeks.
“You watch. Wherever we have to go next, I know most of it will be on foot. Because we won’t be able to get any petrol. I’ll walk to fucking Baffin Bay if I have to,” Raza said.
Raza’s return to Pittsfield seemed to trigger a city-wide worry about the cloud, which had now become The Cloud. At first, only the adults and the rich kids seemed to care; they were the ones who held up signs in Park Square, with slogans like “it’s coming” or “hold your breath.” Things got more tense when other people showed up with signs that said “Keep going your not sleeping on our couch.”
It was known that The Cloud was a slow bomb, a creep, and instead of an incendiary (Kelsie’s new favorite word) event, it was a pulmonary event. An event, they said, that began with a dry, nagging cough and ended with a gasping, retching heave that shot arterial blood, alveoli, and tarry matter into your mouth. There was a name for this cough, Raza said: la tos marron. The brown cough.
Raza knew the skull stage was the last holdout place where things would live, the last place they existed before dying forever. She tried to remember South Florida before the cloud. All that was left was the time leading up to her family’s departure. What was the smell of Hollywood Lakes? She kept sliding back to her grandmother and her stories about grapefruits and their stinging ruby meat, and the pretty stink that blew off the sewerage treatment plant on the days when the wind blew from the northeast, which was rare at the end. But those were grandmother’s memories, not Raza’s. Not that it always mattered. Better the borrowed ones than the thing she kept fighting back: Xiane doubled over in exhaustion, pain, and disgust, quickly wiping away the contents of her cough on her magenta kidskin glove.
Raza stood outside the bathroom stall and waited for Xiane to finish cleaning herself up. She made a point not to touch anything in the girls’ room. Within six days of Xiane showing symptoms that severe, 38 more kids at South Broward High started with la tos. The cloud was the lead story on almost every major news feed throttle and the heads made it sound like it was a visiting dignitary, this one more malevolent and unpredictable than any named storm. By the second week, two-thirds of the 5,550 kids at South Broward had stopped coming to school. Xiane was bedridden, her device got shut off, and the parents of both girls agreed it was best if no one visited Xiane.
The last day she went to school, she wore the regulation mask they were handing out at the old Publix. Mr. Jiminez, standing bent and weird at the screen in front of the almost empty class. There were only two other kids, and they also wore masks. After a few minutes into his mumbled lecture, Raza realized the man had aged decades in like one week. Then she noticed the tears streaming down his cheeks and diverting gracefully around the thick rubber gasket sealed around his mouth. He just stood there shaking, light biro in his hand, trying to suppress a cough, or sobs, or both. He kept saying, in English, something that sounded like “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” She took that as a sign to stop going.
Then the massive bird die-off, the sound below of men’s shouts in the apartment downstairs and on the street below; that afternoon was the first time Raza could say she was in a living nightmare; her cat had gone missing and she was ashamed that she couldn’t remember the last time she saw him, when she held him last; after the Home Guard left their apartment Raza was on her white throw rug by her bed, looking to see if he was up in the boxspring where he used to hide when he was really scared. Raza straightened out her legs and lay on her stomach. What was this? “The frantic niggling patience of a man in a burning house trying to gather up a broken string of beads.” Faulkner, one of her favorites. That line was for this moment, a fistful of water, which kept her alive, which kept sliding away.
She put her wet forehead on the back of her hand and began to cry for real, luxurious tears, half appalled and frightened.. She couldn’t remember why she was on the floor, what she was looking for. Please don’t take my mind. She was sixteen. Her father called from down the hall. Raza, let’s go.
That was months ago. But here was that time again, in Pittsfield. June. Raza was on her scooter, sitting in a petrol line on Wahconah Street. She guessed the line looked like something out of another generation’s memory of lack, of rations, of barely contained panic and hostility. A toy vision of the end.
Raza stayed straddled on the scooter and walked it toward the pumps using her toes, which was kind of difficult because she was wearing flip flops. It took an hour to get to the pump and put a gallon and a half into the tank. A guy in a trashed Vauxhall filled with what appeared to be scrapings off a hoarder’s floor poked his head out the passenger window and asked if he could go where she was going. His eyes were boiled red and when he rolled down his window she could smell a gust of state line smokes and baked vinyl. It was doubly sad.
She found Kelsie lying on her bed. “Don’t do that,” Raza said, in her usual flat voice, putting a percussive tap on the last t, which annoyed Kelsie to no end. “Did you pack anything?”
Kelsie didn’t answer. “Well, we can’t bring it anyway,” Raza said. “I figure we’ll get way up in Vermont with the petrol we have, but after that, we’ll probably have to walk. Come on, my dad wants to get on the road.”
Kelsie stayed on her back, chin to chest, arms limp at her sides. Her screen was balanced on her stomach and she was watching something Raza couldn’t see. “How are we going to do this,” Kelsie asked.
Raza considered just leaving her there, so she could cough herself to death. “Where is your mom?”
“I don’t know. Not here. I don’t think she’s been here for a long time.”
Raza had a feeling she knew where she was but she didn’t say. Instead, she wrapped her ponytail around her fist and flapped her hair in hope of a breeze. “Come on. We’re gonna drive, then we’re gonna run, and walk, and run. It’ll be fun. And look – ” Raza lifted her shirt and spun around, wiggling her ass. Kelsie burst out laughing.

Photo: Sophia, by Jessica Willis 2010