Flesh (excerpt)

I pulled my arm back and felt the wind give. Frustrated, it became the deep exhale of a woman disrespected for being a woman for the last time. The wind tries at patience, but with each hurricane breath the plants that make this building on First and Gregory a home, become exposed at the root. I feel the joints and bones in my shoulder twitch as their tissues dissolve and seep from my pores. Liberated, my arm reaches around my body with the greed of a colonizing vine, until I can hear with my left ear, the steady pulse of blood in my right elbow. With the release of murderous tension allowed to bubble and reproduce with each “hoe,” “thot,” and “bitch,” I free the stretched elastic that my arm has become and stare into the cavity that its contact with Marcus’s face leaves at the parts that used to be his eye socket, cheek, and its bone. The right side of his face is still intact, but ruined by the hollowed look of a body abandoned by its inhabitant, and returned to organic matter. His left eyebrow is still in place too, and I feel sad at that. The one-million-hairs lush of his eye’s accessories were what had made him look so regal. My heart sinks a little, weighted by the guilt of wasting such a beautiful thing. I decide that this is something that I cannot wholly justify and use my own exhale to summon the wind’s again. Calmed by my removal of the pollutant, the wind’s release of breath kicks up loose gravel and dead leaves, but leaves plants rooted and only gently raises the hairs on my arm, where it chaffed me before. I decide that the beauty that God reserved for Marcus’s curly eyelashes, full lips and eyebrows, perfect chinstrap, and eyes deep brown enough to swim in, won’t be wasted. I fold him up, put him in the trunk of his truck that is the true scene of his murder, and drive one hour and forty-five minutes to the place where the wind and I had our first conversation. Marcus will be fertilizer for my mother’s flowers.