Kiss the Ring

by Meesha Mink

  As she moved toward the kitchen door, Naeema picked up her mattress from where it leaned against her dresser and plopped it back down atop the box spring on the full-sized metal frame in the center of the room. She quickly snatched the brightly striped comforter set and the floral sheets off and left them in a ball in the center of the bed. There was no way she was going to sleep on them knowing a stranger had manhandled her bed.

  Next, she bent down to pick up one of the frames holding a photo of her son, Brandon. Her anger returned in a rush at a piece of the shattered glass that tore the paper of the photo, making a white fleck on his cheek. Brandon was dead. Killed at just fourteen years old. She found vengeance—and some relief of her guilt for giving him away as a baby—when she sought and killed his murderer eight months ago.

  She hadn’t laid eyes on her son in nearly all his fourteen years. The pictures were a connection to the young man she grew to know during her weeks living under the alias of Queen as she moved among the band of thieves he called friends. One of whom had proven to be more foe than friend.

  And she had proven to be his judge, jury, and executioner.

  Fuck it and fuck him.

  After she picked up the broken frames and removed each of the nine pictures depicting Brandon from kindergarten to eighth grade, she scooped up all her panties from the floor before tossing them back inside the large plastic container where she had kept them. “I don’t even feel right putting these on ever again,” she said with a twist of her mouth, rising to set the container back upright.

  Naeema bent again to stand her nineteen-inch flat-screen television back up. “No good son of a thieving bitch,” she snapped, eyeing the jagged crack across the screen.

  She dropped to a knee to reach over and plug the set back in.

  “I love you, Steebie—”

  Naeema rolled her eyes at the rerun of Love & Hip Hop Atlanta playing but Joseline’s image was fractured by the crack in the screen. She cut the set off before lifting it to where she always sat it atop the container—a makeshift TV stand.

  She looked around the room at the rest of her things scattered on the floor and her eyes fell on the stairs leading to the second floor, wondering if the intruder had violated her privacy up there as well. She rarely ventured upstairs. Her wedge sneakers pressed a shard of glass and snapped it in two against the faded wood floor as she moved across the room to stand at the foot of the stairs. She flipped the switch, brightening the dusty glass-covered light fixture on the slanted wall covered in faded blue-and-white-striped wallpaper.

  Ain’t shit up there to steal.

  She was halfway up when she stroked her palm with her fingertips, wishing she held her gun. She couldn’t explain the fear that caused the soft, short hairs on her nape to stand on end. The drawn-out creak of one of the steps didn’t help at all.

  “Aight, Naeema, get your shit together,” she reprimanded herself, dashing up the rest of the stairs.

  As quick as a booster trying to make it out the door of a store without getting stopped, Naeema stuck her head inside four of the five bedrooms quickly lifting the light switch to fight the darkness caused by the boards on the windows. In each there was more of the same. Empty rooms. Faded and peeling wallpaper. Dull wood floors. Memories of better days.

  At the bedroom just off the top of the stairs, Naeema leaned in the doorway as she flipped the switch. If these walls could talk.

  There were many a night she had starting smelling her own ass and thinking she was grown enough to either sneak out or sneak boys in during those late hours when her grandfather slept. He wrongly assumed that the room closest to his master bedroom would help him shelter and protect the preteen who came to live with him after her mother’s death, but he overlooked the closeness to the stairs that had become her escape route to freedom. Wildness. Boys. Sex. Drugs.

  Naeema couldn’t do shit but shake her head. She once rejected everything her grandfather offered that she needed like love and stability. To her the room with the pink and white walls with teddy bear stencils was worse than any jail cell on Orange Is the New Black.

  “Just young and dumb,” she said with a heavy release of breath before turning off the light and walking across the open hall to the closed door leading to her grandfather’s room.

  She reached for the clear-glass door handle but her hand paused just above it, her long stiletto-shaped nails causing a claw-like shadow against the wood. In all the years she lived with her grandfather he had always taught her that his bedroom was off-limits.

  “A man deserve some privacy in his own house,” he said.

  Naeema had pushed the limits on many things but she never fucked with crossing the threshold into “his” space. Not once. Even when she returned to take over her claim on the house after his death she had pressed Sarge to clean out any sign of the vagrants that had squatted.

  Naeema forced herself to grip the knob, turn it, and then push the door open wide. “Shit!” she swore as a mouse jumped from the windowsill, raced along the wall, and disappeared under the closet door.

  She made a note for Sarge to lay out more traps and poison. The fight against mice and roaches in the hood was an everyday struggle. That was one war Naeema was determined to win.

  With her focus off the rodent, it sunk in that her grandfather’s room with its dark green walls was the only one with the windows uncovered and the glass free from the harm of rocks thrown by bored children. She knew it had to be because the room was on the side of the house where there was only a small backyard cushioning it from her next-door neighbor’s.

  There was dust and some minor clutter in the corners but as with the other rooms it was empty as well. Naeema closed her eyes thinking she could almost smell her grandfather’s aftershave above the stench of uncirculated air and mouse droppings. Almost.

  She turned, closing the door behind her.

  Naeema didn’t bother with the bathroom or the trap door leading to the attic. She quickly descended the stairs and cut off the lights. The upstairs was even more of a reminder that she had to find the time and the money to finish renovating the house. It was barely a step above the shitty dump the squatters wallowed in.

  At the sound of tires squealing loudly on the asphalt outside she moved to open the front door, turning the knob and lifting the door to unjam it from a botched job by a bootleg handyman she hired to hang it. You get what the fuck you pay for.

  Standing on the top step she looked up and down the length of the slanted street. The sun had faded and there was just barely a breeze in the June air. Nearly every porch was occupied by residents thinking they could escape the heat of their homes. Maybe someone saw something.

  People in the hood barely missed a damn thing but it was a toss-up whether they gave enough of a shit to “snitch.” Hood politics were legendary. Naeema came down the stairs feeling ready to risk it. There had been at least a dozen or more break-ins on the street for the last couple of weeks, and that had to be enough to make someone speak up about seeing someone running from her house.

  She reached the bottom of the steps and took a moment to smile in pride at the gate to the fence now reattached and hanging properly. One lost wrestling match too many with the gate that used to swing with the same abandon of a sweated-out track of a weave from a woman’s head. Just no structure. No control. Plain disrespectful.

  Now just a thousand other things to do on my list.

  Closing the gate behind her and hooking the new bright aluminum latch to the pole, she glanced over at the small brick house to her right. She hadn’t seen her neighbor Coko in more weeks than she could count. Maybe even months. The lights were on in the house so someone was paying the bill but Hunga had not appeared recently. The young woman had long since succumbed to a heroin addiction that left Naeema having to help her last year after finding her passed out on her porch from an overdose.

  Turning away from the house, she went walking up the street with long strides meant to defeat the steady inclin
e and make sure it didn’t defeat her. She walked past the few porches that were empty and stopped at a powder blue two-story colonial with white shutters.

  A tall, slender light-skinned woman with a wild, curly, bright red Afro glanced up from the head of the preschool-age child sitting between her freckled knees on the step. The little girl offered her a welcoming smile. The woman did not.

  She bristled at the coolness. Fuck I do to her?

  When Naeema moved back into the house and set about making it livable she knew she didn’t bake brownies and visit her neighbors for introductions. Hell, she doubted she could point any of them faux, suburban living asses out in a lineup but instant hostility? Taking a deep breath to keep from getting to the woman’s level, she forced a smile.

  “How you doin’?” Naeema began, placing her hands on her hips. “Someone just broke in my house and I wondered if you saw somebody running away? I live in—”

  “Nah. I ain’t seen shit,” she said, with one last hard look and an eye roll.

  At the sound of a chuckle, Naeema looked up and spotted a man sitting on the porch in a kitchen chair leaning against the siding. One of the white pillars nearly shielded his presence. His eyes shifted down to take in her thick thighs in the black high-waisted leggings she wore with wedge sneakers and a tank top tied beneath her full breasts. He twisted the toothpick in his mouth from side to side, enjoying the view, and Naeema knew he was the reason for the woman’s instant animosity. His disrespect. His past—or current—cheating. His shit done to her. That was their bullshit. Not hers. Fuck ’em.

  Naeema kept it moving.

  “He ran around dah corner.”

  Naeema stopped and looked down at the little girl who was still pointing down the street. The opposite direction Naeema was moving.

  “Shut your ass the fuck up,” Freckles snapped at her, tugging roughly on the girl’s hair and popping her cheek with the back of her hand causing tears to fill the whites of her eyes.

  Queen’s anger sparked and she balled her right hand into a fist as she raised it from her side.

  “What the fuck wrong wit’ you, yo?” the man on the porch roared, jumping to his feet to rush down the stairs and grip the woman’s red Afro in his hand to tug at just as roughly.

  Queen uncurled her fingers and lowered the hand she was just about to swing against the woman’s freckle-covered neck. Instead, she turned and crossed the street needing to be out of their space for her anger to ebb. On any other given day Queen would straight snap on a man abusing a woman—especially in front of a child—but in that moment she didn’t give a shit. He could straight deliver a Mortal Kombat punch to her ass and she wouldn’t blink.

  Ignoring them, she turned and looked down toward Eastern Parkway. The traffic on the one-way boulevard flowed steadily and she knew the thief was long gone. All she wanted was a clue as to how he looked. Any little clue to help her hunt him down and then beat his ass down.

  No need to keep going that way. His back would be to them.

  Heading back down the street she locked her eyes on an eight-unit apartment building. The porch was crowded with a dozen teenage boys all posted up without a care in the world. She walked up to them and her eyes narrowed as she watched a young girl in booty shorts and a tank walk out onto the porch and take a blunt from the mouth of one dude, hit it, and then turn to blow a stream of thick smoke into the mouth of another just before she kissed him.

  Naeema frowned a bit as she got closer and saw that although the girl’s thick body said eighteen her face revealed she was no more than thirteen. A baby trapped in a grown woman’s frame. That didn’t bode well for a young girl without much sense to know better. Naeema knew that shit firsthand.

  Naeema’s steps faltered as the girl turned and walked inside the apartment building. Every boy watched her movements with their eyes before their bodies followed as well. One by one each disappeared from the porch into the building. One by one.

  Naeema shook her head. It would take a fool—and she was far from that—to know their plans included entering her. Violating her while she took their sex like a compliment. One by one. “Shit,” she swore.

  She continued down the street and then took the steps by two before she pushed the front door open and paused before entering the hallway. It was unlit and the darkness offered some coolness from the heat and sheltered the bodies now gathered in the corner with their backs to her.

  “Damn that bitch can take a dick, yo,” one of the voices said.

  “Hurry up, yo. I got next in the pussy,” said another voice.

  Naeema pressed her eyes closed as she felt taken back to a time and place where she was the young, dumb girl in a small room with one bed and a line of boys waiting to fuck. One by one.

  She pushed the door opened wider and the band of sunlight streaming in widened. The boys at the rear of the semicircle, who were of various heights and weights, glanced over their shoulders. Their faces were a mix of guilt and annoyance. Naeema didn’t give a fuck.

  As the boys’ urgent whispers began to rise in the air she jammed a thin and less than welcoming rug under the door to keep it open. “Get out. All of you,” Naeema said, her voice showing her aggravation that she even cared to stop the train.

  “Who dat?”

  “I don’t know that bitch.”

  With an eye roll and a heavy breath Naeema came striding toward them, pushing the sweaty and musty bodies out of the way. She turned up her nose at the smell of the girl in the air. It wasn’t pleasant and in the heat of the hallway it was even worse.

  A thin boy was between the girl’s open thighs as she lay on the floor. He hadn’t stopped his awkward rutting in the commotion. The girl looked up and their eyes met in that quick second just before Naeema bent down to grab the teenager by his neck and the rim of his pants, which were down just below his flat ass.

  With one solid grunt she yanked him out of her pussy and onto his feet as he hollered out, “What the fuck!”

  “Get up,” she said to the girl still lying on the floor with her legs spread wide like the arms of cult leader preaching to his followers.

  BAP.

  “Ow,” Naeema yelled as a hit landed across the side of her face sending sharp darts of pain behind her eyes and her mouth.

  “Damn!” someone hollered out.

  The footsteps of some of the boys flying out of the hall echoed.

  Naeema felt herself sway on her feet but she fought to stay up on them. Oh shit, I got hit.

  “Why you hit her, Tee-Tee?” the girl asked.

  Naeema stiffened her back, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and then looked over at the teenager still standing there. Five others stood with him. She didn’t know if they were enjoying the show or were ready to pounce. She got her mind-set focused on the latter.

  I ain’t no killa but don’t try me. Well, I sorta am a killa. Anyway . . .

  She fired off a round of punches to Tee-Tee’s smug face like it was a speed bag in a boxing gym. When she caught the sudden movement of someone in her peripheral vision she instinctively turned and delivered a solid gut punch that sent the short, squat-looking boy to his knees as he fought to reclaim the breath she knocked from him. Just as quickly as she turned back and grabbed Tee by the throat he tried to deliver another blow.

  Silly rabbit . . .

  She grabbed his arm and whipped his young buck ass around to slam against the wall as she twisted his arm behind his back.

  He released a high-pitched scream that would put a soprano to shame.

  “Anybody else wanna try me?” she said, locking eyes with each one to let them know she was ready for their ass. She even leveled a hard look at the girl, who stood there with her booty shorts and underwear down around one ankle.

  No one said a damn thing. Good decision.

  With a grimace she jerked Tee-Tee from the wall and pushed him across the distance into the opposite one. She waited to see if he was ready for some more.

  He shi
fted his eyes away from her. He wasn’t.

  Naeema turned and the remaining boys stepped back, making a path straight for the ajar front door. She headed right for it, ready to feel the sun and get some fresh air. Just before she stepped out onto the porch she turned and pointed her finger at Little Miss Hot Ass. “Let me holla at you for a minute,” she said to the young girl, pausing just long enough on the porch to take a deep inhale.

  For the moment all thoughts of the man who broke into her home were set aside . . . but just for the moment.

  Don't miss what's next for Naeema "Queen" Cole, coming February 2015 from Touchstone Books

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  Acknowledgments

  I have to thank God for His continued blessings. I am so grateful for my career that continues to grow every day. I am finally walking this path with anticipation of everything He has in store for me.

  The rest of this is to acknowledge the ladies in my life. I love my man, my brother, and all the men I am blessed to call family but this ain’t ’bout them right now! Lol.

  I am a woman who can say that I had the examples of extraordinary women to help raise me, guide me, nurture me, and protect me. My mother, Letha. My granny Bertha. My aunts, Rodger (aka Sister), Marsha, and Alberta. How blessed was I to have all of you? Strong, beautiful, independent women who left an imprint on my life that remains to this day. My mother, my guardian angel first on Earth and now from heaven above, I thank her for teaching me to listen to my gut. I am finally getting it, Ma. My grandmother Granny, I wonder almost every day if I am living up to the woman she helped mold me into. She always told me and the other young girls in the family that if we grew up keeping our panties up and our skirts down we would be alright. Lol. That was just one of a million of your one-liners I need to write down one day, Granny. My aunt Alberta taught me through example to never be afraid to laugh loudly and enjoy life. My aunt Marsha showed me how not to be afraid to strike out on my own. And last but not least, my aunt Sister has always pushed me to want and work for more. I thank her so much for everything she has ever done for me. I’ll never forget how she purchased a box of my first book back in 2000. A box! Forty-eight books. How awesome are you, Aunt Sister? You tried so very hard to fill the gap my father left behind. Please know you are appreciated and loved.