Milk Blood Heat

by Dantiel W. Moniz

  Tweet didn’t whine, only stood squinting into the blind sky as if divining meaning from the blue, her ratty bath towel slung around her neck. I had made her leave her water wings at home, not wanting the others to poke fun.

  “Come on,” I told her, and grabbed her hand, and the four of us ran ahead down the sandy paths, sunlight sliding from our shoulders, long legs carrying us carefree toward the water. We cut through the grassy pavilion where free concerts were sometimes played, past pitched cloth and plastic tarp, the homeless sheltering beneath. They scared Tweet, the way their hands darted out when they asked for our spare change. I skipped past them, unconcerned. They couldn’t touch me. I trailed my laughter like a flag.

  We trekked across the pavement-hot sand and picked a spot, breathed deep the warm aroma of summer—of salt and shells and seagull shit—while we waited for the adults to catch up. How slow they were, like manatees bumping along the riverbed, while we were speedboats, our turbulence gashing the water a lighter blue. When they reached us, we huffed through the setup, the laying down of towels and smearing of sunscreen onto my stepmother’s back. Finally, my father brought the raft to the water’s edge and we clamored in, our knees drawn up to our chins.

  He pulled us out to deeper water and left us there, let the big waves push us screaming back to shore. We called to him, “Again, again!” We must have done it ten times, twenty—the white noise of roaring water in our ears—but we didn’t grow tired. We laughed and laughed. A fish splashed out of the water and, far away, the thumbtack moon governed the swells from outer space. I saw my stepmother glaring from the beach blanket on land. My father saw too. He pulled us out one last time and told us we were on our own for a while, leaving to lay his head in what little lap my stepmother had left. I turned my face away from him, pretending I didn’t care.

  There was no big wave. The water became a vast expanse of pocked, green-tinted mirror, our plastic raft anchored on its surface. We dangled our fingers over the side, imagining they were shark bait. Our hands were blades slicing apart the water and the sky; they were telescopes spying treasures ashore that were ripe for plundering—a shovel and pail, a Barbie beach blanket. The waves we craved frolicked ahead, forgetting us.

  Chris picked his boogers and Tweet had to pee.

  “Let’s jump out,” I said. We could walk back to shore.

  There was no debate. We all jumped overboard, and then we were plunging down into the ocean. We never touched the bottom. Down there the water wasn’t clear or brown or green, and we couldn’t see the sun.

  We broke the surface, kicking, thrashing, grasping at nothing.

  While we had played pirates and chopped the horizon apart, the ocean’s stealthy fingers had tugged us into deeper water. It was an illusion, that stillness. Nothing ever stayed in one place. I ducked my head under the water, my eyes open and stinging, and watched three sets of small feet churning the water to boiling. Chris and I propelled our bodies down, summoning the coiled energy living in our bellies, and still, we never felt the sandy floor, though we sensed it, just out of reach. This was no apartment pool, no tame six feet. The deep here was wild, and though we could swim, there was nothing to push off from, nothing solid to direct our bodies. Tati gasped, and as if on cue, fear seized us; we became too heavy with panic to relax and float until someone noticed we were gone.

  We called for help, but only the gulls heard. The raft rocked gently away, indifferent to our screaming and the salt in our mouths, the urgent pulling of currents at our toes. Up ahead, the shore gleamed bright, a tantalizing yellow ribbon.

  No one came for us.

  A wave rolled over our heads, and I tumbled beneath it, opening my mouth and swallowing the sea. Bright spots of light exploded beneath my eyelids, purple and blue. I was not separate from this width of water; it beat inside of me, became me. And if He sees everything, He watched us then. When I think of this moment, I imagine Jehovah peering down beneath the waves and reaching for my heart; prying it open with His dense fingers; examining my fear, the fat black rivulets spilling out. I bit my tongue and watched the blood plume before me, a small red tide in the waves. I believe it came to me, with that bite, that I was nine and beautiful and mortal. I saw us all clearly, like He would, sinking down until we were just four child-shaped stones at the bottom of the sea.

  I broke the surface, the air burning a warning in my lungs, my limbs exhausted. Tati was moving toward the raft, her head disappearing beneath the water and bobbing up in jerky starts. I wanted to follow, but the raft seemed as far as the moon. Instead, I turned to Chris and scrambled up his back, pulling myself partway out of the waves, eager to escape the clutching depths. That dark, mysterious beckoning. I held onto him as if playing a game of chicken, with the fierce intent of never letting go. He threw me off, yelling, and I went back a second time, and a third, paddling toward him relentlessly, my mind bent on the word salvation. He flipped me from his back one last time and reeled away, swimming a ragged path behind his sister.

  I had only one remaining hope—Tweet treading water next to me, her head tilted back, chin pointing shoreward like a compass, mouth sucking at the sky, too tired to scream. I clambered onto her, my nails biting into her shoulders, just hoping to float. She wasn’t strong enough to throw me off. I clenched my eyes tight against her cries and tried to hold onto the world above the water.

  “Get off!” she gasped, but I couldn’t let go, couldn’t let myself be dragged down into that darkness. I thought of Jonah sinking into the rush and how eagerly the bubbles must have broken away to surface.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that, my arms around her neck. Time became nothing more than the solidity of my head above the waves. I prayed to God for someone to find us, for Him to send a whale to swallow us up. I prayed for it to be over.

  That image haunts me, Tweet and me in the ocean. We never talked about it, never told anyone what I’d done. While my grandmother raises her third generation of children—a little boy and girl with Tweet’s familiar features—I wonder if things could have been different for my cousin if I’d come clean about my own darkness. What if I had spilt mine onto the kitchen table where the light could reach it, let her sift through and compare it to her own? What if I’d confessed; what if my mother had stopped looking for her brother’s sins in my cousin’s face? Maybe Tweet could have made peace with all her loss, instead of passing it along to her children. I think, too, about the day we threw stones at wasps, when she told me God was real. I’m still shaken by her certainty. I believe that He was real for her because she’d seen His demons, and recognized them. She must’ve known that light could not exist without darkness; no good without evil. How might it have been if we’d told her you could be both things and still be loved? All the time, I wonder where Tweet is. What she believes in now.

  Of course, we were saved that day. Chris and Tati steered the raft beside us and hauled us in. We collapsed on top of them and Tweet’s shivering shook the rest of us, her panic, still electric, singeing guilt into my heart. Nobody said a word. I lay crumpled against the plastic bottom, brine pooling around my cheek, trying to pretend I was the other girl, who had not yet tasted Him. He was the burn of salt in my nose, the blue-blackness of the underside of waves.

  Onshore, Tweet knelt on hands and knees as if praying to our grandmother’s Jehovah, gulping air and choking on it. I sat beside her, silent, drawing circles in the sand. I didn’t know how to explain myself—how I had become full of terror and light, or that I had been both the drowning and the wave. How suddenly I knew that all things must die.

  I didn’t know how to apologize for wanting to save my own life. I wrapped my arms around her, like a mother might, pressed my lips into her neck. Her body relaxed into mine and the shivering stalled. I heard her sigh.

  “I love you,” I said, and I willed the words to vibrate at a higher frequency, to jounce through her solid-seeming skin and settle in
her bloodstream, as with the voice of God.

  Snow

  That morning there was frost on the grass. Even though Jacksonville was far enough north that this happened each year at some point—the temperature dropping to the teens, our breath, for once visible, fanning the air like bettas in their shallow pools— it never failed to shock us. There was a sense of betrayal in it. Like how dare Florida, of all places, try and turn a season.

  Derrick came into the bathroom while I stood at the mirror, securing my hair with a tie. He passed behind me, reaching over my head and into the medicine cabinet, and I sucked my stomach in and pressed toward the sink so we wouldn’t touch. Our reflections avoided each other’s eyes.

  “Be careful driving tonight,” he said, spooling floss onto his finger. “News said there might be flurries.”

  I slicked down my baby hairs with jojoba oil and a soft-bristled toothbrush, then wanded mascara onto my lashes; I dotted blush on my cheeks. “That’s good for me,” I said. People got antsy during weird weather, wanted noise and bodies near them. They wanted a drink. On top of this, it was Saturday, so there was high probability I’d make bank. For this and other reasons, I was excited for the shift. I finished with my face and tidied my uniform—snapped the collar of my white, youth-size-small polo and brushed lint from my black pants. Derrick picked at his teeth, his presence large behind me, tickling at the back of my neck.

  “You look pretty,” he said, and, briefly, we met eyes in the mirror.

  He was objectively attractive himself—thick dark hair, a large and striking nose, those arms that had made me, four years ago, fall in love with him . . . but it made my stomach drop, how little I now felt. Or how little what I did feel felt like love.

  “Thanks,” I said, though I didn’t think he deserved my beauty. “See you later.”

  “Be safe.”

  It was a relief to leave the bathroom, our apartment, cramped as it was with all our unmet needs. Our blaming silence. We’d never called each other anything other than baby, and now, like this, it was as if we didn’t have names at all.

  Derrick and I had been married five months and now hadn’t fucked for three of them. The last time, he’d gone soft in the middle of it and we both sat on the bed feeling terrible and too naked. This had been happening with frequency. “It’s work stress. Well, stress in general,” he’d said, but it still felt like a deficiency in me.

  He’d initiated. I hadn’t even been in the mood and now I was embarrassed. I got angry, it was hard not to, and he’d sighed. He stared at the ceiling rather than look at me, and I kept glancing at his dick, shrunken and vulnerable against his thigh.

  “It’s too much pressure. I get worried I won’t be able to perform and won’t please you or I’ll make you feel bad or you’ll get angry, and the more I worry, the more it happens. It’s too much.”

  “You said it wasn’t me.”

  “It’s not. But then you make it that way.”

  I’d said something flip in response, as if it didn’t matter to me, and he reached out one hot hand for my thigh.

  “It’ll pass. It doesn’t mean anything about us,” he said. But it did.

  I thought he didn’t know how to confide in people; when things were rough for him, he walled me out, and these rejections made me resistant to attempting to understand the problem. I knew my behavior wasn’t helpful, but I was too caught up in being hurt by it all to meaningfully engage. Some days, I couldn’t blame myself; what models did I have for unconditional love outside of TV?

  After that, I started dressing in the bathroom so he wouldn’t see my body, and I thought about sex constantly—the sex I wasn’t having versus the sex everyone else must be. I bought a new vibrator with a soft curved tip that had eight speeds and three different undulations. Whenever I used it—when Derrick wasn’t home or quietly on the couch late at night while he slept—I always came, but the orgasms were shallow, unsatisfying and quick, leaving me more frustrated, feeling like there was some deeper, better peak just beyond that wasn’t within my capacity to reach. I’d felt something like that my entire life and didn’t appreciate it being spelled out so physically.

  I understood stress and, unlike him, could articulate mine. I was twenty-three and already starting to get nervous about so many things: aging; inhumane healthcare and the endlessness of student loans; the growing anxiety that I might not be good for much else than serving other people. I worried that we were crazy to get married so young, but was too conscious of social stigma to admit it. I felt alone. Lately, unless I drowned it out with drink and dance and work, other distractions, all day a voice way in the back of my brain, real calm, sang: Dumb girl, you’ll die this way.

  I pulled into the restaurant parking lot at a quarter to four but stayed in the car with the seat reclined, listening to the playlist I’d compiled for pre-shifts to force myself into a better mood. It was never a good idea to walk into a bar shift early; you were always needed. A moment later, R.J. guided his silver Civic into the spot next to mine. I watched him through the glass as he fumbled around in his glove box, searching for something, and once he’d found it, he looked up and noticed me. He smiled and unlocked his passenger door, crooking a finger in my direction. I turned off my car and hopped out, skipping around to his passenger side, crushing my lips together to keep from smiling like a fool.

  “What up playboy,” I said as I got in.

  “You ready to make this money, T?”

  “Always.”

  The heat was on, warming up that smell his car had—­tobacco leaves and citrus air freshener and the astringent scent of his sweat. By now I was used to it, and maybe I even liked it. R.J. leaned over the center console and hugged me, holding on for a couple of beats. He wore a big, gaudy diamond in one ear and even during shifts, I’d never seen him without a ball cap slanted backward over his short-cropped hair. He had these deep-set brown eyes, the pupils always big with whatever he was on, and a habit of licking his lips when he spoke to you, his tongue quick and furtive. Fascinating, like some kind of animal. We were friends. Prior to this, we’d worked together at a club bar called, inexplicably, Boston’s before we jumped ship with one of our managers for this better-paying gig.

  People often liked to say they weren’t affected by other people’s opinions, but I thought those people must be lying. When you heard something about someone, you were already looking through that filter, at least at first, whether you wanted to or not. So when my friend Casey had gotten me the job at the club, I asked her who she thought was interesting, and she’d said, “The barback’s pretty sexy,” and because of this, when I met R.J. I already had this little crush. It was nothing, not even unusual in our industry. All those tight spaces and bodies brushing throughout the night occasionally offered up moments of uncomplicated intimacy. Sometimes we’d hang out in each other’s cars after close, 3 am, just talking.

  We sat together in comfortable silence, listening to the low beat of a song on the radio, the sky around us beginning to dim. I said it depressed me, the way winter stole the sun. R.J. shook the small baggie of white powder he’d been hiding in his fist. “You want?” he asked, grinning at me. He knew I’d say no, only offering because I’d been offended to learn that most of my co-workers and even the managers were doing blow on their bathroom breaks. No one had ever invited me and when I asked why, R.J. had shrugged. “You never seemed like you needed it.”

  “Ask me later when I’m in the weeds,” I told him now, with my hand on the door.

  “See you in there,” he said, and winked, and though this gesture, too, meant nothing, I felt a delicious little jolt.

  My regulars lined the bar, some of the newer ones I knew not by name but by their particular poisons—Seven & Seven, Bombay martini with two blue cheese-stuffed olives, Dewar’s neat, the guy who only ordered what was special on tap. Most commonly they were middle-aged, somewhat wealthy whites who liked to
think of themselves as liberal, but I suspected I was the only black person with whom they regularly interacted, so surprised they were at how I was, how well they thought I spoke. I made a game of balancing my resentment of them with my appreciation; even superficially, it felt good to be adored. I laughed with my guests, picked on them—they loved to be picked on—kept their glasses full, made sure not to throw out any seasoned ice. When their food took too long, I pretended to hassle the kitchen about it, giving my patrons my “We’re on the same team” spiel, all arm touches and sympathy. They never blamed me. My manager, Johnny, the slick-talking Jerseyan I’d come over with, called what we did Flirting For Money, and I was good at it. I often wondered what else my patrons saw in me. Prettiness, youth—maybe that was enough. Whatever it was, it kept them coming back, all our communal loneliness appreciating into currency.

  The bar was busy, like I’d thought, the mood agitated and somehow festive. I circulated among my guests, refilling glasses, making enthusiastic small talk, slapping drink tickets down onto the soggy mat at the service well where servers waited, drumming their trays with matching frenetic energy. The low golden light of the bar bounced attractively off the large windows, fogged against the cold; made us all look lovelier than we were. I felt in my element, flushed and warm and present; there was little time to think, and I was glad to be swept up in the bustle.

  Midway through the shift, the door slammed open and a chill breeze gusted in like an impatient guest. Several heads swiveled and there came that sort of hushed buzz that preceded events of interest. When the woman came into my line of vision, I understood. She was tall, blonde and blue-eyed, cloaked in a confidence which invoked inherent grace. I wouldn’t have found any of those privileged, mainstream elements particularly noteworthy, but there was a smooth brownness to her skin that wouldn’t be explained by a tan. The woman chose the empty stool nearest to the service well, a spot most people avoided, wariness sparking off her like cold-weather static. My other patrons watched her with doggish intensity as she shrugged from her calf-length coat and sat. She grabbed a menu and plainly ignored them, and I wanted to applaud.