We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White

Author:Tyriek White [White, Tyriek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000 Fiction / General
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Published: 2023-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

• • •

I TOOK THE train home, to the outskirts of the richest city, a glass tower of Babel sitting on bedrock and bones. Through blocks of empty lots and scrapyards, fields of junk or auto parts divided by rusted fences, ribbons of barbed wire. For miles were waste facilities so the streets would smell soured around dawn, heat plants that chugged smoke out of their towering chimneys. Bundled in brick were halfway houses, drugstores with bulletproof windows, hospices or shelters where folk had gone crazy, blanked from depressives the state approved, sat in the sun with their damp cigarettes with a look of a stonewall. Farther down were motels that bustled after one a.m., girls I’d seen around or from school in short dresses and heels lined up in the parking lot of the White Castle next door, winking at cars and checking their beepers. There were nursing homes next to salvage yards next to lots of landfill. The animal control center failed to wrangle the stray pit bulls that wandered the lots. They did manage to capture possums and raccoons, sometimes bludgeoned already from cars or shop owners who’d caught them hanging under their store awnings.

Genesis had been supportive, especially since I could keep paying my share of the rent. I remember when I first told her, months ago in our fourth-floor, one-bedroom apartment.

“I want to become a doula,” I shouted over the roar of her blow-dryer.

“A what now?” she asked. I told her it was like a midwife but not really. “Is the pay good?”

“Not in the beginning. But neither was sales associate at Macy’s.”

“You know I support anything you do, girl,” she reassured me, but I could tell she would miss the furs and DKNY heels we’d go through, how she’d model the new pieces in front of Dee, who laughed at our enterprise whenever he could. I missed it too. I missed carrying a backpack through Manhattan on Saturday nights, changing outfits between the Roxy or Fun House or Studio 61, jumping between looks at a moment’s notice. In the tight, crooked aisles of the Strand, I read about professional midwives and birth attendants. I read about births at home and birthing centers and when none of the plans went right and you had to give birth in a Laundromat or in a car speeding toward the hospital.

Most of the women Carrie and I saw were alone, cradled by their mothers or aunts, their sisters or best friends, women from their church or their community center. Some had men who hurt them, who let them down in every way, could not provide but only take, could not protect but only take cover behind the closest thing to them. Some women belonged to men who loved them with all they had, and not to would mean an existence they fought hard to escape from. You could tell the histories of a community in how they give birth and the ways in which they bury their dead. We ourselves are markers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.