Apex Magazine: Issue 120, May 2019 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Apex Publications

1 Social Text, volume 20, number 2, (71), Duke University Press https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/issue/20

Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good by LaShawn M. Wanak

14,900 words

Rosetta knelt to look at the stump in the corner of her client’s bedroom. It had the likeness of a ten-year-old boy, four feet tall, dressed in an oversized shirt and suspenders, and its features were flawless, from the newsboy’s cap cocked on its tight curls, to its pupil-less eyes fringed with long eyelashes. The only oddity was that stump’s hands were unformed, shapeless blobs. It was easy to believe that a sculptor had chiseled a boy out of wood and had stepped away just before finishing its hands.

Rosetta sucked in her breath through her cloth face mask. The SPC hadn’t told her that her first stump extermination would look like a child.

“Why did it take you so long to report this?” she asked the woman who rented the apartment.

“Went to visit my sister in St. Louis last week. When we got back, there it was.” The bedroom door opened, revealing a gaggle of gawking kids. The woman shooed them back, then frowned at the white man maneuvering a medium-sized crate into the bedroom. She sidled up to Rosetta and whispered, “He gotta be here too?”

“It’s all right; he’s my handler. Set the vacuum up over there, Marty.”

Marty Houchen winked a blue eye at the woman. “I do all the heavy lifting, ma’am. Sister Tharpe got the harder job.” Rosetta could tell he was smiling behind his own face mask.

The woman hmphed. Her mask, the cheap, paper sort usually sold at the SPC, dangled from her neck above her plain cotton-blue maid uniform. It made Rosetta feel overdressed in her faux fur and white kid gloves. To cover up the awkwardness, Rosetta went to look out the window.

The woman’s apartment was on the tenth floor of the Ida Wells Projects, the newest housing development touted as affordable for those with low incomes. The woman’s apartment was sparse, but everything was neat and clean, albeit it smelled of oxtail stew and shoe polish. It was also stifling hot in the apartment. Sheets of thick, opaque filters lined most of the windows in the main rooms. In the bedroom, there were no filters, but the woman had hung up bedsheets across the windows—a cheaper alternative.

If the woman had just returned from a trip, she probably had opened the window without thinking to let in the cold, fresh, February air. Just enough for a spore to float in and take root.

“What’s this made outta of anyway?” Rosetta turned around to see the woman prodding the stump’s cheek with her finger. “Don’t feel like wood. Feels spongy.”

“Don’t do that!” Rosetta rushed over to grab the woman’s wrists. The slight indent that the woman made in the stump’s cheek was already remolding itself back into shape. Rosetta glanced down to the stump’s formless hands. Was that the hint of fingers? “Marty, hurry!”

“I’m working as fast as I can.”

Still holding

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