The art of flash fiction thrives on desire: Readers are given a brief tale that leaves them wanting more. This feeling is also a vital component in the act of writing, illuminating the search for new ways of depicting the world. Our shorter stories this year are based on the theme of desire; some authors have decided it worthy of interrogation in and of itself, while others use it as a path to altogether distinct ideas. What results is a thrilling array of voices, with stories ranging from ancient eroticism to modern longing. In the beginning there was desire, and then there was … that’s for you to find out.
Photographs by Molly MatalonIn GizaBy Sterling HolyWhiteMountain
It is Giza in the middle of the night and I’m wrecked by jet lag thinking about you and in the alley below the flat there is a chained-up dog barking. Bad pop music is blasting out by the pyramids and a gaudy light show plays over the Sphinx’s face and I am certain that when the world ends only the lights of Vegas will remain shining. Since I was a boy I’ve wanted to see the pyramids and there is a voice in me that says I’ve been waiting just as long to catch sight of you but if you did not know love is dead, which is to say so much for all these feelings! Everything is about sex except sex, which is about blah blah blah. I crossed a continent and an ocean and most of another continent and yet here in this desert city I feel like I’m home. Let me explain. There are boys and girls riding horses in the dirt streets and everyone is some shade of brown and the infrastructure here is barely holding together and this home of original empire has been breached and left to its own devices by so many invaders that it is clear Egypt is the original reservation of the world—and somehow in all this I am hopeful. Me and a friend are tracing the beauty that runs from this place of ancient sun to the Athenian peninsula with its Platonic aura still remaining and on to Rome, where the meeting of architecture and emperor was perfected, and still on from there until we find ourselves back in America. What my first glimpse of the Great Pyramid showed me was not a miracle structure of impossible stones but a dream shimmering some 4,500 years over the light-struck dunes. But … let’s get down to it, shall we? Let’s say for argument’s sake there is much good art and some great art and a thousand Great Pyramids’ worth of bad art, but the only art I give a fuck about is your ass. Am I being clear? Is this transmission doing its thing across time and space? Baby, am I … the best you ever had? A request: Don’t answer that. Another: Let’s do this like we’ve never done it, which is something I didn’t do even when I’d never done it. Innocence is a brave thing and almost no one in the age of Instagram has the courage for it. But also let’s do it like we have? Sweetheart, I’m supposed to write about longing, but here I am, writing about something else. Take note: That first kiss, like, my angle of approach, was off, and and and I am telling you! Since our first night together, I have been studying very diligently at the Royal Academy of Smooching. From here on it’s nothing but movie kisses worthy of deleted Indiana Jones scenes. Royal this, royal that. The fans turn slow overhead in the dim rooms of empire’s afterlife, and the shades of British accountants work through the heat and the day’s ledgers and their latest letter to Martha. If I correctly understand this book I mail-ordered from the back of a magazine in 1985, upon returning I am certain to be a master lover and the historians tracing the arc of my adoration for you will … maybe take note! Hieroglyphs are the GOAT of writing systems. Like, just look at that shit. It’s fucking sick. But also … maybe not so efficient. Even more than young men ready to die brilliantly and a willingness to enslave all and sundry to commit a pharaoh to eternity, an empire needs a good writing system. As indicated by an intensive Google search—I almost went to the second page—before it was the Great Pyramid of Giza in Arabic, it was the Pyramid of Cheops in Greek, and before that it was the Pyramid of Khufu in Egyptian, but we both know before that, it was called Pharaoh’s Love Shack in the first language there ever was. You could take your best girl there and get a strawberry shake and a side of mutton and later she might wear your gold-leaf letterman jacket, but only if you were the right kind of pharaoh’s son, which, you know, I am not. In the end it’s always your younger brother with the great traps and the hyenic smile who gets the girl, and you, you ugly brute, you get sent out to carve more arcane but strangely practical symbols into the timeless rock. Thoth, now there’s a true bro for a writer. A deity for language? For art and judgment? America, you absolute plebe, take note. Meanwhile, my friend the dog, who I am certain bears the dark and pointed visage of Anubis, is still barking down below, and with each hopeless yawp he gains my admiration. (In fact he reminds me of myself when I was that age.) Hear me out for real though: Only the losers are worth a writer’s time, and there are way too many winners in the world of American letters now. But—I have two questions for you. First off, did you know the pyramids were once covered in limestone, their walls pale and smooth and rising impossibly bright to the heavens? And two, do you have any idea what you’ve done to me? Jesus Christ on a velvet cross! As a true connoisseur of the high art of gaming, I can only say one thing: Baby, you’ve got me stun-locked. Speaking of spiritual masters, our tour guide is the truth and the light and the way in this city, with its many layers of time, you feel like you might be drowning. I see in him the hard-achieved irony won by way of pain, frustration, and the bewilderment of a high intelligence waiting for the world to, like, catch the fuck up. He leads us through his homeland with the sly smile and wink of a lesser god who is lesser only because he chose it. I said I was an American Indian and he put his hand on his head to indicate a feather and we both laughed. I have not thought about the Egyptian afterlife since I was but a young reservation boy in the Wild, Wild West but now here I am, thinking about feathers and hearts. This fine eve I would cut out my heart and place it upon the scales of judgment for a chance to strip you down and do things to you that would bring the UN to my doorstep. Whatever. I will go down like a true Hollywood gunslinger—shooting blanks—only to be resurrected once more by that pharaonic ass. I know, I know! I just wanted to say that word. Here’s another one: callipygian. That's Greek for “a great ass.” Say it in your best Pacino. We’ve got such a gumbo going here, this piece is surely a violation of the Great Literary Treaty of 20__. You remember the one, we traded irony for safety. Anyway. How about this: Is anyone as over the discourse as me, because I am terribly, murderously over it. Behind us only slaughter, ahead only more, and all these people—I need a term that fuses philistine and dilettante, somebody help me out here—can talk about is being offended. Well, this stupidity is harming me, and still there is still no legitimate talk about Indian Country and it’s pretty goddamn clear there never will be. But don’t worry, me and my peeps are used to it. We just throw up a jeep wave and crank up the volume. What I want to discuss, though, is how life lately looks like the barrel of a gun set to my temple. Maybe it’s in my mouth? You know, for variety’s sake. My love—can I say this, is it too soon, I don’t understand the rules, my sense of timing is appalling—maybe be my oasis and I’ll be yours? May we drink deeply from each other ’til the sun falls finally on our day. I kiss your neck a few times and feed you the gelato flavor of your own choosing and maybe … we eat some hot dogs? I don’t know. The guy driving me and my friend all over kingdom come has the most beautiful eyes I’ve seen. Second only to yours, of course! They are green and unguarded and he cannot speak a lick of this language of empire that is my only option and he has the genuine heart of someone from where I am from. He could be a cousin of mine. Did I tell you I once was a tour guide? I, too, took foreigners—some people call them Americans—through my many-thousand-year homeland and talked about the before times and if they liked me enough I got tipped! It was really something! An ex once told me she was tired of the Indian thing and, if you can believe it, that was the moment she became an ex! You said I could not compare you in any way to fruit but … I kind of like fruit. What if I said you were like a mango that was actually like a supernova I happened upon while perusing the night sky with the telescope of my bitter heart and there you were, a phenomenon of such scope and size one finds oneself tempted to use a parallel but nonetheless commensurate description such as: There you were, the smoking-hot gunner bitch on the back of the apocalyptic jeep at the edge of the world. (There’s a dog at her side. It’s me.) She wears designer sunglasses and always has a toothpick in her mouth, but she has a heart of—well, probably some kind of fruit. Being in the midst of one of the great, dry expanses of the world has me in a mood. I am thinking of a J.Lo track that, on occasion, comes up in my list of liked songs. When others hear it, they likely want to shake their asses to the sick beats, or discuss how dated the sound is, but when I hear it, my gaze, driven by the note of elegy threading through the song, drifts dramatically out to the horizon. There are pyramids out there, I am certain of it. They stand silent and implacable and contain still the fury and horror and religiosity of original vision, and all beauty begins with them and comes to us across time from them—I kid you not. At the end of the long hall of the mind they shimmer massively. I will put my hands on you. We will do the oldest thing.
The BoysBy Tess Gunty
The boys were born with their fists clenched. Motherless almost as soon as they arrived, flexible cartilage ossified in fields of hot dust. As babies, they dozed in acres of corn, drooled between sweet rows of genetically modified symmetry, and cried for milk, but most of the mothers were sick or buried or ash by then, so the boys sucked rubber from their fathers’ fists instead. No one understood the disease and there wasn’t enough money to care. Fathers rocked cottoned fat calm, kissed putty heads, loved for two.
The boys learned to hop and climb, operate scissors, fear strangers, count to 10. Fathers recorded first words and ticked door-frame heights in graphite. At the schoolhouse, the boys kicked each other’s shins and learned how it felt to hurt and be hurt. As teenagers, their bodies stormed alone. Sometimes they undressed each other. It made some feel found, some less lonely, others lonelier still. A sighting of a live girl or woman was rare—most had died off by then—but when one did occur, the boys stared without blinking, no matter her age or appearance. The boys collected pictures of female bodies to study them. They wondered if female heartbeats sounded different from their own. Older boys told stories: Girls can grow strawberries just by looking at dirt. Girls have scales when they’re born and can jump over 10 feet high. It was a girl who started the Water Tower Fire last year. Girls have tails.
At the high school, the boys studied agriculture, medicine, law enforcement.
By the time they began to work, most of the boys had developed asthma. Their cartilage calcified and their prefrontal cortexes matured. Bad habits became personalities, and tiny pieces of freedom crumbled away each year. After sweating for hours in the fields, they gulped buckets of hose water and pressed ice to their wrists. They collected food tickets, small paychecks, and nonperishables. Prepared themselves for a drought or a flood or a war.
The Department of Agriculture sent the boys gifts of cured meat at Harvest.
The land was starving the livestock and the livestock were starving the land—animal meat, milk, and skin waned sparse, imported, expensive. Soon it became too hot to grip metal tools without gloves, so hot each boy could only work in shifts of 30 minutes. Smoke stampeded the town from the west; gifts of cactus meat and dried cowpeas began appearing on doorsteps at Harvest instead of jerky.
Two nurses painted the death ward sky blue. Nine females left. Family visitors only. Eight, five, three. Eventually, none.
In their isolated plot of America, the boys launched spades into dirt, operated gleaming machines, sprayed chemicals to keep the crops alive, and beheaded cobs from their stalks. They stood quietly, obedient and theistic. Mr. Wolff promised them imported women. Each hoped to find the fabled girl, the one they heard stories about, hiding in a corncrib on the outskirts. Some invented tales about her for the younger boys. She eats raw birds. She eats nothing at all. She can go three weeks without water. You can’t imagine. And this last was their refrain: You can’t imagine.
The younger ones countered, rolled their eyes, helplessly believed.
The boys punished the earth for its infertility and infidelity—for turning girls into dust. For killing their mothers. Despite the supercrops, which were resistant to heat and drought, malnutrition flared. Kernels were dried, ground, fried, grilled, baked, popped, boiled, consecrated, and hated. Motherless boys became men.
Some of the men considered abandoning the familiar, hot dust for someplace else, perhaps a place with women and water and sand, but travel required a vehicle and a passport and border fees and provisions, all of which required money they had never come close to possessing, and the essential things—wallets, ribs—had thinned. They were men of tanned necks, high-school diplomas, and meager savings. Some questioned the existence of other communities—they’d only seen images, all taken before the Water Tower Fire, the droughts, the floods. Perhaps this desiccated life was a kind of miracle. They loved each other, worked hard and laughed into dawn, always waiting for something essential to change. Lying on a hard bed of cornmeal, each man cried for milk until his fists unclenched.
GroceriesBy Sarah Wang
Oat milk. Eggs. Blueberries. Tortillas. Sour cream. Pilsner. What was he forgetting? JW switched the shopping basket from one hand to the other. His left wrist was still messed up. It had been six weeks. Too stoned at the gym. He blamed it on his new cannabis company.
The chip display was admirable, with boxes stacked elaborately into a proscenium arch. There were so many flavors now: special limited edition, mash-ups. He reached for the last bag of habanero dill ranch pizza. A tang alighted his tongue as the chips communicated to him through the propylene. Man, was he stoned.
“Excuse me!”
A shrill voice cut through the air.
“Hey!” a woman said. She was heading straight for him.
He looked around. Who was this lady talking to? Her cycling jersey and stretch shorts scared him.
“Do you know how to drive?”
She reached out to knock the chips from his hand. Instinctively, he lifted his arm. B-ball reflex. She jumped up and swatted at the bag, slamming him with the side of her body. The hard soles of her shoes clopped as she stumbled.
“You cut me off!” she shouted. “Asshole!”
JW stepped back. His hand was still in the air, not on account of any conscious intention but merely because his amygdala had taken over. The woman swiped the bangs out of her flushed face and lunged. He spun, dodging her flailing arm.
“You’ve got the wrong person,” JW said. “It’s not me.”
By this time, a few people had gathered around the two.
“What’s going on here?” a man asked.
“This murderer turned into the bike lane.” She crossed her arms over her heaving chest. “He’s endangering lives. He tried to RUN ME OVER!”
The people looked at the two of them, the angry woman and JW. He finally managed to lower his hand to his side, but the chip bag had popped in his grip. This was all happening so fast. The crowd multiplied. Now there were seven.
“I’m shopping,” JW said. He held up the basket as proof.
“After committing attempted vehicular manslaughter!” The woman began sobbing.
His mind was swaddled in a fog of THC. He wanted to run, but that would only make him look guilty. If he ran, people would give chase. It was animalistic.
“Wait, are you—” an older man looked at JW.
“You were on Dancing With the Stars!” a woman shouted.
The crowd stared at JW as if the cyclist were not there. He felt light-headed. This was not what he wanted for his Wednesday morning after therapy.
Sobbing turned into wailing as the woman tried to regain the crowd’s attention. She crumpled over, holding her face in her hands. The launched cries bounced off JW’s body, a horrible echolocation.
How could he have done whatever in the bike lane? Whatever she was saying. He’d been here for 20 minutes already. Aside from being stoned, he was a slow shopper. He liked to take his time. See what was new. What was on sale.
A teenager pointed her phone in the woman’s direction. A guy wearing a Zankou Chicken T-shirt pulled his phone out too and began filming. JW was thankful that they seemed to be exclusively filming the cyclist and not him. Couldn’t risk the investors pulling out. He stepped to the left in case he was in the frame, still holding the deflated bag and his basket of groceries. His wrist hurt. He must have twisted it just now. In the melee.
“Don’t film me. I’m not a criminal. I’m a victim,” she gasped. “Film HIM!”
“Lady, this man said he is not the person you’re looking for,” Zankou guy said.
A newcomer sidled up to the teenager. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“This lady is freaking out.” The teen shrugged.
“Oh, one of those,” the newcomer said.
“You don’t care about the environment. I do! I care!” the cyclist yelled, pointing at JW.
The newcomer looked at JW and did not look away. The woman who had recognized him from Dancing With the Stars was whispering to the older man. Then all three stared at JW. People didn’t recognize him as much anymore. Mostly just people in his community. Middle-aged women, sometimes. JW was middle-aged himself now. Too old to go viral. Not for this.
JW shook his head, as if to express sympathy for the cyclist. His media training kicked in. Keep the audience’s allegiance. He didn’t need to deflect. The cyclist was the only one in the camera’s frame. All he had to do was let it ride.
“Stop it!” the cyclist screamed. “Stop filming meeeee.”
She grabbed a bag of chips from the display and threw it at the teen.
More people showed up with grocery carts. A woman and her three children. A guy in a suit. Two store employees. A couple. A dude cradling low-fat milk and a box of French-toast cereal who also looked stoned. Some watched the cyclist as she ducked around the back of the chip display. Some watched JW, but he couldn’t tell if it was because they recognized him or because he was the accused.
“Help!” the woman screamed. “Help me!”
The cannabis line that JW had spent a decade trying to secure investors for had just launched last week. His garage was full of merch: T-shirts, Ping-Pong paddles, rolling papers, vapes, even waffle irons. His teenage face was on all of it.
“You don’t call the police. I call the police!”
Middle-aged yet suspended in adolescence. JW had decided, fuck it. Use his decades-old character for branding. Give them what they wanted. It was the only way to get funding. The ’90s were back: the rare guest-starring roles his agent booked, the series canceled after one season, his ex going to the press. He’d had to pay for lawyers and good PR because of her. Thankfully, only internet tabloids picked up the story, framing it as “jealous ex trying to get more alimony.” Charges dropped.
The cannabis line was the most media attention he had gotten in decades. Nothing could jeopardize it. What would he have left? JW inched close to an onlooker, positioning himself behind her.
“HEEEELLPP!”
The crowd encircled the cyclist. Half a dozen phones were out. She yanked bags off the display and threw them on the floor. Chip bags surrounded her clopping shoes. She stomped. Pop. Pop. Pop. Kicked broken chips across the polished linoleum.
“Your mother gave birth to rats. You’re all on welfare!”
He kept taking slow steps backwards, away from the crowd. Internet evidence of him at the scene would only bring ruin. His ex’s allegations would resurface; the bills from his PR team would pile up again.
In times like this, regret washed over JW. If he’d only pursued basketball instead of acting. He’d had the chance. In high school, the bleachers would rumble, the gymnasium resounding with people calling his TV character’s wildly popular name to cheer him on. Kids stomping, jumping. Cheerleaders flying through the air in his honor.
He could have had a career. NBA. Nike. Gatorade. American Express.
“Go back to where you came from. All of you!”
The woman who’d recognized him from Dancing With the Stars pivoted toward JW, aimed her phone at him. He lowered his head. His stomach dropped.
The manager was here now. The police were on their way.
His wrist throbbed. All he wanted was to go home and pour himself a pilsner. Work on the list his therapist had suggested making. Post the video of his daughter making a branded waffle. Try these chips.
Phoebe Moffat—The Early YearsBy Diane Williams
“Can I,” she asked, “sit here and lean up against you?”
He said yes at first, but then he said, “It’s too warm,” because he had reversed what was once one of his more conspicuous characteristics—his interest in her.
And to make a point about such conduct—Leonardo da Vinci once referenced shoemakers, of all things! He remarked that many men can take pleasure in seeing their own works worn out and destroyed.
And hadn’t Andre Bach formed and reformed this woman, so that she could be more to his liking? And she had once been confident she would get to spend as much time in his little house and on the grounds as she wished.
She had especially loved the open wood that was nearby, with its overhanging trees and masses of ferns, and she had adored hurrying across his green lawn. Then she was too free. Perhaps nobody is supposed to be.
“I must go now,” Andre said—“I am afraid.”
Andre ought to say something more to the woman than, “Aren’t you tired? I am.” But no matter—because Andre Bach had changed.
Early WritingBy Eileen Myles
The thing about being written about that’s a problem is that nobody wants YOU to have the whole thing, to say it. I don’t want to be in your reality. I want to be in my girlfriend’s and I want her to be in mine and I think about a space that is this sweet overlap but for instance I don’t want to hear how she talks about our relationship to her friends. Every time I say something about her to my friend on the phone I think why is it so easy here to describe what she does but facing her my version melts. Writing, however, is the place where we are able to put them inside of our story and so they are like little tiny people in the palm of your hand. I loved when they were both writers and we could be in this big story together. And nobody wrote it. The inside was jagged, happy we all could allude to it in our poems. And one time he told us his fantasies and they were disgusting. And hers were just like her poems and were filled with compensations for the sparse pleasures of her childhood and now there was an abundance of people as opposed to the grim few in Brooklyn. I enjoyed being a poet but even then I wanted a house like the one I have now. I was adamant that I needed to get famous then when I was young. I mean it’s interesting because if that person had gotten what they wanted I can’t even imagine how that would look. It’s easy to say I’d be dead and it might be true. When I think of Kurt’s 27-year-old body sprawled on the floor it just gets weirder and weirder. When I think of Will bleeding out in the bathtub. When I think of Heather leaning forward to her bed, strangling herself. Christina doing the same. Emma with a scarf in Italy. Tootsie, some lonesome place turned blue. I wouldn’t have died like them because I kept retracting my wishes. Though I may’ve bumbled into it. So the house I would have bought keeps disappearing with my dead body in it. My dog walks toward the door and sees that it’s a screen and shuffles back. I’ve trained her to be like that. I joke with friends that you break their spirit. I’m thinking about the impossibility of telling my young story while I was young. If I wrote anything larger than a poem or did a play again and again if it was good or read the poem that brought the house down a second night instead of needing to be different all the time no I just thought reaching for success seemed fraudulent. I thought a calculated arrival would never work because my hand would vanish as I was reaching, vanishing back into the mists of my shifting dream. I remember I wanted to be a rake, a large man in a leather jacket irresistible in his insouciance, French. I couldn’t tell my lovers who I was at 31 but in my dream he grew large. I would write a novel, a soft green story in which everyone I knew had slightly altered names and I would declare at least there who I wanted to be and I sat down daily in my apartment at my desk and I deployed the result. Not being satisfied with my house I built another one and I could even build another one inside of that. This is that. By the time I was writing my novel about our relationship it was already losing its elasticity and there was a need for other projects. I was bringing in the bread. In my head. Often the paper I wrote on was used and had some other typing on the other side. My friends were all poets making poetry magazines out of rough, thick paper that received the chemicals and the pounding of the keys to produce magazines and there were often too many copies of page 63 (I wrote on them) and I think I even had extra pages from my own little book and I would write my novel on the other side so that it indeed really felt like a draft. That paper was too thick to go someplace else. It wanted to be here. I had a way to be away from them now and not even me but a person in the future writing like this in a small apartment I made bigger by the effort of returning every day and it was like building another room or a tunnel to the world. Last winter she showed me several passages from her novel in which I appear from when she was obsessed with me. I have become in some ways the person I long ago planned to be but I am not that person. It just works that way having badly and then repeatedly and then successfully done that and now here they (I) walk out into the world to be pursued by her and rejecting her and eventually being depicted in print. I read it. First of all she didn’t use page numbers, my total pet peeve. Because I want everything to be over all the time. I’m waiting. What is that relationship to pleasure. Is there any. I am releasing and I am counting. All the time. I have a phone date in 11 minutes. It’s Sunday. I write in little bursts. So I appear in my friend’s novel as I bluntly wrote myself as I appear in the world and am not and therefore am hiding (happily) in the house inside the house inside the house. But that’s not it. That would be too cute. Her writing is very good and I even think she’s learned from me but not too much. It’s all her. That’s the thing that’s weird about the people who have taught you something and you dwelled for a while in that teaching and that love and they declare “I taught you nothing” but they tipped your hand and expanded your map if this doesn’t sound like fundraising prose the horse was gifted with a number of jumps but it’s still the horse and at first you stop at the jump and say no I don’t do that. And then you do and it’s odd but occasionally brilliant. And occasionally it sticks. Your love for a teacher enhances your game. They were not my teachers. They were my lovers. I would go to my home and I was in practice for my life. I had a collarless shirt. I wrote 58 pages. I showed it to him. She would not look. Firstly he was mad and ashamed that I depicted myself as an arrogant and lazy preening man. Putting him and his wife and his children inside my world was the worst hauteur. What about me? he cried. They were now in my little crystal ball and I was making those mesmerizing waving hands and the power of my childhood indeed the magic I saw had always been coming that way. I was Nature Boy. He would not look inside my ball and see the tiny family and his dream, which was merely patriarchal (“You’re predictable!”), was even worse. There-was-only-one-man-in-the-family-and-it-was-him. But I was cute and six feet tall and lazy. I wore a leather jacket. I had bangs. I was a mooch. They were utterly charmed by me and that was my hustle. No no he screamed. He sneered that the writing was bad. So terrible. It’s a miracle. I realize that deep in my archive is a folder that contains this very bad novel. If I have a bad day here—most days increasingly magic and trippy and not real—I am growing my life! I am growing another. I want my writing to be transporting. I want to take you away. But on bad days I am writing exactly like that large lazy seductive man until he had to do a thing and my poorly named characters (ho-ho) were a beloved jumble by confused this hung-over and amphetamine driven I was hungry, I was young I didn’t even know how to sit down I watch a cat walking stealthily across my yard and they know a dog is living here who is sleeping right near me in the tiny writing house the bad writing is the sleeping dog that just doesn’t know and what’s swift and good is the smart tippy-toeing cat that manages to make their way across the yard without a ruckus and here all here now here here in my crystal ball even the kindness I feel now toward the one who sits down writing badly, full of all their louche and sexy desires, frankly offensive, banging paper to make him a house that got them here. I hope it will be magic.
Ella StaywokeBy Kiese Laymon
Ella Staywoke’s real name was Ella Steward but we called her Ella Staywoke because she stayed saying woke things when DeVante and I least expected it.
Like, out of the blue, Ella told me she needed me and DeVante to drive her up north so she could go to the doctor. I asked her why and what procedure she had to get up north and she said, “Y’all mean.”
DeVante was probably the most gifted 14-year-old in the history of Jackson, Mississippi, next to Ella Staywoke. I was gifted as hell at 14, but slightly novice at being gifted at 16.
DeVante’s greatest invention, if you let DeVante tell it, was calling people “ol’ blank-blank-blank-ass nigga” without blinking.
Like, if you ate an apple too fast, DeVante would call you an “ol’ eating-apples-like-they-plums-raisins-grapes-ass nigga,” or if you failed a test, he’d call you an “ol’ TikToking-when-you-shoulda-been-stik-studying-ass nigga.”
If one of us called DeVante a name he didn’t like, DeVante could slap the taste out of your mouth better than any ninth grader, except for Ella Staywoke.
Slapping the tastes out of folks’ mouths, describing smells perfectly, staying woke and weird, memorizing everyone’s pass codes to their phones through her peripheral vision, and plotting revenge were just five parts of what made Ella Staywoke the most gifted new teenager in Jackson.
That was, until last week.
Last week, DeVante got jumped by two old 16-year-old MAGA-hat-wearing jokers from Pearl.
It all started when DeVante went out of his way to embarrass this snake-lipped kid who was also named DeVante. We called him Mean-White-Ass DeVante, or Mean-Ass DeVante for short. Mean-Ass DeVante called Our DeVante “a bowlegged transgender activist” in the parking lot of church. It hurt for a lot of reasons, mostly because DeVante actually was a 14-year-old bowlegged transgender activist, but also because no one had ever dissed someone by calling them any kind of activist before where we stayed. DeVante was pissed, but he appreciated how fresh Mean-Ass DeVante was with his disses for a white boy from Pearl.
When everyone looked his way, DeVante said out loud that he never knew that a white boy could smell like nut sack, urine, dookie, and rotten rutabagas through his MAGA drawers. I didn’t even know they made MAGA drawers. Then, as loud as he could, in front of the whole church parking lot and the one white person who went to church, DeVante called Mean-Ass DeVante an “ol’ mean catching-yo-dookie-in-a-MAGA-hat-then-wiping-yo-MAGA-ass-with-the-same-MAGA-hat-when-you-need-to-be-scrubbing-yo-stank-MAGA-ass-ass nigga.”
It wasn’t the most dynamic diss DeVante has ever slung, even though “ass” was used three times, but it did its job.
Even Mean-Ass DeVante’s own cousin started laughing. And when the Mean-Ass DeVante got in DeVante’s face, DeVante apparently slapped Mean-Ass DeVante across his mouth twice with both hands.
That’s four slaps right in the middle of the church parking lot.
Then he ran to tell Ella Staywoke and me what he did. The sad thing is that when he ran up on Ella Staywoke and me, I had on that new Axe and I was just starting to finally spit my game I’d been practicing for months. “You loud,” Ella Staywoke kept saying. “You real loud.”
Ella Staywoke said she wanted me to stop spitting game. But she only said it once, and she squeezed my hand when she said it. So.
I did not stop.
Anyway, when DeVante found Ella Staywoke and me in the woods, he told us what happened. Ella Staywoke did this strange thing where she grabbed his hand, thanked him, and then started crying. DeVante grabbed her other hand and he started crying. I wanted to cry too, but I didn’t know what we were supposed to be crying about.
That’s when DeVante told us that his mama and grandmama were most definitely going to beat his ass for saying the word “nigga” in front of white people, even if those white people were MAGA white people.
Ella Staywoke and I told DeVante we had to leave him in the woods because Uncle Robert said we could play this old Nintendo game called Duck Hunt in his old callus-smelling room at four that afternoon. Uncle Robert was in the top 30 singers in Jackson who still used Auto-Tune.
Uncle Robert never allowed DeVante in his room, because he said DeVante was “too girlish and too confused sexually” to be around his expensive clothes.
We hated Uncle Robert for that.
Before we left, DeVante hugged me for the first time in our lives. “Don’t ever be mean to folk who would never be mean to you,” he whispered in my ear. “It’s okay to be scared of hurting niggas.”
Then he hugged Ella Staywoke and whispered something in her ear too.
Ella Staywoke and me waited for an hour in Uncle Robert’s room, but Uncle Robert never showed. While Ella Staywoke was playing Call of Duty, I was going through Uncle Robert’s diary. He kept the turquoise diary at the bottom of a box of shotgun shells. The diary was covered in duct tape, and it had a lock on it. I’d asked Ella Staywoke if we should read his diary.
Ella Staywoke had helped me take the duct tape off the diary and let me use her pocketknife to break the lock.
“What you gone say if Robert finds out you broke in?” Ella Staywoke asked me.
“I’m gone lie,” I told her. “Shid. Listen to this sentence. Uncle Robert think he so smooth.”
“When she talked with me about sad memories, I would ask her why she rested her head in sad places. We could get rid of sad memories. She said I was becoming a sad memory …”
After I finished reading the entry, Ella Staywoke’s eyes started leaking but the rest of her face didn’t make a sound. I told her again that kissing me might feel better than she thought. Ella Staywoke fake-laughed and started biting the nail bed of her left thumb. When she got a nail sliver off, she used it to clean the dirt out of the nails on her right hand.
“Your uncle,” she said, “him and his friend, they was real mean to me and DeVante two months ago.”
“Mean how?”
“They just, you know, wrapped themselves up in some mean,” she said. “All of us. Now we gotta unwrap it.”
“Huh?”
“They made me and DeVante be mean to each other. That’s all.”
I asked Ella Staywoke if “wrapped themselves up in mean” was a new phrase she and DeVante had made up without telling me.
“Naw,” she said. “It ain’t new. I don’t really want to be in this room no more. Can we leave?”
“How come?”
“It’s too familiar.”
“Too what?”
Later that evening, Mean-Ass DeVante, the white boy who got slapped four times in the church parking lot, and another one of his friends dragged DeVante back into the woods. Our DeVante slapped, punched, kicked, and bit the best he could, but they ended up beating DeVante down with T-ball bats. They didn’t ever hit him directly in the head, but they crushed his larynx. DeVante’s body stayed spread out in those woods all night before we found him. We only found him because one of the boys put a video of the beating up on Instagram Live.
I told Ella Staywoke about my plan to kill Mean-Ass DeVante and his friends for what they’d done to DeVante. Ella Staywoke described the smell of sap oozing from a tree as “golden frozen time” and then said she wasn’t interested in killing anyone this year.
“They did what all y’all do sooner or later,” she said.
“Who is ‘y’all’?” I asked her.
“Y’all mean,” she said. And Ella Staywoke starting biting on the fingernail of her right thumb for what felt like two whole minutes.
I tried to hold her hand.
Ella Staywoke jerked back.
I tried again. Ella Staywoke slapped the taste out of my mouth. “Ask, nigga.”
“Ask?”
“Stop being so fucking mean,” she said. “And ask. Please. I don’t want y’all to touch me the way y’all want to touch me. It’s too familiar. I just want to go home.”
“Okay,” I told her. “Pick you up at seven tomorrow for the trip up north. You got the directions?”
“Yeah,” Ella Staywoke said. “I got the directions.”
“Wonder what the doctor’s office gone smell like up north?” Ella ignored my question and started walking home.
“Bleach,” I heard her say down the road a little. “Probably bleach.”
That night, the night of Our DeVante’s funeral, I walked home knowing I’d lost DeVante, Ella Staywoke, and myself to a mean we were all too young to name. And even though none of us were even 17 yet, that same mean—whose hard belly we giggled, wondered, and wiggled in—felt so familiar, so blank-blank-blank-ass-Mississippi.