ANGEL
“Hey, my angel,” said Angel’s father through broken breaths. “And there’s my sweet boy.”
Her father held his arms open for baby Michael, and just like before, he fell into them. The same calm knowing came over Michael, and it made Angel want to cry. She knew that her father was right, but didn’t want to accept it. The child knew something about her father that she couldn’t know. Her instinct was to snatch the baby away. It was too obvious when they were together—new life and impending death, sitting at the opposite ends of their journeys, greeting one another with a mutually earned respect that she couldn’t bear to acknowledge.
Angel wanted her father alive. She wanted both of her parents, walking hand in hand like they used to. Supporting one another. Holding each other up in life and health and strength, never in sickness. The knock on the door made her shoulders jump and snapped her out of whatever she was in. It was her mother’s four o’clock hair appointment—the tender-headed Barney twins plus one. Angel was beginning to think their mother was sending them just to get a break from their chaos. Odd of the sisters to knock on the front door. They usually burst directly into the back as if they owned the place.
“I’ll get it,” said Angel, looking back at her father. “Don’t worry, I’ll walk them around back. You okay with Michael?”
“Thanks,” he said, relieved to not have to shift himself out of their chaotic way. “Yes, I’ve got Little Man.”
Angel cracked the front door, and to her surprise, Muggy Little Jr. was standing there holding a brown leather-bound journal in his hands, grinning mischievously.
“I’ve got something to show you,” he said with a sly wink.
ISAIAH
Isaiah’s lips had gone all tingly, but Dorothy Mae was still lapping them with full lungs. She smelled nice—like fake flowers. Had to be a lotion of some kind, because as her hands, then wrists, then forearm, then armpit brushed close to his nose, the smell stayed the same. Bored of kissing, he tried to ease her away gently. She was a girl, after all. One with an assertive way about her—like a fake flower.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered into his neck before kissing it.
She sounded like a picture-show girlfriend, not a real one. Like she’d rehearsed “don’t stop” to her own reflection to make it sound authentic. As he knew her, that summed her up. Isaiah wondered what she was like when she was alone—when she first stepped out of the bath. Smelling only of basic soap and hard Greenwood water, not fake anything. He wondered, did she wipe the condensation away from the mirror to stare herself down or did she walk past it unwilling to truly see herself as she was, regular. Beautiful, but regular, just like him. Still, Isaiah wanted to believe there was depth underneath all the vapid.
He pushed her away so hard she couldn’t deny he wanted to stop. “Let’s talk awhile.”
“Talk?” she replied. “Whatever do you mean?”
“I mean”—Isaiah scooted back, putting enough distance between them that she couldn’t lunge onto his sore lips—“what’s your favorite color?”
“Don’t be a flat tire, Isaiah,” she said, nervously picking at her pink polish. “Who cares what my favorite color is?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t care, but okay, I’ll start,” he began. “Mine is obviously blue.” He pointed to the colored paper on his bedroom walls and wondered if she’d ever even noticed.
She looked around and half smiled. “Huh.”
Silence fell hard on his bedroom, slowly stacking a thousand invisible bricks between them in his small bed.
“Want to hear a quick passage from my favorite book?” he asked, pulling Souls from underneath his pillow. “I don’t know if you follow Du Bois.” He paused. “Do you?”
“I don’t follow politics.”
Isaiah laughed. “Du Bois is not just politics. He’s starting a revolution for our people. Real change, not that flimsy stuff Booker T. used to preach. This is taking our power back from the white man. Standing firmly on our feet and telling the world that we’ve earned the right to exist. Listen to this!”
Dorothy Mae held her hand in the air, halting Isaiah.
“I like Booker T. Washington, though,” Dorothy Mae began, her brow creased. “I don’t like when people disparage him for his methods. He did the very best he could under the circumstances of his birth and region.”
Isaiah grinned. “I thought you didn’t follow politics,” he said, noticing a fresh zeal in her eyes, finally a reveal of an opinion about something important. “You should show more of this.”
“I…,” she started, and got stuck in the beginning of the sentence. “I meant that I follow politics just fine, I just … How should I say? It’s not expected of me to speak my opinions aloud. I’m meant to marry well, not express my like or disdain for the revolutionaries among us.”
And that’s when Isaiah pinpointed the elusive thing he liked about Dorothy Mae—born to a wealthy-bank-owner father and a former-beauty-queen mother, she was just as trapped in expectation as he was. Hers was the expectation of marrying well within Greenwood society. Utilizing her radiance to charm herself into cushy sitting rooms with cut glass and tiny sandwiches.
“Okay.” He joined her back on his bed. “Indulge me for one more question.”
“Just one if you please.”
“What do you dream of becoming?” he asked before again shooting to his feet to pace the room. “Not ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I hate when teachers ask such questions. No! I mean, when you lie down on your pillow, alone and free, what do you dream of becoming?”
She looked at him skeptically, like she was afraid to be honest with him. Almost ashamed. “Father says I should—”
“No,” Isaiah interrupted. “Not what father says. What you say! What you think!”
With eyes like saucers, she opened her mouth and closed it four times before she found the courage to speak. “No one’s ever thought to ask what I want to be. Maybe never in my life. I’m not sure how to…”
“The truth as it exists in your heart, Dorothy Mae.” Isaiah beamed, finally feeling some semblance of connection to her.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
Isaiah held his palm to the sky. “You have my word.”
She leaned back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling, allowing herself, for the first time, to slouch. “I want to fly.”
Isaiah didn’t laugh, not even a little. He did, however, sit back on his bed and lean in close to her. “That’s the Dorothy Mae I want to hear about. Tell me everything.”
Then she stood to her feet, shedding her posture completely. “I don’t care how I get up there, Isaiah, I just want to be as close to the clouds as possible. Is that dumb?”
“I think this is the first not-dumb thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“Hey!” she shouted playfully.
“It’s the truth,” he said, equally spirited. “All that talk about the weather and dinner parties. That’s dumb. But this? This is quite the opposite. This is the talk of a woman whose more than the weather or who sits where at the dining table. More than fringe and feathers. This, dear, is the talk of a dreamer.”