Patience thought about murder more when she was alive. Between the countless episodes of Snapped and LifeTime movies she watched with her mother, she supposed that she thought about it more often than she maybe should have. Even so, it was one thing to think about death in terms of a show; curled into the couch with a bowl of popcorn warming her lap, it was easy to place blame on one person as it was to do so for the next until the culprit, if there was one, was exposed. It was entertainment - nothing more, nothing less.

Her first brush with murder came in the form of neighborhood boy. She’d never found a reason to speak to him herself, but she learned that his name was Tresean Young from her mother. Shanice always pronounced the name with repugnance, as if it were coated in a layer of shit that rubbed off on her lips as it passed through. Patience heard it often when she came home to her mother standing in the front room, glaring out of the windows onto the street with the telephone cord wrapped around her finger.

The boy had at least five years on her eight. Housed just one street over, by the time she returned home from school, she could more often than not hear his voice in addition to several others dancing out of the mouth of the alley that connected the two streets. Long after the last time she saw him, there were two things that she remembered about him.

The first was that he was the tallest boy in his group. His gangly limbs were comically long compared to his torso. He wore the same navy blue polo and tan khaki pants uniform that his friends did, but the bottoms of his pants ended just above his white socks, exposing a strip of brown skin that was always ashy. The second was his laugh; it was a hearty thing, high-pitched and jouncing. If he ran out of sound when he found something especially funny, his shoulders would continue to shake as tears collected in the corners of his squinty eyes. It was such an ugly laugh that she couldn’t help but wish that she knew the cause of it, couldn’t help but take notice when she didn’t hear it anymore.

Patience developed a routine. She crept onto the bus just as the older kids began to set up shop towards the back. If she found them perched on the edge of the sloping seats, she knew that as soon as the bus’s engine roared to life she would have to endure countless rounds of Tarzan the Monkey Man and Slide Baby. Tucking herself into a corner in the seat just behind the driver, she tried to doze as she committed the songs to memory just in case they one day asked her to join. When she was teetering on the edge of unconsciousness the ride ended and she was being handed off to her father, who accompanied her on the short walk home from the bus stop. He kissed her forehead, reminded her to do her homework, and was gone. All for the better; the boys usually appeared around three-thirty.

Her mother’s voice floated from her station at the kitchen sink where she stood elbow deep in gray, soapy water. Patience ducked beneath the strained landlord cord that bisected the kitchen doorway and all but threw herself at the kitchen table, muttering a greeting just loud enough to be heard. She rushed to finish her homework, all the while keeping an ear out for the telltale whooping. Once the last equation was finished and the one and only i in her name dotted, she fixed her eyes on her mother’s back and waited for her to hang up. If she was unlucky, the conversation went on beyond the street lamps’ illumination and she went to bed crestfallen. Other times, she finished her work in unison with her mother’s conversation.

“Mama, can I go play outside?” She’d ask.

Her mother’s mouth would twist, pucker, and she would huff, but Patience knew this for what it was; a surrender.

“Okay.” And Patience would all but trip over her good shoes to get to the front door, but her mother’s voice would always carry after her. “Make sure I can see you from that porch. And stay away from them damn hood rat kids in the alley. You are a young lady, you do not need to be playing with them boys.”

She deflated, but nonetheless remained on the porch. From the top step, she watched day after day as the boys streaked up and down the street on bikes that were either too small or too big, tossed grenades full of water at one another, and wreaked general havoc on the neighborhood as young boys with no one to police them did. They laughed at anything and everything, radiating a slap happy joy that she felt separated her from them much more than the final step of the porch that she wasn’t allowed to cross.

The routine deviated when Florence Young broke up with her boyfriend. His name circulated the phone lines often enough, though Patience never learned it. Instead, Shanice referred to him only as That Crazy Ass Nigga.

That particular day, her mother used the oncoming rain to keep her inside. Settled at the window with a plate of boiled hotdogs in her lap, she watched as boy after boy was gradually soaked with no parent who cared enough to call them in. Their bikes were abandoned on patches of browned, dying grass in favor of seeing who could make the biggest splash in the growing puddles, mud coating the bottoms of their khakis. In spite of the distance, Patience could distinctly remember when the gun went off because she’d never heard one clap of thunder follow so briskly after another.

Three bullets, one after the other. At one, her mother jolted at the kitchen table, knocking over a large bowl of flour. The steaks inside slid out, flopping onto the wood. At two, she barreled into the living room and told Patience to go hide under her bed; she’d protested, squeezing her fist until the bread wrapped hotdog inside began to burst through her fingers. It was bad enough that she hadn’t been allowed to go out to sit; now she was being put to bed early?

“You must think fat meat ain’t greasy, girl. What I tell you about,” Her face was pinched in as she gripped Patience’s elbow, wrenching her off the floor with such strength that her feet were momentarily suspended in the air. “not listening when I tell you to do something?”

Her shoulder ached even when it was allowed to settle back into place. Bottom lip trembling, Patience shoved the remaining half of her hotdog into her mouth as she scrambled to do as she was told.

On the third, her mother went about turning off all the lights in the house in a frenzy. Up until the moment that she joined her, Patience counted each heartbeat as it pounded in her ears. Underneath her bed, time seemed to distort. Too much had passed since her mother yelled at her, but so little that she was able to convince herself that if she just gave her just a bit more that surely, she would return. Among week old dirty clothes and clumps of dust, she bit her lip to hold back frightened tears. When the door finally opened and her mother slipped in crouched low to the floor, the pressure behind her eyes overwhelmed her. Cramming herself into the tight space, Shanice allowed Patience to fit herself into the curve of her body. Only then did she eat the rest of the hotdog, swallowing it in jagged chunks that hurt going down.

“Baby I need you to be quiet now, okay? I know it’s scary but we got to be quiet.” Her hand was gentle on Patience’s head as she smoothed down her hair. When she continued to snivel into her neck, her mother’s touch became laden with tension, leaving a dull, tingling pain behind on the back of her skull. She breathed in a shuddering breath of her mother’s scent, using it to steady herself. They stayed that way for an eternity, right up until her father came for them.

For days after, he was home much more often. Although she wouldn’t learn why until much later, Patience delighted in coming home to him. It was a much needed reprieve from her mother, who wore the same pinched face whenever she looked at Patience.

The next time she encountered Tresean was after his mother’s funeral had already taken place. She’d stared at him as he passed her home, alone with his head tucked neatly between his shoulders. His face then reminded her of a dead lightbulb. He’d been the one to sit with his mother as her blood oxidized in their already grimy carpet. He did so for half an hour before an ambulance maneuvered it’s way onto their narrow street, that Crazy Ass Nigga long gone. 

Her mother eventually commandeered Patience’s place by the window. Day after day she watched him return home from school, his name sopping with pity as she stated his mother should have known better than to trust a man so unwell. But what exactly did unwell look like? Patience wanted to ask, but to do so would have been to oust herself as eavesdropping on grown folks’ talk, and so she was left to wonder. When Florence’s Heaven intercepted Patience’s, the stress that she’d worn in life was a shawl wrapped securely around her shoulders.

She asked about her son. Patience lied and said that he was doing just fine.

As far as she was concerned, the shoes that hung from the power lines changed in color and the names in the obituaries were different, but the storyline was altogether the same.

For the first 24 hours after her death, Patience clung to her murderer as if she were his second skin. She could still feel the warmth that her body left behind on his fingertip and attached herself to it, even as it faded. She called his name in hopes that she had imagined what he had done to her, that he could see her as she shadowed his steps.

He ignored her, just as he’d done when she was alive.

Upon first inspection, Darius was so overwhelmingly typical that Patience hadn’t even noticed him. Even on the day that he’d taken her life, there was nothing outwardly untoward about him; he looked nothing like the people her mother sometimes pointed out on the street, the ones who shambled more than walked and looked at you but didn’t really see you. He was just the sort of boy she knew her parents would, and did, like. His existence stopped them from asking questions.

At the beginning, she found herself asking all the worst what ifs. What if she never dated Darius to begin with? Would he still somehow have found himself at Havana that day? What if she had taken her shots a little slower? Would she have had to go to the bathroom so soon? What if she had sucked it up and gone to dance? Would he have given up? When she thought about it too hard, even as Owl scolded her for it, she could feel the brightness of the porch melting away into the dusky club bathroom.

She could hear the distinct sound of the bathroom turn lock clicking into place and a knot would lodge its way into her throat. At first, she hadn’t even realized it was Darius; all she’d seen was his broad stature, and the fear that dropped her stomach into the soles of her feet was generalized.

“So this really how you gon’ do me after four years together, huh? It’s just that easy for you?” Recognition had slammed into her then; she hadn’t heard that voice for at least a year by then, but some things just weren’t forgotten.

He stood in front of the only exit, just barely outside the reach of the dim bathroom lights; he was at least twelve feet away from her if not more, but she was sure that it was his breath that she felt on the back of her neck. The way she looked at him only served to infuriate him further; he hadn’t done anything yet, so why did she look so scared? It would’ve been better if he had screamed. Cursed. Showed any semblance of anger. Instead, anything he felt was obscured behind a mask of calm. It was one of the things she hated most about him; that mask made it impossible to know when the violence would seep out of the cracks in his skin to poison those around him.

Her skin crawled from the feel of his hands on her body; calloused, rough. Unforgiving. The faint smell of urine, cheap hand soap, and his particular odor permeated the air, mixing to create a concoction that nearly caused her to vomit up the few drinks she had consumed. He lifted her by her thighs, forcing her to sit on the counter. The water there soaked into her dress.

This ain’t happening. It just ain’t. A mantra. Her knees locked together, but the defense lasted only as long as it took him to hook his fingers into the crevice between her legs. They viciously dug into the soft tissue there, dispatching whispers of pain into her nervous system as he pried them apart. There was no more club Havana. Only him, surrounding her, making the room smaller and smaller. From that point on, she was no longer the one that any of it was happening to.

She was somewhere else, a shapeless spectator watching herself push those hands away over and over, watching how quickly he got fed up. His palm was open and her face stung. The tears came then, hot and pointless. Someone pushed against the bathroom door, either too inebriated or too frantic to try the handle. His hand again, gripping the lower half of her face. 

It didn’t matter. Any sounds that she had were buried deep, beyond her reach. He waited until the voices had faded back into the music to slide his hands underneath her dress, bunching it just above her hips. His lips and teeth against her neck, his hips much too wide for her legs to accommodate comfortably. Something tore, and then he was inside her. Pushing, pushing, pushing, sweat dripping from his brow onto her shuddering body beneath him. Her nails dug into the skin on his forearms, leaving behind little red half-moons that bled. Her stomach emptied itself onto his shirt, and she felt his fingers wrap around her throat as if to cut off the leak from the source.

Too enveloped in himself, he was unaware of the moment that the thin cord that tethered her soul to her body snapped, unable to watch her as she floated away. In all of the time that was left afterwards, she debated with Owl that he was what unwell looked like.

She avoided him as best she could. At first, it wasn’t hard; he didn’t seem to want her attention. He appeared only every so often, maybe on the corner at the end of the street or on the porch of one of her neighbors, though she couldn’t say exactly how frequent that was. Time was more alive than she was, crawling sluggishly over her feet and slithering between her toes. There was never anyone that came out to shoo him off of their property. 

The only other person she’d come across was Florence, but she’d seen her once and never again. The woman had waddled around the same corner that Owl liked to loiter on and hadn’t come back since. The two of them had nothing to talk about. Even so, she had been happy to have the company.

Patience spent as much time as she could on earth. She kept expecting to feel something, though she wasn’t exactly sure what; maybe a gentle tugging like a child’s hand on her sleeve, urging her back to the afterlife. Someone would whisper in her ear. Leave the living to the living, Patience. And she would listen, not because she wanted to, but because to be ignored and walked through as if she were never there to begin with took its own toll. She did her best to send the thought away, but it gradually pushed its way to the front of her mind until it was all that she could think about. 

Why me?

It always came with a spoonful of guilt; to ask that question was inevitably to wish her fate upon someone else. Logic wasn’t enough to stop it. She needed something else to distract her, and that was what drove her to speak to Owl again.

It was drizzling, as it often did there. The rain was comfortably warm, first penetrating through her fro, deflating it before it began to water her scalp as she crossed the street to where he sat. Miss Keysia’s rickety wood porch moaned beneath her weight as she took the steps; even when she broke into his line of sight, he continued to stare through her. She stood awkwardly, her arms at her sides. Still, he said nothing.

Something like glue bound her lips together. She couldn’t be the one to break the silence. He carried on ignoring her, his fingers playing with the holes in his jeans. They weaved in and out of the frayed fabric as he tapped his foot in rhythm to a song she couldn’t hear, his lips shaping the words in rapid procession. There was no doubt in her mind that he was doing it on purpose. It was too short a time before her irritation outgrew her pride. Her mouth opened and acid came out. 

“Owl.”

She half-expected him not to respond. Maybe it was just some look alike, crafted with his face and granted the knowledge of Owl’s mannerisms in an effort to remind her that she was being punished. They were familiar in all of the wrong ways, and it would have made sense; death as she’d known it thus far was too inconsequential. She almost felt as if she’d been let off the hook with a slap on the wrists. There had to be something, someone there to tip the scales.

Once called, he lifted his gaze to meet hers, as if he were thawing. Smiled that smile full of gold as if it were only yesterday they’d last seen each other.

“You one stubborn ass girl, you know that? I been here for how long and you just now speaking? Rude ass.” He stood but kept his distance, his eyes drinking her in. They stood at the same height, and Patience struggled to maintain eye contact. “I ain’t gon’ lie, I been checking in on you and to see you here now…” He trailed off, his smile dropping. “Shit happens, I guess. But I’m glad you finally speaking to me.”

She didn’t understand anything that he was saying. Each word seemed to reach her ears only after being put through several layers of white noise. It made her angry, tinting the grey confusion she felt into a muddy, rust brown.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Her fingers flexed at her sides.

He stepped past her and she caught a whiff of stale cigarettes and artificial sugar. She was sure that he was leaving. Maybe all he wanted was to show himself just long enough to tantalize her into speaking to him first just to show her that he could, and then he planned to leave. It wouldn’t have surprised her; he could be vindictive when he wanted to be.

He stopped on the sidewalk when she hesitated for too long. His white shirt began to darken, clinging to his chest. It exposed a light outline of his ribcage, and Patience could just barely make out the black ink of his Gateway Arch tattoo etched into the skin of his upper arm beneath the fabric.

“Look now, this ain’t my Heaven. It’s yours, and I ain’t tryna stay out in the rain. Either you gon’ invite me in and give me some noodles or we ain’t talking.” She hesitated and he kissed his teeth, snapping his fingers. “Come on already. I may have all day but that don’t mean I’m tryna spend it all here.”

Next Chapter: 7