The Mare

Velvet

Once I heard my mom talk on the phone to this woman Rasheeda, the only black person my mom ever liked. It was when we just moved to Crown Heights, and my mom kicked Manuel out for not paying and maybe for messing with me and he’d come back pounding on the door. I heard my mom say, “It’s like there’s a hurricane and I’m sitting in my chair holding on with white knuckles.”

Now I knew how she felt. I couldn’t hear the hurricane and I couldn’t see it. But it was there and I didn’t even have a chair to hold on to. I had to ride a horse through it. I took out my phone and played my mom’s message again. There won’t be a home for you anymore. I knew she didn’t mean it, any more than she meant most of what she said. But still, her voice pulled on me and made me want to tell Ginger the truth and not compete, just go back to my mother’s hurricane.

That’s when I realized: When she said that to Rasheeda, it was only her in the hurricane. Like me and Dante were just part of the storm blowing around her with a bunch of other stuff. I turned off my phone and put it in a drawer. I took the piece of blue shell from Providence that I broke off to carry in my shirt pocket while I rode along with the sea horse and with Dominic. I took it all the way out into the field where me and Fiery Girl practiced jumping and I dropped it there. I looked up into the sky; it was cold with purple on the bottom of it. I thought the words I saw on Dominic’s chest and then I said them: “You armed me with strength for battle, you humbled my adversaries, you made my enemies run. And I destroyed them.”