Java Sparrow Press

He shields his bleeding right hand with the left one that’s left gripping the murder weapon: a bloody knife. He crushes the vines barely missing the tomatoes of his mother’s garden. His heart is beating in his mouth, the breaths come too fast, too big. This is home. He is safe now. Cairo leans against the back of his parents’ three-room wooden cabin, steadying himself. He is safe. This is home. Besides his mother’s vegetable garden, underneath the kitchen window.

Emma Ann jumps from the shadows and pushes Cairo back into the wooded wall. Her forearm sits across his neck like a bar. He’s startled, thinking he was entirely alone. He drops the blade at their feet.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name –” Emma begins, like it’s a curse instead of a prayer. Her yellow dress makes her look like a hunter’s moon. Her two braids swing like sparrows sprinting across the twilight sky.

“I cut girls.” He threatens. Hard-jawed and tight-lipped, Cairo pushes her away. He needs to find the knife. He waits for the shine of the blade to catch his eye.

Emma puts him in a headlock, after straddling his back. His growth spurt hadn’t kicked in yet, but hers had. Emma is half a foot taller than Cairo. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.”

“You think this is funny, don’t you?” Cairo tries shaking Emma off his back without further injuring his hand.

“On Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day…” Cairo flips her off his back and onto the ground on her back. It takes her breath for a moment. She licks a drop of blood from the corner of her mouth not realizing it was bleeding. “ …. Our daily bread.”

“Will you go away if I let you go?” He says, through clenched teeth, with his knee holding Emma to the ground.

“And forgive us this day our trespasses. As we forgive those who trespass against us.”

“I’m going to let you go and when I do, go somewhere else!” He jumps up, off her and away. Cairo barely avoids stepping on the cabbages. No blade still. Everything in the garden is splayed out hiding his knife.

Emma pulls her hand from near the collard greens and stands dusting the soil from her dress. The hem of her dress gets caught on shrubbery and a thread flies loose in the wind as she charges Cairo again. His back is up against the wall. He’s still looking for the blade, hoping she goes away. She’s looking for a battle he doesn’t want to engage in.

“And lead us not into temptation, Lord.” She says, before she charges.

“Fine.” He grumbles, grabbing her up before she could crash into his torso. “Is this is how you want to play it? Have it your way!” He throws her to the ground and pins her there, showing his strength. “I’m tired. I need to bathe.”

“But, deliver us from evil.”

“THIS is not funny, Emma! Do you want me to make you bleed tonight? I can.” She grabs him by the neck, when he tries to push her away. They both fall to the ground.

She straddles him, her knees on either side of his torso. Her forearm is on his barely-there Adam’s apple. Cairo moves to throw her off into the herbs of rosemary, sage, and thyme when he feels the knife at his throat. He stops moving, defeated. He never even saw her pick it up. How could she find it when he couldn’t?

“For thine is thy kingdom. And power. And the glory.” Emma finishes, clearly the victor, tattered, torn, and bloody. Cairo gives up. “For ever and ever.”

“Get off me!”

Noises come from inside the house; the unlocking of the window and hushed voices – A rifle cocks itself in the too-close background. Emma puts the blade under the bloody, dirty hem of her dress.

“If you wake the children with all your rough play, both of you will have a very long night ahead of you. And why are you in my garden?” FreedaMae waves her hand around, at all the open land. “All this land out here.”

“Sorry, Mama.” They say in unison. This is not the first time their roughhousing has gotten a reprimand from their mother, after hours.

“Who’s out there, Freeda?” They hear their father yell from the inside, the one with the rifle ready to shoot them like a thief in the night.

“Put that gun away, Deet! It’s just the twins. Emma and Cairo are roughhousing again.”

“Who win this time?” He laughs, knowingly. Cairo grinds his teeth wanting to push his sister off him still.

“Emma Ann, it look like.” Freedamae beams with pride, the same pride in her husband’s laugh. Emma always wins. “Don’t hurt your sister, Cairo.”

“Mama! I’m the one that’s on the ground. What you mean?”

“Oh, you’re fine.” She dismisses him with a wave of her hand. “Dust yourselves off before you come in. I left biscuits and gravy out for you. You’ll be fixing my garden in the morning if it needs fixing, you understand?”

“Yes ma’am.” They say together again. FreedaMae looks out at the woods, all the way to the river, and in between the trees until she senses nothing unfamiliar.

“Well, be careful out there. Someone may think you’re animals, and shoot you for a Sunday stew.” She smiles to soften the blow of her words, before she closes the window and locks the latch again.

“Amen.” Emma finishes and Cairo pushes his sister off him once he’s sure the window is closed.

“Get off me before I hurt you.” Cairo stands, and looks at the blood pooling in the palm of his hand. The blood drips onto the ground.

Emma stands and looks at Cairo’s hand. She grabs the knife from the ground, turning it over to see the blood staining it. “You find Joe, I take it.”

“Something like that.” He whispers looking at the kitchen window to make sure their mother was nowhere near it. The light from the living room fire leaves shadows of everything in the kitchen all over the wall. The yellow curtains sway like a lady slow dancing alone.

Emma leads the way to the river. They walk past the open spaces, past all the other Colored Folk houses, and to the woods. Mz Stine sits on her porch with her shotgun in her lap and a pipe hanging from her lips. Her attention ain’t on the twins. They spend most nights out running around, and wrestling. She keeps watch, just in case. The night is quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that makes it hard to sleep through. Something is coming. She doesn’t know what or when. It isn’t final yet. Whatever it is, it’s still being decided. She’s on guard, until a move is made. Her rifle is the community’s bell, if it comes to that.

Cairo and Emma walks through the woods in silence. They know these woods. All of their sixteen years have been spent learning these woods. They couldn’t get lost in them if they wanted to.

The river is the boundary between where the coloreds live and where the whites live. The poor whites live on the other side of the river, and the landowners and wealthy whites live further away from the river and in the town.

Emma sits on the ground and covers her knees with the hem of her dress and notices the thread, the dirt, and the blood. She wipes at it before she realizes it’s stained. She puts the blade on the ground in front of her. The cool air and the waters’ mist chills her bare arms. She looks up at Cairo who’s contemplating and looking off into something she can’t see. She glances at the crescent moon in an eggplant-colored sky.

The night is young and alive. So is her brother that she tries hard to keep a watch over.

“If you did what I think you did with that blade, you may as well bury it in the bottom of the river. Where’s Joe?”

“In the bottom of the river.” Cairo whispers. His hurt and anger are still in his bracing shoulders, boiling in the blood under his skin. “They hung him, Em. They hung him like a hog they were bleeding; they dropped him into dead man’s river. He’s laying at the bottom of Jemisin’s Creek anchored to the land, like a sunken ship.”

… … …tbc