anything but white when they looked into her gray eyes.
Turning her back on stranger-to-stranger intimacies meant severing her links with blackness in a way that rang with a finality Marie had never intended. Her brothers would never have found themselves in such a situation. Since their skin and hair didn’t advertise their blackness, they broadcasted their cultural allegiances with cornrows and cut-up eyebrows, clothing that aligned to black trends and postures adopted to interrupt assumptions of whiteness. Marie’s relationship to blackness was a little more complicated. She had no self-hatred and needed blackness in her life to feel whole, but she only needed it as part of her general ambiance rather than her inner circle.
By the time Marie was an adult, her closest friends were white. In a way, choosing them as home had been all her doing. In another way, her closeness to them had been thrust upon her. What was she to do when her parents sent her to a prestigious boarding school on a riverbank in Nowhere, Louisiana? Between her and the five other black people in the school, there wasn’t much comfort to be had. How could she not convert?
After those first flushes of friendship all those years ago, it had become a lifelong habit—forming kinship with white people. At home there was no conflict. Her friends knew exactly what her lineage was. But in New York, she felt trapped. She’d had to work so hard at building intimacy, that when she finally made a friend, she was skittish. She would torture herself for hours waiting for the right moment to reveal her racial makeup, but no matter how many perfect moments she identified, her certainty dissolved the second she opened her mouth. She knew true intimacy would not come without complete honesty, but there was a stubborn hysteria within that refused to yield to truth; a fierce doubt that convinced her that the truth was not worth the risk.
Before she became the New York Marie—the Marie who pressed her hair, wore stilettos, and favored taxi cabs—Marie had an encounter that would have destroyed her had she not packed it away in a tight compartment and left it suffocating in the dark crevices of forgetting. Had she been able to remember the incident, she would have convinced herself that it was nothing more than a hallucination induced by physical exhaustion and emotional fatigue. For when she was newly arrived, the city’s density had frazzled her. She was constantly falling asleep in taxi cabs, on friends’ couches, and frequently, on the subway. Whenever she awoke she always felt interrupted, disoriented, vulnerable.
During the hour leading up to the encounter, she had fallen asleep on her way home from work. She woke with a start—irritated with herself for having fallen defenseless in public—and looked around the subway car. When she saw that she was completely alone, an electric bolt of fear jolted away all vestiges of sleep. She jumped to her feet and walked to one end of the subway car. She peered through the glass on the door. When she saw that the next car was full of people, she exhaled in relief.
She stumbled back to her seat, looking around for a sign indicating what subway line she was on. All the spaces where there should have been signs were blank. She twisted around in her seat to peer through the windows. She could see the dark walls of the subway tunnel whizzing by, but there were no station names to orient her.
When the subway car started to slow, Marie finally saw a station slide into view. She squinted, working to make out the station’s name. When she read the name of the station, she cursed. She didn’t know where she had been going, but she knew that she was far from home. She hurried over to the subway doors and prepared to exit. When the doors slid open, she could hear the tinkling of a musician plinking out notes on a steel pan. She saw people rushing across the platform and running up the stairs to the exits, but she could not move. Sweat began building under her palm as she gripped the pole. Her heart broke out into an irregular thudding, and her eyes darted around wildly. She tried to coax her legs to step off the train, but they would not obey.
Marie was still staring out onto the platform when a tone, signaling that the doors were about to close, sounded. She didn’t see a hooded figure glide onto the subway car, but she felt a vague amorphous danger panting at her back. She was held immobilized and terrified until the doors closed. Then her legs buckled, the subway jerked forward, and she lost her balance. Marie careened into a row of seats, then caught herself. She gripped the edge of a seat and struggled to sit. Moisture seeped from under her arms and between her legs. She closed her eyes, gasping, trying to force air into her lungs.
A whispering rushed past her ears and she opened her eyes. A hooded figure was sitting in front of her. She looked around at the rest of the subway car to confirm what she already knew: she was alone—locked in a speeding metal box with a stranger who radiated harm. Her body went numb as a deep chuckling rustled from the recesses of the stranger’s hood.
“I hear you got something to discard,” the hooded figure said.
It was a heavy voice, a voice that seemed to have been mangled by heavy smoking and drinking. A tingling crawled through Marie’s limbs as if they were waking from a long deep sleep.
“What?” she asked, leaning away from the stranger.
“I said I hear something’s weighing on you real heavy,” the stranger said. The stranger lifted a twisted, knobby hand and shakily pushed back the hood. It fell away to reveal old skin, gnarled with wrinkles and rough craters. There was a slash of a mouth that folded in on itself like the pleats of a discarded glove. There were two eyes: one radiating a piercing gleam, the other—midnight blue—absorbed all light. The eye with the gleam stabbed Marie with its brightness, holding her transfixed. The other eye softened the corners of Marie’s vision, turning everything but the stranger into a fuzzy haze.
At the periphery of Marie’s vision, the plastic seats and metal poles began to melt away. Marie couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw trees sprouting on either side of her. She tried to look to her right, but she found that she could not turn her head—she could only make it twitch. She tried to look to her left, but she could not release herself from the gleam in the woman’s eye.
In an instant, everything went dark. A cold breeze whipped up around her and pushed her to her feet. She crouched, shoulders hunched against an unknown danger that she could sense but could not see. She looked around her, but darkness rendered her vision useless. Slowly a soft glow began to illuminate the sky. Marie caught a glimmer reflecting off the silver hardware on her shoes. As the light grew stronger, Marie whipped her head around, scanning her environment. She saw dense bush, huge old trees with ridged bark, scraggly blades of grass growing at the edges of a dirt road. Overhead, a full moon burned dirty yellow. The hooded stranger was nowhere to be seen.
Marie was attempting to calm the thicket of thoughts ricocheting in her head when she heard an animal wail. Whether it was a cry of warning, pain, or pleasure, she could not tell. Sound exploded somewhere to her left—something was crashing through the bushes, moving quickly toward her. All thought drained from her mind, and she ran, racing down a dirt road away from the sounds. She hadn’t run far when she reached a crossing. She hesitated, then changed directions, pitching herself down the road that had crossed her path. The sound receded, and Marie relaxed enough to observe her surroundings again. But, truth be told, there was nothing to see. All around her was thick foliage, darkened by night.
Marie kept running, watching as the moon flashed in and out of view. A few feet in front of her, a groan rang out. She skidded to a stop. The groan sounded like an old tree branch cracking off its trunk, but then it tapered into a low bellow, like the moan of a large animal catching the lash. She stepped back a few paces and tried to calm her panting. When she looked down at her feet, she was surprised to find that she was standing on another crossing. She allowed herself the luxury of considering which road to take, but even as she weighed her options, she knew it didn’t matter which direction she chose. She could not walk, run, or crawl her way out of this forest—she was trapped.
As soon as she had admitted to herself that she was ensnared, the hooded stranger appeared in the distance. Marie glanced over her shoulder as if checking to see if a magic escape hatch had sprung up behind her, but she knew exactly what she would see when she looked around: no lights, no houses, no people, just the shifting dark greens of dense bushes. She contemplated jumping off the path, but the rustling and grunts escaping the thick foliage were frightening. A memory flashed through her mind of tottering around the bayou with a tear- streaked face, certain a hawk would swoop down and carry her away. She had heard the story for years—how she had wandered out of the family yard when she was three and stumbled around the bayou alone for hours until she had been returned unscathed by a gator hunter who also happened to have an 8-foot gator in tow. She had memorized the details of the story from its multiple retellings, but had never had her own memory of being lost. But now, with fear fluttering in her chest, she remembered.
Marie heard the echo of a cough reaching out to her from afar. By the time she had shaken off her
