Genre(s): Epic/High Romantic Fantasy. Sword & Sorcery.

Synopsis: A king’s mage and her knight stand on the edge of retirement. One last quest before twenty years of service and silent longing finally end. When they enter a door feeding on three winters of loss, they must fight through waves of crystallized sorrow while the door’s hunger turns inward, searching for a lock. What began as a mission becomes a reckoning with devotion, sacrifice, and everything left unsaid.

Content Warnings: This story contains blood and combat violence, emotional grief (loss of loved ones and bereavement imagery), themes of self sacrifice, and forced separation/imprisonment. Please take care of yourself as you read.

Imagery: The sketches were done by me. All the images were sourced from Unsplash—a great resource for free, non-AI-generated stock photos.

A Door, A Kiss, A Stone

A mage was never without her knight, and I was never without Leo.

Even when the academies cleaved us apart for six long years, honing us into blade and flame for the kingdom, we found our way back to each other. Letters slipped through official channels. Festival leave aligned just often enough. When we reunited at last, Leo returned much as he had left: green-eyed, golden-skinned, broader now beneath his armor, but unmistakably himself. Knighthood had not stripped him bare.

The mage academy was less kind.

I had entered their halls a scrawny girl with dark hair, dark eyes, and sun-darkened skin. I emerged drained of color, as though something essential had been leeched and never returned.

I was terrified Leo wouldn’t recognize me.

The changes had come late, in my final year, when the archemages forbade us from drawing magic from the earth or imbued objects. Instead, we were restricted to our bodies. A trial meant to prove survival: that a mage cut off from all other sources could endure the pull of her own power.

For a year, I siphoned from my own vitality for every lesson and test. My hair lost its pigment. My skin paled until every freckle stood stark as a star chart. My eyes shifted to lilac—the mark of a mage fully claimed by her power. That change and the arched ears, at least, I had expected.

King’s mages drew from our knights.

When a warrior achieved knighthood, the divine marked them, granting immortality bound within a mortal body. An endless well, so long as the bond held.

Leo was my knight. And I was his mage.

And this was our last quest together.

We found a clearing on the outskirts of the village—wildflowers, rabbits, the distant sound of someone else’s celebration. Close enough to hear the revelry, far enough to go unnoticed.

Our journey had taken us through dozens of villages, where we’d been housed in the finest quarters and fed the richest foods. Leo had kissed enough maidens’ hands, and I had carved protection runes around enough crops to last a lifetime.

On the night before our final quest, we were content with only each other.

I conjured the fire; he fished. He skinned and gutted, I roasted and salted. We ate with charred greens and the last of the wine, then lay in the grass and watched the stars wheel slow overhead.

Leo had a habit of naming stars and swearing he remembered and recognized each one, no matter which sky we laid under together.

“That one,” he said, pointing through a gap in the canopy, “is Commander Lothric. You see how it just sits there, doing nothing, taking up space?”

“Stars don’t do anything, Leo.”

“Exactly my point.”

I laughed and the sound startled a rabbit somewhere in the dark. I felt the warmth radiating off Leo where our shoulders pressed together. After ten years, I knew every scar on his forearms, the exact pitch of his laugh, the way he went quiet and still when something troubled him. He’d been a little too quiet at supper.

“That cluster there,” he continued, “is Lady Sulyvahn. I’m sure you remember her.”

“Ah, yes. The one who called me decorative.”

“She meant it as a compliment.”

“Doubtful.”

I had been twenty-three then. Lady Sulyvahn had regarded me the way she’d regarded the flower arrangements: pleasant and purposeless. “She asked if you’d tired of me yet.”

Leo turned his head. “What did you say?”

“I told her I was a King’s mage and had no interest in her opinion on my ornamental value.” I paused. “Then I set her sleeve on fire.”

The laugh that came out of him was wondrous—the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him seem briefly like the boy he’d been before knighthood.

In thirty-three days, we would collect our commendations and our formal release from the crown, and Leo would be free. Not free as I understood it—solitary, wandering, as was typical for mages—but free to settle. To choose a place and a life and a wife whose eyes were some ordinary color.

He was thirty. Well-made and beloved everywhere we traveled.

Somewhere in the last decade, I had made the quiet, catastrophic mistake of building my world around someone I could not keep.

“Tegan.”

His voice had shifted. I turned and found him already watching me.

“You’ve gone somewhere,” he said.

“I’m here,” I said. “Always.”

He seemed to consider this. Above us, Commander Lothric burned on, indifferent and unhelpful.

“Tell me about the door,” he said.

I exhaled, welcoming the distraction. I pulled my satchel close and withdrew the wax-sealed documents I’d been given in the capital.

“The village calls it the Grief Door,” I said. “There are variants across old records. A threshold that opens in places of concentrated loss. Battlefields, plague towns, execution sites. This one appeared three winters ago, when most of the village’s fishing boats went down in a storm.”

“And it’s been open since?”

“Getting wider, from what the reports say.”

I turned one of the pages over. The sketch of the door was crude: a door standing free in the dark, the gap filled with simple black. The kind of black that meant the artist hadn’t known how to draw what they’d actually seen. Or perhaps, they were too afraid to.

“The door thrives on grief, then on fear,” I said. “And that village has been feeding it for years.”

Leo reached over without looking and tucked a strand of hair from my face the moment it fell across my eye. His fingers grazed my forehead, a gesture so natural he likely didn’t know he’d done it.

“Can you seal it?” he asked.

The truth came first: I don’t know. Then, another truth: something like this had sealed a mage in the capital sixty years ago, and she was probably still in there. I remembered the archive mage who had said only that he hoped, when the time came, we’d face it together

“Yes,” I said instead.

Leo didn’t believe me. “Tegan.”

“It’s our last quest. I’m not going to make it dramatic.”

“You’ve been dramatic since you were nine years old and told me my sword form was ‘functionally tragic.’”

“It was functionally tragic.”

He huffed. “I am the most decorated knight in the kingdom.”

“And I’ve been correcting you for decades. You’re welcome.”

He smiled, and it was the kind that arrived in quiet moments and stayed too long. I made myself look at the stars.

“After this,” he said.

“After this,” I agreed.

Neither of us said what came next, but I ached to know—to ask and have him really answer. What will you do? Where will you go?

To freedom, he always said.

Most would think a king’s mage and knight had all the freedom on the continent, but rising in rank only brought more chains. Longer assignments, farther quests, and the unspoken rule that we should never cross the sea. We were permitted everything except the one thing that mattered.

Lying beside each other under the stars, Leo and I were playing at freedom.

I turned to look at him. He had already fallen asleep, his breath deep and even, his jaw working. The firelight catching the planes of his face.

I tucked in closer, nudging his arm until, reflexively and without waking, he made room for me. I curled against his side and held on.

So many nights Leo had held me this way: for warmth, for comfort. So many nights I had wished for it to be something more but talked myself back from the edge of it because wanting was one thing, and asking was another, and losing him entirely was the thing I could not survive.

I laid my head on his chest, listened to his heartbeat, and pretended one final time that in the morning we could choose differently.

The fire burned down to coals. The stars moved. Leo slept.

I stayed awake and watched over him, letting myself want the things I would never say.

***

We found the door at the base of a cliff, tucked between a crystal blue grotto and a shelf of black-packed sand. A simple arch of rotting wood, barnacled and framed in iron gone orange with rust. It blended almost perfectly with the cliffside. Easy to miss, until you felt it.

The door stood ajar, just wide enough for us to slip through. The crash of waves muffled the sound drifting through the gap—a low, discordant hum, almost like voices trying to remember a melody they’d once known and all beginning at different points in the song.

Leo pressed his palm flat against the wood and shoved.

The door didn’t move.

After a long moment of straining, he dropped his hand and looked at me with the expression of a man who has done something foolish and was choosing to frame it as experimental.

“Didn’t hurt to try,” he said.

“My pride is wounded for you,” I replied.

I laid my palm against the wood as he had but didn’t push. I stilled, closed my eyes, felt the grain beneath my fingers, and listened for the shape of the loss underneath.

It found me instead.

Something seized my heart like a fist. I gasped—

“Tegan!”

Leo’s arms were around me before I hit the sand, pulling me back and locking me against his chest.

The vice around my heart yielded. But the images didn’t stop.

Me. Younger. A hand closed over my wrist. A stolen loaf in my hand. No magic in my blood, no name. Just a hungry girl who’d made a bad decision and gotten caught.

The shopkeeper’s face above me, red and furious. A cleaver raised.

I had imagined, in that suspended moment, a life without that hand. Everything it could not do. Everything I would never write, never catch.

And then: a collision. A body slamming into the shopkeeper’s gut—reckless, headlong, graceless. A boy. Brown-skinned, green-eyed, slightly dazed from having used his skull as a weapon.

“Grab the loaves. Run!”

We ran until our feet bled. We stopped only when we found water and had nowhere left to go. Then we ate. Everything we’d stolen, together, and we did not speak for a long time, and it was the most comfortable silence I had ever known.

Since that day, bread had always tasted like Leo.

“Tegan?”

I came back to the beach. Leo’s arms around me, his heartbeat fast at my back.

“Why would a door of endings show me a beginning?” I heard myself say.

I tilted my head back and found him already looking down at me. His eyes were wet.

“Let’s turn back,” he said, voice nearly swallowed by the waves. “Find a boat. Abandon this quest. You and me, let’s claim our freedom now.”

His words landed like an arrow finding its mark, and I wanted—gods, I wanted—to say yes.

But I saw what came after. The endless looking over our shoulders. The sea only carrying us so far before the kingdom’s reach found us. Another pair of mage and knight, sharpened for pursuit, sent to make an example of their predecessors.

I pulled free and got to my feet. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m fine.”

I waited until I felt his shadow fall alongside mine before I faced forward.

“Did you see it too?” I asked.

A beat, then: “The day we met.”

My breath iced in my throat. What did it mean?

Leo’s hand moved to the waystone that hung on a strip of leather at his throat. A knight’s last resort: one use, any destination in the world. Mages didn’t need them; we could draw enough power to move ourselves across the world, if we had a knight willing to give it. The cost of that kind of magic was enough to kill the man who gave it.

I had never done so and I never would.

“Stay behind me,” he said. “Just in case whatever that was happens again.”

I could have argued. In any other circumstance, I would have. But this was Leo offering what he had to give, and I had thirty-three days left to let him give it.

I nodded and tucked in close at his back.

We walked through the door together, and the moment we crossed the threshold, I lost the sound of the sea.

All sound turned inward. My blood. My heartbeat. My breath. The other side of the door was cold to the bone. Each step felt like walking through a web spun from ice, the strands catching at my face and hands then dissolving before I could be sure they were real.

A few paces in, I knelt and pressed my palm to the ground, searching for life.

Nothing. The ground was silent. Absent.

I rose and wiped my palm on my tunic then looked at Leo.

He was staring past me; his face emptied of everything except the specific dread I had only seen on him twice before. Once when I’d nearly drowned in the Suze River, and once when fever took me in Bramblecroft and wouldn’t let go for six days.

It was the face he wore when his options were running out.

“The door,” he said.

I turned.

It was gone. Behind us, nothing but tunnel stretching into black. What had felt like three steps had become an hour’s worth of dark, as though the space had unfolded while we weren’t looking. Ahead, more of the same. Endless. Lightless.

Except, there was light. Faint, sourceless—

Crunch.

Snap. Scuttle.

The sound came from ahead. Then from behind. Then everywhere.

Leo raised his sword, and without looking, reached back, offering me his hand. “Take all you nee—”

Our fingers brushed.

The shadows hit us like a wave.

I saw three things in the instant before I lost my footing: Leo’s palm against my sternum, shoving me clear. Claws raking through his armor as though the steel were cloth. Blood.

My head struck the dirt. I was up before the haze cleared, because there was no other choice, because Leo…

A thread of his power still burned at my fingertips, siphoned in the half-second our hands had touched. I raised my arm and threw fire into the dark.

The shadows shrieked. The darkness peeled back, writhing, and in the flare of flame I saw gold.

His armor.

“Tegan!”

Alive. That voice was full and strong and furious and it was the best sound I had ever heard.

We ran toward each other, his sword clearing what my fire didn’t, my fire burning what his sword couldn’t reach. We met in the middle.

Up close, I smelled his blood before I could see the wound. Whatever had struck him had torn clean through the steel, through the chainmail beneath.

“I’m well,” he said, and cupped the back of my head and drew me close until our foreheads touched. His eyes moved over me. “You are too,” he murmured, softer, almost to himself.

I gripped his wrist and turned my mouth to the inside of it to leave a kiss against his pulse before I could think better of it.

“I think I’d like to turn back now,” I said.

He laughed—and the blood staining his teeth knocked the breath from my chest. He turned before I could say anything about it and faced forward.

“All doors have an exit. We’ll find it.”

I looked at the stubborn set of his shoulders and understood that arguing would cost us time we didn’t have. I laced my fingers through his then called flame into my free hand.

We pressed on.

I had faced spirits before—marsh-wraiths, ancestral-haunts, pale and mournful things that lingered to people and places they couldn’t let go of.

These were not souls. They had no center, no self. They were splinters: shards of sentiment the door had swallowed, sharpened, and set loose. Every fear a fisherman’s widow had carried through three winters. Every grief a child had felt standing at the waterline watching for a boat that never came. The door had taken those feelings and fractured them, the fracturing had multiplied them, and what came at us now was pain amplified nine times over.

I built a wall of flame across the tunnel’s width and felt the first splinter throw itself against it. The impact rang through me like a struck bell. I felt what it carried: a voice, the register of someone calling a name they know will not be answered. It lasted only a moment. Then the splinter burned and the feeling went with it.

The next one hit harder.

By the third wave I had stopped trying to keep them out and started simply surviving.

A man’s last morning aboard a boat that would not return. A daughter’s face, seen from the water, receding. The way a house sounded different after someone stopped moving through it.

Each splinter drove its shard into me, and the only answer I had was my magic and the refusal to let go of Leo’s hand.

We had found our rhythm by the fourth wave.

Ten years of questing made it effortless. I felt him slow a half-step and moved left without thinking, covering the gap his sword arm couldn’t reach. When a splinter came in low, he dropped his shoulder and I cast over him. When my flame guttered, his hand tightened around mine, and the warmth of his power moved through our joined hands.

A splinter found the gap where my concentration had slipped. It came through low and fast, and it didn’t bring loss—it brought longing.

I stumbled.

Leo’s arm came around my waist before I hit the ground, his sword still raised in his other hand. He held me upright and kept fighting, and I pressed my palm flat against his chest, drawing more power, before I pushed fire in a circle that drove the splinters back.

“With me?” Leo asked, without looking down.

“Always,” I said.

He released my waist. I found my footing. We pressed on.

The voices started somewhere in the fifth or sixth wave.

Stay with us, little mage.

I drove a spear of ice through the splinter and didn’t answer.

We are cold and lonely. We only want the warmth of your fire.

“You can’t have it!” I growled. Leo shot me a sideways look.

Someone must stay. The door asks for only a lock.

Those words settled alongside everything else I’d been cataloguing since we crossed the threshold. The archive mage had pressed his lips together when I’d asked how a bonded pair would approach a door this old.

Together, I’d hope.

I was beginning to understand what he’d hoped for. What he’d known.

A splinter broke through on Leo’s left. He spun and caught it on his blade and as it broke, it shed what it had been carrying: a boy’s hands, a cleaver raised, the world narrowing to one terrible point.

The day we met.

Leo felt it too. I saw the flinch move through him. He reset his grip and said nothing.

We kept moving.

The visions came in the lull between the seventh and eighth waves. I was breathing hard, reserves burning low, sweat and blood and scorched air making everything taste of iron.

And then I wasn’t in the tunnel anymore.

I was standing on a hillside in summer. Leo beside me, older—laugh lines settling deep, gray threading his temples. The sea was far below. His hand was in mine. I couldn’t see what we were looking at, but I could feel it: freedom.

It lasted only a moment.

Then: a different hillside. The same light. Leo older still, and a woman beside him I didn’t know. Two children. One with his eyes. One with hers.

The ache of it was…clean. I had always known this future was coming.

Then: Leo on one side of the Grief Door. Still. His face the way it looked when his options had run out. And me…walking away. Free. Alone. The long road ahead and no one at my back.

The door had asked for a lock, and I had known the answer the moment I felt the first splinter.

The vision broke.

I was on my knees in the tunnel. Leo was crouched in front of me, one hand cupping my face.

“Tegan.” His voice was quiet beneath the sound of the splinters regrouping. “Where did you go?”

“I’m here,” I said. “Always.”

He held my gaze a moment longer then stood, drew me up with him, and turned to face the eighth wave.

I fought harder than before. My fire ran hotter. My ice bit deeper. The lightning came faster than I could direct it and Leo moved around my magic without being told, reading the angles, trusting me not to burn him. And I trusted him. We traded that back and forth in the dark the same way we had traded his power—freely, without accounting for it.

“There.” Leo’s sword arm lifted, no higher than his waist. He was pointing ahead.

Light. A thin line of it. Outside light.

I let myself look at him then. The wound in his chest had stopped bleeding, his body already beginning its slow, stubborn work. His sword arm trembled with the effort of holding the blade. He had taken every strike meant for us both.

But he would heal. He always healed.

I kept my hand in his.

We walked toward the light, the splinters at our backs, diminished but not gone. The exit was a crack of gray light. The smell of salt reached me before we arrived, the sound of the waves hitting the shore.

We stopped just short of the threshold.

I felt the door’s magic then, as if every splinter that had passed through me left its signature on my bones and now that we had reached the end I finally had the complete tale.

The door could only be closed from the inside.

And only one of us could leave.

I understood now what the archive mage had hoped for. And what the king had arranged.

“Go,” I said.

Leo turned. He’d understood too. I could see it in his face.

“No.”

“Leo—”

“No.” His jaw had gone to stone.

“Listen to me.” I kept my voice even. “By morning, if you rest, you will heal. You can use the waystone. You’ll be halfway across the continent before the king knows we’re gone. You can find somewhere no one has heard of a king’s knight, somewhere small and quiet—”

“Stop.”

“You can have a life, Leo. A real one. Not thirty years of bleeding for a crown that just tried to lock us in here.”

His eyes changed when I said that. I watched the same calculation move through him. The same cold truth arriving. The quest with no solution. The archive mage who’d looked away.

The king had never hoped. He had arranged.

“Tegan.” My name in his mouth had always sounded sweeter than it did anywhere else.

“I love you,” I said.

The tunnel went very quiet.

“I have loved you since you ran headfirst into a shopkeeper for a girl you’d never met.” I steadied my voice through will alone. “I have loved you through years of letters and nearly two decades of quests, and I never said it because there was always going to be a tomorrow.”

Leo stared at me.

I pressed on before he could be kind in a way I wouldn’t survive. “You are going to go through that door and use the waystone, and eventually you are going to find a life worth all the years we gave away. That is what I want for you. That is the only thing I have ever wanted for you.”

“Are you finished?” he asked.

“I—yes?”

He crossed the distance in two steps, his hands finding my face. “How could you ever think I would want any life without you in it?”

My breath left me.

“Tegan.” His thumbs brushed my cheekbones. His forehead dropped to mine, and I felt the tremble in him he’d been too proud to show until now. “I have been in love with you since I watched you swipe that loaf of bread. Through every fever and every quest and every battle.” A rough, undone sound escaped him.

Then he kissed me.

I kissed him back.

It was not gentle and it was not brief and it tasted like salt and iron and twenty years of nearly, and I held onto him with both hands and let it be everything I’d been saving for.

When we broke apart, his eyes were still closed.

I memorized him. The line of his jaw. The gold of his skin even here in this lightless place.

Then I stepped back and built a wall of runes between us and the dark.

The magic came from the only place left: me. Not the earth, not Leo, just the fraying thread of my own vitality, pulled hard and woven fast. Runes flared to life along the tunnel walls, burning white-gold and pressing the splinters further back. The effort hit me like a fist to the stomach. I doubled over, retched, straightened.

The runewall held, but it would not hold long.

“Go,” I said, my back to Leo.

His hands closed over my shoulders and spun me around. His face told me everything: he was not going to make this easy. He had never once in his life done the easy thing when the hard thing was also the right one.

“Let me seal it,” he said. “Take whatever you need from me. Take all of it.”

All of it? All of him. His immortality, his vitality, the divine gift burning in his blood since the day he was knighted. Enough to seal a hundred doors. Enough to kill him.

“I won’t,” I said.

“Tegan—”

I kissed him once more—fast and fierce and before he could make another offer—then shoved him through the exit with everything I had.

He hit the black sand on the other side of the door and spun, reaching back through the gap.

“Tegan!”

I put my back to the door and pushed.

Grief doors did not want to close. They wanted to remain open and be fed, and this one had been hungry for three winters and had swallowed everything we’d given it and still wanted more. I fed it the only thing I had left: my magic. My own life.

The runewall cracked.

The gap narrowed.

I heard Leo on the other side—his voice, then the sound of him running, boots on packed sand. I did not look. I knew what I would see. Him sprinting toward me despite the wounds and the exhaustion.

I closed my eyes and thought of the clearing and the stars. Of Bramblecroft, the fever, and the look on his face when I finally woke. Lady Sulyvahn’s sleeve burning. The sound of his laugh. The way he had held out his hand in the dark, palm up and open: take all you need.

The door snicked shut.

His voice cut off like a candle going out.

I sank to my knees in the dark.

I did not have enough left in me to fight. I had known, when I started pushing, that I would not. The door took what it needed and the lock held and that was the end of it.

I had told Leo I was not going to make this dramatic. But I was, as it turned out, going to cry after all.

The tears came fast and I didn’t try to stop them. There was no reason to. The dark pressed in. The splinters moved at its edges, slower now, almost idle. The door was sealed, the price paid. Whatever came next, came next.

A warmth appeared at my side.

Something solid. Like a body, like—

I opened my eyes.

No.

Leo was kneeling beside me in the dark.

The waystone at his throat had split down the center. Two pale halves hung on their strip of leather, cracked and spent.

“Funny thing,” he said, voice rough. “I asked it to take me home and it brought me to you.”

Something in my chest broke open. “You absolute fool,” I said, barely above a whisper. “Leo, that was your one—”

“I know.”

“We’re trapped!”

“I know.”

“I sealed the door to keep you out, you stubborn, reckless, impossible—”

He pulled me into his arms.

I fought him. Briefly, with what strength I had left, which he weathered with the patience of a man who had been on the receiving end of my temper for twenty years. When I stopped, he held me tighter, his chin on my hair, his heartbeat steady.

I held on.

Behind us, the runewall’s remnants gave a low, warning groan.

“Where would I go,” Leo spoke into my hair, “without you?”

I laughed, wet and undignified. “A brothel.”

He pulled back just enough to look at me. “I’ve never paid a day in my life.”

I snorted and shoved him. He let me, grinning, and when I turned to face the darkness I felt him rise at my side.

The steel of his sword sang as he drew it.

“I hope,” he said, “you have grander plans for afterward than a brothel.”

My heart lifted. His words doing more work than he knew. “Maybe I’ll tell you.”

“After this?”

I looked at him, battered and bloodied and smiling. “After this,” I said.

The runewall fell.

We charged into the dark together.

Genre(s): Coastal/Southern Gothic Fantasy.

Synopsis: A young man trapped in a hurricane-flooded Gulf town dives into dark water to rescue a stranger and surfaces to find she isn’t human. What follows is a negotiation between two creatures stranded where they don’t belong: the siren who can’t find her way home, and the boy who’s been trying to leave his whole life. They strike a bargain—her passage for his—and discover that the thing they each needed most wasn’t a door, but someone willing to make the crossing with them.

Content Warnings: This story contains suicide ideation, near-drowning, themes of entrapment and isolation, and hopelessness. Please take care of yourself as you read.

Imagery: The sketches were done by me. All the images were sourced from Unsplash—a great resource for free, non-AI-generated stock photos.

THE SIREN SHACK

This town, uninspired as it was, left its captors with only two fates: die or flee. The thing is, fleeing was as much a fairy tale as the mermaids were.

Looked like drowning was my only option.

The town didn’t have a name worth remembering. It was a smear of salt-warped wood and bait shops pressed against the Gulf like something the ocean coughed up. We had one stoplight, two groceries, three churches, and a restaurant called The Siren Shack that was decorated with plastic mermaids the color of chewed up bubble gum.

I had worked every station that shack had to offer. Line cook, waiter, busboy, oyster shucker—once, memorably, the emcee for a six-year-old’s birthday party where I wore a foam crab suit. I had given four years of my life to the shack. I had saved every dollar that didn’t go toward keeping the lights on at my parents’ place, and I had a deposit down on a dorm room two states away and a start date for classes circled on my calendar.

I should have left a week sooner.

Hurricane Piper made landfall on a Thursday and when the water finally dropped, the only bridge out of this place had a twenty-foot gap in it like a row of missing teeth. The coast guard had bigger problems than fixing our rinky dink bridge. We were low priority and everyone seemed to know that except me.

“Felix!”

Marisol’s voice cut through the dinner rush, sharp enough to crack crab shell. She was already nodding her head toward the far corner booth. A new table. I tucked my notepad into my apron and made my way over, trying and failing to walk in a straight line.

I was born crooked. Scoliosis. In a town this small, everyone knew me as the crooked one. I was ready to be known as something else. Someone else.

I let the shift carry me the rest of the way, table to table, refill to refill.

Every day the bridge sat broken was a day closer to losing my deposit. The college had a policy, and I’d read it sixteen times now, the paragraph highlighted in yellow on a printout folded in my glovebox.

Students who fail to appear in person by the deadline forfeit non-refundable fees and their placement.

I couldn’t afford that. I couldn’t afford a lot of things.

I sat in the parking lot until the lights buzzed on and the last busboy locked up and drove away. Then I sat there a little longer, listening to the ocean push, pull, push, pull.

I started walking. Out of the lot, onto the docks, then the pier. I didn’t stop until I ran out of planks beneath my feet and my chest met the wooden rail separating me from the water.

I leaned over the edge and breathed in. Salt and brine, the same flavor that had baked into my skin so deep I wasn’t sure where the town ended and I began. I used to wonder what it would be like to smell something else—sugar or rain or fresh-cut grass. The water below was gray. The sky above was gray. Both clouded with the same haze that always settled over this place.

I didn’t want to go home. Home was my parents in their recliners, the television loud with opinions about a world neither of them had seen much of. The air thick with cigarette smoke and the specific staleness of people who had stopped trying to live.

I hung my head against the rail and let the wood take some of my weight.

Maybe I could swim across the space between the bridge and the mainland. It’d be a long swim. The rocky shores made the shallow water turbulent, the tide more vertical than horizontal. I could slip into a tidepool and drown before I got halfway across the gap.

The idea of drowning didn’t sting as much as the possibility of being stuck here.

I patted the damp rail, shifted my weight off the bad leg, and turned to go—

A piercing, frantic cry stopped me mid-whirl.

I spun back toward the water. The docks stretched out in both directions, empty, shadowed. The water lapped against the pilings.

It came again. Higher this time, splitting the air open. I turned toward it, my steps unsteady, scanning the water and the neighboring docks for machinery or an animal—

By the third wail I found her.

A girl. Tangled in netting near the end of the adjacent dock, thrashing. She screamed again—piercing and desperate and all throat—then she went under.

I was moving before she was fully out of sight.

I sprinted across the lot, hit the wrong dock first, corrected myself, found the right one. The boards groaned under each footfall. I was already digging the oyster knife out of my shorts, already not thinking about the water or the cold or the tide. I reached the end of the dock, went over the rail, and dove in.

The water hit like a slap. I surfaced once, got my bearings, and went back under. Seaweed dragged across my forearms and calves. The salt found every small cut I didn’t know I had.

I kicked toward where she’d gone under.

The netting had pulled her down, snarled around something structural. A pylon or rusted anchor line, I didn’t know. The dock light above only reached so far, but I could see her by the way she moved, the churn of her arms fighting, her mouth opening in a breathy scream.

I grabbed her shoulder and she went rigid.

I couldn’t speak between the water smacking my face, so I said it with my hand as best I could. One firm press. I’ve got you. Stop fighting.

She stilled, nodded, then I dove under.

My hands were clumsy with cold, fingers going numb at the tips, and the current kept nudging me sideways. I hooked my arm around the nearest rope and pulled myself in close and started cutting.

The netting was swollen with salt, knotted in layers. I sawed through one line and felt the tension shift but not release. There was more. I surfaced for air and went back down. Something moved against my legs while I worked. Several somethings—fish, caught the same as she was, wriggling against my shins and knees.

The tide was the real problem. Every few seconds it would drag me back a foot and I’d have to burn the effort to close it again. My legs didn’t fail me. In water, I didn’t have a bad one.

I cut through the last line and felt her come free.

We went up together, her arm in my grip, breaking the surface into the distant smell of the Siren Shack. She gasped beside me, a huge tearing sound, and I did the same. Then we were swimming.

Or she was swimming, and I was keeping up with her, which shouldn’t have been possible given the tide and the cold. But free of the rope, she moved through the water like a fish. I watched her out of the corner of my eye between breaths and told myself it was adrenaline or the current shifting.

She hit the shore before I did. I dragged myself onto the concrete ramp at the edge of the lot, rolled onto my back, and coughed until the ocean gave back what it had taken. The adrenaline left my body and my nervous system began its report of my crimes. Sore muscles, bruising, scrapes. That would be tomorrow’s problem.

I turned to check on the girl. The lot lights caught her first.

Silver.

I’d thought it was the water or the fluorescents. I thought it was salt and sand in my eyes.

It wasn’t.

Her arms were scaled from wrist to shoulder, disappearing beneath hair that was pink and fleshy and tendrilled, slow-moving even without wind, like the trailing arms of a jellyfish. Scales lined her cheekbones, crossed her collarbone, her chest. And below her hips, where legs should have been—

What the fuck.

A fish tail.

It shifted against the concrete. Wide as my shoulders. Translucent at the fin’s edge.

My mind flashed to the moment I could have made a different choice. The pier. The rail. The moment before the dive.

Maybe I didn’t make it.

Maybe the tide took me, and the rescue and the swimming and the whole ugly slog didn’t really happen. Maybe I drowned and this was whatever came next—which meant I died in this parking lot, under these lights, in this town, and still didn’t get to leave.

This was hell. And I didn’t think I deserved hell.

I almost laughed, but I didn’t get the chance. She twisted and her tail came around in a broad arc and caught me clean across the side of the head.

The lot lights went out.

***

I woke to the taste of salt and blood. My limbs cold to the bone, my chest burning where rope had bitten through the fabric of my shirt.

I twisted where I sat and felt the rope fibers bite deeper into my ribs. My fingers were numb. I blinked, felt grit rake across my eyes, and closed them again. I needed to get my bearings.

The ground beneath me was soft and soaked. Every few seconds the tide would reach me and retreat. Faint above me, the low whoosh of a car on the coast road. Not far. That was something.

I opened my eyes again and took the sting until my eyes teared up and washed some of the sand out.

Darkness, mostly. Pale strips of dock light filtered through the planks overhead. I was under one of the piers, tied to a pylon that was uncomfortably close to the waterline—the waterline that was now a few inches closer than it had been a moment ago.

I tested the rope. Nothing.

Then I saw her.

The girl from the water was standing a few feet away, on two legs now, wearing a soaked Siren Shack t-shirt. It hung heavy off her thin frame, drooping from one shoulder, skimming her upper thighs. Below the hem: legs. Or the rough draft of them. Scaled silver all the way down to webbed toes.

I caught a glimpse of a nametag peeking through her pink hair.

Felix.

I looked down at myself. My shirt was gone. She took it.

“The hell?” I said, before I could think better of it.

She put her hands on her hips and squinted at me. The dock light caught her eyes for just a second—wide yellow irises, the pupils blown and ovular, tracking nothing like a human eye would.

Goddamn fish eyes.

“What the fuck are you?” I wheezed.

Her mouth fell open, which only compounded the fish impression, and she let out a frustrated shriek before kicking a spray of wet sand into my face.

“Hey!” I caught a second kick. “Cut it out!”

“What the fuck are you?” She fired back. Her words came out strange—technically correct, but the cadence was wrong, like she didn’t quite understand what they meant but knew they were offensive when she threw them back at me.

“I’m normal,” I said, and almost laughed at myself. In this town, that word had never applied to me. But here, tied to a pylon with fish girl staring me down, I’d take it.

“You don’t look normal to me.” Her head tilted. “Bent boy.”

The words landed dead center in my pride. I was aware, suddenly and painfully, of the way I sat: the tilt of my shoulders, the jut of bone, the S of my spine, crooked against the pylon.

“Right back at you, fish girl.”

Her scales flashed, a full-body shimmer, and she lunged—only to collapse teeth-first and close enough to my ankles that I yanked them hard to my chest to avoid losing a foot.

She surfaced from the sand furious, shoved to her knees, and tried to stand again.

“Useless!” She slapped the water with both palms, scales flickering with her temper. Then she grabbed a pylon for purchase and hauled herself upright—held it for exactly as long as it took for a small wave to brush the backs of her calves—and sat back down.

I watched her, and stupidly, felt a pang of sympathy. For a body that wouldn’t do what it was meant to do, that wouldn’t obey its host.

“What’s wrong with you?” I heard myself ask.

She looked up. The yellow dimmed in her eyes, the pupils pulling into something rounder, and for just a moment she looked human enough that it softened everything else. The scales, the tendrils.

“What’s wrong with you?” she countered. More curious than cruel.

“Touché,” I sighed.

The tide moved in. I felt the water climb my chest and swallowed a surge of panic. “Look, are you going to eat me or not?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “You don’t look very delicious.”

The water kissed my collarbone. “Great. Then untie me.”

“You cut my net.”

I stared at her. “You’re welcome?”

She dragged her fingers through the wet sand, and the sharpness went out of her. “I was trying to get home.”

“By…drowning?”

“It would have returned me to where I came from.” She said, voice going distant. “I can’t find the way back.” Her eyes dropped to her legs, and something moved across her face that tugged those loose sympathy threads I was feeling for her. “I’ve been here too long.”

My mouth fell open. “You were trying to die?”

She looked up at me, and I braced for teeth, for sand in my face. Instead, she looked like she was about to cry.

I leaned my head back against the pylon and couldn’t help but feel the same urge.

The dorm room deposit. The highlighted paragraph folded in my glovebox. The way I’d stood at the pier rail with my weight pressed forward, like the ocean might have an answer I hadn’t thought to ask for yet.

“I think,” I said, almost to myself, “I understand.”

The tide pushed in. Water reached my neck.

“You are trying to get home too?” she asked, head tilting. “To the other bent boys?”

I laughed and immediately swallowed a mouthful of saltwater. I spat it out and shook my head, coughing. “No. No, I was trying to go somewhere new. Somewhere better.”

“And drowning would take you there?”

My chest squeezed at the simplicity of it. “It would have taken me somewhere.”

She went quiet. The water moved between us, and I watched her look at me the way I’d been looking at her, both of us trying to figure out who and what the other one was.

“Well, you cut the thing that would take me home,” she said.

I considered telling her there are many ways to drown, but I didn’t want to give her any ideas. I didn’t want to give her that way out, and I wasn’t sure why it mattered to me at all then.

The tide came in again and this time it lapped my chin, and I had to tilt my face toward the dock beams to keep my mouth clear.

She stood suddenly, and this time she made it—arms out, adjusting her weight foot to webbed foot—and walked toward me unevenly, like crossing a deck in rough water. She crouched at the pylon behind me, then I heard and felt the rope shift.

I exhaled as the rough rope loosened and dropped to the water then quickly scrambled away from the tide. I crawled until my torso was above water, then my legs, before I flopped onto the packed sand. Bits of seashell and seaweed bit into my back, but I was too grateful to be gulping down air.

Grateful to not have drowned. To be alive.

A shadow crossed over me, and when I opened my eyes, I found the girl—her eyes again becoming less fish-like, her hair still and less jellyfishy. In the darkness, away from the glare of the lot lights, she looked almost normal. Her corded pink hair could have been braids, her ovular irises, swallowing much of the color just dark eyes. The shine of her skin glitter or makeup.

Something about it made me…sad. Like the dream, nightmarish as it was, was fading and I’d have to go back to my car and then home and then my life.

“What now?” I asked her.

She tilted her head, studying me. “I would like to go somewhere else.”

“Yeah,” I huffed, pushing myself onto my elbows. “That makes two of us.”

She didn’t reply, only looked at me and waited as if I had all the answers..

“Where did you come from?” I asked. “Is there another way back? Another…” I gestured vaguely toward the water. “Door?”

Her eyes flicked to the tide. “There are many doors.”

“Great,” I said. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I used to, but now…”

“You’ve been here too long,” I finished for her.

She nodded.

Silence settled between us again. The tide whispered in and out, brushing the edges of where we sat.

Then she stepped closer, and I tensed.

“When I held onto you,” she said, “I was stronger. Faster.”

I frowned. “What?”

“In the water,” she clarified. “When you cut the net. I could feel more. The currents. The pull of things. It was easier to move.”

“That’s adrenaline,” I said. “Or panic.”

She shook her head. “It was you.”

I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it. “Okay,” I said slowly. “Let’s say it was. What does that mean?”

She stepped close enough now that I could see the detail of the scales along her collarbone.

“I think you have something I need.”

I let out a short breath but couldn’t grasp a reply.

“Could I borrow it?”

“Borrow what?”

“Your…energy.” She frowned at the word like it didn’t quite fit. “So, I can find my way home.”

I stared at her.

“I don’t—” I laughed, a little sharper this time. “I don’t have extra of anything, okay? I can barely get myself out of this place.”

She didn’t move or argue. She just watched me.

“Look,” I said, dragging a hand down my face. “Even if I wanted to help, I wouldn’t know how.”

She tilted her head again. “What if we shared?”

I frowned at her and waited.

The tide rolled in, then out. The sound filled the space between us for a few breaths.

“Tell you what,” I said, lighter now, almost joking. “You get me across that busted bridge, I’ll lend you whatever you think I’ve got.”

Her eyes sparkled.

“You want to cross over,” she said, a tremble of excitement in her voice.

“Yeah,” I said.

She looked past me, over the shore and through the dark lot, as though she could see the broken bridge from here.

“I can do that.”

I blinked. “You can?”

“Yes.”

A beat.

“Okay,” I said. “Then we have a deal.”

She shook her head. “A bond.”

Something in the way she said it made my stomach drop, like there were layers to the word I wasn’t seeing and should before I took another step down this path. “…What does that mean?”

She stepped even closer. Too close.

Up close, the last of her inhuman edges were fading. The scales along her shoulders dimmed, smoothing into skin. The strange tension in her posture eased. Even her eyes—those wide, wrong eyes—shifted. The pupils narrowing, rounding, the irises ambering, becoming something I could almost recognize.

Human.

Beautiful, even.

I should have looked away.

“This is how we share,” she said, softer now, eyes on my mouth.

I knew I should’ve stepped back but I found myself leaning closer. She was suddenly the other side of the bridge and I would do anything, agree to anything to be on the other side with her.

“And after?” I heard myself say.

“You help me find my door,” she said. “And I help you cross.”

It sounded simple. Too simple. But then again, so did drowning, and I’d been standing at a pier rail with my weight tipped forward not that long ago. Sharing energy, bonding or whatever she called it, seemed better.

She reached for me. Slow and careful, giving me time to pull away.

But I didn’t. I wouldn’t.

Her fingers brushed my wrist first. Cold, but soft. Careful, but affectionate.

Something shifted under my skin at the contact—a flicker, like a current finding a path—and all at once I was aware of everything: the sand caked into my hair, the rope burn across my ribs, the salt drying in the creases of my palms. And then the awareness narrowed and there was only her.

My breath hitched.

She rose on her toes and breathed into me, “Let us bond then.”

For half a second, I thought about the bridge. The dorm. The highlighted paragraph in my glovebox. The life I’d been building toward, dollar by dollar, that was supposed to be waiting somewhere past all of this.

Then I stopped thinking and met her halfway.

Her lips were cold and salty, then sweet. The flavor spread—caramel and sea salt and something underneath that was nameless—and I kissed her back before I’d decided to, my hands finding the front of her shirt and pulling her in. She came without resistance, her cold palms pressing flat against my jaw, and the sweetness kept spreading, moving outward from my mouth like warmth returning to a numb hand.

For a stretch of time, there was only the salt and the sweetness and the cold and the feel of her in my arms, and the peace of a person who has finally stopped fighting the current, letting it take them where it intended.

Something surged between us—a snap, a pull, a lock clicking open—and my chest seized.

The world tilted. Shifted. Opened.

She pulled back.

For a second, neither of us moved, then she smiled and all the inhuman parts of her rushed back in.

She took my hand. “Come, bent boy.”

Before I could ask anything else, she pulled me forward—

—and dove.

The water swallowed us whole.

I thrashed, instinct taking over, lungs locking, body screaming to get back to the surface, but her hand tightened around mine.

And something…changed.

I opened my eyes.

Shapes moved around us—currents, I realized, but not just water. Something layered inside it. Paths. Threads of gold. Pulls I could suddenly feel as clearly as my own heartbeat.

Doors.

My legs kicked to keep up with her, suddenly strong and even. No imbalance. No bad side.

I laughed, or tried to, but it came out as a rush of bubbles.

We dove deeper. The threads flashed brighter. Her skin shone silver. Then, so did mine.

The salt in my mouth turned sweet. Not sugar-sweet. Something crisper. Brighter. Like air after rain, or the smell of somewhere I’d never been but had been reaching toward my whole life.

I drank it in and squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back.

And for one impossible, perfect moment, I didn’t want to leave.

I woke up choking. Air slammed into my lungs, and I jerked upright with both hands pressed to my chest, wheezing until my ribs ached.

Water sloshed at my ankles. I smelled the sea and the stale cherry air freshener in my car—

I was in my car.

I froze and looked through the windshield.

It was early morning. The street lights were still on, throwing orange-yellow cones of light across the asphalt. Everything inside was soaked—the seats, the dash, the steering wheel—dripping like the whole thing had just been hauled up from the bottom of the Gulf.

My shirt clung to me, soaked. I pressed a hand flat against my sternum and felt my pulse—

My nametag was gone.

The ocean flashed behind my eyes: the girl, the currents, the threads, the way my spine gave into its shape and I wound through the tide like a snake.

Then it slipped, the way dreams do when you try to remember them.

I twisted in my seat.

The bridge loomed behind me. Still broken, the concrete ending in mid-air.

“…How?”

Help me find the door. I’ll help you cross.

My hands shook as I turned the key. The engine groaned, coughed, then failed. I tried again. It sputtered.

On the third try, it caught.

A startled laugh that also could have been a scream burst out of me.

I threw the gear into drive and floored it.

The town fell away behind me, slow at first and then faster, the road opening up. I rolled the window down and the air rushed in. Salt and brine, strong at first, then it started to thin, slowly replaced with the stench of ozone and wet grass. I breathed it in over and over, trying to mark the exact moment it stopped tasting like the town and started tasting like somewhere else.

I extended one hand through the open window, fingers slicing through the wind with glee—

Something flashed along the back of it.

Silver.

There then gone.

I yanked my hand back in the car and laid it atop the steering wheel for a better look.

My stomach pitched as I watched a single silver scale slip beneath my skin.

I stared at my hand until my eyes blurred. It looked like my hand. Felt like mine. Whatever had surfaced had vanished before I could grasp it, slipping away as quickly as the dream. I didn’t know if that meant nothing or everything or something I wasn’t equipped yet to understand.

She’d said I had something she needed. I wondered if she’d left something in return.

I shook out my hand, let out a slow breath, and rolled the window up.

Then I kept driving and never looked back.

Eight of these stories were already written by the time I returned to the project, drafted in graduate school as part of my thesis. The other two were rough, never workshopped, and ultimately cut from my final thesis. Writing those was particularly hard. I hadn’t worked in this genre in so long, and the urge to sneak in a spark of magic or a goblin was very, very (VERY) hard to resist. And yet, finishing them was a way back to a medium I once loved: the short story.

These pieces reminded me how much I enjoy writing toward a single moment. Working on Crown allowed me to revive one collection while opening the door to another.

If you never studied writing in academia, you may not know how much emphasis is placed on short stories over long-form fiction. Sarah J. Maas spoke about this on Call Her Daddy, recounting professors who pushed her toward shorter fiction and, memorably, one who scoffed at her desire to write fantasy. When I heard that, my mind immediately flashed to a similar moment from my freshman year. It went a little something like this:

If eighteen-year-old me had been half as vocal as I am now, I would have told her:

1. Twilight (which is clearly what she meant) may not be perfect (and there’s a reason I refuse to reread it, knowing the magic that possessed my teenage self has surely expired), but it was an awakening for a lot of young girls. Exciting, escapist, and something to bond and gush over. Let us have it.

2. Don’t dunk on erotica. Allow us our cliterature! Do not yuck our yum!

3. Your essay about wandering in a desert put me to sleep, so your opinion holds no power here.

But—as I so often do—I digress. Back to the point!

The short story makes practical sense in academia: if all twenty students in your cohort submitted 300+ pages of a novel for weekly workshop, everyone would be drowning. And yet, novel writing wasn’t just discouraged, it was practically forbidden. I spent six years writing short stories, only to discover when I tried to query them that very few agents represent short story collections. It’s not a popular medium. I wrote Crown as interconnected stories because I love long-form fiction, and writing moments from a bigger world kept me tethered to that love.

In college, I wrote some fantastical shorts, but distilling big worlds into 3,000 words was a challenge I wasn’t ready to tackle. Until now!

A new short story project

For my next project, I’m presenting a series of romantic, fantastical shorts, each plucked from the worlds of my larger (unpublished) works, offering a taste of the fiction I write now.

Three things led me here:

First, revisiting the Crown series. You know that story already.

Second, the Forest & Fawn (now Woodland Writers) romantasy short competition. When I first heard about it—write a 2,000-word romantasy story in a week—I thought: impossible. Then I started brainstorming. Characters and moments bubbled up. Ideas multiplied. I eagerly waited for the prompt to drop, and the moment it did, I started writing. The words poured out…and then I remembered the word count and had to furiously edit back down.

When I finished, I was energized. I wanted more! I joined another contest (Writing Battle) and hunted for others. I kept going, and eventually, more stories poured out of me.

Third, Dipsea. In graduate school, I applied to write for a company called Dipsea that produced erotic, romantic audio stories. I listened to three stories on a free trial and was immediately enthralled. This was before “smut” had its cultural moment and those of us who loved it came out of the closet. I had read plenty of books with love scenes, but I realized many were written by men and from a male perspective—no yearning, no emotional weight behind the intimacy. Think Neal Stephenson, Stephen King, Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson: skilled writers whose love scenes read as narrative blips, functional and forgettable. Dipsea was different. Their whole ethos is creating safe, empowering, affirming love stories for the female gaze. Sign me the F up.

I wrote for Dipsea for about a year before grad school demands became too much. Later, in the thick of my job search (see: “Intermission — Protect Your Whimsy”), I found myself torn between staying in my existing industry or returning to the arts. I had always been intentional about keeping my creative life separate from my professional one, partly because I couldn’t yet reasonably profit from writing, and partly because graduate school had already broken something in me by making me write stories I wasn’t invested in for a grade. I didn’t want to become that version of myself again. And yet, I didn’t love who I was becoming either.

Fortunately, I have landed in steadier waters, and a Dipsea side hustle wasn’t necessary. For now.

Trails Volume I: Kindling

This series is called Trails—as in, follow the “Breadcrumbs” (the name of this little blog) trail long enough and they lead you somewhere.

I know, I know. Very clever of me.

Volume 1 is called Kindling, because every story here begins the same way: with a spark that has been waiting for someone foolish enough to cup it in their hands.

I envision many more stories will follow; I just don’t know when. I also don’t know if all of them will make it to this corner of the internet. The ones here flowed out of me so quickly, and I was so excited about them, that I couldn’t help but share with friends and then, eventually, all of you.

The first story publishes next Sunday, with the others following.

Disclaimer: I mentioned Dipsea, so let me be clear—these are not erotic stories. I shan’t bring such chaos to Substack. Don’t panic. There is intimacy, and things may get a little warm, but nothing so spicy that you’ll need to dramatically slam your laptop shut if someone glances over your shoulder. Hopefully. Maybe. I’ll include content warnings per usual, just in case.

Consider this your formal invitation. These are small windows into bigger worlds. Six stories and many moments that made me smile like a dodo while writing them. I can’t wait for you to read them.

P.S. The playlist, because all stories need them.

This story includes references to incarceration, past violence, grief, and family trauma.

Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

P.S. Roux carries the weight of what came before. It resonates most deeply alongside Akademos—or read as the closing movement of the full series. However you arrive at it, I’m glad you’re here. Happy reading.

ROUX

Travi got out on a Friday.

I left my classroom early. Walked three doors down the hall, then two more, asking the same question with different levels of pleasantness until someone finally said, I’ll cover it. Go.

My chest was tight as I backed out of the school lot. I told myself it was just logistics—I was the only one with a car, the only one close enough to tolerate traffic—but that wasn’t the whole truth. I’d wanted to be the one to pick him up.

And I didn’t want anyone else to see him first. Didn’t want anyone else to be the one he looked at when he came through that gate—because I needed to see his face before anyone else could, needed to know what was in it. Whether it was the version of his face that would let me breathe, or the one that would confirm what I’d been carrying for eleven years.

Family reunions in my life had a pattern. We gathered when something cracked—after hospital calls, after funerals, after somebody made a mess big enough the rest of us had to come sweep around it. We rarely showed up just to celebrate. There was usually smoke somewhere, even if we couldn’t see it yet.

I told myself today wasn’t that. That I had grown into a woman with a classroom key and a paycheck and a roster of children who called me Miss. Still, driving toward that prison, I felt the old version of me pressing up underneath, like my body had already braced before my mind caught up.

The old version. The one who held the matches.

When I got there, I waited in my Beetle with the air on high, parked along a chain-link fence that cut the sky into neat little diamonds. Men came out in small groups, guided down the gray path like they were being returned to sender. Some were met by women who cried into their shoulders. Some by kids who stared like they didn’t recognize the shape of their own fathers. Some by nobody at all.

I didn’t know what Travi would look like anymore. Every time someone stepped through the gate, my body tried to guess. The tall one? No—too thin. That one? No, wrong walk. As if he’d walk the same way over a decade later.

I kept thinking of the last time I’d seen him: unkempt hair, clothes too small for his long body. The church lot buzzing like a kicked nest. Smoke moving faster than sense. Me holding the kindling while Travi was the one tucked into the back of a police car—

Then Travi appeared, and I stopped guessing.

He had a stack of books pressed to his chest—worn spines and fat pages. His shoulders were wider than I remembered, his neck thicker. His hair close-cropped and clean. His face shaved, skin clear. He wore a white button-down and dark jeans that fit him perfectly. When we were kids, Travi was always in clothes too big or too small. Hand-me-downs. Nothing that was ever truly his.

My heart slipped out of rhythm and for a few seconds I forgot how to breathe. Not because he looked older—I expected that—but because he looked like someone who’d carried years that weren’t only his. Years that had slipped sideways and settled on him while I kept moving forward.

And at the same time, he looked good—better than I remembered or expected.

For a second, I was eleven again.

He didn’t smile when he saw me. Just tipped his chin at my trunk and mouthed, open.

I popped it from the driver’s seat. He placed the books inside carefully, shut the trunk, and slid into the backseat behind me without a word—even though the passenger seat was open and dusted of crumbs, just for him.

“Hey, cuz,” I said, turning halfway around.

He looked past me, out the window. “How goes it.”

Not a question. A cue. Okay then.

I swallowed. “Can’t complain.”

I pulled out. Checked the mirror. Checked it again. The silence was tangible. It pressed on my shoulder like a teacher leaning over me while I bubbled all the wrong answers. The longer it stretched, the more I felt like I was failing some test I hadn’t studied for.

But the truth was I’d been studying for it for eleven years, and I still didn’t have the answers.

He rolled down the window and let the wind slap his face. Eyes closed, mouth open, like he was breaking the surface for air.

He didn’t speak until we cleared the gate. “You still in school?”

“Graduated.”

“Mm.” He nodded once. “What you doing now?”

“I teach. High school.”

That made him glance at me. A flicker of something—approval, disbelief, both? “English?”

My cheeks warmed. “Yeah.” Part of me liked that he guessed right. Did he remember I liked to read? Or did my newly acquired librarian look scream I tortured teenagers with Victorian poetry?

“How you get that?”

“An old professor,” I said. “He put my name in the right place.”

Travi hummed like he understood more than I’d said. He didn’t ask for the story behind the referral, or why I’d needed someone to vouch for me after I transferred schools—after getting kicked out of the other for selling essays to pay my tuition. He didn’t need it. Families know how to hold your missing pieces without naming them.

Or (more likely) Dre’s big mouth told him.

Traffic gathered on the freeway and pressed us into its slow heat. I kept my eyes forward. I didn’t want to look too long. It felt rude, like staring at a scar that used to be yours too. And it felt dangerous—like if I looked too long, I’d forget what year it was.

I thought about Dre waiting at my apartment, wishing his shift had ended early enough to ride with me and be a buffer. Dre could talk about anything to anyone. He had always been good at forward motion. Travi had always been good at holding still. And me—I’d spent years trying to live somewhere in between. A safe middle.

It hadn’t always worked. There were years I’d swung too far one way, running so fast I lost track of what I was running from. Other years I’d gone still, and the quiet had turned on me. But I’d built something here in Houston that felt like mine. A classroom. A paycheck. A grocery store I knew by heart. And now Travi in my backseat, breathing free air for the first time in over a decade, while I tried to figure out if I’d earned the right to be glad.

“You hungry?” I asked after a while.

“I been hungry,” he said, a small grin tugging at his mouth. “What you got in mind?”

“Asia Town.”

He laughed under his breath. “That a restaurant or a continent?”

I chuckled. “It’s part of Houston. I’ll show you.”

He didn’t argue. Just let his head rest against the seat, window down. He looked almost peaceful like that, like maybe we could make it through a day together without something catching.

The market sat in a strip of signs written in different alphabets. Travi didn’t want to stop and eat anywhere—too eager to get someplace that felt more like home, even if home was my couch for the night. So, we agreed on H-Mart. A light bite there. Groceries for something homemade later.

When I parked, Travi stayed still for a second, looking up at the storefront. The silence stretched. I didn’t rush him. Just waited with my keys in hand until he moved.

Then he stepped out, stretched his arms, and lifted his face to the sun.

“Damn,” he sighed. “It smells like everything out here.”

I inhaled too—grilled meat, pickled vegetables, warm sugar. I smiled. This part of town had become muscle memory for me—where to park, which entrance moved fastest, which aisles held what. It felt good to bring him somewhere I knew.

Inside, Travi grabbed a cart and pushed.

“What we making?” I asked, though I’d already started piecing it together from what he stacked inside. Green onions. Celery. Bell pepper. Garlic.

He grabbed a sack of flour then a jug of oil.

“Gonna make me guess?” I pressed, smiling now.

He looked at me—and this time he smiled back. Brief, like a light flicking on. “Gumbo,” he said. “If your kitchen can handle it.”

“So long as you don’t need the microwave and toaster oven,” I said. “I’ve run those into the ground.”

He snorted and rolled forward.

We moved through the store like that—him choosing, me guiding us to the right aisle, the cart filling with the bones of a meal. Chicken. Andouille. Shrimp, shells piled in a foam tray like pink jewelry.

“You been here before?” he asked.

“Yeah. This is my primary grocery.”

He nodded. “So, you’ve been living out here.”

I nodded, chest warming.

Part of me preened—see, I grew up. I landed somewhere loud and working and mine. Another part of me wondered why it mattered so much what he thought. If he’d expected the princess to end up someplace greener, quieter. Somewhere that matched the future folks used to speak over me like a prayer.

I wasn’t sure which version of myself I wanted him to see.

Outside, he loaded the bags into my trunk, shut it, and looked at me over the roof of my Beetle.

The silence came back. I felt myself reaching for something to break it. A joke. A question. Anything to keep the day moving forward before it stalled out and turned.

I thought about how nobody else had volunteered to pick him up. How easy it was for family to say I love you in theory and make you do it alone in practice. And even with this strange awkwardness simmering between us, I still wanted to make the day soft for him.

“You—uh—still don’t hug?” I asked.

He snorted. “I ain’t ever been a hugger.”

“I know. Just checking.”

He nodded once, then tapped the trunk with his knuckles. “Drive, Princess.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t start.”

“I’m just happy you’re still you,” he said. “That’s all.”

I nodded, because that was easier than explaining how hard I’d worked to become her. And how there were years I wasn’t sure I would.

My apartment complex looked tired in the afternoon light. The gate was broken again. Palms shed into the pool, the blue filmed over with dying green.

Dre was waiting under the carport, bouncing on his heels. Thick and shining, beard full, smile wide enough to split his face. He swarmed before Travi could get both feet on the pavement.

“Welcome home, chef!” Dre yelled, wrapping Travi so hard he made a sound like his ribs got rearranged.

Travi’s hands hovered at first—surprised, unsure—then he clapped Dre’s back and laughed into his shoulder.

Travi may not have been a hugger, but Dre didn’t leave people many alternatives.

For a second the three of us just stood there, bodies angled toward each other like magnets. Sunlight baking the pavement. Hot asphalt and palm rot in the air. Dre grinning so wide it looked painful. Travi blinking like he still expected someone to call him back through the gate.

And some small part of me waited for the sky to split.

Then I flashed—sharp as a camera—to the last time we’d been a triangle like this. Night sky. Smoke. Gasoline on our clothes. Dre’s face slick with tears. Travi’s stillness. My throat closing around words I didn’t know how to say.

Travi glanced at me then—quick—and I believed the same images flickered through him too.

Dre clapped his hands. “Come on,” he said, like he could usher us past memory by force. “I’m starving.”

We went inside together. Travi laid out his groceries and started assigning tasks before his shoes were fully off.

“You want us to help?” Dre huffed. “I ain’t ever been in a kitchen that intimately, cuz. I don’t think Z’s got much skill either.”

I snorted, knowing that was true. My fridge held 99-cent pizzas, cheddar, old bread, applesauce, and jalapeño hummus. My pantry: two half-eaten cereal boxes, a tin of raisins, and snack-size bags of chips and granola bars I pilfered from the teacher’s lounge.

“Gumbo’s a team effort,” Travi said. “Tastes better when more hands in it.”

He boiled the chicken whole in the largest pot I owned, then handed Dre the produce to chop on my counter since I didn’t own a cutting board. He showed Dre how to measure each piece by the length of his pinky nail.

“Just like that. No bigger, no smaller.”

“Yes, chef,” Dre said, unable to stop smiling.

Travi passed me the shrimp. “You on shrimp.”

“Yes, chef.”

That made him smile again.

He’d earned the nickname inside. Started in the kitchen because it beat staring at cinderblock walls and because working with his hands kept his mind from chewing itself raw. He worked with what he had—powdered spices, tired vegetables, cuts nobody wanted—and made something steady out of scraps. Momo mailed recipe cards with Papaw’s notes copied over like scripture. Gumbo. Jambalaya. Griddle cakes. He memorized them until he didn’t need paper anymore.

Standing in my kitchen now, sleeves rolled, voice sure, he looked like the title had followed him home.

He set a skillet on the burner and dropped butter into it.

“Roux time!” Dre announced as if it was a holiday.

Travi watched the butter melt. Watched it foam. Then shook flour over it like snow.

I worked the shells off the shrimp, cold and slick under my thumb. The kitchen filled with heat and sweet butter.

The roux went from blond to tan to penny brown. The smell turned nutty, deep. It caught in my throat.

The TV murmured behind us, some procedural none of us were really paying attention to. Someone yelled. Someone ran. Then fire bloomed across the screen—glass exploding, black smoke rising above the heat like it had been waiting for its cue.

The room shifted.

Dre reached for the remote. “Man,” he muttered. “They gotta put warnings on shit like that.” He clicked it off, then stood there a beat too long, eyes fixed on nothing. “I’m gonna grab a smoke,” he said, already moving toward the balcony.

The door snapped shut.

Travi’s stirring never stopped.

And I saw it again—not the TV version. The real one.

Gasoline soaked into denim. Matches scattered in the grass like breadcrumbs. Smoke outrunning reason. Dre sobbing, loud and animal, the second the flames climbed higher than we meant them to. Travi yelling for us to get up the hill. The shout from inside just before the stained glass burst outward in a rain of color. The body bag rolling the priest out. The air smelling wrong for days after—burned sugar and metal lodged so deep in my nose I thought it would live there forever.

We told ourselves we were fixing something. Protecting someone. Burning a cursed church that ate away at our grandfather until it swallowed him whole. All we did was destroy a building, a man, and whatever thin thread was holding the three of us together.

I saw Travi in the back of the cop car, crying so hard the whole thing shook. I heard him shout I’m sorry before the door slammed, and I never knew who it was for. Father Sweeney. Papaw. Us. Maybe himself.

After that day, time did what it always does. It kept going.

Travi drifted in and out of the system, one charge bleeding into another, his name showing up in conversation like weather. Dre worked and joked and built momentum like if he ran fast enough memory couldn’t catch him. And I went to school. Transferred. Started over. Learned how to stand steady, keep my hands busy, and my face composed.

I became good at looking like someone who had put things down. I learned how to hold a classroom without trembling. How to speak in complete sentences about books I loved without letting the voice in the back of my mind remind me that I was the one who’d gotten away clean. Not because I deserved it. Just because the cop who showed up that night had different math when it came to me.

Still, there were things I never learned how to set down.

“Trav,” I said.

He didn’t answer. The roux deepened. Penny to copper. Copper to something darker.

My chest pulled tight, the same way it had in the car, the same way it always did when I tried to look at this directly. I’d rehearsed it. In the shower. On the drive over. I’d built whole speeches, careful and articulate, full of the right weight. But now, standing three feet from him with the smell of butter and flour filling my apartment, everything I’d prepared felt ridiculous. Too small. Too late.

“I—I never thanked you or…” The words felt wrong in my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I tried instead.

He didn’t look up. “Me too.”

It landed soft. A mercy I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath for.

The smell thickened. My eyes burned. I couldn’t tell if it was the roux or me.

“I should’ve—” My voice broke but I pushed through it. “I should’ve said something. Done something.”

He paused just long enough to glance at me. “You don’t gotta finish that.”

But I did. I needed him to know I’d lived with it—not cleanly, not gracefully, but that I’d carried it. That I’d let it cost me things. That some mornings I stood in front of thirty teenagers and thought about him in a cinderblock kitchen making something good out of nothing, and the thought was both the thing that kept me going and the thing that made me feel like a fraud.

“But I want to,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Sorry for resenting you. Sorry for how you carried your grief like a weapon after Papaw died and you didn’t know how to move without him. I wouldn’t understand that kind of absence for years, until my own grief had me wrecking things I meant to protect.

“Roux can’t go backwards, Z,” he said. “Once it turns, it turns. All you can do is keep it from burning.”

I stared at him, waiting—for something more. Wisdom. Absolution. Anything besides a goddamn food metaphor.

He didn’t give it. He just looked back at me, lips twitching, fighting a smile. Then he laughed.

I started laughing too. It burst out of me—half relief, half despair.

“Sorry,” he said, wiping his face. “That sounded wiser in my head.”

I pressed a hand to my side, aching from laughing and from how much my body still wanted to cry. To fix. “I should be comforting you,” I said. “You’re the one who paid.”

He turned fully toward me.

“Princess,” he said softly. “I got my whole life ahead of me.”

Something in me loosened then—cracked open, really, the way a window gives when the pressure finally equalizes on both sides—and the ugliest question slipped out before I could stop it.

“Don’t you hate me?”

The words sat there between us. I’d never said them out loud before. Hadn’t let myself. Because asking meant admitting I’d wondered, and wondering meant I’d spent eleven years believing the answer might be yes.

His face twisted like the word itself hurt, like the idea of hating me had never even crossed his mind.

“We were kids,” he said gently. “You especially. We had adults who should’ve been paying attention.”

I almost corrected him. Almost said I’d had structure and chances. That the difference between us wasn’t age but who got left behind that day. But with the way he was looking at me, I knew he wasn’t keeping score. And maybe I didn’t need to either.

“Now,” he said, picking up his spoon again, the circle resuming, “you gonna help me feed our people or what?”

I wiped my cheeks. “Yes, chef.”

He shook his head, smiling. “Y’all stupid with that.”

The gumbo took over my apartment the way music takes over a house.

A knock at the door cut through the smell, and I left the kitchen to answer it.

Our cousin Boo stood there with a plastic bag in one hand and a bottle in the other. “I brought dessert and trouble.” He lifted a bag of beignets and a bottle of Crown.

Travi appeared behind me, wiping his hands on a towel.

Boo’s grin shifted. Softened.

For a second, neither of them moved.

Boo and Travi were the same age, and their lives forked around the same time—Travi into the system, Boo into trade school. As kids, they were close enough to be brothers. Years and circumstance did the rest.

Boo stepped forward first and clapped Travi’s shoulder. “Good to see you, man,” he said, quiet.

Travi nodded once. “Good to be seen.”

My table was small—cheap wood, one leg wobbling if you leaned too hard, chairs that didn’t match. We dragged it into the center of the room anyway, pulled the loveseat forward and made space for all four of us.

Travi ladled gumbo into bowls like he was baptizing them. He packed rice into a mug for a clean dome, flipped it into the center so it sat proud above the broth, then scattered green onion over the top.

First bowl to me. Then Dre. Then Boo.

Boo hummed. “This smells like somebody knew what they were doing.”

Travi grinned at that, almost bashful.

The smell hit me and I was a child again. Papaw at the stove. Cousins running through a house too small for all of us. Someone always missing, someone always arriving. The world intact for the length of a meal.

“Eat,” Travi said.

We did.

Dre moaned, pointing his spoon. “Trav, you ain’t allowed to leave us no more.”

Boo laughed, mouth full. “You’re the one leaving. Take me to Colorado with you.”

“You can’t handle that altitude,” Dre said.

Boo waved him off.

“You two can barely wipe your own asses,” I said.

They groaned and flung napkins at me.

“When you leaving?” Travi asked.

“Next month.” Dre shrugged like it was nothing, but his smile gave him away. He’d been working at a brewery in Houston. When they needed someone to run a new site in Colorado, he put his name forward. I helped polish his résumé then we went suit shopping—even though he didn’t need it. The job had been his before he asked.

Travi watched us, bowl still untouched. Then he shifted his chair closer. Ate. Shifted again. Until his knees knocked ours and his elbows brushed the table.

Boo tore open the beignet bag and set it in the center. Powdered sugar drifted over the table, dusting our hands.

Dre licked sugar from his thumb. “This is what heaven tastes like.”

Travi laughed—full, surprised, like it caught him off guard.

When the bowls were empty, I stood and stacked dishes in the sink. Travi joined me, rolling up his sleeves.

“You good, fam?” he asked.

“I’m good,” I said. And meant it. “Really good.”

I reached for the soap. He reached for the sponge.

“What’s next for you?” I asked.

He grinned down at the suds, pink foam climbing his wrists. “Dishes.”

He started washing, and I watched him a moment longer.

I’d seen my family like this before—crowded together, talking over one another, hands busy, but usually after disaster. Grief pulled us back into the same rooms, and food—always Papaw’s—taught us how to smile once the worst had already happened.

When I woke up that morning, I’d braced for something similar. I’d dressed for it. Carried it in the tight line of my jaw all the way to that parking lot, through the gate, through the silence in the car, through every moment where I was sure the day would finally show its teeth.

But standing there at the sink, listening to my cousins argue about sugar and altitude and who owed who money, I realized—nothing had broken.

It was just us, making a mess we’d clean up together.

The thought settled slow and steady, the way a roux does when you’ve kept it from burning and didn’t walk away.

Maybe the tide really was turning.

And this time, when the feeling came, I didn’t flinch.

The Crown Series: TOC

0. An Introduction to “Crown”

1. Akademos

2. Crown

3. Oxtails

4. Ham Hocks

5. Juice

6. Ash

7. Dock of the Bay

8. Good Friday

9. Fat Tuesday

10. Roux

*While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose.

This story includes grief, substance use, and familial rejection connected to sexuality.

Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

FAT TUESDAY

The letters arrived the same day—a kindness and a cruelty. I opened the one that would decide the fate of the other first.

My hands shook as I unfolded the paper. My eyes wouldn’t focus. A medley of alphabet soup.

We regret to inform you…dismissed from the program effective immediately. You have the right to petition—

The letter slipped from my fingers.

Panic ballooned so fast my vision speckled with spots. I needed air. Instead, I opened the second envelope.

My LSAT scores.

The pain heated my chest until I was laughing, then crying, then screaming—silent, because I was still trying to be a person.

The spring semester had barely started. Graduation was close enough to taste. I’d been so stupidly hopeful I’d convinced myself they’d let it slide. That I could collect the diploma, do the internship, apply—then head off to be something clean and impressive.

I’d been caught selling essays at the end of last spring. My trial loomed all summer—scheduled and rescheduled—only to land here, right at the finish line.

My score was perfect. But I’d been kicked out.

My phone buzzed, and my stomach lurched as I imagined my family learning it at the same time, like we shared a nervous system.

I checked the family group chat—overstuffed, numbers splintering into new threads like a hydra. They were planning tonight’s Fat Tuesday feast.

Who’s bringing the king cake? someone asked.

Bran. Great spot by the hospital, my cousin Dre replied.

I’d been on my way out the door when I decided to fuck my day up and read my mail first. Now I stood in the empty mailroom with failure in one hand and victory in the other, pride curdling between my teeth.

I wanted to shout that I’d nearly aced the test that almost hospitalized me—no sleep, no water, every breathing hour spent studying. I wanted my parents’ pride like sunlight.

That’s my babygirl, my mom would say.

How do you have any heart with all those brains? my dad would say.

I didn’t know how to tell him I didn’t have one anymore. There would be no joy when they learned the score was just a number and I had nowhere to collect the diploma I needed next. That all the money they poured into me had burned down to this.

My phone buzzed again.

Not gonna make it this year, my cousin Bran wrote.

The outrage that followed was mostly about king cake. People were more offended we wouldn’t get the best one in the city from a place none of them lived near.

I backed out of the thread and texted Bran.

You’re not coming???

His reply was instant: My parents know. Long story. Can’t be around family right now.

New panic gripped my throat, and I was relieved—shitty as it was—that I wasn’t the only one burning today.

Another text followed.

We’re going to Nola to see Tini instead. You’re welcome to join.

Something in me glittered. Escape.

I ran upstairs to pack. Bran picked me up twenty minutes later.

Kal, his boyfriend, sat in the passenger seat. When I climbed into the back, his eyes flicked over me. Puffy face, red-rimmed eyes, shoulders folded inward. He didn’t ask questions; he just handed me a bottle of water.

Bran didn’t look back. He had both hands on the wheel and a bruise under his left eye.

“Did you get in a fight?” I asked.

Kal’s gaze dropped.

Bran laughed, dry. “With the Holy Spirit. It won.”

We merged onto the highway. Houston flattened behind us—strip malls and feeder roads, the city loosening its grip. The dismissal letter and score report were folded in my bag like contraband.

“So,” I said as soon as Bran flipped on the cruise control. “What happened?”

Bran glanced at me in the rearview. “We got caught.”

“Caught how?”

Kal shifted, jaw jumping.

“Mom came by the loft,” Bran said. “No warning.”

Heat sparked in my chest.

“She used her key. Walked in. We were in bed.”

“And she?”

“Screamed. Like someone died.” His fingers tapped the wheel. “Which I guess, to her, I did.”

Kal stared out the window, face carefully blank, jaw working.

“She called my dad,” Bran went on. “Called everybody. Made it a whole thing.”

I pictured the group chat lighting up: the same swarm that debated king cake now passing judgment like a platter.

Kal had come to the States for Bran. They’d met abroad right after Kenny, Bran’s little brother, died—when Bran fled the country in an effort to outrun his grief. Bran was Kal’s only sure thing, which made us—our cousins, our noise—Kal’s family by default.

Family didn’t exile family.

Bran came out after Kenny died. First to me, then slowly to the rest of us. We folded around him without hesitation. The ease of that love made the crater Kenny left feel deeper.

I’d been wrapped up in my own mess at school, barely registered time passing. I saw Kenny in the hospital one day and blinked and he was gone. Meanwhile Bran learned how to disappear behind his brother’s illness.

Now he was being seen.

Kenny had encouraged him to come out while he was still alive, promised he’d smooth it over as one of his dying wishes. Accept Bran or I’ll haunt you for eternity! But Bran didn’t want that weight on him. In the back of that car, I considered wielding my letter the same way Kenny had offered his illness.

Hey guys, turn around, I have something more controversial than your sexuality to distract the family!

Unfortunately, Kenny was a lot braver than I ever could be. Kenny, who wanted everything and deserved more life than anyone I knew, was gone. And I was still here.

The unfairness stung.

I pressed my forehead to the cool window glass. Outside, the highway blurred—billboards, brown fields, the low line of trees. My body kept trying to settle and failing. The dismissal letter throbbed in my bag like a bruise.

Kal reached into the console and handed me a paper-wrapped thing. “King cake,” he said.

It was squished. Purple and green sugar stuck to my fingers, and buried in the dough, the plastic baby stared up at me.

I laughed. Of course. Of course this stupid holiday was built around a hidden thing you choke on if you’re not careful.

“What happens if you get it?”

“You buy the next one,” Bran said.

I turned the baby over. A little idol. “Seems unfair.”

Bran met my eyes in the mirror. “That’s the theme.”

The highway hummed. I ate until the sweetness cramped my stomach then chased it with water and leaned back.

I dreamed of Kenny.

We were at a crawfish boil—red shells piled high, spice stinging the air. Kenny was cracking shells and sucking crawfish heads, grease shining on his fingers.

Some neighborhood kids rode by and taunted our cousin Dre. I couldn’t remember why—Dre had lorded over Barrett when we were kids, and someone was always trying to knock his crown loose. Kenny and I were his loyal knights, always eager to defend.

I kicked their bikes over. Kenny circled behind them, quiet as a ghost, and dropped live crawfish down their shorts. They screamed and did a little dance on the concrete, trying to shake the crawdads loose. Kenny laughed so hard it split his face, then took off running.

I remember thinking how fast he was.

It was the last time I ever saw Kenny run.

When I woke, Dre had texted me directly.

You still coming? Can you grab the cake?

I stared at his name longer than I meant to, then turned off my phone and went back to sleep.

***

Tini lived on the outskirts of Nola. She stood on a pink porch in beads and a corset, welcoming us heathens into her coven. Her black hair spilled to her waist like liquid night, her skin blindingly gold.

Louisiana had claimed her years ago—pregnant, sent away from the Artis side like a problem to be relocated. She took exile like a crown and built a life anyway: her son, her granny’s house, a city that didn’t ask her to apologize for taking up space. She stayed in touch through texts and social media, but she didn’t come around anymore.

She had to be sought.

“I hope that isn’t what you’re wearing,” she told me by way of greeting.

I grinned at her, welcoming her spice like air. I hadn’t changed out of my sweats and hoodie. “And I hope you have a coat,” I told her before falling into a tight hug.

She kissed my head. “Witches don’t get cold, cuz. And you’re in luck—I have something slutty for you.”

I would wear whatever she gave me today. Anything to feel like anyone but myself.

She didn’t ask why we were there. She just opened the door wider.

Inside, her place smelled like incense and green tea. Beads hung from curtain rods. A fan whirred in the corner, pushing glitter off the coffee table in slow, drifting eddies. The walls were crowded—photos, posters, saints with glitter glued to their halos.

Her bedroom was a riot—bold jewel-tone clothes everywhere, shiny lipstick tubes and rainbow palettes of eyeshadow dotted her dresser. She stripped my hoodie over my head before I could protest, tossed it onto a chair, then turned me toward the mirror.

“Lord,” she muttered. “You look like Cousin It.”

I tugged my overgrown hair—too heavy to curl, too stubborn to fall straight. “I prefer Wednesday.”

She slid a dress up my legs—tight, short, fringed, a waterfall of purples and greens and golds. She tugged it into place, adjusted the straps, stepped back, frowned, then stepped forward again.

“Lose the bra,” she said. “You don’t need it.”

I obeyed. For once, no fight in me.

She straightened my hair with quick, practiced pulls, the iron hissing. She brushed glitter across my cheekbones, darkened my eyes, painted my lips with color that matched the purples we wore. She opened her closet—an overflow of clothes and shoes sparkling like jewels in a chest—and handed me a fur-lined coat, bright yellow. Then she pulled on an identical one, hers the same purple as our dresses.

When she finally turned me toward the mirror, I startled.

The girl staring back looked loud. Alive. The olive tint had found its way back to her skin. Her dry, damaged curls had surrendered to the burn of the flat iron, to the rich creams Tini combed through them. The coat and the dress hid how much she’d shrunk, gave her body the illusion of health and vitality.

She was pretty. Smiling. Deserving.

I wanted to stay like this forever—before anyone could remember who I really was. I wondered if exile always looked this bright from the outside.

Tini caught my eyes in the glass and smiled, slow and satisfied.

“There she is,” she said.

We Ubered into the chaos and skipped straight into the cold, losing ourselves on contact. Beads rained down like blessings. Brass bands blared so loud they rearranged my insides. Street saints and sinners pulled us into their orbits—feathered women smearing glitter across our cheeks and hips, laughing as they danced against us.

Beautiful men fed us foil-wrapped po’boys from manicured fingers and pressed thumb-size baggies of weed gummies into our palms.

Eat. Swallow. Receive.

We moved with the crowd until we were too drunk and too blistered to stand, then collapsed near the bayou, between little valleys of abandoned beads and crushed tall boys. My feet screamed. My throat burned. I didn’t care.

That was when Tini decided we needed a reading.

She dragged us down a side street, past a hand-painted sign promising clarity for twenty dollars cash. Inside was a shack draped in violet velvet, guttering candles and low hymnals. A round table waited for our wandering quartet.

The woman who read us didn’t ask our names. She turned the cards over fast, like she already knew what they’d say.

Tini first: Queen of Wands. The reader smiled. “You already left,” she said. “And you’re not sorry.”

Bran next. Eight of Cups. Her smile thinned. “You’re walking away from something that still calls itself love.”

Kal, The High Priestess. The reader paused, really looked at him. “You see what others refuse to. And it costs you.”

Then she turned my card.

Ten of Wands. A figure bent forward beneath a bundle of sticks, arms full, head down.

The brass outside dulled, the world’s volume dialing down, its record scratching.

“You don’t know how to put anything down,” the reader said.

I laughed, defensive.

“You pick up what isn’t yours,” she said. “You carry it because you think that’s love.” She tapped the card. “Grief. Guilt. Old promises. A brother. A cousin.”

She didn’t say their names, but my stomach dropped anyway and their faces flashed through my head.

“That’s enough,” Tini said, already standing, her hand warm at my back. “We came for fun, not penance.” She slapped cash on the table and thanked the reader.

We fled the velvet room like it had teeth, spilling back into the street where the music hit us full-force. Noise safer than quiet.

We danced and drank. I became nothing but a body—my brain and soul slipped loose and drifted somewhere overhead. At one point I thought I saw Kenny and Dre in the crowd, their faces turned toward me, smiling, and it almost cracked me open.

Instead, I sang. I spun. I danced until the hurt lost its shape.

We were there like the greatest song on loop. Over and over. A fight broke out nearby—shouting, glass breaking—and Kal caught it first, steering us sideways, back toward the band before it could touch us. Celebration and danger on the same street.

Tini leaned in close, her mouth warm against my ear. “They don’t exile you for sin,” she said. “They exile you for freedom.”

I believed her. I believed everything.

The sun slid down. The air cooled. And when Granny called us home, we obeyed. Even drunk and high and exiled, we answered the call of our elders—eye drops to clear the red, mints to cut the alcohol.

Granny cooked okra with sausage and shrimp, and I nearly squealed when I recognized it—Papaw’s recipe. One Tini learned from Momo and passed on to her other grandmother, a woman tied to our family not by blood but by flavor. Kal cooked too, insisting, binding us to his flavors through caramel pudding that Granny kept calling cheesecake. We didn’t correct her. We just laughed until every slice was gone.

I scraped my bowl and licked my plate clean then sat heavy and warm on the couch beside Tini’s son Felix, who leaned into me, his small shoulder fitting under my arm like it had always belonged there.

For a moment, I thought I saw Kenny. Smelled him.

Kenny had been barely twenty when he died, but he was this small at the end—light as a child when I lifted him from the bathroom floor and carried him back to bed.

Felix shifted, sighing in his sleep. I hugged him closer, the grief rising so fast it blinded me. When Tini gently pried him from my arms and carried him down the hall, I almost wept. She tucked him in, kissed his forehead, then came back with a joint like an offering.

We sat on the porch and listened to brass bands drifting in from streets away. The house behind us was quiet. For a suspended second, it felt like shelter.

Then Kal tried to do this headstand push-up thing and fell, knocking over lawn chairs like dominoes. Bran laughed too loud, scooped him up. Kal leaned in. Their foreheads touched. They kissed.

Tini whooped. I clapped.

I think I was happy for a breath. Close enough to touch it.

The sound carried. The screen door slammed. We turned.

Granny stood in the doorway, and the night shattered like a plate hitting tile.

The rest came fast and blurred—scripture sharpened into a weapon, worry dressed up as care. Why them boys kissing? Don’t believe your own eyes. What if the child saw? Love the sinner. This ain’t right. Go back to bed, Granny. A slur landed last.

I sobered instantly, then we fled.

Tini didn’t come with us. She couldn’t. Her freedom had borders—her son, her roof, her fragile peace with Granny. She squeezed my hands before we left. “This isn’t the end,” she said.

I loved her for trying to make that true.

Every hotel and motel was booked. The drugs and alcohol fizzled but lingered enough to blur exhaustion and fear. We didn’t want to risk it—or Kal’s visa. Luck had already made itself clear.

So, we drove, we walked, and when both ran out, we boarded the New Orleans ferry, hoping salt air and motion might treat what we couldn’t name.

The ferry hadn’t even pulled away before Kal cracked.

“Your family is fucked up.”

Four words, and they lit my veins like lightning.

“Kal,” Bran said quietly, leaning against the rail. Head bowed. Eyes closed. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard it.

“Strangers welcomed us tonight,” Kal said, voice climbing. “Strangers!”

He was right. I knew he was right…still, it felt like betrayal to the family I’d just fled.

“Your mother threw a Bible at you,” Kal shouted. “A hardback.”

“She was just—” Bran started. “Shocked.”

“I would never hurt someone I love like that,” Kal said, accent thickening around the edges. “Where I come from, you don’t throw people away. You argue. You stay. You fix it.”

I thought of everything we’d tried to fix together over the years—illness, curses, money—and how often love hadn’t been enough.

“I don’t want to see them ever again,” Kal said.

The impossibility almost made me laugh. There was no escaping the family.

Bran said the very words I’d been thinking in defense of the family. Maybe we really did share a nervous system.

“That isn’t love,” Kal said. “That’s dependency.”

“Khaled,” Bran said. Once. Then again. “Khaled.”

He used Kal’s full name—the one he’d arrived with, before we shortened it because it was easier for us to hold. Before we sanded him down to fit the body of the family, the way white blood cells rush a wound, sealing it no matter what gets lost in the process.

Kal turned to the water.

Bran turned to me and took a seat. The ferry looped. Again. Again. We stayed suspended, going nowhere.

Kal began to hum then shifted into words. Poems. Something about being tired. About going back and forth. About waiting for morning. His voice loosened, and the rhythm of it tangled with the letter folded in my hands, rejection bleeding into verse until I couldn’t tell which was which.

I startled when Bran touched the paper.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I hadn’t realized I’d taken it out again. Defeated, desperate to let someone else carry my sin, I handed it over.

He only needed the first few lines. “Fuck, cuz. The hell were you doing selling essays?”

“Money,” I said, tears already rising.

“Why not get a regular job?”

“It wasn’t enough.”

“Loans?”

“They covered school, but...” I trailed off.

“But what?” Bran pressed.

I closed my eyes. “I bailed Dre out.”

Bran closed his eyes too, like he’d been waiting for that. “Goddamn.”

“It was right after Kenny died,” I said. “And it was so stupid.” I put my face in my hands, shame heavy. Dre, Kenny, and I had been a unit once. When Kenny died and Dre went back inside, I couldn’t stand losing both. So, I emptied my account. Missed rent. Failed a class.

Kenny was still dead, and Dre was a ghost I only saw at parties.

“There’s something wrong with me,” I said, the words small and thin.

“Z—”

I snatched the letter back and lifted it into the air, letting it go. A childish ritual. A hope that tying my fear to the paper might make me lighter once it was gone.

Of course it didn’t.

“You’re going to be okay,” Bran said. “I’m here.”

Was that enough? I thought of what Kal had said. Of how our love had made us fierce and loyal and reckless. How it had taught us to endure anything, even when we shouldn’t. How it had made monsters in its own image.

“I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone the way I love our family,” I said.

Bran huffed a laugh. “There’s a word for that, and I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.”

“Not like that. I mean—” I pulled in the salty air, searching for language. “I don’t have to think about it. I just know it. When I’m away—trying to be someone—I think I’m happy. And then I come back, and I feel it again. Like I’m alive. Like I’m real.”

“Family is home for most people,” Bran said gently.

“No.” I shook my head. “That’s not it.” I tried again. “I would never give that much to anyone who wasn’t family. I would never break myself for someone who wasn’t family.”

I would never hurt anyone the way I’ve hurt my family, or let them hurt me, and still come back begging for more because the hurt always led back to love.

Then I was sobbing into Bran’s shoulder. Then laughing or screaming—I couldn’t tell which—because suddenly he was laughing too.

Kal wrapped his arms around both of us, holding us like we were something worth keeping.

We were very tired, we were very merry—

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry

It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—

But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,

We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;

And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

Kal recited the poem like a spell. And maybe it worked, because eventually the crying slowed. Bran and I found our legs again. We walked off the ferry and into morning, the sun spilling gold across the sky.

What now? my brain screamed as we moved farther from the water. Farther from the loop. Farther from the pretending.

We drove. Bought kolaches and donuts and coffee.

Every mile cut into me.

I can’t go back to school. I can’t go home. I can’t face my family.

“You can,” Bran said.

I hadn’t realized I’d said it out loud.

“We’ll be okay,” he said.

I believed him, because in the thin gold light, sugar dusting his lips, hair damp and glowing like a halo, he looked like Kenny.

And Kenny wouldn’t lie.

In the rearview, the mist had undone Tini’s work. My curls had returned. My makeup washed away. I was back in my hoodie and sweats, folded small in the seat.

I looked like me again.

I turned back to the window and let the reflection slip away as the road carried us home.

The Crown Series: TOC

0. An Introduction to “Crown”

1. Akademos

2. Crown

3. Oxtails

4. Ham Hocks

5. Juice

6. Ash

7. Dock of the Bay

8. Good Friday

9. Fat Tuesday

*While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose.

Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

GOOD FRIDAY

I was twenty-one, a year away from earning my bachelor’s, when the dean’s secretary called to schedule my hearing.

“How is Monday morning?” she asked, sprightly, eager to get me on the calendar and out of her hair.

“No can do,” I told her, standing in the center of my studio with one foot in a sneaker. “That’s the day after Easter. I’m sorta Catholic.”

“Tuesday then?”

My phone vibrated against my ear. When I pulled it away, I saw the preview of a message from my boyfriend.

Jason: Have you lost your fucking mind?

“Yes,” I answered the secretary.

“Alrighty,” she sang. “Your hearing is scheduled for Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. Plan to arrive thirty minutes early and bring any supporting—”

I tossed my phone onto the couch and kept dressing.

It was Good Friday, and I was already late to my family’s party. I had missed the past three celebrations and would face disownership if I fell back on my promise to make an appearance this year. The last few years, I’d been in D.C. for Model U.N. nationals; however, a month ago at regionals, I called the Russian delegate a cuntosaurus rex for interrupting me during a moderated caucus. My team was disqualified on the spot.

And so, I would be driving the to Barrett Station.

The drive was clear—no traffic, only a few red lights. I rolled the windows down as soon as I passed under FM 1942 and onto Crosby Lynchburg Road. The smells hit first: smoke, wet grass, hot oil. Barrett always smelled like it was on fire. Smoke spilled from barbecue pits, overheated cars, and dead birds local kids set aflame out of boredom. It filled my car, and I welcomed it.

Going to Barrett was like going back in time. The cars were older, the buildings chipped and faded, and in spite of my burgeoning adulthood, every elder in Barrett still treated me like the nine-year-old who used to steal hot chips from the corner store.

The roads were narrow, bordered by deep muddy ditches. There were more children on ATVs and elders on horseback than there were cars. The businesses were small—built stout, painted in pastels, shaded with carport. A few shopping centers had sprouted up and introduced Barrett to the magic of Starbucks and Chipotle.

On my way to my grandmother’s house, I stopped at the barber shop to pick up my cousin Dre, who was getting a trim from our other cousin, Boo. Boo owned the shop, and it was just four houses down from my grandmother’s. When I pulled into the lot and stepped out of my car, I could hear the faint thumps of zydeco from down the road and knew it came from my family.

Boo was a barrel-chested man in his mid-thirties with neat braids down his neck. Inside his shop, there was a gold-framed painting of Tupac Shakur by the door. Above it hung a black-and-white photo of the Eagletons—Boo’s family and the artists behind the desegregation of Barrett Station. Beside that, a double 8-by-10 frame held Boo’s barber license in one panel and his business degree from Texas Southern University in the other. Just beneath those degrees sat the deed to his property.

I parked myself in the empty leather chair across from where Dre was getting a high fade.

“Now, I’m not a racist,” Boo said as he circled Dre’s chair with clippers, “but this neighborhood went to shit the day all those white folks started buying up land.”

Before Barrett was annexed by Crosby, it was a smoothie of Blacks and Choctaws. Now it was mostly wealthy white families who bought up land and built beautiful homes on it. With the influx came Barrett’s first Starbucks, first McDonald’s, and first Walmart.

“Tell me about it, Boo,” Dre said, spinning in the barber’s chair—eyes closed, features relaxed, completely trusting Boo’s hands.

“All these restaurants and mini malls,” Boo said, switching on the electric razor and tapping the lever to lower Dre’s head. “They only divide what we built. Starbucks is a corporate trap. We used to do Sunday coffee at Miss Shirley’s. Now they’re paying six bucks a cup for a crappuccino!”

I chuckled and tried to hide it by coughing into my hand.

“It’s true,” Boo said.

“Not if you just don’t go there,” I said.

Boo paused his craftsmanship to fix his eyes on me. “Where would I get my coffee then? Miss Shirley don’t make it anymore.”

“Make it yourself.”

“I don’t have the equipment.”

“Then buy it or settle for instant.”

Boo set down the razor and folded his arms across his chest. “You think I’m gonna walk into Walmart—a minority sweatshop—and pay for a piece of crap machine made by a bunch of Chinese kids?”

I raised my hands in surrender.

“You just don’t get it,” Boo said, snatching up his clippers again. “You grew up on that Starbucks and Wonder Bread diet.”

He and Dre shared a laugh.

I exhaled and checked my phone. Six more messages from Jason.

Jason: call me NOW

Jason: what the actual fuck?

Jason: the SAME fucking essay did you even think???

Jason: we need to talk

Jason: WHY

Jason: u crazy fucking bitch

My mouth watered with the urge to spit. I clenched my teeth so hard my temples ached and my vision blurred. I threw my phone onto the counter behind the barber’s chair and tucked my shaking hands under my thighs.

A year ago, I’d lost my scholarship after failing Business Calculus. In need of funds, I began writing essays for most of the athletes at the university. I told my parents my scholarship had extended past its two years because I was that good of a student. They told the whole family. Their friends.

Jason was a regular client turned lover turned boyfriend. It lasted a semester before I gave him an essay I had already sold to one of his teammates. One football player blabbed to save his own neck. Now I was roped into an academic hearing to defend myself.

“So what’s been going on, prez?” Boo said. “Talk to us.” He was only halfway done with Dre’s fade.

Everyone in the family started calling me prez the day I declared myself poli-sci and pre-law. They were all banking on me to be the first biracial female president.

“How’s school going?” Boo asked.

I tapped my feet against the silver pedals at the bottom of the chair. “I got in trouble for cheating.”

Boo took a step back from Dre’s chair, clippers raised near his shoulders. “No shit?”

“You get suspended?”

“That’s up to the hearing.”

“Jesus Christ, B.” Dre’s hands shifted beneath the barber gown. “You got a record now?”

“No—I mean—this could go on my academic record, which could fuck up my law school chances. But it’s not a criminal record. Nothing like it.”

Dre relaxed. “Aw, well that’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.” I gripped the edges of the leather chair.

I sure as shit wished it were nothing—that I could flip a switch and not care. All I had was my education; it was the one thing I could always do right. Now there was this dread following me around, threatening to take it away. The pressure on my chest was constant, like someone sitting on me, holding me still.

I got the email a week before Good Friday. It was a form letter with a custom box explaining my charges: I was being accused of writing essays for more than one student, and at least three had come forward to say I coerced them into letting me write essays for money.

I practiced apologies in my closet. I imagined ways I could lie to my parents if I were expelled—pretend to go to school a few more months, pretend I didn’t care about walking at graduation, pretend I didn’t care for the spectacle, even if it broke my parents’ hearts.

“Sounds like white folk drama to me,” Dre said, leaning back and hanging his half-shaved head over the edge.

“Worrying about my education is white folk drama?”

“No,” Dre said slowly. “Worrying that your folks’ll find out. You’re only twenty-one. Take an extra year if you have to.”

“Let her freak out a little bit,” Boo said. “Cheating is serious shit in college.”

Dre wiggled beneath the gown, trying to turn. “How serious?”

“She could get suspended, expelled, blackballed—shit, I hear folks get arrested for cheating.”

“But none of that happened,” Dre said. “Did it, prez?”

“Not yet,” I said through clenched teeth.

I looked out the glass windows, striped red and blue with hair specials. Beyond them, kids rolled by on ATVs, whipping in and out of strip centers, laughing, passing foil-wrapped burritos and hot-pink bowls of melted ice cream.

“What were you doing cheating anyway?” Boo asked. “I thought you were smart?” He set the clippers down and plopped into a chair a station over.

“It was my own essay that got me caught. I wrote two for the same class and gave them to two football players.”

“Why give an essay to a football player?” Boo asked. “He your boyfriend or something?”

“I sold it,” I said, my armpits damp, my shirt clinging. “I pay my bills with those essays. Athletes buy them from me and pass with flying colors.”

“The money any good?” Dre asked.

“Very,” I said, delighting in the math of it. “I write essays for a third of the football team. Prices vary based on length and due date. If somebody refers a client, I knock something off.”

“That’s what’s up, prez!” Dre applauded beneath the cape. “You’re a hell of a saleswoman!”

Boo didn’t share Dre’s pride. “Don’t go encouraging her,” he said.

“Why not? If she fucks up and drops out, she could open a tutoring business.”

“You think folks gonna pay a dropout to get their kids through college?”

“Shit, I would.”

“I sure as fuck hope you’re impotent then.”

Dre twisted his mouth and shifted in the chair to face me. “You got a clean record and good grades, right, prez?”

I didn’t answer.

“I got an experiment for you,” he said. “Pull out every photo ID you got. Both of you.”

I hesitated, then reached into my shoulder bag and walked to Dre’s station.

He smacked the counter where Boo and I were supposed to put our IDs.

Boo stacked his license on top of his TSU student ID, a concealed handgun license, a Costco card, and a membership to the Crosby Library. From one photo to the next, we could track Boo’s transformation from boy to man—his neck thickening, beard growing.

I only had two forms of ID: my license from the morning of my eighteenth birthday—wild frizz, too much eyeliner, an ear-to-ear smile because my dad let me skip first period to beat the DMV line—and my student ID, a paler version of myself with flat-ironed hair and no smile.

“Now what?” Boo asked.

Dre hopped out of the chair and dug into his back pocket. He laid two IDs on top of ours.

His driver’s license: a glowing boy with pudgy cheeks and a clean fade. And beside it, an older version—bald, beard bleeding into his neck, eyes heavy.

It was Dre’s inmate ID from his stay at the Department of Corrections in Houston.

Boo and I took in the stark red border, Dre’s inmate number, the breakdown of his height, weight, and race.

Dre tapped the face of the inmate. “Talk to me about your problems when you got one of those, prez.”

I stared into the stony eyes in the red frame, feeling Dre’s gaze on me too. I didn’t look up.

Boo cleared his throat. “Alright, Dre,” he said, laughing nervously. “Point made.”

I slid my IDs back into my wallet and returned to my chair. My ears and cheeks burned. I felt myself slowly deflating against the leather.

“Everybody got problems, prez,” Boo said, voice gentler. “Dre got a whole cesspool of issues, but that don’t make yours any less.”

“Shit,” Dre said. “I’d take suspension over a damn jail cell—”

Boo clapped his hand against the counter. Both Dre and I flinched.

“You know what y’all need?” Boo said. “A drink.”

He wagged two fingers and disappeared through the red curtain.

“I got some cognac and coke in the icebox,” he called.

While Boo dug through the fridge, I finally looked at Dre. He stared at his IDs, mouth puckered, brows furrowed.

Boo returned with three plastic cups, a two-liter of Mr. Pibb, and a bottle of Hennessy. He set everything down, unstacked the cups, and twisted off the cap.

Dre grabbed the Henny and took a hearty swig.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Boo waved his hands. “I don’t want none of your backwash, man!”

Dre swallowed and passed it over. “We family. Quit whining.”

Boo poured, stirred with his finger, then brought my cup to me with a wink.

I waited until he sat.

“I got a confession,” I said. “That football player? The one I sold the essay to? He was my boyfriend.”

“Pshh,” Boo laughed. “We already knew that.”

Dre laughed too.

“I submitted the same essay on purpose,” I went on, “just to get him suspended.”

Boo stopped stirring. “Care to elaborate?”

I nibbled the rim of my cup, weighing my words.

Jason and I were at a party when I decided to screw him over. I was meeting his parents at an athletics banquet held at a country club near campus. There was free booze, duck confit on quarter-sized baguettes, crab cakes drizzled in cream that tasted like expensive mayonnaise. I ate sparingly, starving but careful. I didn’t want to be seen as that girl.

His parents were polite but stale. They asked stock questions with hidden meanings: what part of Houston I was from, what my parents did, which law schools I was looking at.

I answered carefully, every sentence bookended by Jason’s compliments—lovely girl, smart girl.

“She has a 4.0,” Jason said, rubbing the small of my back. “She balances grades and a job. I don’t know how she does it.”

My cheeks warmed. I sipped wine. It helped having him in my corner.

The more we drank, the fresher the questions became.

Did I tan easily. Was that all my hair. Was the texture natural.

“She’s not really Black,” Jason said, trying to defend me—to defend my whiteness. “You can only really tell she’s a Black girl when she gets angry. Then it comes out.”

He laughed. His parents laughed too.

I laughed with them, even though my instinct was to scream—to do something “Black” enough to make the room choke on it.

When we finally left, I’d drunk my way through a bottle and a half of house wine. I climbed into Jason’s car and closed my eyes.

“I think I’m gonna puke.”

He rolled the window down. “You shouldn’t have eaten all that bread.”

“Go fuck a cat,” I said.

He scoffed. “Did I do something wrong?”

“I’m sorry. Was that a little too Black for you?”

“Calm down.”

“Oh, so now I’m the angry Black girl?”

“You’re drunk.”

“You’re racist.”

“I can’t be racist,” he laughed. “I’m dating you.”

“Fuck you.”

“You see this?” He wagged a finger. “This is what I was talking about. This is your Black side.”

Eventually, I was so outraged I removed my shoe and whipped him on the shoulder. A chunky heel, toe point first, which I think was generous. He didn’t hit me back, but he did kick me out of his car and make me walk two blocks back to campus in the dark with one shoe on.

“He said all that about your yellow ass?” Dre asked.

“One drop rule, I guess.”

Dre snorted, but Boo didn’t laugh.

“That shit ain’t ever harmless,” Boo said. “It comes from somewhere.”

“Tell me where the little bastard lives,” Dre said. “I’ll show him angry.” He drank his cup dry and slammed it down. Boo refilled it.

“Why were you writing his essays anyway?” Boo asked.

“Fucked if I know,” I sighed. “Because I thought it was a nice thing to do in exchange for him paying my rent when I couldn’t?”

Dre laughed again. “Cuz is a fucking pimp,” he said, and Boo finally cracked a smile.

I laughed too.

“I don’t know why you’re bitching,” Dre said. “I see two career paths: pimping or tutoring.”

Boo covered his eyes. “Man, no wonder you went to jail.”

My phone buzzed against my thigh. I pulled it free.

Jason: i didn’t rat u out

Jason: just call me. we need to get our stories straight

Jason: maybe i should just rat on u??

My heart beat so hard I tasted copper. My phone shook. Even then, the thought of Jason as an ally—a shitty ally—was appealing. Anything to save my neck. Anything to relieve the pressure.

I set the phone behind my chair and sat on my hands. My teeth chattered despite the heat.

“What’s the plan now, prez?” Dre asked as Boo stepped behind him again. “You gonna talk to your folks or what?”

“I haven’t even wrapped my head around this,” I said. “I keep waiting to wake up.”

“Well,” Boo said, “I’m sorry to say it—but you’re definitely awake.”

I felt like crying. Hearing it from someone outside my classrooms and studio apartment made it real and inescapable.

“I probably won’t tell them,” I said. “Not unless I get suspended. Then I won’t have a choice.”

Boo sighed as he traced the hairs on the back of Dre’s neck with the razor. When he clicked it off, he lowered the chair, dusted Dre’s neck, oiled his hands, and patted his head soft, like a blessing.

“Voila!” Boo clapped and ripped the cape away. “You almost as pretty as me, my man!”

Dre beamed, dimples deep. He looked like the boy in his old driver’s license.

Boo swept the floor quick.

“Food gotta be ready by now,” Dre said.

“Gimme five,” Boo said. “I gotta make a clean spot.”

Dre and I waited by the door while Boo closed down. He wouldn’t let us help.

“Only I know how I like it,” he said. “Don’t get in the way.”

He poured pink Fabuloso onto the tile. It smelled like raspberries and vinegar. He mopped wall to wall, scrubbing tough spots with a wide-bristled toothbrush. He wiped the mirrors, inspected them, oiled the chairs, laid tissue paper over each seat.

“Maybe I’ll get a cosmetology license,” I said. “The work seem to make Boo happy.”

Dre snorted. “You ain’t cut out for the work.”

I smiled and leaned into him. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder.

“Alright,” Boo said, keys in hand. “Let’s go eat.”

The three of us squeezed into my Beetle. Zydeco from my grandmother’s house thumped faintly through the air.

I drove slow down the narrow roads. Boo rode beside me, Dre in the back, both with their heads half out the windows. New houses lined the street—tiled roofs, balconies, bird fountains—wedged between older homes of tin and crumbling brick.

The farther down Zinn I drove, the louder the zydeco got. Barrett’s smoke gave way to fried cornmeal and buttermilk, boiled garlic and cayenne.

I realized my phone was no longer in my pocket. I’d left it at the shop.

Jason had probably sent more texts. He’d probably already ratted.

I could pretend not to care for a few hours. For the day, at least.

I parked a few houses down. The street was clogged with relatives’ cars. I closed my eyes and leaned into the seat, taking it in for a few seconds before my nerves could start again.

I opened the door and stretched my legs onto the pavement. Boo and Dre were already walking toward my grandmother’s driveway.

I waited, limbs heavy. I practiced my lies.

My scholarship is getting extended. I’m adding a degree. Jason couldn’t make it. You’ll meet him soon.

Everyone would smile and applaud. Ask about graduation. I’d pretend I didn’t know. Or pretend I didn’t care about walking. I’d pretend I didn’t want them to make the trip just to see me shake hands with the Dean on a jumbotron.

I’d have a bedazzled cap that said I’ll see you in court! Law school here I come.

I’d sell that lie until I moved out of my studio, until my dad bought a bottle of champagne we could barely afford, until my mom ordered invitations with my face in big chalkboard letters—

—and then the music hit a little harder, like the yard was calling me by name.

I swallowed, stepped out, and shut the door.

The Crown Series: TOC

0. An Introduction to “Crown”

1. Akademos

2. Crown

3. Oxtails

4. Ham Hocks

5. Juice

6. Ash

7. Dock of the Bay

8. Good Friday

9. Fat Tuesday

10. Roux

*While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose.

In my family, illness and death are familiar presences—sometimes catastrophic, sometimes quiet and slow. When something enormous happens in your own life, it’s easy to narrow your vision, to focus on survival and momentum and whatever comes next. Dock of the Bay sits inside that narrowing. It is a story about harm and consequences, but also about the ways we miss one another while doing our best to endure.

This story contains depictions of terminal illness (leukemia), hospitalization and medical trauma, the death of a young person, and grief.

Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

DOCK OF THE BAY

I saw Kenny for the last time a few months before he died.

It was only for a handful of hours. I was half delirious, wired on caffeine and Adderall, hadn’t showered in three days—all for the LSAT. Legally, I was probably unfit to drive, but I needed to get away from my books. And I wanted to see Kenny before he disappeared for good.

He’d been diagnosed when we were sixteen. After that, he turned into the Disappearing Boy. Year after year, something came off him—hair, pigment, weight. The more the cancer progressed, the less of Kenny I could see.

That last day, he looked like one of his own half-painted figurines. His head was blindingly bald. His eyebrows were thinning black commas. His nostrils were frosted with dried snot and hooked to a cannula that kept fogging under his nose.

We still talked a lot—mostly texts, sometimes calls—but as I looked at him then, I realized I hadn’t really seen my cousin in years. In my head, he was still fourteen: shaved head by choice, warm brown skin, clear eyes, solid body. Over the last five years, I’d caught glimpses of him at parties between undergrad, LSAT prep, and all the hospital stuff. But the sicker he got and the heavier my course load became, the more our orbits missed each other.

He’d quit chemo a month before. It was his decision, and his parents respected it. He was tired and didn’t want to finish treatment. He was staying at a hospital in The Woodlands, an hour away from my university. When I got there, we crowded around a giant Bayou Bleu pizza, milkshakes, and plastic cups of green chile queso—his request. All the food he’d been forbidden since diagnosis.

Kenny’s big brother Bran sipped queso straight from his cup and asked, “Do I get your dog when you die?”

Kenny slurped his milkshake, eyelids heavy. “Mom already called dibs.”

“Fuck Mom,” Bran snorted. “That dog’s in his prime. He needs a playmate, not to be a rug.”

“That’ll be one hell of a custody battle,” I said. “Momma Cancer versus the Boy Wonder. I’d pay to watch.”

Bran earned “Boy Wonder” the day everyone realized for every curse Kenny inherited, he got a blessing. When Kenny was always sick, Bran only ever got minor sports injuries. When Kenny was homeschooled, Bran went to high school, made friends, joined teams, collected trophies. When Kenny started chemo, Bran started college. When Kenny moved into hospitals, Bran moved into clinical rotations.

“Leave Mom the dog,” Kenny said. “She’ll need a friend. You can have my PlayStation.”

“Can I have your medical pot when you kick it?” I asked.

“The only person that’ll fight you for that is my Grandpa.”

“I can take him,” I said, sliding off the end of his bed and heading to the bathroom.

“Again?” Kenny called. “Damn, Z. Want me to ask the nurse for a catheter?”

“Give me a break,” I said. “I’ve been on an all coffee diet for two weeks. My bladder’s weak sauce.”

I closed the bathroom door, locked it, and turned on the vent. I shoved my yoga pants to my ankles, ripped the jumbo pad off my underwear, stuck on a fresh one, and popped a squat.

The second my pee hit, it felt like someone poured hot sauce through my urethra. I bit down on my lip so I wouldn’t scream.

“Fuck,” I hissed, folding in half until my forehead hit my knees. My whole body pulsed with the burn.

What makes a UTI worse? All caffeine. No bathroom breaks. Shower sex.

I couldn’t remember my last glass of water.

When the fire finally tapered off into angry drips, I wiped and pulled up my pants—only to feel like I had to pee again.

Out in the room, Bran knocked to say he was heading back to his residency shift. He was rounding out his nursing degree. After each shift, he’d drive the two hours from Clear Lake to The Woodlands, sit with Kenny, then drive back to start again. He lived in traffic and fluorescent lighting, between other people’s emergencies.

I waited until I heard the heavy door close behind him before I left the bathroom.

Kenny was flipping through Netflix titles from his bed. His hospital room was dressed up to look like his old room. Flat-screen TV with a hacked FireStick, the latest consoles, a shelf of graphic novels he’d already read twice. Superhero and anime posters, maps of Gondor and Hyrule, blueprints of the Death Star taped over the green-and-white walls. Yellow curtains shut out the afternoon sun. A small black desk sat in front of the window, wedged between the curtains.

On the desk were tiny Lord of the Rings figurines, less than half painted. A Super Mario mug held skinny paintbrushes. Beside it, a big orange Nike shoebox, filled with bottle-cap containers of paint and more unpainted gray men.

“I haven’t had the chance to finish any of them,” he said. “Every time I get in a groove, somebody barges in to take my temperature or fluff my pillows or some shit.”

I picked up a half-painted Legolas and brought him closer. “They’re really good,” I said. “Like…tiny surgery.”

He snorted. I swapped Legolas for an unpainted Gimli and brushed my pinky over the carved beard.

“You want one?” Kenny asked.

“I can’t,” I said, setting Gimli down. “They’re yours. You worked hard on them.”

“I’m dividing up my estate, Z.” He smirked. “Pick your favorite and it’s yours.”

I hesitated, scanning the rows of little faces. Only a few were fully painted—Boromir, Pippin, an orc. The rest were battlefield-gray. I picked up one of the finished ones and held it up.

“Good pick,” he said. “You always were an Aragorn—the moody know-it-all.”

“What does that make you?” I crossed my legs on the end of his bed. “Frodo? The always-injured attention whore?”

Kenny grinned, tearing the foil off a Jell-O cup. “I always wanted to be Legolas.”

“Everyone wants to be Legolas,” I said. “Perfect hair. Zero responsibility.”

“Take Legolas too,” he said. “I’ll never finish him.”

The pressure in my bladder ratcheted tighter. I knew I had to ask.

“Kenny,” I said, folding my arms in my lap, trying to sit very still. “Do you—um—have any antibiotics?”

He looked up from his Jell-O, brows knitting together. “Of all the drugs people hit me up for,” he said, laughing. “You know you can’t get high off antibiotics, right?”

“I’m not trying to get high.”

“You got an infection?”

I uncrossed and recrossed my legs. “Yeah.”

“Where?”

I didn’t answer.

“Is it an STD?”

“No, fuckboy.”

“Then what are you embarrassed about? It can’t be that bad.”

“Do you have any or not?”

He smoothed out his sheets with one hand. “I do.”

I picked at the frayed cuffs of my pants and chewed my bottom lip.

“They’re in my closet,” he said, nodding toward the built-in under the TV. “Leftover from my last surgery.”

The pain in my bladder pulsed. I exhaled through my teeth. “You don’t need them?”

“I don’t need much of anything anymore.”

My cheeks burned. The words hung in the room like secondhand smoke.

“They’re all yours under one condition,” he said. “You tell me what they’re for.”

I pressed my lips together.

“Come on,” he said. “Dying wish.”

“That’s a pretty shitty wish.”

“I’m a simple man.” He shrugged against his pillows. “Besides, the Make-A-Wish goons already beat you to the big-ticket items.”

I smiled despite myself—and then the urge to pee hit again, sharp.

“Fine,” I said. “I have a UTI and no health insurance.”

He started to grin, then tried to hide it. “How’d you get it?”

“How do you think?”

He stretched his arms over his head. “Recently removed catheter?”

“Fuck off, Kenny.”

“What? That’s how I got mine.”

I put my face in my hands and groaned. “You can’t tell anyone,” I said.

“Who would I tell?”

“Your nurse.”

“Nah,” he said. “The hot ones are on duty today, so I’m the dying boy who can’t bathe himself. No time for gossip.”

I exhaled, and my bladder throbbed. “I got it from Juice.”

“What the fuck kind of juice are you drinking?”

“No, idiot. Juice. That kid we grew up with? The one Momo used to call O.J. Simpson?”

“Meyer?”

I closed my eyes and nodded.

He didn’t even let me explain. The second he realized I’d hooked up with the pretty boy we used to shake down for pops, he started cackling. He knew I lost my virginity to Juice so I could swipe his bar mitzvah money, but he and my cousins saw that as a duty—a sacrifice for our treehouse money. This…well, this was a choice. And to him, that was humiliating.

“Fuck you, dude,” I said, hunching over, hot shame climbing my neck.

“You and Meyer?” he wheezed, machine beeping. “Was it one time? Or like—a whole saga?”

I hopped off his bed. “You got your answer. I’m taking my drugs now.”

I opened the built-in closet.

It hit me immediately—Kenny’s old smell, from before the chemo and antiseptic and lemon disinfectant. Sweat in cotton, hot crayons, wet grass. For a few seconds, the hospital scent vanished. I was in our childhood again: grass-stained knees, crawfish carcasses on the asphalt, zydeco blasting from a duct-taped boombox. I remembered the day the swing set collapsed under us at the park—rust and bad welds—and Kenny’s arm snapped, the bone pushing against his skin.

I’d princess-carried him six blocks back to Momo’s house, singing “Dock of the Bay” to calm him down. My voice was shit, but he’d laughed between sobs.

Back then, I thought that bone was the worst injury he’d ever see.

“Can you see it?” Kenny called from the bed. “Check the PS4 box.”

Inside was a treasure trove of creams, tabs, capsules. A graveyard of prescriptions.

I sniffed and wiped my eyes on my sleeve as I dug. Zofran. Ativan. Reglan. Finally: doxycycline. Small bottle. Blue capsules. I set the box back on the shelf, closed the closet, and turned back to him.

“Take one every eight hours with food,” he said, eyes closed, head sunk deep in his pillows. “No milk. You’ll puke your guts out.”

I nodded and pocketed the bottle, then climbed back onto the end of his bed.

“I’ll page the nurse for cranberry juice,” he added. “That helps, too.”

“Thanks,” I said, which didn’t feel like nearly enough.

“You in pain?” he asked, one eye half open.

“I’ll live,” I said—and wanted to swallow it back the second it left my mouth.

Kenny shut his eye again. “How bad?”

“I’ve had it a week,” I said. “The frequency’s the worst. I started wearing an adult diaper so I can sit through LSAT class.”

“I’m wearing one too,” he said. “It’s not so bad.”

We laughed and swapped diaper sizes. Mine was bigger. Somehow that made us laugh harder.

“So, when did this thing with Meyer start?” he asked.

“Jesus Christ,” I sighed. “Let it go.”

“Dying wish.”

“You already used one.”

“There’s no limit on dying wishes,” he said, nudging his cannula. “Come on, Z. I’m stuck here with daytime TV or Netflix reruns. I need some element of danger. And don’t say dying of cancer is dangerous. That’s not danger. There’s no if in it. I know how the story ends.”

My groin throbbed, but I held it. “Okay,” I said. “But you only get one more wish from me. That’s it.”

He beamed. “I wish to know everything about you and Meyer,” he said. “When it started, how long, all the dirty details.”

So, I told him. How Juice and I kept in touch after he moved out of Newport. How we landed at the same college, took the same classes, went to a freshman Christmas party, drank too much spiked eggnog, and ended up in his bed wearing Santa hats and nothing else. We’ve been finding our way into each other’s beds since.

“I’ve never been drunk,” Kenny said. “Bran tried once. I couldn’t even finish a beer. It wasn’t the cancer. Beer just tastes like piss.”

“Beer is gross,” I said. “You don’t drink it for the taste. You drink it to get fucked up.”

“I’m already fucked up,” he said, studying the IV line on his hand. “Is Meyer the only guy you’ve been with?”

I propped myself up on an elbow so I could see his face. From where I was lying, the only things I could see was the dimple at the base of his chin.

“No,” I said.

He smirked, just barely. “That busy, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, drawing out the word. “Have you ever been with someone?”

He lifted his head, frowned at me. “Is that a serious question?”

“Some people have cancer fetishes,” I muttered. “You’re starting to resemble a Black Professor X. Some girls might be into that.”

His frown deepened, lips working around words, then he just barked out a laugh. He laughed so hard the cannula slipped and he stopped getting air. The flow meter beeped and within seconds a nurse was in the doorway, fussing over him.

“Can you bring me a bottle of cranberry, Nicole?” he said around the thermometer she’d stuck in his mouth.

“Something wrong with the OJ?” she asked.

“Nah,” he grinned, chewing the thermometer. “It’s for my cousin. She got a UTI from some dork we used to pick on.”

While the pretty nurse undressed Kenny for his bath, I slipped down the hall into a public bathroom. I locked the door, yanked my pants down, and peed fire again. I dry-swallowed a doxy then folded myself over, forehead on knees.

The urge to pee didn’t go away. I whimpered into my kneecaps. My legs shook. Someone jiggled the handle on the other side of the door, and I couldn’t even form the words “occupied.” All I could think about was bacteria shooting up into my kidneys, phantom flank pain blooming.

I tried to think about LSAT flashcards instead. Logical reasoning, conditional logic. Stuff I knew better than my own body, apparently.

Convert the sentence into if/then form: I am going to die of kidney failure.

If I don’t surrender coffee and sex, then I will die a slow death alongside Kenny due to kidney failure.

If Kenny and I are the same blood type, then I can have his kidneys after he dies.

At some point, I dozed off like that, head between my knees. When I woke, another stranger was jiggling the handle. I wiped, pulled up my pants, and drank tap water from my cupped hand until my tongue stopped feeling like chalk.

When I got back, Kenny wasn’t in his bed. A shard of panic stabbed my gut. The pretty bath nurse was at the station outside his room, typing and smiling like nothing was wrong. She would’ve told me if something had happened. I knew that. I didn’t believe it.

I paced outside his bathroom door, counting seconds. Then I flopped into the recliner by the window and put my legs up, interlacing my fingers over my lower stomach. Pressing down relieved some pressure. The AZO I’d been popping like candy had stopped doing anything around day five.

“Hey, Kenny,” I called. “You got any pain meds you can spare? My urethra is crying.”

No answer.

“Also, can you hurry up? I have to pee again.”

I heard the shower curtain rip open. The metal trash can knocked over.

I jumped up, knocked on the door. “You good?”

Nothing.

I turned the handle and pushed.

Kenny screamed on the other side. “Shut the fucking door!”

Toilet paper ribbons flew at my face. I ducked and grabbed the door, pulling it mostly closed to allow him privacy but keeping my hand on the knob.

“Shit—sorry,” I said. “I thought you needed help.”

“I can wipe my own ass, jerk.”

“Technically, no, you can’t,” I said. “They just told you not to bathe yourself.”

“Fuck you.”

“Want me to get a nurse?”

“Please don’t,” he said, suddenly quiet. “I thought you left.”

“I told you I was hitting the cafeteria,” I said.

“Everybody says that when it’s a convenient time to dip,” he said. “It’s the cancer-kid Irish goodbye.”

I wedged my nose in the crack of the door. The smell hit me—day-old meat and something sweet underneath. My stomach lurched.

“Don’t come in,” he said.

I stopped pushing but didn’t let go of the knob. “What are you doing?”

He didn’t answer at first. I listened to him breathe.

“I was trying to go to the bathroom,” he said finally. “By myself.”

“You have a nurse for that.”

“I don’t want a fucking nurse for it. Especially not the hot ones.”

At the sound in his voice, I let go of the hesitation and nudged the door open with my knee. Kenny yanked his hospital gown over his lap.

He was on the toilet, face strained and sweaty, invisible eyebrows drawn low. He looked like someone had sat him on a landmine.

“Get out,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You need someone to wipe your ass or nah?”

“Z, please.” His voice cracked. “Get the fuck out.”

I inhaled—and immediately regretted the deep breath.

“Look,” I said. “Either I wipe your ass or the pretty nurse does. Pick your poison.”

“I don’t need my ass wiped,” he said, not looking at me. “Not yet, I don’t think.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s stuck,” he whispered. “I can’t get it out or, like, pinch it off.”

I glanced from his face to the toilet and back. “Oh.”

Kenny’s copper cheeks darkened.

“I see.”

“Just go,” he said. “This stupid pain medicine constipates me. Makes it harder to go.”

Stupidly, it hit me then that of course he was in pain. I’d known it, technically. I hadn’t felt it, not like this. It’s easy to forget someone’s hurting when they’re making jokes about your sex life.

“I just need to catch my breath,” he said, eyes squeezed shut. “Then I can push again.”

“I’m not leaving you on the toilet with half a loaf in your ass,” I said.

“You’d leave any normal person to shit alone, wouldn’t you?”

“But you’re not normal, Kenny,” I said—and almost swallowed my tongue. Out of everything mean I’d ever said to him, that one seemed to land the hardest.

We stared at each other.

“Are there gloves in your room?” I asked.

His eyes widened. “No fucking way.”

“If you’re not strong enough to pinch it off, somebody has to be.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I’m a disgusting human being,” I said.

I found latex gloves and a paper mask by the sink. When I came back, he was gripping the safety bar on the wall, breathing hard.

I slipped on the gloves and mask, then crouched beside the toilet.

“Lean forward a little,” I said. “Hold the bar.”

He half-squatted, knees shaking. I wrapped my left arm around his waist to steady him and slid my right hand under him.

The first contact made me gag behind the mask. The stool broke apart under my fingers like dry clay, clinking against the porcelain as it fell.

“Jesus,” I said, slumping back against the seat. “I think we just leveled up our relationship.”

“There’s more,” he muttered. “Some of it’s still stuck. Further up.”

I glanced up. His face was stony, but tears were streaming down.

“I got it,” I said softly, patting his knee.

We repeated the maneuver—my arm around his waist, my gloved hand under him. I hooked a finger just inside, scooping out what his body wouldn’t let go of.

“That good enough?” I asked.

He nodded.

I eased him back onto the seat, wiped him, then stripped off the gloves and mask and scrubbed my hands in water so hot it left my skin pink.

I soaked a washcloth in warm water and wiped down his back, his chest, his neck. He was drenched in sweat. He didn’t want to bother the nurse for a second bath.

I fetched a fresh gown, helped him into it with my eyes politely on the tile, then princess-carried him to bed. He was lighter than my LSAT books. When I’d carried him as a kid with a broken arm, we were about the same weight, and I had to keep stopping to rest. Now, he felt like air.

I tucked him in and climbed onto the bed over the covers.

“Did you really think I left?” I asked after a while.

He nodded. “Usually when visitors say they’re going to the cafeteria, it’s code for ‘I’ve had enough of the cancer kid.’”

I squeezed his hand. “I would never do that. When I leave, I’ll tell you.”

He chuckled into his pillow, then rolled onto his back.

I laced our fingers together. “Do you need to…talk? Or—”

“Stop,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re not good at the feelings talk,” he said. “Don’t force it.” He squeezed my hand back. “I don’t have a reset button, Z. There’s nothing anyone can do. Not anymore.”

I broke then but blinked the tears back and rested my cheek against his shoulder so he couldn’t see my face.

“If you’re still in pain,” he added, scrolling through Netflix. “I’ve got some high-dose ibuprofen in the shoebox that might be expired. No more oral pain meds. Everything’s IV now.”

He picked an anime movie and tucked the remote under his thigh.

I stayed in that bed until Bran came back around three a.m., smelling like antiseptic and coffee. The fire in my bladder had cooled some, thanks to the antis. Kenny was half asleep, drooling on my shoulder.

I plucked his ear. “Hey. I’m leaving.”

“You’re an asshole,” he mumbled, eyes closed.

“Well, your breath stinks,” I said.

Bran laughed as he sank into the recliner. Still in scrubs, eyes bloodshot, jaw shadowed.

“You okay to drive?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, sliding into my shoes. “All Frodo and I did was sleep.”

“She got what she came for anyway,” Kenny said.

I almost didn’t hear it. Almost wished I hadn’t. It landed like a knee to the gut—whether he meant it that way or not. Whether it was a joke, the way we’d always talked, or something he actually believed.

I looked down at him, waiting for his eyes to open. They didn’t. I didn’t believe he was asleep.

“Well,” Bran stretched out his legs. “Shoot us a text when you get home safe.”

“I will.”

I kissed Kenny’s head, the skin was warm and dry. I wanted to say I love you and I’m sorry and you’re not just some errand between practice exams, but in that moment, it felt fake. That’s what I told myself.

I didn’t see his face again until the wake.

They held it at the Newport Country Club, a few streets from his childhood house. The caterers served catfish coubillon with skillet cornbread—Kenny’s favorite. I hated catfish, but I scraped my bowl clean. Bones, tomato juice, everything. Just for him.

The mortician had colored Kenny’s skin back to mocha brown, replacing the chalky chemo pallor. They filled in his eyebrows with makeup, glossed his lips pink, flushed his cheeks, topped his head with a thick mass of black curls. I’d never seen Kenny with hair like that. He’d always kept it shaved.

The body in the casket was a stranger. So, I focused on what I recognized: the dimple in his chin. It was the only real thing left—no makeup could fake it. I brushed my thumb over it until I had the ridge memorized. Then I slid something between his fingers.

Unpainted Legolas. The one he told me to take.

“I’ll never finish him,” he’d said.

I tucked the little figurine under his folded hands. Some part of me liked the idea of him sailing off to whatever came next with an unfinished elf in tow.

After that, I stepped back from the casket, fighting the urge to swipe the wig off, to scrub away the blush, to tell everyone this wasn’t him.

The body in the box could stay pretty for everyone else. I’d already said goodbye to the real Kenny on a different dock, in a different bay.

The Crown Series: TOC

0. An Introduction to “Crown”

1. Akademos

2. Crown

3. Oxtails

4. Ham Hocks

5. Juice

6. Ash

7. Dock of the Bay

*While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose.

This story includes non-graphic physical violence, verbal aggression, and themes of religious shame and guilt.

Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

ASH

Bran and I were taking turns drawing black crosses on each other’s foreheads in the basement when our cousin Tini showed up with a black eye and a busted lip.

“The fuck happened to you?” Kenny, Bran’s little brother, asked from the loveseat in the corner.

“Tribal disagreements,” Tini said. “I’ll dab some Mac on it, so the priest doesn’t exorcise me.”

In a few hours, we were supposed to bow before a priest and renounce our vices for Lent. Usually, the priest marked our foreheads himself, thumb in a bowl of palm branch ash. But we didn’t want him to smell the weed on us, so we did it ourselves.

“Okay then,” Bran said, looking away from Tini’s eye. “How’s the res?”

Tini lived on the Choctaw reservation in East Baton Rouge, the only one of us who actually grew up on tribal land. The rest of us were scattered across south Texas, checking the “American Indian or Alaska Native” box like a magic coupon.

“Same old, same old.” Tini dropped onto the carpet beside us and brushed her bangs aside, exposing her forehead. “Do my cross, will you?”

Bran obliged, dipping his fingers into the palm ashes he’d collected in a Christmas cookie tin. He drew a crooked cross between her brows. When he finished, she let her bangs fall back into place, covering it. I suddenly felt silly that my cross was on full display against my pale forehead, while theirs—on darker skin, under bangs—looked faint.

Mine screamed. Theirs whispered.

“Gonna share any of that, Herc?” Tini tilted her head toward Kenny, who we’d nicknamed Herc after he beat his first bout of cancer.

Kenny looked down at the line of joints on the coffee table. “They’re all yours.”

Tini grinned, plucked one from the table, struck a match from the pink box in her back pocket, and lit the end.

She was the kind of beautiful I wanted to be. Long legs, sleek raven hair, copper skin. At seventeen, I hadn’t worked out how to straighten my hair yet; every day was a new battle with curls that bent to the mood of the weather.

“What’s with the dress, cuz?” Tini asked, smoke curling from her lips.

I wore a black lace dress with a white Peter Pan collar and low heels with ankle straps my mom called “church appropriate.”

“You look like Wednesday Addams,” Tini giggled, leaning into Kenny’s shoulder. He and Bran laughed too.

“I’m just that thrilled for two hours of gospel,” I said. “What about you? You wearing booty shorts to church?”

She clicked her tongue. “Touché, Wednesday. I’ve got two dresses in the car. You can borrow the one I don’t wear if you want a splash of color.”

The offer was too tempting, which is exactly why I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

“Suit yourself,” she said.

Tini ended up in a green satin dress that hugged every curve, silver jewelry bright against her skin. She looked like a jewel someone had smuggled into church.

We went to a big parish in Newport. Tini sat beside me and my parents, smelling like rubbing alcohol with a hint of rose. I could feel the eyes of the local boys crawl over her, then land on me like I was background scenery. When I looked away from the altar, I caught them staring, wide-eyed and flushed. Baby pit bulls.

Tini ignored them, sighing whenever we had to stand, kneel, or sit.

Each sigh earned her a side-eye from my mom.

My mother had loved Tini when we were little—another girl to braid, another mouth to feed. Then we grew hips and secrets. Tini started coming back from the playground with torn stockings and a laugh too loud to be ashamed of, and my mom started watching her like a stove left on.

Don’t be like her, my mother didn’t say. She didn’t have to. I learned how to move my chair away from Tini without touching her.

When it was time for communion, we shuffled into line.

Tini took the communion bread, knocked back the grape juice like a shot, then turned around and grabbed my wrist, pulling me behind a pillar.

“You have a car, right?” Her lips were stained purple.

“Yes,” I said. My dad had found us by then, his head craning around parishioners. My mom’s eyes were narrowed, lips pinched. I could feel their attention like a hand on the back of my neck.

“Drive me somewhere,” Tini said.

“I can after the service.”

“A store,” she said. “Now.”

My mom was standing in the pew, pointing to the empty seat beside her. Sit. Now. Then she dropped back down, jaw tight.

“I can’t have Momo know I’m gone,” Tini hissed. “She’ll expect me back right after. The window’s now or never.”

I looked at her black eye. My cross itched. “I’ve missed communion,” I whispered.

“Your soul’ll make the next one,” she said. “Trust me.”

Tini dragged me down the aisle. When I caught my parents’ eyes, I pointed at Tini and mouthed, emergency. My dad frowned but nodded. My mom’s eyes went wide. I knew I’d pay for it later.

We drove to Meyer’s Grocery & Pharmacy, a yellow box of a market between Newport and Barrett Station. My friend Juice’s grandparents owned it.

Inside Meyer’s, Juice was stacking shiny green apples in a wooden bin by the window. Puberty had been kind to him—just a faint line of acne scars at his hairline. We’d been friends for years. In the fall, we’d be at the same university.

“Hey, Z!” he called. “Happy Ash Wednesday.” He kept a mental calendar of my Catholic holidays. I did the same with his Jewish ones.

“Hey, Juice. No class today?” I asked. Tini veered off down an aisle without a word.

“Nah. Free period.” He looked at my forehead and smirked. “You off all day?”

“Catholic orders,” I said.

“Of course,” he laughed. “Explains the…smudge.” He pointed at the cross on my forehead.

I clapped my hand to it, suddenly aware of how visible it was here, under fluorescent lights.

Juice’s eyes flicked toward Tini when she returned. “Who’s your friend?”

“This is my cousin Tini,” I said.

They shook hands. Tini’s gaze flicked over his biceps like she was reading fine print. When she pulled her hand back, she traced her cheekbone, jawline—subtle as a siren.

“Nice to meet you,” Tini said. “Wednesday Addams here got her period, so we gotta plug her up before lunch.”

Heat shot through my gut.

Juice flushed, laughed nervously. “Yikes. Sorry.” His eyes traveled from the hem of my dress up to my collar. “You do kinda look like Wednesday, though.”

“Thanks, ass,” I said, pushing past him, following Tini to the feminine care aisle.

Tini drifted past pads and tampons, fingers brushing price tags.

“You dragged me out of church for your fucking period—” I started.

“It’s not my period,” Tini whispered. She waited until the couple disappeared, then snatched a pink-and-white box from the shelf and tucked it at her side.

“Is that a pregnancy test?” I hissed.

“Keep it down, Wednesday. This town’s got thin walls.”

“You pulled me out of communion for this?”

“I’m sorry, cousin. Is this not serious enough for you?” She pretended to browse tampons while a red-faced man with an ash cross on his forehead rolled by.

“I can’t do this on the res,” she said when he passed. “People know me there.”

“And people know me here,” I said. “If you want that test, you’re buying it. Yourself.”

She glared. My stomach twisted, but I didn’t back off.

“Fine,” she said, stuffing the box into her purse.

I caught her wrist. “Don’t steal it either.”

She yanked away. “Fine. Where’s the bathroom?”

“In the back.” I pulled the test from her purse and held it in plain sight. “After you pay.”

At the register, Juice’s grandma checked us out. Thin, curls pinned back, eyes bright with practiced neutrality. Tini told a story about her mom being sick and needing the test. Juice’s grandma nodded like she’d heard every version.

Then she turned to me. “You still on track for college?” she asked. “Grades still good?”

I nodded, throat tight. “Yes, ma’am.”

After we paid, Juice handed over the key to the employees-only bathroom. Tini could bend him as easily as I could. That always sent something sour and bright through me, like jealousy mixed with pride.

Inside, she locked herself in a stall. I waited by the sink, arms crossed.

“How long?” I asked.

“Five minutes.”

When the stall door swung open, she washed her hands hard, shoulders hunched.

“Who’s the father?” I asked.

“A guy from back home.” She kept her eyes on the sink. “He’s older.”

“Did he give you that black eye?”

She shrugged. “I hit him harder.”

My face twisted before I could stop it. She saw.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Not every romance is flowers and chocolates. He and I have real passion. So much passion it hurts sometimes.”

The word passion sat wrong in her mouth. And still—some small, ugly part of me wondered what it would be like to be wanted enough that someone would risk everything and get ugly for you.

“I can’t have a baby,” she said, eyes closed. “My mom would crucify me.”

“So…abortion?” I asked.

“I can’t afford that.” Her voice tightened. “And he can’t know.”

I looked at her eye again, swollen under the makeup. “If he can’t know,” I said carefully, “what was the black eye for?”

She didn’t answer. Wouldn’t look at herself.

“Time,” I said, tapping my wrist.

We stood at the sink. Tini stared at the stick like it might change its mind. Then she rolled her head back and shut her eyes.

“Fuck me,” she breathed.

Outside, in the hot car, we sat without speaking.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

Tini twisted off the orange juice cap, took a long drink, then dumped celery seeds into the jug.

“What are you doing?”

“An abortion cocktail,” she said, voice shaking. “I’ve been Googling ways to get rid of this all morning. And unless you wanna knee me in the stomach or push me down a flight of stairs, shut the fuck up.”

I covered my eyes, ashamed for her.

“Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying all of this, Wednesday.”

I dropped my hands. “Excuse me?”

“As if you needed to look any more perfect,” she said, her voice breaking. She ripped open a bag of cheese balls and shoved them into her mouth, orange dust streaking her lips.

There was a time we were equals. Whole summers in Barrett Station. Barbies and Betty & Veronica. She was always Veronica, me Betty.

“What do you need?” I asked, reaching across the console, dabbing her tears with one finger. “Do you want to see a doctor? Those sticks can be wrong.”

“I don’t have health insurance,” she whispered.

“Who is the guy?” I asked. “Tell me.”

She tore into a box of raisins next. “He’s forty-one. Has kids and a wife.”

I held still, like if I moved I’d knock something loose.

“Is that why he hit you?” I asked.

Tini stared at Meyer’s. “Yesterday I asked for the card. He said don’t spend more than fifty.” She touched her eye. “Card declined. Then he tells me he can’t pay his mortgage.” She swallowed. “He was pissed.”

Then, almost flat: “I knocked him out with a crowbar and took whatever cash he had to get here.”

Part of me didn’t believe her. The other part believed it too much.

“If only I got knocked up by a nice boy like Juice,” she said. “Then this wouldn’t be so bad.”

“That’s stupid,” I said.

“It isn’t.”

Juice was inside, probably stacking apples, thinking his life was complicated because of tests and parking tickets. Tini’s world was crowbars and celery seeds.

“You have it made,” she said. “You’re going to college with your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I muttered, turning the key and blasting the A/C.

“If he isn’t,” she said, “why are you so defensive?” She air-quoted. “Because he’s a good guy? He wouldn’t want some knocked-up floozy like me?”

My foot slipped. The car jerked. I slammed the brake.

“Fuck you, Wednesday,” she said. There was no venom in it. Just exhaustion.

She opened the passenger door and leaned out. “Hey, Juicy!”

Juice was outside now, rolling his bike toward the crosswalk. He turned, smiled when he saw us—saw her.

“Why don’t you come by our grandmother’s after school?” Tini sang. “Wednesday and I would love to hang.”

Even from the driver’s seat, I could see the way his whole face lit up.

“O-okay!” he called.

“You know where it is, right, love?” she asked, syrupy.

He nodded, still grinning. “See you in a few!”

He hopped on his bike and pedaled away.

My stomach clenched.

I drove to Momo Rene’s in silence. Tini used my rearview mirror as a vanity, repainting her face.

Under the carport, our relatives ate fried catfish, buttered grits, and baguette slices off plastic plates. Fasting was technically part of Ash Wednesday, but my family always started strong and repented later.

My parents intercepted us at the back door. My mom smiled too wide. “Where have you two been?” she asked. Only I could hear the strain under it.

“I got my period,” Tini said. “We needed to hit the store ASAP.”

My mom looked to me for confirmation. My dad took a bite of fish and looked elsewhere.

“I drove her,” I said.

“You two all good?” my mom asked. “Everything taken care of?”

We nodded. She studied us, then let it go.

“Good then,” my dad said, clapping my back. “Let’s get some food in you girls.”

Inside, Papaw’s back kitchen was a shrine to his absence—unfinished beams, checkerboard vinyl, photos of cousins and aunties and Momo, a water-stained map of Barrett Station on the wall.

“Where y’all been?” Bran called.

“Girl stuff,” Tini said, heading straight for the dominoes table where she slid in like she belonged.

I sat on the couch and lifted Kenny’s skinny ankles into my lap.

“You alright, cuz?” he asked.

“Fine,” I grunted.

He lifted both hands. “Sorry I asked.”

Juice arrived a few hours later. By then, Tini’s breath was sharp with booze and fish.

The grown folks swallowed him in hugs under the carport—“The Juice has arrived!” “O.J. in the house!”—his face lighting up as he squeezed toward us.

When he reached the back kitchen, Tini wrapped both arms around his neck, pressing her hips to his. Juice’s brows knit, but he smiled anyway, arms hovering at her back, unsure where to land.

When she pulled away, he gave me a quick side hug.

“You hungry?” Tini asked, already lacing her fingers through his and pulling him toward the counters. He let her.

I hovered. Tini stayed close. Juice didn’t touch her back, but he didn’t move away either. They laughed, shared food, moved like a unit.

My chest ached watching him slide toward her orbit. The worst part wasn’t that she wanted him. It was that it looked like he wanted her too—and that I understood why.

“I’d like to be a nurse,” Tini told him later.

“That’s admirable,” Juice said, eyes fixed on her. “Have you applied anywhere?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have the time. Or the grades.”

My stomach flipped when Juice suggested she try community college then transfer to be with us. Thankfully, Tini changed the subject.

He left later without saying goodbye to me. I went to Momo’s bathroom, scrubbed the ash cross from my forehead, and had a silent pity party on the toilet until my eyes weren’t so red.

When I came out, Tini was waiting in the living room.

“He had a curfew,” she said. “He wanted me to tell you bye.”

I nodded. Outside, behind foil-taped windows, my family’s laughter rose and fell.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

I closed my eyes, tired. “What do you want from me?”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“Really?” I said. “How’s that fetus? Did you tell Juice he’s walking into baby mama drama?”

Her face hardened. “You’re cruel,” she whispered. “How did you get this way?”

“How did you?” I shot back. “You’re such a disappointment.”

“Fuck you, Wednesday.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Call it like I see it,” she said, pushing her bangs aside.

I wanted to rip them out by the roots. “I’ll do it for you,” I heard myself say.

“Do what?”

I looked at her stomach. She looked at my clenched fists, then took a step back.

“Are you fucking serious?” she whispered.

The house was quiet except for the muffled party outside.

“Would you really?” Tini asked. “I want you to. I need you to.”

I shook my head, but the word that came out was, “I can try.”

She swallowed, walked to the door, and turned the deadbolt. The lock clicked, loud as a slap.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

“I wasn’t entirely—” My teeth chattered. “Tini, this is—”

“I want you to,” she said. “Please.”

My heart hammered. I knew it was stupid. I knew it was dangerous. But we’d been raised on stories—remedies that could fix anything, curses that could kill, rituals that could save a soul if you did them just right. We were girls raised on half-truths and kitchen magic, taught to wield our bodies like weapons and shields long before anyone taught us how they worked.

“Do it,” she begged. “Before Momo wakes up.”

I drew back my fist out of habit, then dropped it.

“Use your knee,” she said. “It’ll be…more effective. I think.”

Tini stepped close and rested her forehead against mine, hands on my shoulders. I felt her breath on my nose. It didn’t smell like booze anymore—just salt and citrus.

“Do it,” she whispered. “Like you mean it.”

“Okay,” I whispered. And in my head, I added: for both of us.

“Do it twice.”

I gripped her shoulders. She nodded against me and closed her eyes.

I drew my right leg back. My calf shook. I waited for it to still, then drove my knee forward into her stomach. Dull thunk. Tini folded over my shoulder, gasping. I kneed her again, then stumbled back, landing hard on the tile.

My knee throbbed like I’d hit bone. I wanted to cry from it.

Tini dropped to her knees, both arms around her middle, heaving. Little choked coughs escaped between her fingers. The sound shredded me.

In a panic over being seen, I hauled her up, slinging her arm over my neck. We slipped out the back door, circled the house, and made it to my Beetle parked down the street.

All I had in the car was a university hoodie and a water bottle.

I helped Tini pull the hoodie over her dress. I fed her water. We kicked off our shoes, filling the car with the smell of feet and grass. I reclined her seat, then mine, and rolled onto my side to face her.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

She shook her head. “I needed you to.”

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“A little sore,” she said. Then she gave a breathy laugh. “I didn’t think you could hit that hard, Wednesday. Guess you really hate me.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s okay if you do,” she said. “I hate me sometimes too.”

I reached across the console and swept her bangs from her eyes, resting my hand along her jaw.

“I envy you most of the time,” I said.

She snorted. “Yeah right.”

“You don’t have a map,” I whispered, and hated myself for how much I wanted that. She got to do things nobody taught her to apologize for. “You’re smarter than you think. You could do a lot better for yourself.”

“You don’t know—” she started.

“You’re not a prisoner,” I cut in. “You have options. Escape routes. You have a family. You have me.”

Tini breathed in and out, a soft wheeze on every exhale.

“What if the baby isn’t gone?” I asked. The words felt small and huge at the same time.

Tini shuddered under my hand. “I don’t know.”

“Would you keep it?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t. I don’t think I even want kids. Ever. Is that bad?”

“No,” I said.

“You’d be a good mom,” she said. “I really think so.”

“You’d be better,” I told her.

“Why?”

“Because you have passion,” I said.

She started crying, my palm still on her jaw. I scooted closer, as close as the console would let me. She covered my hand with hers and nuzzled into it like she could burrow through skin and disappear.

“I’m sorry I kept calling you Wednesday,” she said, voice thick.

“It’s alright,” I said. “This dress is awful. I deserve it.”

She laughed into my hand, hot breath bursting against my palm in quick little puffs. Then her face went heavy, her eyelids fluttering like a candle giving up. She stayed pressed to me anyway, still holding on.

Outside the windshield, the street was empty and shiny under the porch lights. Somewhere back at Momo’s, the house kept breathing without us.

Tini slept. I watched the rise and fall of her chest. Counted it. I wanted to lay my ear against her belly and listen for proof. I wanted a sign that we hadn’t just hurt her for nothing.

My knee throbbed, a dull ache blooming up my thigh. I pressed my palm to it and breathed, trying not to think about what I’d done.

Two girls. A locked door. A body turned into something we had to fix.

Later would come words for it. Later would come the knowing.

But then, I only knew we were trying to save each other with what we had.

The Crown Series: TOC

0. An Introduction to “Crown”

1. Akademos

2. Crown

3. Oxtails

4. Ham Hocks

5. Juice

6. Ash

*While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose.

This story contains underage drinking, substance use including overdose, and racialized comments and profiling.

Disclaimer: These stories take place in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some legal references may be outdated. Thank you in advance for indulging the millennial slang, which is also—mercifully—outdated.

Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

JUICE

Juice and I had been friends ever since I gave him my virginity at his bar mitzvah. My cousins dared me to after learning he was going to inherit a large sum of money—and I did it.

He became a man, I lost my virtue, and we built a treehouse with bar mitzvah money.

Mazel tov.

The summer after my freshman year of college, Dre and I invited Juice to Houston to Christmas shop. The summer deals were better than the holiday sales, so my cousins and I often ’tis-the-seasoned in July.

My baby blue Beetle was crammed to the ceiling with bags and bodies. Juice sat shotgun, Apple Maps open, while Dre filled the backseat—stuffed like a melting marshmallow man between peeling leather and crisp black bags. The humidity glued my shirt to my spine. Traffic on I-69 North didn’t move so much as breathe.

“Hop on the feeder,” Juice said. “This rubbernecking goes on forever.”

I inched into the right lane. It fed into another line of cars and a red light that looked personal. In my rearview, Dre’s bald head was bowed over a strip of paper. When he looked up, he was licking a joint sealed.

I stared. “Are you fucking serious?”

“Chill, Z.” He dropped it into an XL Ziploc full of joints. Bits of dank clung to his goatee. “I know the rules. This is a no-smoking zone.”

Juice glanced back at the bag—not at Dre. “How much is that?”

“’Bout twenty grams,” Dre said, clapping the back of my seat. “Can you navigate to 288? Gotta hit the south side.”

“A drug deal?” Juice whispered, like my car was wired.

“A trade-off,” Dre said. “Mary for Molly.”

Every other month, Dre quit another job and went on a dope-selling bender to make rent. He’d used my car for this before. Family favors didn’t come with a lot of options.

“Molly?” I asked. “I thought you were a green man.”

“I am, but we’re enterin’ snowy territory and white kids love Molly. Gotta please the market, cuz.”

Juice threw his head back and snorted. “I’ve never tried Molly in my life.”

“You’re Jewish,” Dre reminded him. “White kids ain’t gonna share with ya.”

Juice was as Jewish as I was Catholic—on holidays and when our parents were watching. We both had ties to Crosby, except he was Newport and I was Barrett Station. When we landed at the same college, we got closer. Study buddies. Fuck buddies. When he rode shotgun, I usually let him hold my free hand or rest his palm on my thigh—small proofs I didn’t offer anyone else. He was never allowed to do it in front of my family. But with Juice, I let myself imagine an easier future—one where I didn’t have to explain anything.

“Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost,” Dre wailed, kicking my seat. “Crank that AC up, Z. I’m dyin’ back here!”

My VW sputtered and wheezed out what cool air it could. “You wanna buy me a new air filter?” I patted the dash.

He tutted. “Shit. I’m broke as a joke.”

Dre never had money, but I never faulted him for it. He worked jobs from here to there—bouncer, mall security, bus driver, short-order cook—never long enough to get ahead. Most of what he got came from the Nation, and most of that went straight to his mom’s dialysis. What was left—if anything—went into his grocery jar for Great Value rice, beans, and biscuit mix, and Jimmy Dean sausage. He didn’t cut corners on the pork.

The light ahead flashed green for fifteen seconds, then went yellow like it was bored of us. Cars trickled through and stopped again.

“How much can you get for that bag?” Juice asked.

“Couple hundred, I bet.”

Juice wiped sweat from his lip. “Market value on weed is a little different from MDMA.”

Dre clicked his tongue. “What would you know about it?”

“You may not get an exact return on your investment,” Juice said—calm, careful, like he could talk the situation into behaving.

“You worry about your shit, white boy.”

Juice faced forward. “NowI’m white,” he muttered.

Dre made us wait a few blocks from the drop at a Sparkle Burger while he traded Mary for Molly. Juice and I paid for our burgers in quarters, parked under the freeway, and sat on the hood. The air clung to my skin like wet cloth and frizzed my hair. I’d started straightening it in college. Juice was the only friend who knew its natural texture. I tugged my curls under the hood of my rain jacket, trying to keep them from springing free.

“What’re you gonna do when he comes back with all that Molly?” Juice asked.

“Not a clue. I can’t leave him on the curb.”

“I would.”

“Easy for you to say.” I rolled my head toward him. “He’s not your family.”

“You know what happens if we get caught with that shit?”

We’d taken a poli-sci course together in the spring—three weeks on drug crime penalties. I knew exactly where his mind had gone: minimums, maximums, how much damage we could do to ourselves in one bad decision.

I crumpled my wrapper. “Possession of between four ounces and five pounds of marijuana with intent to sell is a second-degree felony. Minimum one-eighty, max two years, ten-thousand-dollar fine.”

“I’m serious.”

“You asked.”

Juice dragged a hand through his hair and slipped off his glasses to wipe the humidity smears. “This would hurt you and me a lot more than it would Dre,” he said, sliding them back on. “Let’s just drop him somewhere. I’m not cool with Molly in the backseat.”

I stiffened. “It’s not your car.”

He muttered something about futures. I ignored him and tore my wrapper into neat little squares.

“You got out of Barrett, Z,” he said. “Stop trying to go back.”

That hit hard enough to piss me off. “I’m not—and even if I was, what the fuck does that even mean?”

“You’re on a full ride at a good university,” he said. “You’re three years from graduating. Studying for the LSAT already. You keep your GPA and you’re an auto-admit to any law school.”

“So?”

“So you’re one family fuck-up away from losing all of it,” he snapped. “Dre’s full of shit, and he’s gonna take you down with him.”

Something hot lodged between my heart and stomach—anger or grease, I couldn’t tell. “Juice,” I said, “you don’t get to talk about my family like that. You’ll never have that right. You’ll never understand.”

He scoffed. “Understand what—that y’all are doomed to be poor? Or doomed to commit felonies trying not to be? That what I’m missing?”

I flung the little paper squares at his face and slid off the hood.

“What the hell are we doing?” he groaned. “What are you trying to prove?”

I jabbed a finger into his chest. “What are you trying to prove? Why do you care so much?”

He hesitated. “Because you’re my friend,” he said. “And, believe it or not, I care about you.”

He turned from me then. I climbed into my Beetle and sat behind the wheel with the window down. Cars roared overhead, the concrete humming with each pass. Juice didn’t get in until it started to drizzle.

We met Dre at Sims Bayou in Sunnyside nearly an hour later. He leaned against a swing set, a thumb-sized baggie of capsules pinched between his fingers.

“That’s it?” Juice laughed as Dre climbed into the backseat.

“Fifteen-six of green buys you one-five of white,” Dre said. He shoved the pills into his pocket and stared out the window, embarrassed.

“Tried to tell you, man,” Juice said.

“Eat a dick, Juice.”

“Now what?” I asked. “Call it quits?”

“We just gotta find some white kids.”

Juice snorted.

“We need—” Dre inhaled, scanning the street, “—like a white girl trap.”

“Don’t say that so loud,” I said. “We’re near the police station.”

“You know what I mean,” Dre said. “Give me a pumpkin spice latte and a Patagonia.”

“The hell is a Patagonia?” I asked.

“It’s July,” Juice said.

Dre and I looked at him.

“Pumpkin spice is seasonal,” Juice explained. “Like September to December.”

Dre cracked up. “You wouldknow that.”

“Well,” I said, patting the steering wheel and catching Dre’s eyes in the rearview, “we’re not gonna find any white kids here.”

“White kids love the hood, Z,” Dre said. “We just gotta be patient.”

I wasn’t, so I drove to Rice Village, where we prowled for white kids.

Thick oaks arched over the streets; brick storefronts wore black serif lettering like credentials. Valet stands and tip jars lined the sidewalks while teenage boys in khakis drifted past. I parked on the second level of a garage. Juice paid for parking with his credit card.

We struck out at Kendra Scott and Banana Republic—both of which Dre swore were white girl traps. Rain chased us into a bookstore just as we were about to leave. Between the record bins and audiobooks, Juice spotted a guy with a blond fauxhawk and red-rimmed, non-prescription glasses stocking disco.

“Meyer, my man!” Fauxhawk said, setting down a box of records and sticking out his hand.

Noah Meyer—that was Juice’s real name. My family were the only ones who called him Juice. He earned the nickname at the first crawfish boil he ever came to, when someone misheard Jew as juice. Everyone assumed it was a nickname. Juice thought it sounded cool. It stuck.

Juice shook his hand. “How’s Tech?”

“Barely survived,” Fauxhawk said, trying and failing to rake his fingers through hair stiff with gel. “You?”

“Awesome,” Juice said. “We really like it.” He flicked a glance at me, and I nodded.

Fauxhawk nodded back—then his eyes slid to Dre and stalled.

Dre loomed beside us—tall and wide, arms crossed, tattoos climbing his forearms, his mouth set in the kind of scowl he wore around people he didn’t trust, which was most people.

Fauxhawk blinked once, recalibrating.

“You party?” Dre asked.

Fauxhawk hesitated, so Dre dangled the baggie between them.

“Oh, shit,” Fauxhawk said, stepping back then tossing Juice a wary look. “College changed you, Meyer.”

“We’re just looking for somewhere to turn up,” Juice said, rocking on his heels.

“You’re in luck,” Fauxhawk said. “Couple friends are heading to a trash party in Montrose. You might find buyers there.”

Montrose: gritty-but-safe, where suburban kids pretended to slum without consequences.

An hour later, we stood in a junkyard in the heart of Houston. The “party” was a showing—trash assembled into art, each piece labeled with the name of an 80s rock song. A crucifix of toilet paper rolls. A gutted Impala pasted with Jackie Brown stills. The artist drifted through it all with a boombox playing Icelandic ambient music—and to Dre’s complete fury, the artist was a green man too and cringed at the sight of the Molly.

The crowd was immaculate and uninterested. No one wanted our drugs. Dre cut the price—ten percent off, then half, then all of it for the price of one.

“Punishment for carryin’ this shit is life,” he muttered. “Gotta get rid of it.”

“You won’t get life for a gram,” Juice said.

“Look it up.”

“Less than four grams of MDMA with intent to sell is a second-degree felony,” I said. “Two to twenty years. Ten-thousand-dollar fine.”

Dre twisted his mouth.

“It’s only life if you keep eatin’ like you do,” I added. “Cracklins and boudin’ll shave it down for you.”

He laughed but his features hardened, like I had said the wrong thing. “Okay, officer.”

“You were worried about the time—”

“Just waitin’ on you to throw the book,” he said. He peeled the bag open and swallowed a pill, then tossed the rest at Juice. “Embrace your culture, whitey.”

A spike of hurt drove into my heart, like I had unintentionally chosen a side—a side I hadn’t realized existed.

Dre glanced back at me then. “You don’t gotta do that,” he said, low, eyes on the bag, like it was already too late to stop anything. Like he already knew me.

Juice held the baggie away from his body. “So much for white kids loving Molly.”

I watched as Dre drifted toward a plastic-wrapped table of beer and Solo cups. Alone. I didn’t want him to be.

I took the baggie from Juice and slid my pinky under the seal.

“Don’t,” Juice said. “Please.”

I tipped a capsule onto my tongue and swallowed. Then I pulled out another and held it out to him.

“You’ve never done Molly,” he said.

“Neither have you.”

He looked at me, searching my face, like my answer mattered more than the drugs. “You don’t know what it’ll do to you,” he said.

“I know,” I said. I didn’t move my hand.

He shut his eyes, exhaled, then took it, tucking the rest into his pocket.

We drifted from the crowd toward the edge of the junkyard, where the Icelandic music thinned into the bayou slapping a chain-link fence. Paths narrowed between heaps of scrap and recyclables. Juice and I threaded through smoke clouds hand-in-hand. Dre was gone.

Juice pulled off his raglan and tied it around his head. I lost my shoes somewhere in the filth. We found a knot of girls in pastels clustered around a porcelain bathtub turned sofa.

“It won’t fit in my Fiat,” one said.

“But it’s so cute,” another whined.

I nudged Juice and pointed. “Finally. Snow.”

He covered his face and giggled.

“Oh my god,” a redhead said as I wobbled past. “Your hair is gorgeous.” She pinched a curl. The tiny tug sparked my scalp and sent warmth down my spine.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s just so pretty.”

I closed my eyes and wished she’d pulled harder.

“Is it a perm?”

“It’s natural,” I said, tossing it over my shoulder.

“She’s mixed,” Juice said, patting my back. “Half Black, half white, half Indian.”

“Choctaw,” I said, eyes on him. “Different Indian.”

The girls oohed.

“How much does it cost to rent a place like this?” Juice asked.

“Nothing,” one said. “It’s just junk.”

He leaned into me. “Still private property,” he muttered. “Sign out front. Does Picasso have permits, or is he pleading the Fifth on serving alcohol to kids?”

“We’re not underage,” the girls said together.

“We are,” Juice whispered. “What’re the charges, Z?”

“Violation of the Texas social host law,” I slurred. “Class A misdemeanor. Fine and a year.”

“Dude,” a golden-haired girl said. “Your pupils are huge. What are you on?”

“Molly,” Juice said, hips shifting toward them, mouth close to my ear. “Want some?”

“No,” she said quickly, fingers worrying the beads on her wrist. The soft clink chimed inside my head.

“Let’s go,” a pink-haired girl said. “People are waiting.”

“Liars,” Juice groaned, sagging into me before sliding down against a broken TV.

I dropped into a mustard recliner across from him. My head tipped over the armrest. My brain sloshed. For a while, we just lay there. I thought about the penalty for one gram of Molly.

“I feel like hell,” Juice said.

I turned my head. He had his whole hand in his mouth, gagging.

“If you puke,” I warned, pointing lazily, “you’ll never be cool. Everybody in my family’s got an iron stomach.”

“This shit’s getting to me.”

“Take another,” I said. “You weigh more than me. You probably haven’t hit the right dose.”

He squeezed his eyes shut.

“Do it.”

He pulled the last pill from his pocket and swallowed it dry. His face flushed.

I curled deeper into the chair. It smelled like rot, but it felt soft. I didn’t want to move.

Colors burst. Everything glittered.

The music thinned. If I shifted my head, it slipped away, so I stayed still. When it stopped, the junkyard rushed back in—voices, footsteps, metal underfoot.

“Cops!” Dre shouted.

I was kicked in the hip. Juice was yanked upright.

“Get up!”

I rolled into the dirt, weightless. Seeing Dre drained the color from everything. Reality snapped back. He hauled me by the elbow and we ran—past spindles, car bumpers, crushed bins—until a fence stopped us cold. He shoved me behind him without looking back, taking a beam of light full in his face like it was nothing.

“Fuck!” Dre kicked the fence.

Juice panted, eyes darting between us.

I laughed into the chain links and clapped a hand over my mouth.

Dre tore at the fence. “Get on my shoulders!” He told me.

Juice dropped to his knees and clawed under it, frantic, like a puppy escaping a bath.

Flashlights cut through the scrap.

Juice stacked on Dre’s shoulder next, slipped, fell.

“Fucked, we are,” I sighed, dropping on my ass and kicking my legs as giggles rolled through me.

Dre paced, fists tight. Juice hovered, pleading, muttering penalties like prayers.

I stayed where I was. The beams grew brighter.

Then a sound above me—smack, crack, crunch.

“Juice!” Dre yelled.

I rolled onto my side.

Juice was on the ground. Ghost white and glossy with sweat. His eyelids were puffing; his eyes rolled back. His mouth hung open, drool pooling at the corners. When Dre tried to pull him up, his limbs stayed stiff—vibrating against the dirt like planks of wood.

“I think he’s OD-ing!”

Juice started convulsing, his body flailing in the trash and leaving angel-shaped impressions.

The giggles in my belly turned into a thousand shards of glass, and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. I crawled to him and cupped his face, trying to steady him.

Voices and beams were only a mound of garbage away.

“We gotta go,” Dre said. He turned to the fence. “The cops’ll take him in. He’ll be okay.”

Tears stung my eyes. I tasted them as they slipped into my open mouth. I realized I was thirsty. Dehydrating. “We can’t leave him!” I sobbed.

Dre looked over the trash mountain. “Go then,” he said. “I’ll wait with him.”

I shook my head and gripped Juice’s skull tighter. Dre shoved me back, but I crawled right up again. “I’llstay,” I said. “I fucked him up. It’s my fault.”

Dre’s eyes widened, his pupils were blown. “You serious?”

I shoved him as hard as I could and screamed. “Go!”

Dre didn’t wait for me to say it twice. He climbed the fence at a speed I would have applauded under different circumstances. As soon as he was over, he took off and didn’t look back. I faced forward and waited for the lights.

***

I was cuffed and detained. I refused a drug test—it was my right—so they held me until Juice’s parents arrived. I wasn’t charged.

Juice was taken to St. Joseph’s downtown. They pumped his stomach, gave him fluids and steroid shots. The Molly was laced, and he was allergic to whatever cut it. He slept for a day. When he woke, the cops charged him with possession. They’d found the thumb-sized baggie in his pocket. Juice didn’t tell them where it came from.

In the hospital, his parents were always there. They hovered, adjusted blankets, asked questions before the doctors finished answering them. We didn’t talk. After he was discharged, I didn’t see him for the rest of the summer. He stayed in the Heights; I went back to Humble. Twenty-three miles apart—wide enough.

When classes started again, I caved and texted him about the sneakers I’d left at his place.

He texted back: Come get ’em.

I was there in ten minutes. I sat stiffly on the loveseat, staring at the wood floor. Juice stretched out on the couch opposite me, a bottle of sparkling water balanced easily between his thighs. He looked good—clear-eyed, intact. Saved.

“My parents paid the fine,” he said. “Got the community service waived. It’s still on my record, but our lawyer’s working on it.” He said it like a report. A box checked.

“That’s lucky,” I said.

“I quit smoking too.”

Juice had smoked maybe three joints in his life, but I smiled anyway. I wanted to be near him, to settle back into the familiar gravity of his presence, the easy safety of it. Relief warmed my chest—and then stalled, crowded by something heavier that wouldn’t let me have it cleanly.

“You hear from Dre?” he asked.

My chest pinched. “They caught him after the party,” I said. “He’s still inside. Nobody had bail money.”

“What’d they charge him with?” Juice asked—too even, like he already knew the answer.

“Possession. Evading arrest.”

Juice nodded and took a sip of water. Something in his face loosened, as if the numbers had landed where he expected them to.

“He could talk to my lawyer,” he said. “His card’s on the fridge.”

It was kind of him to offer. It was also beside the point. My family couldn’t afford his lawyer any more than they could afford bail money on short notice or holiday sales hikes when the season came early.

That night in the junkyard, I wanted to save them both. I believed—briefly—that wanting it badly enough would make it possible. I stayed with Juice, and it worked—he lived—while Dre slipped away into something quieter and longer. A different kind of death.

He would sit until someone scraped together enough money or until his time ran out. He’d come out lighter only where it didn’t count—another job, then another, meetings with a parole officer folded between shifts, the same realization waiting at the end. It was never enough. Eventually he’d call me again, ready to ’tis the season, one bag of green at a time.

I knew the penalties by heart.

Juice watched me from across the room, waiting—for forgiveness, for agreement, for me to admit he’d been right.

I smiled anyway. “Sure,” I said, my tongue thick with it. “I’d like that.”

The Crown Series: TOC

0. An Introduction to “Crown”

1. Akademos

2. Crown

3. Oxtails

4. Ham Hocks

5. Juice

*While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose.

This story includes depictions of grief, death of an animal, and violence.

Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

HAM HOCKS

I left a pot of hocks and greens to boil in a crock pot as I packed up my dorm room. It was Papaw’s recipe: drain the marrow, save the fat, hold the salt, add a pepper. Golden. The key to hocks is the broth: the fat has to dissolve into the bouillon before you melt down the marrow. You have to watch the pot, make sure the pieces stay themselves.

If the hocks become the greens become the pepper, the meal’s no good.

Halfway through boxing up my book collection, my mom called to tell me my cousin Kenny had died. Leukemia. When she hung up, I grabbed a fresh roll of packing tape and kept sealing boxes. There wasn’t much else I could do. My parents were six hours from campus; the hospital Kenny died in was eight. All I had at that moment was time and cardboard.

cancer (n.) from the Greek karkinos: a giant crab that assisted Hydra in its battle against Hercules; one of Herc’s Twelve Labors.

The family nicknamed Kenny “Herc” after his twelfth round of chemo. I humored him with the word etymology once—crabs and Hercules and Hydra and how it all tied together. He didn’t get it, but he laughed hard enough to jostle his nasal cannula, which messed with the flow meter and summoned a plump nurse into his bedroom to shoo me away.

The last time I saw Kenny outside of a hospital was when we were fifteen. He was riding shotgun in a Caddy with a baby pig in his lap. The passenger door was cracked so he could stretch his long legs across Momo Rene’s driveway. His shaved head brushed the car’s ceiling. He and his folks were in the middle of a cancer scare. Two months before we met up in Barrett, Kenny had woken with swollen lymph nodes, a nosebleed, and a fever. His GP recommended an oncologist, and his parents had to wait three weeks for an appointment. That appointment was a week away, and all of us were quietly wondering if Kenny was dying.

“Hey, Z,” he said, mouth wrapping around every syllable. “How’s it going?”

I chucked my SAT manual into the backseat and climbed in. “Whose pig?”

My other cousin Dre slid into the driver’s seat. “Like him? I stole him from that Jewish kid you’re always hanging with. Name’s Otis.”

“The kid?”

“No, stupid,” Dre snorted. “The pig. I named him Otis.”

“I thought Jews don’t mess with pigs?” I said.

“Aw, you know they don’t read the same Bible as us Catholics,” said Dre.

Kenny rubbed Otis’ belly. “Why we got a Jewish pig?”

“Cousin Chouke needs it. Kinda like a gift. We’re celebratin’ his homecoming.”

I rolled my eyes. “From prison?”

Last time I saw Cousin Chouke was at Dre’s eighth birthday. We’d just finished the birthday song and started cutting into a buttercream cake when the doorbell rang. Sheriff had Chouke in custody for cutting the heads off Miss Shirley’s chickens. All my uncles, my aunts, even Papaw, left to scrounge up bail money. My parents took me home before I could get a slice of cake to go.

I hated Chouke ever since.

“He’s blood,” Dre insisted. “Besides, he’s offered to help us out.” He grinned as he backed the Caddy out of Momo’s driveway. “Today, we get rid of Papaw’s curse. For good.”

“Aw, hell,” Kenny groaned.

I pressed my head to the window. “We’re getting too old for this shit.”

The family curse started with Papaw. He abandoned priesthood to marry my grandmother and temporarily quit his job as showrunner St. Martin’s so he could focus on family. Too dependent on Papaw, the congregation crumbled—no more seasonal fairs, gumbo cookoffs, or after-Sunday-Sunday school. Everything went to shit.

Church attendance dropped.

Employment plummeted.

The water supply got contaminated.

God, according to the family, cursed Papaw for abandoning his people and, as punishment, killed off a member of the family each year.

Every summer after Papaw’s death, my cousins and I tried to break the curse. It started five years before, with cousin Travi—the summer he burned down St. Martin’s in the name of saving us. The first of many failed attempts.

Dre parked the Caddy outside the Baptist church. It was bigger than the Catholic one. Bloated, even. The stained-glass windows seemed to sweat Gospel, overflow with the Holy Ghost, and feed the dying grass beyond the panes with warm holy water.

“Why’re we here?” Kenny asked.

“We need money,” Dre said, counting a wad of cash: $177.

My fingers curled around the door handle. “What do we need that kind of money for?”

“It’s the price for Chouke’s services.”

“What services?”

“The curse-riddin’ services.”

I followed Dre out of the car. “The hell is Chouke doing?”

He shushed me. “Don’t swear. We’re on holy ground.”

“Fuck that,” I grabbed the neck of his shirt. “Chouke’s bad news, Dre.”

Kenny zipped Otis into his hoodie. “My mom says he killed somebody.”

“He’s blood,” Dre shrugged.

“You sound like Travi,” I muttered.

Dre balked. “Is that bad?”

I didn’t know.

“I’ll explain everything after we get the money,” he said.

Otis squirmed and wheezed inside Kenny’s hoodie. “I don’t think the Baptists are gonna give us any charity,” Kenny said.

“You know Baptists got dough,” Dre said.

“All that money goes to God.”

Dre smiled a plump grin. “Exactly.”

We spread out inside the church. Kenny took the back row. Dre went left, me right.

We sat through a reading from the Book of Ezra, watched six people catch the Holy Ghost, and clapped our way through a rhythmic “Holy, Holy, Holy” before the donation basket was released.

My hands trembled. I tucked them under my thighs and watched the basket bounce from Baptist to Baptist, each one emptying purses and pockets into the woven wood.

I stole a glance at Dre, who had already stole a wad of cash from the basket on his side. With his bounty secured, he slipped out of the aisle.

A round-faced girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, dropped a ten with a star and a heart drawn over Hamilton’s face into the basket, then passed it to the man beside her. He dropped a blank check with a Christ watermark on top of her bill and handed the basket to me.

I yanked my hands free and knocked the basket to the ground. Paper scattered under the benches.

I slid from the pew, dropped to my knees, and started gathering. I grabbed everything green I saw, crushed the bills in my hand, stuffed them into my bra. I scooped the remaining envelopes and singles back into the basket, then looked up.

The round-faced girl glared at me like some sinful roadside attraction.

I stood with the basket in my shaking hands. The rest of the congregation rose to their feet, “amen”-ing through the closing prayer. That little girl was the only one still watching me: a Catholic phantom here to disturb the peace.

I reached into my bra and pulled out the first bill—a twenty. I laid it on top of the envelopes, then set the basket in her lap. Her glare softened. She looked like she was either going to cry or whisper, I’m gonna pray for you.

I returned to my cousins in the Caddy. We didn’t talk about the money.

Dre drove down Oak Avenue until we were back on Lynchburg, pulling over every so often so Kenny could vomit on the sidewalk. A combination of Dre’s junk food and Kenny’s maybe-cancer made him sicker by the hour. Dre and I stood on either side of him, listening to him yak, meal after meal.

We didn’t talk about that either.

We sat on the hood of the Caddy outside Big E’s mini-mart. Kenny fed Otis a strip of jerky while I squeezed Kool-Aid into his mouth after each piece. Dre handed Kenny hot chips; I offered more Kool-Aid. Otis was one of us.

“Quit feedin’ him that jerky,” I told Kenny.

“Why?”

I snatched the bag before he could shove another slab into Otis’ snout. “This is pork jerky, dummy.”

“So?”

“That’s forced cannibalism.”

“Aw, shit,” Dre stopped counting money to look over his shoulder. “That’s a felony.”

“What you know about it, fatass?” Kenny said.

“This one guy cousin Boo used to work with—his fiancée’s best friend’s boss once fed a live chicken fried chicken, and you know what happened? Cops put him in prison for life.”

“You’re lyin’,” I said.

“Right hand to the Man,” he swore.

Kenny tossed the jerky under the Caddy.

“Whatever, man.” I laughed. “I’m sure the cops will be more pissed we stole Otis than fed him one of his uncles.”

Dre stuffed the money in his pocket. “You won’t be sayin’ that when you sharin’ a cell with Travi.”

Kenny chuckled. I didn’t.

“Kenny,” I said, turning toward him. “You worried about your appointment next week?”

He tugged on Otis’s ears. His bottom lip trembled. “Momma and Daddy say it’s just routine, that I’m probably growin’ too fast or somethin’.”

“Man, fuck cancer,” Dre spat.

“Yeah,” I said, stupidly. “They’re probably right.” I didn’t know any other way to respond to something like that. I still don’t.

“How’d you do on the SAT?” Kenny asked.

“Fourteen-twenty outta sixteen hundred,” I said. “I’m retakin’ it in a month.”

Kenny nodded. “I wish I could graduate already.”

I smiled because I didn’t know what else to do. Kenny wanted away from his mom’s watchful eye, away from organic food and his dad’s morning PT. My mom just wanted me as far from Barrett as possible. I would’ve traded places with Kenny—his potential illness for my degree. That way, Kenny could be free from the curse, and I could spend whatever time I had left fighting it.

“School ain’t for me,” Dre said, taking a swig of cream soda. “Money is.”

“I wish I could go to school,” Kenny said, tracing circles around the rim of his soda can. “It’s always just my momma and me and—” he sucked in a breath—“she tries to keep cool, but I get the feelin’ she thinks I’m gonna die. I hate knowin’ that.”

Dre let his soda can slide from his hand. It bounced once, then emptied into a foamy white puddle. Otis stepped into it and licked up the dirty cream.

Dre leaned in. “Nobody’s gonna die. The curse ends tonight.”

I wrapped an arm around Kenny’s shoulders. “We’re doin’ this for the family. For you, Kenny.”

He smiled and dragged his sleeve across his cheeks.

“It’s gonna work,” Dre promised. “I stole a pig from a Jew and Z looted a Baptist church. Shit, it has to work.”

I forced a laugh. “If not, Dre and I’ll be sharing a space in hell.”

“You and I goin’ to hell anyway,” he said.

Kenny laughed for real then. “Alright.” He curled a finger around Otis’ tail. “I wish we hung out more, guys. I miss y’all.”

Dre snorted and gave Kenny a shove. “Whatever, Elephant Man.”

We waited until the sun sank behind the Catholic church before we climbed back into the Caddy.

Dre took Lynchburg toward FM 1942, rolling from the feeder onto the freeway—seat belts on, speedometer just under the limit. We drove a good half hour before a motel sign flickered into view. Dre parked in the lot, killed the engine, and we climbed out. With Otis tucked under Kenny’s arm and the banded bills in Dre’s pocket, we marched toward Room 5.

“He’s in there,” Dre said, peeking through the window. We listened to cars weave in and out of the lot.

He knocked.

Kenny dropped into a squat, hands clasped behind his head.

“Not gonna puke again, are you?” I asked, hand on his back.

“Think it was that jerky,” he groaned.

Otis circled Kenny’s hunched body, blotchy face tipped up at me. One eye was patched in black; the rest of him was all pink. He wheezed into our shoes. When he lifted his snout, those beady eyes found mine. To this day, I swear he was smiling.

The door opened.

Chouke was massive—lengthwise and sideways. Sunken bloodshot eyes, crooked nose, hollow cheeks, mouth full of broken teeth. He wore only a pair of tattered green cargo pants. His body was bony and scarred, covered in tattoos. His hair was long and thin, balding at the crown and braided down his back.

He terrified me. I thought about sprinting back to the Caddy and driving past Barrett, past Crosby, to anywhere the curse couldn’t find me.

He stepped into the yellow light over the door and said one thing: “You got the money?”

Dre nodded and stammered, “Yessir,” fishing a baggie from his pocket. “Three hundred. Like you said.”

Chouke counted the bills, then pulled the door wide.

I followed Dre in with my head turned back toward Kenny. He had tears in his eyes, Otis squeezed tight to his chest.

The four of us sat on the edge of the motel bed while Chouke paced. We listened to the heavy bottoms of his boots thump against the chipped floorboards and the hem of his cargos drag over the prickly rug. When he finished packing, he pulled a T-shirt over his head and slung a duffel over his shoulder.

His gaze slid to Otis. “Gimme here,” he said.

Kenny hugged Otis tighter.

I reached for the pig and caught Kenny’s wrist instead. “We have to give him back later,” I said, eyes on Chouke. “The pig. He belongs—”

My voice trailed off as I watched rage twitch at the corners of his mouth. I clenched my jaw and watched his hands, waiting for him to hit me or punch a hole in the wall just for talking.

Kenny started to cry beside me.

“No, we don’t,” Dre cut in, yanking Otis by the tail. “It’s your pig, Chouke. We took him for you.”

“It’s not his pig,” I hissed. “Dre said you needed it for the ritual, so we thought you could use him for that and then we could return him. Right, Dre?”

Dre didn’t answer.

A smirk flashed across Chouke’s face so quickly I almost missed it. “Sure,” he said. “I only need a little blood.”

My own blood went cold. I swallowed hard, trying to bleach the images forming in my head.

We rode in the bed of Chouke’s truck as he drove us back into Barrett. He parked in a ditch and led us down into the ravine. We followed shoulder to shoulder, keeping Kenny in the middle. Ragged branches and tall grass scratched at our legs. I slapped mosquitoes off my neck and knees.

Chouke dragged his feet until we reached the bayou at the base of Papaw’s old hill. It had been fenced off after Travi’s fire took down St. Martin’s. Chouke found a hole in the wire, pulled it back, and waved us through.

We climbed to the top.

“Sit,” he ordered.

We did.

He dusted his body with white powder until he looked like a chalk outline come to life.

“Gimme the pig,” he said again, hand extended.

Kenny clung to Otis. “You’ll give him back, right?”

Chouke repeated his demand. Kenny gave in.

“He promised,” I told Kenny. “He’ll give him back.”

Dre shook his head.

Chouke tucked Otis under his arm. Otis squirmed and squealed. Chouke clapped his hands, sending powder into the air in soft white explosions.

On our knees, arms around each other, we waited.

He crouched and dug through his duffel. When he rose, he had a long, blunt blade in one hand and a silver bowl in the other.

“No.” Kenny lunged, but Dre and I held him back.

We knew what came next.

I turned my face into Kenny’s shoulder and listened as Otis squealed himself into eternal silence. The sound of flesh splitting filled my ears, followed by blood ringing against metal. The smell of rust settled over us.

Kenny sobbed. Otis was dead.

Dre’s bottom lip folded inward; the dimple in his chin trembled above the many folds of his neck. “I’m sorry,” he cried. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Chouke tossed Otis’ body down the hill and howled. Specks of blood dotted the dying earth and freckled our faces.

He moved toward us. “Stand up!” he panted. “Gimme your hands.”

Dre dragged us to our feet. We shook.

Chouke yanked my hand from my pocket and drew the blade across my palm in one clean slice. Pain shot up my arm to my shoulder. I screamed as my hand filled with our mixed blood.

“You all need to be cleansed,” he said. He grabbed Kenny’s hand and cut it just as quickly, then Dre’s. “Bleed out the curse,” he hissed. “Bleed.”

Dre howled and slapped the blade from his hand. “Run!” he shouted at us before tumbling down the hill.

I hauled Kenny upright and slid after him.

We rolled over rocks and ant mounds, past snake holes and wet, red dirt, until we crashed into the fence at the bottom.

Kenny wheezed beside me, clutching his stomach.

“Move!” Dre yelled, yanking at our elbows. “Go! Go! Go!”

Hobbling behind them, I made myself look back. Chouke’s powdered body glowed at the top of Papaw’s hill. He watched us. He laughed.

We never actually saw him chase us. Still, we ran until we reached the stoplight that split Barrett from the highway. That’s when Kenny started throwing up again.

“Are you kidding me? Now?” Dre kept walking, looking over his shoulder.

Kenny emptied his stomach onto the gravel, trying to catch the mess in his hands so he could keep running. He pushed himself up, slipped, fell again.

“Slow down, Dre,” I said, kneeling beside Kenny and rubbing his back. “Chouke’s not following us.”

Kenny spat into the puddle. “You…sure?”

I nodded. “This whole thing was bullshit.”

“The ritual worked,” Dre said, sure of it.

I saw red. “How did it work if we didn’t even finish it?”

Kenny’s voice came out rough, just above a mumble. “Did you know he was gonna kill Otis?”

Dre’s hands slackened at his sides. The red wash of the stoplight painted his face.

“Not really,” he said. “I didn’t know he was gonna kill him. I mean, I had an idea somethin’ was gonna happen—but I wasn’t sure.”

Kenny went quiet until the light turned green. The second it did, he launched himself at Dre. Their bodies collided, but Kenny was too weak to take him down. He hit the asphalt, scrambled up, and swung anyway, his fists landing soft and furious against Dre’s face.

“You evil son of a bitch! I hate you! I hate you so much!”

Dre toppled and slid across the street. “C’mon, Herc! It was a—a misinterpretation!”

I tried to pin Kenny’s arms, but he kept fighting.

“None of this would’ve happened if you weren’t obsessed with the curse!” he shouted.

Dre’s hands dug into the gravel. He mashed his lips together and stared down FM 1942. “I’m sorry, okay?” he muttered. “I just—I just like havin’ you guys around.”

“Shut up, Dre.” Kenny’s voice cracked. “You used us. Just like you used Otis.”

“I just wanted to get rid of the curse!”

“There is no curse!” I threw my hands at the sky. “We’re not doin’ this anymore, Dre. It’s over.”

The last thing Kenny said to Dre, just before the Caddy rolled back into Momo Rene’s garage, was: “I never want to see you again.”

And he kept that promise.

The timer on my crock pot dinged itself to sleep. I sealed the final box and slid it into the corner.

I knew Otis was done for the moment he looked at me outside Room 5. I’m as much a murderer as Dre is. Some part of me has always believed Kenny knew that too—that he held me in the same quiet disdain he saved for Dre and Travi, maybe even for Chouke.

I pulled a glass bowl from the pantry and spooned in the dark broth, then the soggy strips of greens and a hock.

When I sat at my empty table, I couldn’t lift the spoon. The greens sank to the bottom. The broth had gone murky gray-green. Meat slipped from the bone and drifted down in strings. Lumps of fat clung to the rim. The broth was ruined. All the parts of the stew had melted into one another.

The hocks had become the greens had become the pepper—everything Papaw taught me not to let happen. All that was left visible in the bowl was a bare, picked-over bone.

The Crown Series: TOC

0. An Introduction to “Crown”

1. Akademos

2. Crown

3. Oxtails

4. Ham Hocks

*While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose.

This story contains references to grief and the death of a relative and brief non-graphic sexual content.

Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. I started writing them about a decade ago, shelved them after grad school, and am sharing them now. You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

OXTAILS

For my ninth funeral, we drove four hours from Humble, Texas, to Oberlin, Louisiana, to bury Great Uncle Levi. When the highways gave way to skinny roads, balding trees, and moss-frosted lakes, I knew we were close.

The Oberlin Community Center was too small for my family; our grief didn’t fit. At the door, two elderly men with yellow teeth and soft white brows claimed they’d been at my baptism and known my mother back when she was a wild little tomboy. I smiled, bowed, and tucked in behind my parents—where a proper girl belonged.

Inside, the hall was white in every direction—walls, ceiling, linoleum—broken only by funeral blacks, paper plates, and the flowers piled for Levi’s widow, my Great Aunt Anna Faye.

She stood against the far wall between her daughter, Tonya, and a framed photo of Levi in his younger, sharper days. Her skin was deep brown, cheekbones high, cheeks hollow. Her hair was cropped short and dyed orange-brown, baby hairs disobeying at the edges. Two small moles sat under her bottom lip like crumbs from burnt bread. She wore a fitted black sheath dress, white gloves, and a purple boutonniere pinned over her heart.

Tonya—her only child—had been sick since birth. Diabetes, asthma, muscular dystrophy. Like her mother, she wore white with a splash of purple—long skirt, white camisole, purple shawl. Her hair was pinned away from her face, puffed behind her like ebony wings.

“I’m so sorry, Auntie,” my mom said, hugging Anna Faye. “You need anything?”

“No, babygirl.” Anna Faye dabbed her eyes through her glove. “Your mom and pop been good to us. We don’t need much.”

My father—the palest man in the room, thinning blond hair, blue eyes—hugged her too. “You let us know,” he said. “We’re here.”

My mother steered me to a card table where my cousins Kenny and Dre already sat. We were all eight. Three bowls of oxtail stew waited with saltines on the side. Our parents fanned back into grown-folk clusters, cups of spiked lemonade in hand, talking about Levi.

“I bet you a dollar Levi’s face ain’t got no skin left on it,” Dre announced, his voice always too loud for secrets.

I glanced around. The adults buzzed in circles—some wet-faced and whispering, others laughing hard enough to slap backs. My mom stood with a group of aunties; my dad was a lamppost beside her. When she caught me looking, her eyes widened and her finger shot out.

Eat, she mouthed.

I obeyed, spooning stew into my mouth, oxtail fat slicking my lips.

“I heard my daddy say they couldn’t find all of Levi’s teeth,” Kenny said quietly. He had an egg-shaped head, a neat flattop, and eyes that always seemed to think ahead of his mouth.

“What he need teeth for?” I said. “He’s dead.”

Levi had been hit by a drunk driver walking home from work—Sunday cap in one hand, blueprints for rebuilding this same community center in the other. Kids found him in the road, his face smashed into the pages.

“You know he had a mouth full of gold teeth, right?” Dre said.

“Shit,” I whispered. The swear lit my tongue like electricity.

“Real gold?” Kenny asked.

“That’s what my momma said.” Dre slurped, then leaned toward Kenny’s bowl. “You gonna finish that oxtail?”

Kenny surrendered one without protest. Dre ate like it might be taken away any second, his checkered shirt pulled tight across his chest, the squares stretched into rectangles.

“We should take some of his teeth,” Dre said.

“Ain’t that a sin?” I asked. “Stealin’ from dead folks?”

“Not when they family,” Dre said.

I scanned the room again—half to see if any grown-up could hear us, half to find my mom so I could ask to take my hair down and ditch the dress. The petticoat rubbed bumps into my shins. The high collar choked my swallows. Underneath, I wore jean shorts and a camisole, like a version of myself waiting in the dark for the latch to lift.

Dre kicked me under the table. “Quit lookin’ around,” he hissed. “You makin’ us look spicious.”

I rubbed my shin. “We gonna take his teeth or what?”

“Course we are. We just gotta find the body. Momma says it’s still in the church.”

Before I could say more, the hum of voices dimmed—cranked down until the center went quiet. People turned toward the door.

“Miss Viv is here,” Kenny whispered.

Miss Viv was the self-proclaimed voodoo priestess of Allen Parish. Our parents warned us about her: her soul promised to the devil. Don’t look too long. Don’t eat her food. Don’t let her touch your hair. Just look at her face.

She had vitiligo—golden-brown skin broken by patches of stark white. A pale mask bloomed around her left eye, making her copper iris look borrowed from somewhere else. Her long box braids were coiled into an enormous bun, wrapped in a purple head tie to match her gown. She cut through the funeral black in purple.

She walked the aisle like she owned the floor. The light from the open door narrowed, then vanished behind her. When she reached Anna Faye, she took her hands and kissed them. They spoke in low tones; we were too far to hear. For all the family’s side-eye, wherever Anna Faye went, Viv went too.

“You know she’s a witch, right?” Dre said.

“You really think so?” I asked, finding her at the food line now, wheeling Tonya’s chair.

“I know so,” Dre said. “My momma said she runs through the woods at night with no clothes on.”

“Witches do that?” Kenny asked.

“They do when they Devil’s wives,” Dre said, dumping saltines into his mouth. “I ain’t scared, though. She always got the best candy.”

“What kind?” Kenny asked, because that mattered.

“Mr. Goodbars. Kit Kats. All full-sized.”

Kenny nodded solemnly. A boy with standards.

“Think of all the candy we could buy with Uncle Levi’s teeth,” Dre said.

“How we gonna get them out his mouth?” I asked.

“Easy. Yank ’em. I pulled all my baby teeth out myself just to get one visit from the tooth fairy.”

Kenny and I shuddered.

“I don’t like people goin’ in my bedroom when I’m sleep,” Dre said. “The tooth fairy ain’t no friend of mine.”

Viv appeared beside us, pushing Tonya’s chair. She tucked Tonya under our table, set a red plastic bowl of stew in front of her, then sat. She unrolled a napkin; dark purple globs of plum stained the paper red.

“What’s that?” Dre asked.

“Plum pie.”

“But where’s the crust?” Kenny asked.

“I cut around it.”

Kenny bunched his face. “Why come?”

She smiled. “I’m allergic.”

“You didn’t want any oxtails either?” Kenny asked.

Viv licked glaze from her finger like a cat. “I don’t eat meat.”

I frowned. Everyone in my family ate meat—every part of every animal too: intestines, feet, blood.

“How do you get your nutrition?” Kenny asked.

“Lots of candy,” Viv said.

Dre nearly levitated. “You got any candy witchu now?”

Viv smirked. “Maybe.”

“I want some,” Tonya said, pointing, her words careful and slow.

“Your momma would want you to eat your stew first,” Viv said, picking up Tonya’s spoon. She carved off a bit of oxtail and fed it to her.

Tonya chewed, still watching the plum.

“There,” Viv said. “We’ve had stew.” She slid the napkin back and winked. “Dig in.”

Tonya dipped her fingers into the jammy purple and popped a sliver into her mouth.

Kenny and I exchanged a look. Sharing food with anyone but family was practically a sin.

“Are we going to your house today, Viv?” Tonya asked, purple shining on her lips.

“If your momma’s up to it,” Viv said, dabbing Tonya’s mouth.

“Will you braid my hair again?”

Viv’s eyes warmed. Of course, she mouthed, and stole an onion from Tonya’s stew, swallowing it like a pill.

Tonya relaxed, happy. I watched Viv, trying not to stare at the white patches on her face, but failing.

“I—I really like your hair,” I said when she caught me.

Viv touched her head wrap. “Do you now?”

“My momma won’t let me braid mine like that,” I said. “She makes me wear ponytails.”

My hair was soft at the roots, dry at the ends, refusing every product. My mom slicked it with Pink lotion, ripped a comb through until my ends split, then yanked it into a tight ponytail that puffed out like a brown cloud—kept and shiny. If I took the scrunchie out without permission, she’d whoop me into the next Sunday.

“I can braid it for you,” Viv said, eyes on my head. “If you catch a ride with Anna Faye and Tonya after you eat, we can have a little girls’ day.”

Heat rose to my cheeks. I imagined the weight of braids down my back. A different version of myself.

My mother reached the table before I could answer. She knelt, gaze fixed on Viv. “You alright, baby?” She said to me.

“Hello, Lois,” Viv said.

“Viv.” My mom turned to Tonya. “You get enough to eat, T?”

“Yesmam.”

My mom pinched my chin and kissed my nose. “Why don’t you go play outside? Don’t let this day go to waste.” Her tone made it an order. “All of you. Go.”

Kenny and Dre took off. I stood to follow, but my mother caught me by the hairline, licked her palm, and smoothed my baby hairs flat—pressing me back into place.

Viv watched, her left fist tucked under her chin, her right hand resting on Tonya’s wheelchair.

“Try to keep your hair right,” my mother said. “And don’t wrinkle that dress.”

My ears burned. My heart tugged toward the jeans under my dress and Viv’s braids, but I didn’t protest. I bowed slightly toward Viv and Tonya and hurried after my cousins.

The playground behind the center was tired: a dented jungle gym, rusted monkey bars missing rungs, spring riders in primary colors. Two black swings hung to the left. Kenny and I took the swings. Dre sprawled in the mouth of a tunnel slide.

“Does Miss Viv have a super form?” Kenny asked. “Like Super Saiyan?”

“No, dummy,” Dre snorted. “She do real magic.”

“Super Saiyans do real magic,” Kenny said. “When Goku fought Vegeta and Nappa—that was magic.”

“You a nerd,” Dre said. “I don’t know why me and Z hang out with you.”

I grinned at Kenny in apology and dug at the petticoat biting my knees.

“That’s where they keepin’ Levi,” Dre said, pointing at the white church beside the center.

“Why’s he not buried yet?” I asked.

“So folks could go see him. Only ‘imminent’ family allowed.”

“You mean immediate,” Kenny said.

“Shut up, dork breath.”

I slid off my swing and stared at the church—boxy and white, stone steps, a steeple topped with a brown cross.

“Let’s go get his teeth,” I said.

We followed the pebbled path inside. Red carpet, khaki walls, benches lined up neat from entrance to altar.

“My daddy said they keepin’ him in the back,” Dre whispered, pointing to a narrow door beside the altar.

The door stood cracked. We slipped through into a short hallway—dark wood paneling, red carpet. At the end, a spindly dresser held candles and an 8x10 of Black Jesus.

Four doors. Two on each side.

We split up. Kenny and I took the left. Dre went right. Kenny opened the door closest to Jesus.

“Oh shit,” he whispered, slamming it shut and stumbling back. “He’s in there.”

“Then why’d you close it?” Dre shoved past and pushed the door open.

A small, windowless room with blue paneled walls, two chairs, and a vinyl coffee table. And in the center, on a wooden slab, a white coffin.

Miss Viv stood beside it.

Cold flooded me. I thought about running but my feet wouldn’t move.

“Well,” she said, turning with a sigh. The pale patch around her eye caught lamplight. She didn’t smile or frown—just looked, like she’d already read the ending. Then she slid her hand into the coffin and said, over her shoulder, “Come and see.”

We crept in.

Levi had been sixty-four, but whoever did him up had shaved off ten years. His head was oblong, like it had been broken and put back together from memory. Still, he looked like himself—like he’d leaned back in his lawn chair to watch us run through his sprinklers and drifted off. His hair was a stiff cloud of black curls. Thin jagged lines cut along his temples where—my mind supplied—the skull had been pieced back together.

“Hold it steady,” Viv said, nodding at the lid.

We grabbed it as she slid two fingers into his mouth. Glue stretched, then snapped, as she scissored his jaw open.

Two full rows of gold teeth.

We gasped one shared ooooh.

“What on earth are y’all doin’?”

Anna Faye filled the doorway, sunhat clutched in gloved hands.

Viv winked at us, closed Levi’s mouth, then the coffin. “Best let Old Levi rest now, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am,” we chorused.

“You are askin’ for trouble, Viv,” Anna Faye snapped, jabbing a finger into her chest. “Why’d you bring these babies in here?”

“They wanted to pay respects,” Viv said. “I don’t see the harm.”

Anna Faye squeezed her sunhat until the brim cracked.

“I was leavin’ anyway,” Viv said, slipping her hands into her shawl pockets. Her bangles jingled. “Take some silver for your trouble, babies.” She dropped foil-wrapped candy into our palms. At the doorway, she paused. “You comin’ by the house later, aren’t you?”

At the time, I thought she meant me. My cousins thought she meant all of us. We heard it the way kids do—straight on.

Anna Faye didn’t turn around.

Viv’s eyes flicked from Anna Faye’s back to our hopeful faces. She smiled, batted her lashes, and slipped away.

“Y’all go back to the center,” Anna Faye whispered. “Let Levi rest.”

We yes-mammed and scurried out. Back at the playground, we sat on the broken spring riders and ate Viv’s candy until our parents came.

“We’re all goin’ to Anna Faye’s,” my mom said, hand on my shoulder. “She needs help cleanin’ out Uncle Levi’s things.”

“But we wanted to go to Miss Viv’s—”

My mom stopped. Her fingers tightened around my wrist. “You don’t go to strangers’ houses,” she said quietly. “Did she invite you?”

I stared at our shoes—her nude heels, my black buckles and frilly socks. “No,” I lied.

My father waited at the car. After my mom got in, he shut the door and knelt beside me, whispering, “I’ll distract her. You make a run for it.”

I smiled despite myself and climbed into the backseat.

Anna Faye’s house was three lights from the church—a one-story red place with a dark green wraparound porch and a tire swing in the yard. The driveway curled behind it, packed tight with family cars.

“I don’t see her car,” my mom said. “She isn’t here yet.”

“Maybe she caught a ride,” Dad said.

He opened my mother’s door. When she stepped out, I saw the hard line between her brows—the one that showed up whenever she smelled a lie.

Inside, the air was stale, thick with lemon and mint. The living room was a mismatch: cherry leather recliner, green loveseat, a pink-and-brown floral sofa wrapped in plastic. The kitchen brimmed with relatives, cold funeral casseroles, and sweet tea spiked with cognac. Grief and sugar hung heavy.

Kenny, Dre, and I slipped through bodies and out the back door into Levi’s yard.

“Levi kept junk bikes back here,” Kenny said. He opened the shed; gasoline and wet grass rolled out. Three kid-sized bikes waited—green, silver, red.

I took the silver. We pedaled down the driveway, gravel spitting under our wheels.

“To Miss Viv’s!” Dre yelled.

I braked. “Why?”

“She invited us, and I want more candy.”

My stomach flipped, thinking of my mom’s grip on my wrist. I looked to Kenny.

“I just want some candy,” he said, then added, “Two streets left. Near the swamp.”

Dre and I pointed left—opposite directions.

“Which left?” Dre asked.

“The right left,” Kenny snapped, turning toward Dre’s.

We rode into the Louisiana damp, humidity clinging like a wet blanket. Candy wrappers crinkled in Dre’s pocket. Live oaks draped with moss gave way to algae-crusted bayous, then longleaf pines.

We slowed, pushing through high grass until the land opened over the swamp.

Miss Viv’s house was the only one on Nice Street—the French kind of Nice. The cul-de-sac dipped into the swamp like a hooked finger. Gold light filtered through cypress trunks.

We left our bikes at the street and stepped onto a wobbly wooden path. Mason jars stuffed with tea lights hung overhead, wired tree to tree like fruit. I brushed the warm glass as we passed.

“That’s her house,” Kenny whispered as we approached a small square shack with a tin roof at the end of the walkway.

“You been here before?” I asked.

“Once,” Kenny said. “When Momma thought a bump on my head was cancer. Viv made me drink tea and swim in the swamp to melt it.”

“No wonder you stink,” Dre said.

Kenny punched him.

Dre and Kenny headed for the screen. I veered left, drawn by a strip of gold light spilling from a side window. I pressed my forehead to the glass.

Inside, the house glowed like a lantern—burnt-orange walls, a scarlet velvet sofa, shaggy rugs. Three wooden crates stood in for a coffee table, draped in sheer white, holding a kettle and two empty mugs. No family photos—just a large oval mirror reflecting the room back on itself. A tiny kitchenette held a microwave, mini-fridge, and a steaming crockpot, and at a round empty table there was Tonya’s wheelchair.

Tonya lay stretched on the couch under a thick green blanket, hair newly braided like black ropes spilling over the pillow.

“Does that mean Anna Faye’s here too?” Dre whispered, pressing his face beside mine.

I moved along the wall, leaving Tonya to sleep. Anna Faye had to be close; Tonya was never left alone. Behind the house, I found another window above an AC unit. I gripped the unit and hauled myself up.

It looked in on Viv’s bedroom. There was purple wallpaper peeling at the seams, a yellow clawfoot tub in the corner, and a twin bed with a rumpled purple duvet.

On the bed lay Miss Viv’s naked body.

My cheeks heated and I forgot to swallow.

Dre jabbed my ribs. “What is it?”

Viv was on her back, breasts bare—one dark, one pale. Her lips made small o shapes. Something moved beneath the duvet.

“What you see?” Dre hissed.

I leaned closer. Viv scooted back, raised her knees. The duvet slid down—

—and I saw her.

Anna Faye, naked, moving between Viv’s legs.

Viv cupped her chin. Anna Faye reached for Viv’s breast. Viv wrapped a leg around her waist. They kissed.

Dre hauled himself up beside me. The A/C unit groaned under our weight. I clutched the frame, but my fingers slipped. My chin hit the glass as the unit tore loose. We tumbled with it, crashing to the ground. Plastic cracked. Metal bent. Dre yelped—his hand sliced open.

“Shit!” Kenny grabbed our elbows. “We gotta go!”

But Viv was already outside.

She stood over us in a magenta robe, knot cinched tight. Her braids spilled down one side, touching her calves.

We sat in a halo of shattered plastic and bent metal, staring up at her.

Viv looked from the broken unit to our faces. “Guess y’all better come inside.”

She made us tea with honey and sat us on the scarlet sofa with Tonya while Anna Faye gathered Tonya’s things. Tonya stroked her braids, smiling at the glossy cords.

Viv cleaned Dre’s hand at the sink, wrapped it in a white bandage, then dabbed our scrapes with rosy ointment. When she finished, she leaned against the counter, mug hiding half her face.

“What were y’all doin’ outside my windows?” she asked.

“You invited us,” Dre said.

She raised one eyebrow. “Did I now?”

Kenny and Dre nodded.

“So your parents know you’re here?”

They nodded again—slower this time, like the lie didn’t want to manifest.

Viv turned to me. “And you?”

My stomach clenched. “I—I wanted you to braid my hair,” I said, staring at my dirty fingernails.

She shifted her braids from one shoulder to the other. “You came all this way for that?”

Under the weight of her pale patch and copper eye, I felt myself shrink—like I’d stepped out of the light and been caught. I nodded.

She smiled. “Come on back then.”

She dragged a chair into the bathroom and set it beside the clawfoot tub. I sat trembling—half dread, half thrill. She guided my head under the faucet, one hand steadying me, the other turning the knobs until the water ran warm. My ponytail loosened and my hair fell free.

Cool cream slid onto my crown. Her fingers worked slow circles, nails scratching just enough to send shivers up my spine. When suds crept toward my eyes, her thumb brushed them away.

I could’ve fallen asleep like that—baptized in her tub.

She wrapped my head in a yellow towel, squeezed out the water, then smoothed oil that smelled like cocoa and honey through my hair. She combed from ends to roots, patient. When she met a knot, she softened it with her fingers before trying again.

When my hair lay smooth, she clipped half up and began braiding at my neck.

“Are you and Anna Faye best friends?” I asked.

“Very best,” she said, tugging gently.

“Did…did Uncle Levi know?”

Her hands paused—just a breath. “He did,” she said. “But he and I weren’t very good friends.”

“Why not?”

Viv hummed as the braids climbed. “He liked Jolly Ranchers more than Kit Kats.”

I smiled like I understood.

“What does Anna Faye like?”

“Most definitely Kit Kats.” She kept going. “You know where Levi’s gold teeth came from? He had one gold brick in a safe. His will said to melt it down and make teeth.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “What does he need gold teeth for?”

Viv laughed. “That’s exactly what I said.”

When she finished, she turned me toward the mirror and knelt with a purple hand mirror. “Ready to see your crown?”

My heart thudded. I nodded.

She lifted the mirror.

A stranger looked back—pretty. My braids brushed my shoulders like polished brown silk. Heavier than my ponytail, but in the best way.

“They’re beautiful,” I said. “Like yours.”

Viv’s grin made the white patch around her eye glow. She tapped my nose. “Wear them with pride.”

Anna Faye drove us back. The lecture lasted only a few minutes—how worried our parents would be, how angry—then the car went quiet. She parked at the end of her driveway, still crowded with cars, killed the engine and slumped forward.

“Are you okay, Auntie?” I leaned toward her, my braids brushing my arms.

She was crying—silent at first, then shaking.

“I miss Daddy too,” Tonya said, lacing her fingers through her mother’s trembling hand.

Soft whimpers slipped from Anna Faye, like something tearing loose inside her.

“We won’t tell nobody where you were,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” Kenny said. “I don’t want my momma knowin’.”

Dre frowned, clutching his Mr. Goodbars. “I don’t gotta give up my candy, do I?”

Anna Faye didn’t answer. She stared at us in the rearview mirror for a long moment. “You can’t go in the house with your hair like that,” she said gently.

My hands flew to my braids. My crown.

“Here,” she said, reaching back. “Let me undo ’em.”

“I’ll tell my momma I did it myself,” I pleaded. “Please.”

She shook her head. “Come here, child.”

I leaned forward, stomach heavy. I hadn’t known the secret would cost me this gift.

She untied the bands one by one. Kenny helped, clumsy fingers pulling the braids loose. I folded my hands in my lap and closed my eyes, listening to hair whisper itself undone. Each time I peeked, another braid was gone—replaced by crimped frizz, my hair spreading like wire instead of silk. When they finished, I slipped the tiny rainbow bands into my pocket.

The only piece of my crown I could keep.

We climbed out of the van and walked toward the house. The closer we got, the more the porch seemed to lean toward me, like it had hands.

I tried to hold onto Viv as I walked: purple at a funeral, candy for breakfast, pie eaten with fingers.

The porch steps creaked. I closed my fingers around the rubber bands in my pocket and hesitated. “Hey, Dre,” I said before we reached the doorstep. “Is it…a sin for one girl to kiss another girl?”

He rocked on his heels as he peeled back his candy wrapper then took a bite. “Not when they family,” he said.

The Crown Series: TOC

0. An Introduction to “Crown”

1. Akademos

2. Crown

3. Oxtails

*While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose.

Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. I started writing them about a decade ago, shelved them after grad school, and am sharing them now.

You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

CROWN

Papaw never slept. It was like he didn’t know how. The summer I turned seven, my parents drove to South Padre for their tenth anniversary and left me in Barrett Station, at Papaw and Momo’s house, where I’d stay the week.

On my second night there, I woke to the flat clap of Papaw’s feet against the hallway tile outside the guest room. His steps softened as he moved down the hall, palms sliding along the drywall for balance. His bad knee made him lean on anything nearby—walls, furniture, people—but he was too proud for a cane.

When the sounds faded, I followed him. Through the tiny kitchen, out the back door, beneath the crumbling carport, and across the pebbled path to the back kitchen—his destination.

I peeked through the small window over the sink. The glass was fogged with steam; smoke drifted toward the rafters. Inside, Papaw hobbled from counter to counter, a man stitched together by purpose and sheer will.

He always caught me. He opened the door, lifted me onto the vinyl countertop, and set me there to watch. Oxtails bled onto butcher paper and sausage coiled in loose spirals. Pig feet waited beside pans of dirty rice, roux jars sticky at the rims, a pot of gumbo breathing low heat.

“This all for us?” I asked.

“No, no, lil’ Lois,” he said, calling me by my mother’s name. He called every grandchild by their parent’s name, like we were their echoes. To him, I was always lil’ Lois.

“This here’s for St. Martin’s,” he said, nodding at the gumbo. “That’s for your momma.” The pig feet. “The rest is for the neighborhood.”

“Why you feeding the neighborhood?”

“I always do,” he said. “Gotta do my part.”

“Part in what?”

Papaw tied an apron around his belly and picked pearls of roux from his beard. “My part in God’s plan,” he said. “You’ll have yours someday too.”

I bunched up my face then stole clumps of rice while he turned away.

By the time the sky shifted from black to a gradient of purples, he wiped his hands and nodded toward the house. “Let’s wake the queen.”

The main kitchen was smaller, meant for daily meals, not miracles. Papaw scrambled eggs into rice and fried pancake batter in yesterday’s bacon grease. Inside a kitchen, he moved like a fish in water; outside it, he creaked like old floorboards.

“Can I have some?” I asked as he poured vanilla into the batter, the sweetness filling the room.

“No, ma’am,” he laughed. “This stuff ain’t no good for you.” He took a swig anyway, slammed the bottle down, and winced. “Bitter, bitter, bitter. That smell is a damn lie.”

And I believed him. Papaw never lied.

“How do you know when God’s talking to you?” I asked.

He rested his hands low on his belly. “You know that feelin’ right about here? When it’s time to visit the porcelain altar?”

I made a face. He grinned.

“Your body’ll tell you when the Lord’s knockin’. That’s how I know.”

Because of Papaw, I spent most of my girlhood believing God spoke through stomach aches. I thought I’d inherited his relationship with the divine. Really, it was just gas.

When Momo woke, we said grace and ate in silence. Then she dressed me for church—shiny buckle shoes, frilled socks, a dress with roses blooming along the pleats.

Papaw waited in the driveway in his Sunday best: gray striped suit, cream shirt, glossy tie, red-tinted shades, lemon-yellow shoes. “Always gotta have a pop of color,” he said. “Or else the Lord won’t spot me.”

I looked down at my own—red and yellow roses, red ribbons, a tiny riot of color.

Momo stepped out behind us in a peach dress and a hat speckled with lace and purple flowers. She looked regal.

“It’s the Lord’s day, lil’ Lois,” Papaw said. “We listen, and then we spread the word. That’s the deal.” He said it like a rule older than scripture.

I kept my head down as we walked to the car, hoping the humidity wouldn’t unravel my hair. My momma had flat-ironed it before she dropped me off—an hour of pulling and smoothing until my curls lay flat. My hair was a cross between her auburn coils and my daddy’s blonde strings, and only Momma knew how to manage it. She sent me off with rules: no moisture, plastic cap when you bathe, don’t mess up my work. So, I did my best to keep my crown in order.

St. Martin’s Catholic Church stood one street over. We were late, but the pastor held the service for Papaw—Barrett’s king. Papaw funded the church repairs when a tornado split the chapel, designed the gazebo out front, fed the congregation after gospel. He’d earned that pause.

We sat in the front row. Papaw was silent through the service. He didn’t amen or clap like Momo did—he just smiled, like being there was prayer enough.

During communion, I followed them to the altar, crossed myself, bowed to the priest, and pocketed extra Jesus crackers on the sly. Momo returned to her seat, but Papaw lingered by the pillar behind our bench, scanning the pews. I rose to my knees to see what he saw.

The church was small—low ceilings, white benches packed shoulder to shoulder in chiffon, lace, and tweed. Knees pressed to wood. Hardly room to kneel.

I looked at Papaw. His shades were off, dark eyes roaming. I couldn’t tell who he was looking for.

Then Momo flicked my ear. “Sit down,” she hissed.

After the service, as we unloaded trays of food from the Pontiac, Papaw said quietly, “Victor wasn’t here today. I’ll drop you and lil’ Lois at the house then I’ll go check on him.”

Momo adjusted the lace flowers on her hat, eyeing the congregation gathering by the gazebo, waiting for Papaw’s food. “You need rest, Charles,” she said.

“I ain’t tired.” He jingled his keys and smiled.

“If he ain’t willin’, don’t go draggin’ him out of his darkness.”

“Vic don’t have anyone else.”

“He’s a lost cause.”

“He ain’t lost,” Papaw snapped. “Not yet.”

Momo took my hand. “Come on, child.”

I pulled away. “Can I go with Papaw?”

Going home meant the dark living room with Momo’s stories on the TV, the fan on high, tuna soup for lunch. Papaw meant the chance of something better.

“No, ma’am.”

“But Papaw promised we’d go swimming today,” I pleaded. “He said we’d see Kenny and Bran.”

“I said—”

“It’s alright, Rene,” Papaw said. “She can come. I’ll take her to Newport after we check on Vic.”

Momo’s face hardened. “She don’t need to see Victor.”

“It’ll be alright.” Papaw held out his hand. “Come on, lil’ Lois.”

Papaw drove through Barrett Station, past carport shacks and peach-brick houses with foiled windows, businesses run from living rooms. On Main Street were food trailers, liquor stores, gas stations, groceries. But Papaw didn’t turn on Main. He turned left.

Left was the direction we never took.

“Why we goin’ this way?” I asked.

“Victor lives down here.”

Victor was Papaw’s nephew, a man I mostly knew from Christmas—quiet until he wasn’t, leaving with cookies in his pockets and unmarked presents he pilfered from beneath the tree.

“Is he sick?” I asked.

“Off and on.”

“What’s he got?”

Papaw hesitated. “Inner demons. Makes himself sick. Needs help gettin’ better.”

“And we’re gonna help him?”

“Yes, we are.”

The Barrett Station RV Park appeared without warning—no sign, no fence—just mist, smoke from trash fires, and rows of trailers propped on warped wood. Pastels peeled. Garbage bags flapped in broken windows. Lawn flamingos sank into mud. A shirtless man strummed a toy ukulele on a bleached loveseat as we passed, barefoot and unbothered, like the world had already forgotten him.

Papaw slowed at a metal sign with three arrows. South. East. West. He turned west.

We stopped beside a rusted blue pickup with a small cargo trailer hitched behind it.

“That’s his house?” I asked, face bunched up in judgement.

“Some folks don’t need much.” Papaw parked and raised a hand. “You wait here. Lock those doors. Gotta make sure he’s decent.”

I nodded and hit the lock.

Papaw limped to the trailer, braced himself on the hood, knocked once, twice. No answer. He bent low, found a key beneath the frame, and disappeared inside.

I waited in the car, watching the clock on the dash slide from 12:15 to 12:37.

When the trailer door creaked open again, Papaw came out without his suit jacket. His white shirt clung to him, yellowed at the armpits like the heat had left fingerprints. He tapped the window.

“You alright, lil’ Lois? Didn’t leave you too long, did I?”

“No sir. Is Mr. Victor okay?”

“He will be,” Papaw said, glancing back at the trailer. “He’s gettin’ himself cleaned up. When he’s ready, we’re takin’ him to see a doctor.”

He went to the trunk where he peeled the damp cream shirt off his back, replacing it with a lavender one that strained at his belly. I watched him through the windshield, like a king dressing down for battle. When they came out again, Papaw guided Victor toward the car, Victor leaning hard into his shoulder.

Victor looked too large-eyed for his body, red-ringed eyes and hollowed out cheeks, clinging to Papaw like a child starting school—ashamed and comforted all at once. Papaw buckled him into the front seat carefully, like he was precious cargo.

For a moment, it was just Victor and me. Irish Spring clung to his skin. He stared at his hands, picking at his nails, breathing shallow.

Papaw opened the door and we both flinched.

“You remember my granddaughter, don’t you, Victor?” Papaw said.

Victor shook his head.

“That’s her,” Papaw said. “Lois’s little girl.”

“Nice to meet you,” Victor whispered.

I swallowed and tried to smile. I’d met him many times before.

As Papaw pulled onto the road, he spoke gently, like he always did when he was trying to build someone back up. “This place is real nice. Miss Shirley sent her girl here a few years back. She’s got herself an apartment now. Job at the school too.”

Victor said nothing.

“You’ll be outta this place in no time,” Papaw said. “Feelin’ like a crisp fifty-dollar bill.”

Victor smiled, just barely. Papaw’s laugh was sunlight in the car.

“You gotta get yourself right, son,” he said. “Gotta be stronger than the hurt.”

“I wasn’t using for a long time,” Victor whispered. “I was doin’ real good.”

“It only takes one moment,” Papaw said. “Then you stand back up.”

“I will, pops. I promise.”

Papaw glanced at me in the rearview, like he wanted me to remember this. “What pulled you back in?”

Victor’s eyes stayed on his hands. “My girl. Danny. She came back with a rock.” His voice broke. “It was hard to say no.”

Papaw sighed. “Some folks need more help than we do.”

The neighborhoods shifted as we drove—clean lawns, fresh paint—until we stopped in front of a cornflower-blue house with a sign out front: Newport Rehabilitation Center: Good Food, Faith, & Family.

“Lil’ Lois and I will walk you in,” Papaw said.

“You ain’t gotta, pops.”

“I want to make sure they take good care of you.” He nodded toward the trunk. “Saved you a tray from church too.”

Victor wiped his face. “I can eat a little in the car, if that’s alright.”

Papaw nodded and went to the trunk.

Victor cried then—quiet, shaking, like he was trying not to take up space. I’d never seen an adult cry like that.

Papaw returned and set the foil tray in his lap. “Now don’t go cryin’,” he said gently. “You gotta walk in there strong.”

“You’re too good to me,” Victor whispered.

“The world ain’t been good enough to you,” Papaw said. “Now eat.”

Victor tore into the ham hocks, quick and hungry, scooping rice with the bone when the meat was gone. We watched in silence until the tray was empty and the foil was crumpled tight in his hands.

Inside, the lobby looked like the inside of an avocado—ovular and green with brown furniture that could have been pieces of the pit. The place smelled like cucumber and baby powder. A woman with a blonde pompadour greeted Victor by name. She spoke softly, like she didn’t want to scare him away.

An orderly nodded at Papaw respectfully with a tilt of his chin. “Mr. Artis.”

Papaw returned the smallest bow of his head.

We were told to leave once Victor was signed in.

Walking back to the car, questions crowded behind my teeth, but I was seven. I didn’t think I was allowed to ask. Years later, I’d learn what Victor was fighting—and even then, I learned it wrong, secondhand. A cousin called a two-years-sober Victor Crackhead V over dominoes at the Good Friday crawfish boil as a joke.

“It’s gonna be dark soon,” I said from the backseat. My stomach growled.

Papaw leaned back, breathing deep.

“It’s gonna be too dark to go swimmin’,” I said.

“Maybe the Lord didn’t will it today.”

I decided the that God was a bully.

Papaw started the car. “Just means we start earlier tomorrow. Work a little harder.”

“But then you won’t rest.”

He chuckled. “Rest ain’t worth much at my age, lil’ Lois.”

I leaned forward, studying him in the mirror. “We’re not goin’ swimmin’, are we?”

“I didn’t say that.” He met my eyes. “You’ll just have to swim in the dark.”

“What about the bats?” I asked. Kenny’s neighborhood was full of fruit bats that’d swoop down and lick up water from their pool. I only ever swam in their pool once after dark, and when I did, a little bat swooped down and clipped Bran’s ear. Kenny and I spent the following weeks fearing Bran would become a vampire or go rabid.

“You gotta face your fears sooner or later,” he said.

We drove deeper into Newport, through neighborhoods carved clean and careful. Everything had a place. Everything looked the same. Papaw turned into Fall Hollow.

Aunt Sade’s house was dark.

“Aw hell,” Papaw sighed, knocking anyway. “Forgot the damn day.”

My aunt and her two boys, my cousins, weren’t home. Their summers together were divided into quarters: the first was spent in summer camps, the second on vacation somewhere driveable, the third on vacation abroad, and the fourth with tutors. We were nearing the end of the third quarter, close enough to the fourth that it slipping Papaw’s mind was forgivable.

“You got a key?” I asked, hopeful.

Papaw leaned on the doorframe, hand at the small of his back, eyes closed tight like the effort cost him. “I think they get back tomorrow,” he murmured. “Tomorrow or Tuesday.”

Something sank in me—a feeling like missed chances, like the day was slipping away the way water does when you cup your hands too tight.

“I got another idea,” Papaw said. He took my hand.

We crossed the street to a lake—a perfect green circle with a white gazebo floating in the middle, like a crown. The grass was clipped short. Signs warned: No Swimming.

“You sure we can swim here?” I asked.

“Course,” Papaw grinned. “God didn’t put this here for vanity.”

The lake was man-made.

Papaw shed his shoes and shirt, draping them over the rail. I slipped out of my dress, standing in a white camisole and cotton shorts. I felt lighter. Like someone else.

“I can’t get my hair wet,” I warned, toes sinking into the warm edge.

“Then keep your head up,” he said. “That’s how a queen learns to swim.”

We waded in together. The water climbed our bodies, cooler the deeper it went, mud squeezing between my toes. I grabbed Papaw’s elbows as my feet lifted.

I kicked hard, imagining a mermaid’s tail unfurling from my hips. This water was nothing like Kenny’s pool—no sting of chlorine, no clarity. It was thick and heavy, like moving through a dream, leaving a film on my skin like oil or blessing.

“That’s it,” Papaw said. “Keep them fins movin’.” He slapped the surface, laughing, and for a second—just a second—he looked young.

“Ain’t that somethin’!” he hollered. “A fish in water!”

I swam in crooked shapes, hair unraveling behind me. My mother’s careful work floated free, memory loosening its grip. I kept my chin high, jaw clenched.

“Right-left-right-left!” Papaw called, laughter echoing across the lake.

For a moment, it felt holy. A baptism. An initiation. Papaw’s crown gleamed in the way the world moved around him. The lake seemed to bow to this moment, to him.

Then a voice cut through the air.

“Heeeeeeeeey!”

Papaw’s laughter snapped.

Another “Hey!” ricocheted across the water.

Papaw reached for me. “Time to go.”

We slogged to the bank where a neighborhood security guard waited in a golf cart. He was young, sunburned, his hair bright as a warning.

“You know you can’t swim in this lake,” he said.

“You don’t say?” Papaw’s voice warmed like butter, not apology. He winked at me. “Thank you for lettin’ us know.”

The guard nodded toward me. “Do y’all live here?”

“My daughter does,” Papaw said.

“Her mother?” The guard’s eyes flicked to me, measuring.

“No,” Papaw said. “That’s my other daughter. This one’s from my youngest.”

“I see.” The guard hesitated. “Mind if we confirm?”

“Her mama’s on vacation,” Papaw said, his voice tightening. “Won’t be home.”

The guard studied me, like something didn’t add up. “Anyone else who could verify?”

Papaw’s smile thinned. “Is Lawrence on duty? He’ll know me.”

“No, sir.”

The air changed. Papaw nodded once, jaw set. “Mind if we get my granddaughter in the car?” he asked. “Warm her up?”

“I’d be more comfortable if she sat in the cart,” the guard said.

Something flashed across Papaw’s face—lightning before a storm. “I think she’d be more comfortable where she knows the seats and the heat,” he said. “Ain’t that right, little Lois?”

They both looked at me. I swallowed. “Uh-huh.”

The guard’s hand hovered near his belt. I didn’t know what was inside the holster, but I was sure it could kill someone.

“I’m not trying to upset you,” the guard said, raising a calming hand.

“Try harder,” Papaw said.

Silence spread between them, thick as the lake.

“I’ve got blankets in the cart,” the guard said finally. “She can warm up while we call Lawrence.”

Papaw nodded, stiff, and took the offer like it cost him. He walked me to the cart and tucked a prickly blanket around my shoulders. It smelled like hot plastic and sunscreen.

As Papaw limped away to retrieve his clothes, the guard leaned in close. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “You can tell me. Is that man really your grandfather?”

“He’s my papaw.”

“You sure?”

My throat burned and I fought the urge to cry. Crying made people believe whatever they wanted. Even the truth sounded wrong when it came out shaking. “He is,” I said.

The guard watched me, like he couldn’t see what I could. Like Papaw’s crown didn’t count here.

“You don’t have to lie,” he said gently.

I tried to answer, but nothing came. I didn’t yet know that goodness could be mistaken for theft. I only knew we’d stopped doing what Papaw always did—feeding, fixing, carrying—and the world had noticed.

Papaw returned, shirt half-buttoned, the wet wife-beater beneath it dark as a bruise. “You alright there, little Lois?”

The guard raised a hand. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’ll need to see some ID.”

Papaw handed over every card he had. The guard examined them, slow and careful.

“I’m going to ask that you ride with me to the gatehouse,” he said next. “We’ll confirm who you are there.”

Papaw didn’t argue. At the gatehouse, Papaw called Mr. Lawrence, then Momo. “Bring pictures,” he told her. “From the house.”

Momo arrived in a rush—bathrobe, house dress, shoebox clutched tight. She pushed past the guard and spilled proof across the counter. “This is our granddaughter,” she said, tapping a photo of Papaw holding me beside a crawfish boiler. “And this is her momma—my daughter—and her daddy—”

Even after the guard accepted the proof, Momo kept going. Photo after photo. Name after name.

Papaw said nothing. He sat with me and watched the sun sink behind the lake, his shoulders heavy, his crown dulled. Then he drove us home in silence.

When we stepped inside the house, Momo took off her slippers and whipped me in the living room. She didn’t wait for Papaw to close the door.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” she demanded, each question landing with a sting. “Why didn’t you defend your Papaw?”

I cried but didn’t answer.

“You have to speak up for your family. Do you understand me?” Another lick.

I didn’t—not really. I’d been taught not to interrupt grown folks, not to talk back. I nodded anyway.

“I told you to come back to the house with me,” Momo said, her voice breaking as she turned on Papaw. “You shouldn’t be draggin’ her all over town like that.”

“She was fine,” Papaw said.

“Everybody don’t know you like that, Charles.” Momo clapped her hands together, sharp and final.

“If we’d gotten there before curfew,” Papaw said calmly, “none of this would’ve happened.”

“It was the wrong decision,” Momo said.

Papaw looked past her, at the closed curtains. “I’ll start earlier tomorrow,” he said. “Much, much earlier.”

That was enough for Momo. The conversation was finished. She turned back to me.

She bathed me hard, scrubbing my skin like she was trying to erase something. Then she put me to work. I dried dishes until my arms ached, folded towels into perfect squares, swept the kitchen and the hall. When I finished, she sent me to bed without dinner.

At night, I lay on my wet hair and pulled at the strands as they began to curl again. My crown gone. Momo had scrubbed me with Irish Spring, which made me think of Victor—of the cornflower house with the avocado rooms, of clean clothes that fit, of a bed that wasn’t hitched to a truck. I figured the only thing that wasn’t good there was the food. No one cooked like Papaw.

I stared at the ceiling and waited for him to rise. When I heard his steps in the hallway, I closed my eyes. The back door opened. Slammed.

I thought about following him, to sneak more handfuls of dirty rice or a link of sausage to fill my empty tummy, but I was too tired. The thought of kicking off my blankets only made me sleepier, and I knew missing one night in the back kitchen would be alright for me—that Papaw would return to the work another night, and the work would forgive him.

The Crown Series: TOC

0. An Introduction to “Crown”

1. Akademos

2. Crown

*While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose.

Akademos is the first story in Crown, a short story series originally written as my MFA thesis—a collection of interconnected Southern gothic stories about lineage, food, and belonging. Although these stories draw inspiration from real places and experiences, they are works of fiction. I started writing them about a decade ago, shelved them after grad school, and am sharing them now.

You can read the full introduction to Crown and this series here.

AKADEMOS

Papaw died of a heart attack in Barrett Station, Texas the summer I turned eleven. His absence settled over town like fog, a low sheet draped over the few streets Barrett carved between the affluent sprawl of Newport and the forgetful edges of Crosby.

Before sunrise on the day of the funeral, my parents drove me to Barrett. My mom was Papaw’s youngest, and her task was to help Momo get dressed and out the door. My dad was in charge of the gumbo and corn cakes; it was one of five demands Papaw left in his will:

ARTICLE 2: Let my people eat gumbo and corn cakes on my death day. Only Frank can prepare it. Don’t let Anna Faye anywhere near my kitchen.

Anna Faye was Momo’s sister and a terrible cook. At family parties, it was always Papaw versus Anna Faye: the battle of the gumbos. Papaw’s pot emptied first every time, scraped clean in minutes, and then—because there were so many of us, and because Papaw’s gumbo always ran dry—we surrendered to Anna Faye’s. Her gumbo floated with tomato chunks, okra stalks, and shrimp heads, like she’d skimmed it straight from a ditch.

Some of the older relatives bristled at Papaw’s decree. My dad wasn’t blood; just a white man from Michigan who’d married Papaw’s baby girl. But Papaw had taught him the gumbo arts, and my dad—a worthy disciple—devoured Papaw’s culinary wisdom until their recipes were indistinguishable.

When we pulled into Papaw’s driveway, the sky was streaked pink and purple, clouds rippling like cream in coffee. Papaw’s house was peach brick with a neat black roof; the skinny red Pontiac sat under the gray carport like it was waiting for him to come home.

My mom unlocked the front door and we stepped into the dark, stuffy interior.

“Mama?” she called.

The heat inside felt thick enough to slice. The house smelled of tuna and bleach. I lifted the collar of my dress to breathe through it.

I followed my mom down the hallway toward the bedrooms while my dad veered into the living room to crank open the windows. A box fan rattled somewhere deeper in the house, the kind that hummed all summer in Barrett homes.

Momo Rene was curled on top of the comforter like a fetus. Her hair—usually curled into a soft crown she dyed jet black—was puffed with white roots and streaks of auburn, her natural color. The bedroom had burgundy walls and white furniture. A blue vanity crouched in the corner; the mirror was crowded with photos of grandkids.

“You wore white,” Momo croaked into her pillow when she saw us.

My mom stood in a pleated white dress with a black silhouette, a black sash knotted at her waist, and yellow heels tied at her ankles. Silver bracelets and rings glimmered against her skin. Her blunt bangs shaded eyes swollen from a week of nighttime cries.

“It’s what Daddy wanted,” she said. “You gotta wear white too.”

ARTICLE 4: Everyone will wear white with a pop of color—no black.

My mother had dressed me in a cream cap-sleeve A-line hemmed at the ankles, and red buckle shoes. They pinched a little; the leather was new, still stiff.

“Let’s get you dressed, Mama,” my mom said. She stooped and eased her hands under Momo’s arms, guiding her toward the small baby-blue bathroom. My mom twisted the tub nozzle, hot water roaring against porcelain, steam rising up like breath. She peeled Momo’s pink muumuu over her head and set it on the toilet lid. I stared at my shoes to avoid Momo’s nakedness.

“Come here, child,” my mom said. She held out a bottle of shampoo. “I need you to help me bathe her.”

Keeping my head down, I took the bottle. My mom slipped out of her dress and yellow heels, setting them on the counter beside the sink. She stepped into the tub in her black bra and panties to lower Momo into the water.

“Take your dress off too, baby. I don’t want it ruined.”

I obeyed, stripping down to my cami, panties, and socks. I perched on the edge of the tub to wet Momo’s hair. Her head lolled against my palm, soft and heavy.

That day, Momo had no more mobility than one of my dolls. Her eyes were squeezed shut, brows pinched deep like she was trapped in a nightmare she couldn’t wake from.

“Lift her arms for me, baby,” my mom said.

Her arms were bony; the skin of her triceps hung like damp laundry when I raised her elbows. She smelled like onions and baby powder. I wondered when she’d last bathed. If any of my aunts or uncles came by like my mom did, to make sure she ate or slept beneath her covers instead of on top of them. Since Papaw died, she’d gone still—like grief folded her into herself and forgot to unfold.

When we finished the bath, my mom towel-dried Momo’s hair and torso. I dabbed her legs and feet. We walked her to the bed where she sank like a bag of old books. My mom combed and greased her hair while I stood silently with black hairpins in my palm. One by one, she plucked them from my hand and twisted Momo’s hair into a smooth, high bouffant.

My mom stepped into the closet.

“Which shoes, Mama?” she asked. The white paneled closet still held some of Papaw’s shirts, sleeves slumped like ghosts.

She emerged with a long-sleeved, high-neck white lace dress and two pairs of pumps: satin cornflower with a jeweled toe, and hot pink suede with spiky yellow trim and a green ankle strap.

Momo had the loveliest shoes I’d ever seen. Before Papaw passed, she let my cousin Tini and me play dress-up in her room—beaded sheath dresses, strappy rainbow heels, wide-brimmed hats with chiffon flowers and silk ribbons curling like braids. She’d dab our faces with makeup, spritz Chanel No. 5 over our heads, and we’d feel transformed.

“I’ll wear the pink,” Momo rasped. “Your daddy loved those shoes.”

My mom’s eyes watered. Her bottom lip trembled. She looked down at the pink pumps like they were something alive once and loved. She tucked the cornflower shoes away and laid the dress and the pink pumps across the bed.

Momo dressed herself, insisting. My mom and I hovered, hands poised to catch her.

“You’re beautiful, Mama,” my mom whispered. “So, so beautiful.”

And then my mom’s knees buckled and she fell against Momo’s chest, sobbing. I started crying too. I’d known she’d break eventually, but I never imagined it happening here, in this small blue room, surrounded by shoes.

“Go help your daddy,” Momo said, voice shaking. “Give your mama and me a minute.”

In the back kitchen, behind the house, my dad stirred roux in a steel pot, sweat beading at his temples. When he saw my face—blotchy, wet—he dropped the ladle into the sink and pulled me close. The roux burned, but he didn’t let go.

ARTICLE 1: The service will be at Saint Martin’s Catholic Church and led by Father Malcolm Sweeney.

St. Martin’s Catholic Church was a family heirloom. Every aunt and uncle on my mom’s side had been baptized there. My parents were married there. Most of my mother’s bloodline lay buried in the St. Martin Cemetery behind the chapel, names carved into stone like the roots of our family tree.

Papaw poured himself into that place—fed the churchgoers every Sunday, rebuilt the structure with his own money, held after-Sunday-Sunday school in its shadow. The church was as much a part of him as bone or tendon.

My entire family filled the interior. Aunts, uncles, first, second, and third cousins, great-aunts, once-removed uncles—all in white. Lace sundresses and glitter shoes; cream suits with purple ties; skirts with lilac trim and ruffled blouses the colors of Easter eggs. There were too many of us for the pews. Gray folding chairs were wedged at the ends of every row, shrinking the aisle to a thin path for Father Sweeney and Papaw’s children to walk for the eulogies. The front doors stayed propped open for late arrivals, framing the sun like a waiting phantom outside.

Inside, the walls were high and off-white. Heavy green drapes cascaded down from the rafters. Stained glass bled blue, red, and violet across the cherry-oak pews and rough red carpet. It was dim except for tea lights on the windowsills and a few wooden chandeliers flickering overhead.

Father Sweeney—Papaw’s protégé and friend—began the service with a prayer over the urn. Sweeney was the palest man in Barrett, paler even than my father. Freckles dusted his cheeks; his gray eyes looked like they’d been borrowed from someone who didn’t need them anymore. When he finished the prayer, he kissed the short lavender urn with its silver cap. Then he lifted it gently, walked down the aisle, and knelt to set it in Momo’s lap.

ARTICLE 3: Don’t put me in the ground. Cremate me and keep me close to my old lady.

After the service, our family migrated toward the community center in Momo’s shadow. She carried the urn against her chest, her cheek resting on the cool metal like she could still feel Papaw’s heartbeat inside. Her children clustered around her: my mom in her yellow shoes, my father in white sleeves rolled once at the wrist. Behind them, Aunt Sade in a white jumpsuit with lime jewelry; her husband Larry in seafoam green; Kenny and Bran in matching shirts. Further back, Aunt Grace shuffled beside her oxygen tank, lace sleeves brushing her royal-blue belt, her son Dre by her side in a white polo with wrinkled edges.

Behind the community center, Papaw’s hill rose against the sunset: a fuzzy black silhouette against the afternoon. The highest point in Barrett Station—eighty feet of man-made earth sinking slowly toward the bayou. From its top, you could see everything.

Every summer, after morning gospel, my cousins and I climbed that hill in Papaw’s shadow for after-Sunday-Sunday school.

The day we buried Papaw, Kenny, Dre, and I slipped away before the corn cakes were passed out. Our parents wouldn’t linger; they’d go straight to Momo’s to sift through Papaw’s things and bar the door against distant relatives. It was our last chance to climb the hill before the city fenced it off.

ARTICLE 5: Protect my hill.

Despite petitions and promises, despite Sweeney’s pleas and Papaw’s years of service, the city still planned to break the hill down.

I led the climb. Heat clung to us like another skin. Kenny’s seafoam sleeves were rolled too high, his ankles exposed above black socks—too much boy for clothes that couldn’t keep pace. Dre’s polo was untucked and stained brown with melted push-pop chocolate; his belly hung over his belt like the shirt was losing the fight to contain him.

At the top, Barrett Station unfolded: peach and gray houses, the blue water tower, narrow black roads, the white tops of the Crosby trailer park, the green teeth of trees with pink flowers at their tips. Dirt roads curled toward the Newport mansions like secrets.

On the tippy-top, in Papaw’s old spot, Bran and Travi were crouched over four two-liters and a box of push-pops.

“What y’all doing?” Kenny called, jogging ahead.

Bran hid the pops. His seafoam shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. His pants fell just right, hemmed clean at the ankle. He looked like someone who belonged in his own skin.

“Can’t you see us thinking?” Travi muttered. “Piss off.”

Travi’s acne-pocked jaw and overgrown black hair framed his face like a crooked halo. Off-white pants, faded purple polo, chunky white sneakers gone gray at the toes. He’d lived in Barrett his whole life, a few doors from Papaw’s house. The town clung to him like humidity.

“Where you get all that soda?” Dre asked. “Nobody gave us no soda.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bran said.

“But I want some.”

“Well, you ain’t getting none,” said Travi.

“You stole it,” I said. Not a question—just air that tasted like truth.

Bran laughed. Travi didn’t.

“Z’s from the burbs,” Bran said. “She don’t know nothing about kind country folks getting stuff for free.”

There it was: the reminder. Z in the suburbs. Z not from here. Z not enough of either.

Bran and Kenny lived in Newport, but zoned to Crosby schools. My suburbs were zoned to Humble. Close, but apparently not close enough. That was the math of belonging here.

“Wanna know what we’re doing?” Travi asked, standing and puffing out his chest. “Me and Bran gonna end the family curse.”

The curse: Papaw dropping out of seminary when he met Momo. Nine children out of wedlock. Four dead: Thomas of leukemia; Jude of a heart defect; Jeremiah to a gunshot; Nathan in a car wreck last year. Nathan—Travi’s father.

“How you gonna do that?” I asked.

“We gotta burn down the House of God,” he said.

My breath caught. “Where’s God’s house?”

Travi jerked his thumb downhill toward St. Martin’s.

The church squatted white against the yard: stained-glass archways in front, windows foil-wrapped around back to keep the heat out. Purple double doors, diamond cutouts along the frame. Bronze cross lifted toward the sky.

“But that’s Papaw’s church,” Kenny said.

“Ain’t his anymore,” Travi said.

“Never really was,” Bran added. “It’s God’s. And we gotta burn it with holy water before the curse gets somebody else.”

“Papaw’s gone,” I said. “He can’t be cursed anymore.”

Travi spit into the dirt. “Don’t mean the curse is.”

Travi and I never got along. He was mean and bossy, and he liked to land the first blow. He called me a princess because I ate crawfish with latex gloves to keep my fingers from burning. The gloves embarrassed me, but my mom was the one who brought her own box from home and made me wear them. Still, Travi said stuff like that meant I wasn’t built for Barrett.

One of the reasons Travi hated me—and I didn’t know this then—had to do with my need to second-guess him. He was four years older, and I never could make myself treat him like an elder. Too country to teach me anything, I thought. Too loud to hear anything back.

Dre dug into his shorts pocket and fished out a melted piece of taffy. He shoved it into his mouth and smacked. “Where’d you get holy water?” he asked.

“The sink, fatass,” said Travi.

“How’s it holy then?”

“We blessed it. That’s how—”

Grass crackled at the base of the hill. We froze. Bran leaned over the sloping edge to see who’d followed us.

“Shit,” Bran hissed. “Father Sweeney!”

Travi scooped up the two-liters and passed them to Bran. “Hide ‘em.” He shoved the box of push-pops into Dre’s arms.

“Try not to eat ‘em, porker.”

Dre hugged the box, tears squeezing into the creases of his cheeks.

We stood waiting while Bran jogged down the opposite side. When Sweeney came into view, he had a strange smile—like he thought he was alone but was delighted to find company. He paused halfway up, looking out over Barrett, drinking in the rooftops and bayou like the view eased whatever pain lived in him too.

“Your parents are looking for y’all,” he said. “You shouldn’t be up here. It’s not safe anymore.”

“How long you been lurkin’, Sweeney?” Travi stepped forward, arms crossed, chin lifted like he was taller than the priest.

Travi swore Sweeney was always watching him. That he never liked him. That when Papaw was alive, Sweeney called every time a window broke or somebody carved tits on the Marble Mary outside St. Martin’s. Travi always said he was at the library those nights—the library Barrett didn’t have.

Sweeney softened his smile, hands folded in his sleeves.

“Your parents will want you close. But—” he sighed, looking toward the bayou—“the city is fencing off the hill tomorrow. This might be our last day to stand on it free.”

“It’s your fault,” Travi spat. “You didn’t fight hard enough. You let them take it.”

“It isn’t up to me, Travino. I—”

“Don’t call me that.” His voice was a growl. “You don’t get to.”

Sweeney nodded, throat bobbing.

“Your Papaw was a good man. He kept this hill alive longer than anyone thought possible. But it isn’t safe. The earth is sinking. The garbage in the bayou’s poisoning it from underneath. One day, the whole thing may collapse.”

I liked Father Sweeney. He was an outsider in Barrett, like me, but his difference never kept him from belonging. He asked me about my books when no one else did. Some days I brought them just for him to notice.

He left us on the hill without ushering us down or tattling. He gave us room to breathe. That was more than most grown folks gave kids in Barrett.

“Jesus-lovin’ bastard,” Travi shouted, kicking at rocks as we walked the road back to Momo’s. Our parents had already gone. Momo’s house was only two streets over.

“Momo won’t let ‘em take the hill,” Bran said, hugging the two-liters. “It was one of Papaw’s demands. They’ll honor it.”

“Momo don’t care no more,” Travi muttered. “She’s catatonic.”

“What that mean?” Dre asked.

“Drunk cat syndrome.”

Kenny lagged behind, legs too long for his body. “Who you think the curse gonna get next?”

“Probably you,” Travi said.

Bran punched him. Travi stumbled into a bush.

“You’ll probably go first, porkie,” he corrected. “Choke on them pops.”

“Why me?” Dre whined. “Why not Z?”

“Like the curse will ever get her.”

I jogged to catch up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The family curse only takes family.”

The words pinched my lungs hard. “But I am family.”

Travi snorted. “You’re not an Artis.” He said it like it tasted bad. All my cousins either kept the Artis name or hyphenated it—Artis-Hendrix, Artis-Richardson. My mom took my father’s name instead. In Barrett, that choice lived on me like a stain.

Travi decided who was in and who was out. I was always out. Living outside Barrett only sharpened the point.

He had history to back it up. He climbed this hill with Papaw every day, before and after school. On the worst days, when Papaw’s knee gave out, Travi carried him. Papaw still preached at the hilltop—Akademos, he called it. He told a story, then handed us each a piece of paper, a crayon, and a pork rind. Some of us just ate. Some drew circles in the dirt. Travi always wrote. We never saw what, but words always bloomed in his fists like weeds.

If Papaw had a favorite, it was him. Maybe because Uncle Nathan was the last child Papaw buried. Maybe because Travi’s mom lived in hospitals and heartbreak. Maybe because someone in Barrett always expected Travi to leave Barrett Station in handcuffs. Maybe Papaw wanted to save him first.

By the time we got to Momo’s, Aunt Sade was waiting by her Mercedes, sunglasses hiding her eyes.

“We’re leaving,” she called. “Momo needs rest.”

Bran handed Travi the two-liters. “Gotta go.”

“What about the curse?” Travi’s eyes were wide. Hungry.

“We’ll burn God’s house another day.”

“If we don’t do it tonight,” Travi said, “somebody’s daddy’s dead tomorrow.”

Bran winced at Travi’s words, but when he looked over his shoulder and saw the glare his mother was giving him for trying her patience, he winced harder.

“Next weekend,” he said. He plucked Kenny by the shoulder. “Let’s go before she gets a switch.”

They left. One by one, the families peeled away. Like always—sunrise to sunset—no one stayed longer. Like they were outrunning something they couldn’t name.

I knew my parents wouldn’t leave. My mom would bathe and feed Momo one more time. My dad would wash pots, fix hinges, and tinker with Papaw’s broken things to pretend he was still here.

Dre’s family was close enough for him to walk home, so he stayed behind too.

“What now?” Dre asked, still holding the push-pops.

Travi stared down Zinn Lane toward St. Martin’s. Toward the purple doors.

“Grab a bottle,” he said. “You too, Z.”

In Barrett, everyone learns to drive at ten. If you’re an only child, you learn at nine. Travi was an only child, so Dre and I hid in the backseat of Papaw’s Pontiac while he backed it out of Momo’s driveway, knuckles white on the wheel.

Inside, the Pontiac already looked like it belonged to him. Twelve books under the seat: occult encyclopedias, a worn NIV Bible, dog-eared Texas college viewbooks, and The Complete Works of Plato with a red discount sticker slapped crooked across the cover. On the passenger seat: a neat stack of church programs from the funeral and a stack of the Barrett Station Times folded to Papaw’s two-page obituary.

Travi parked in the vacant lot outside St. Martin’s. He shoved the box of push-pops under his arm, heat already warping the cardboard.

“Get out,” he said. “Grab the bottles.”

He popped the Pontiac’s trunk. Six two-liters waited like soldiers. He twisted one open; Dre and I followed. The air filled with the chemical sting of gasoline.

“Jesus,” Dre squealed. “It smells like the corner store!”

I held the mouth of a bottle beneath my nose. It was gasoline. Not holy water.

“You sure you blessed it right?” I asked.

“Course I did,” Travi snapped. “Read the Lord’s Prayer three times ‘fore I crossed it.”

He stalked the perimeter of the church, splashing gasoline on the wood, on the foil-wrapped windows, on the purple doors. The plastic bottles thudded empty at Marble Mary’s feet.

“Hand me the pops,” he said, snatching them before Dre could extend his arm. He tore open a smaller box inside—matches. He struck one, and it flared bright in his hand.

I stopped breathing then.

“You can go back to the burbs, princess,” he said, eyes on the flame. “Dre and I can do this without you.”

He touched the flame to a branch, the end catching like a fuse on a bomb. Dre backed away, chins trembling.

“I blessed the house,” Travi said. “Now you cleanse it.”

Dre shook his head. “I—I can’t.”

I stood, fists balled. “Come on, Dre. Let’s go back.” I could already feel the road under my feet, the sprint home, the safety of my father’s hands.

Travi turned with the burning branch. “I got a better idea.” He lifted it toward me. “Prove you’re an Artis, princess.”

I stumbled back, heat licking my face as a lie formed on my tongue. “I don’t have to prove anything.”

He stepped closer. The flames brightened, the smoke wavering like a veil around his face.

“You don’t know anything about Barrett,” he said. “You don’t live here. You don’t go to school here. You only come to watch people die.”

The words hit harder than the heat. And though I had once believed my pride would never let me, I began to cry in front of Travi then.

“I bet you’ll live forever,” he said. “Go to college. Get married. Have babies. Be someone. You’re not like the rest of us.”

Shame bloomed under my skin, hot as the flame.

“You don’t deserve the curse,” he said. “You don’t deserve to be an Artis.”

I don’t know which I wanted more—to belong, or to burn the part of me that didn’t.

More tears came, and I didn’t stop them. “I hate you, Travi. I hope the curse gets you next.”

He dropped the branch, but the words stayed lit between us.

“Too bad it’ll never get you.”

Dre wiped his face. “I’ll do it,” he said, voice small. He grabbed the branch too hard and it snapped in his grip. The lit end hit the ground, and Travi stamped it out before the flames could spread.

“Pussy,” Travi muttered before bending for another branch and lighting it.

Something in me cracked. I shoved forward, grabbed the fire from his hands. “No. I’ll do it.”

I don’t know why it had to be me. I didn’t believe in the curse. I still don’t. I didn’t know Papaw like Travi did. I didn’t hate God. But I knew one thing: nothing would have disappointed Papaw more than this moment belonging to Travi.

So, I threw first.

The flames hit the gasoline and roared alive, colors so bright they hurt. Travi threw second. Dre threw third. The church answered each offering with a scream of heat.

Windows burst. The air conditioner fell and shattered. Shingles sloughed like dead skin.

The heat chased us as we ran up Papaw’s hill. Our faces slicked with sweat and ash. Smoke scraped our lungs raw. Barrett shrank below us, the church burning like a heartbeat at the center of town.

We knew no one could save the church. We knew the Crosby Fire Department was twenty miles out. We knew the natives were in their homes between dying fans and the evening gospel. We knew our families were too far or tired or drunk to see the flames.

We didn’t know Father Sweeney was still inside.

I wish I could talk about Travi’s heroic moment. I wish I could tell someone about the time Travi ran into a burning church to save a priest. I wish I could tell everyone in Barrett they were wrong about Travi and that he was everything Papaw wanted him to be and nothing like they expected him to be.

But I can’t tell that story.

Father Arthur Sweeney died in the fire. And Travi was taken away in handcuffs.

The cops found us on the hilltop. Flashlights in our eyes. Dre sobbing. Travi quiet.

“It was all me,” he said. “All me.”

Dre and I didn’t speak.

We walked down the hill behind the officers. My parents and Momo met us at the bottom, faces swollen, breath broken. Travi looked at me through the cop car window.

He was crying too.

My parents didn’t bring me back to Barrett for almost a year. Not until Momo’s first stroke. While my mother bathed her and my father cooked her dinner, I walked the roads alone until I reached the lot where St. Martin’s used to stand.

Nothing but a slab of concrete over scorched earth. Plans for a bigger church in the works.

Behind it, Papaw’s hill was half its size. Fenced off. Crumbling into the bayou—just like Sweeney had said.

I walked to the fence and got as close as I possibly could to the base of the hill. I hooked my fingers through the chain links and pressed my forehead to the metal. The wind whipped my hair. The bayou crashed against the dirty edges of the hill.

Their noise swallowed the sound of my confession against the gate.

My undergraduate and graduate theses at the University of Houston and the University of Texas were a collection of ten short Southern gothic stories, loosely inspired by my family and growing up across parts of Texas and Louisiana. Last year, I wrote about this work on my blog in a post called Two Halves—about lineage, curses, and the way food and family shape the stories we tell. Those themes live here too.

I wrote these stories more than a decade ago, during the strange in-between years of undergrad and grad school. At the time, I wanted to write fantasy, but I was encouraged toward literary fiction instead (oh, the rules of academia). So, I learned how to write people instead of monsters, grief instead of magic, and quiet rooms instead of other realms. I also leaned into the stories and mythos around my family’s long history with death and rituals, creating “funhouse mirror” versions of people who passed before I could meet them and putting their legends on a page. For a while, that worked.

After my MFA, I couldn’t hear these stories without also hearing workshop notes like static—the criticisms, the editorial pushes, the pressures to quit the program, the letters from some peers that cut deeper than they needed to. The joy I once felt writing these characters was buried beneath the sound of other voices. I attached my resentment to the pages, and eventually, I stopped writing altogether. I blamed these stories for the silence that followed.

I queried this collection once. Right after grad school in a pre-Covid market (very different than when I started querying my fantasy novel ~5 years later). Two agents requested the manuscript; one conversation progressed, but I didn’t agree with her editorial vision and I wasn’t willing to put in the work to revise the stories. I was that over them. I sent a few pieces to journals—two were published—and the rest collected rejections like dust. I told myself that meant the work wasn’t good enough, and I folded the stories away.

Recently, while working on something new (an urban fantasy based in Louisiana), I came back to them. Not to revise them for traditional publication but to look for inspiration, and what I found surprised me. I had been far harder on myself than I needed to be. These stories aren’t perfect, but they are tender and honest. They hold the parts of me that were trying to survive becoming someone new and writing in a genre I hadn’t always loved but learned to.

So, I’m sharing them now. Not to be known for them or to seek traditional publication. I don’t have the fire to query these again—that flame belongs to the fantasies I’m writing now—but I do love them and they deserve somewhere to live. Querying is a commitment, and you really have to love a work and want to labor over it to endure that journey.

And in the meantime, as someone who loves stories—reading them, recommending them, making space for them—I’ve grown quietly tired of how much finished work is asked to wait before it’s allowed to be seen. The traditional publishing process has its reasons, but it is not built for immediacy. Sharing these stories here feels like choosing motion over silence. It feels good to say “yes” to something with my own hands, while I wait for someone else to say “yes” to my novel.

The first story in this series, Akademos, began long before I knew what this collection would become. During my time at the University of Houston, I joined an organization called Akademos Scholars, led by Dr. Larry Hill. The group partnered with the Sunnyside community, the Nature Heritage Society, and the Bessie Swindle Community Center to restore a plot of land along Sims Bayou—planting gardens, cleaning trails, hosting design competitions, and building outdoor learning spaces and conservation access for the community.

Dr. Hill spoke often about the land, especially the hill at its center, which was the highest topographical point in Houston. He also talked about his friend Glen Miller, who used to take him there to teach, observe, and dream. The way he spoke about that place reminded me of my grandfather.

This story and this collection grew out of that overlap: grief and legacy, land and lineage, the ache of belonging to multiple worlds and not fitting neatly into any of them. These stories aren’t where I’m headed as a writer—my heart lives somewhere between myth and magic now—but they are where I began. And because I can’t help it, they echo the themes that show up in everything I write. Food, family, rituals, legacy.

I’m calling this series Crown. Originally, Crown was the title of my MFA thesis: a collection of stories following Z, a girl growing up between suburbs and backroads, Houston and Barrett Station, lineage and longing. Across adolescence and into adulthood, she learns to live in the space between worlds—race, class, belief system—always circling the same question: Who am I if I don’t belong to just one place?

Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing all ten stories here—about two per month until we reach the end. They aren’t perfect, but they are the roots of the writer I’ve become.

You can start here, with the first story: Akademos. Please note: this series contains depictions of grief, family conflict, substance use, violence, and themes of identity, power, and survival. Several stories include encounters with law enforcement, illness, and discrimination. Reader discretion is advised.

Thank you for reading, and for giving these stories a place to land!

Eriel

P.S. Although these stories draw inspiration from real places, communities, and memories, they are entirely fictional. The characters, events, and depictions in this series are products of the imagination. They are not meant to represent any real person, living or deceased, and should not be read as memoir or testimony. They are simply stories—made from the materials of a life, not pulled directly from it.

Crown Table of Contents - Updated 5/1/2026

0. An Introduction to Crown

1. Akademos

2. Crown

3. Oxtails

4. Ham Hocks

5. Juice

6. Ash

7. Dock of the Bay

8. Good Friday

9. Fat Tuesday

10. Roux

While the stories are interconnected, they can be read standalone or in any order you choose. And because everything I write gets a soundtrack, here’s one to capture the vibes of this series.