Online Exclusive: “Visitation” by Chantal James

An excerpt from the forthcoming novel The Opening of the Mouth

Chantal James

Visitation

Jade hadn’t mentioned this train ride to her mother. When they’d spoken recently, she’d filled any space that had opened for it in their conversation with some remark about rising crime, gossip from the law practice where she’d started as a paralegal, promises to take her mother, Veronica, to a new restaurant in town. But now she was halfway to DC watching fields of corn race the train and she wondered if she could have brought it up, opened that potentially explosive box. No, she thinks, waving away the attendant offering her an orange juice from the cart. Not enough time to shove back down what might have emerged.

She didn’t entirely know what she was doing by this. She had a shoebox of letters she’d written to her father over the years. She used to store it under the bed in the old house, then she took it with her and kept it underneath winter coats in the closet of the apartment she’d recently moved to. It wasn’t to burden him with all those words written in ink over time, all those questions, that she had taken a few days off of work and bought this ticket. It wasn’t to offer him anything he could shove back in her face.

She’d thought about whether she even wanted to stay with her mother when she arrived. If she did, she’d show up as suddenly as she planned to show up at her father’s since she hadn’t yet called to let her mother know she’d be in town. Veronica might not approve of Jade’s visiting Gunter, opening what had been sealed. She might ask questions. It might raise overwhelming tides within her, recalling so much that she’d worked with discipline to keep from knowing. Jade didn’t feel good about the option of sharing space with her mother and not telling her. Veronica would know. Even though Jade yet had no idea what exactly encountering her father again would do to her, she imagined a seismic shift for her, a reordering of her insides, something that someone who knew her well might be able to detect in a glance of hers, a posture.

In the end, after the train had pulled into Union Station and she’d slung her bag over her shoulder and departed out of its looming marble arches, she made up her mind to get a motel. Without even alerting Veronica she’d come to town, she took a cab to a spot in Southwest. She checked in and collapsed on her back into the hard bed with its blanket of fading orange flowers. She stared up at the flaking paint on the ceiling, which threatened to fall on her in pieces. The journey from Chicago had tired her, and she suddenly found her eyelids heavy and that it was difficult to move her limbs through a swampiness in the air. It was all she could do to kick off her shoes and slip under the musty covers, fully clothed. It was six in the evening.

She wakes near dawn. A film coats her mouth and makes her tongue feel thick when she moves it. She takes a shower in the bathroom with greying calk between its tiles without turning the lights on, watching the rose-colored light refract off the drops of water. Then when she gets out and grabs a towel she hurriedly flicks on the overhead lights, and she lays her suitcase on the bed, zips it open, and stares pensively at its contents. She’d chosen her outfit for today very carefully back in Chicago. She’d selected it over the course of hours at J.C. Penny and it is still in its cover from the store. She unzips it and puts the shirt and skirt on. She goes back the few feet to the bathroom and gazes at her reflection in the blare of the lighting. She notices a grey hair—the third she’d seen on her head in her life—and plucks it like she’d been doing to the first two. She’d just turned twenty-five and her maturity is beginning to announce itself in this small way. Perhaps it is the same hair being reincarnated over and over after she’d mercilessly ended its life, she thinks. She ties the huge bow that is sewn as part of the blouse, tweaking it first on one end, then the other, hoping to achieve the perfect balance. She sweeps a pink eyeshadow over her lids and up to just below her eyebrows and presses her lips together after applying her favorite lipstick, a plum shade. Nothing about her appearance could be left to chance. She has to look like somebody who had made something of herself. She has to look like somebody who never should have been left.

It had been a while since she’d been in the city. Her father’s presumed presence there had been the force that had kept her away for a while. Then too, the town was not the same one without Orlando as it had been with him in it. Jade had slipped into town after she’d left to stay with her mother now and then, and even though each piece of furniture and each decoration was preserved exactly as it had been when Orlando was alive, her mother’s own way of freezing that time, a spirit that made it home for her had lifted from it.

Jade scoots her feet into the flat shoes she had brought. They were a touch of something nice, but comfortable. She slings her black purse with the gold buckle over her shoulder and lifts her head high. On the train, she is so fixed to her goal that she doesn’t notice more vacant glances in the eyes of her fellow travelers than there would have been when she was last here, or the grime of neglect that clung to everything. She remembers that she should get off at the Waterfront station, and she rides the escalator up from underground and blinks into the sky.

Her father’s office is a few blocks away. She knows the way. When she was a kid she’d sometimes spent time after school scribbling over the glossy magazines in his office’s waiting room with marker, something he would threaten to whup her for but never did.

The wonders of a once-familiar route that had now changed strike her on the way to the dental practice. The people she passes that move as though lost, their eyes jerking back and forth in their sockets unnaturally, moves spurred by the spark of the poison they’ve been consuming. Even the squirrels are scrawnier, with ruffled mangy fur, looking as feral as they were. She becomes conscious of the gaze of a man on her, and quickly glances over her shoulder to see a man at the newspaper stand licking his lips suggestively, motioning to his crotch. She tugs her skirt down closer to her knees as she walks, and hurries her stride.

She had not noticed the clouds drawing closer to one another and dimming the light of the sun, and she didn’t feel the first pin-prick drops of rain on her skin. It is the sudden rumble of thunder and the jolt of lightening that follows that catches her off-guard. She realizes that despite all her preparation to make this march through this neighborhood she’d forgotten an umbrella. The sky begins to release everything it contained, and Jade is completely drenched within a few short minutes. Her chest heaves as the sudden hit of cold water makes her gasp for breath. Her shirt is dry clean only. It would be ruined. Her feet make sloshy noises as they move in wet shoes. She pauses for a second, stunned, not sure if she should turn back. But her body and clothes catch more rain when she stands still and she determines that she will press on to her destination, because it would feel at least like she was outpacing the water pouring from the sky.

She turns the corner at the pharmacy. She casts a side eye at its windows and notes with despair that it is closed, her last hope of procuring an umbrella. She walks a couple doors down, becoming completely drenched all the while, until she stands before the glass panes of Bancroft and Son dentistry. The lettering is chipped in parts, but it all looked about the same as she had known it. She wished she wasn’t all wet and is torn for a second between not wanting her father to see her this way and knowing that behind that door stands shelter from the rain. But she turns the knob, jingling the bells on the door at her entrance.

There are two other people in the waiting room she’s entered into, a receptionist she’d never met before cradling a phone to her ear behind the desk and a man in work coveralls resting his entwined fingers in his lap. They both turn their eyes to her and stare when she enters, and she knows it is because she’s a ridiculous sight soaking wet. The blast from the air conditioner that sits in the window now hits her at full force and makes a shiver rise in her. She smiles awkwardly and the receptionist ends her conversation, her courteous tone at odds with the irritation at this sopping wet visitor that shows on her face.

The receptionist asks, “Can we help you? Do you have an appointment here today?”

“No, you won’t find me on the schedule.”

“Are you selling something? Because I’m afraid there are no solicitors allowed on this property.”

“I need to speak to Dr. Bankcroft.”

“He’s a very busy man. You need to arrange to see him in advance. That’s why we take appointments.”

“I know, miss…your name?”

“I go by Martine, not that it’s your business. Look, you’re dripping all over the floor.”

“I’m sure he’ll want to see me.”

“I can tell him you stopped by.”

“I’m his daughter. Please.”

A look of surprise catches this woman named Martine at the corners of her eyes, and she tries to cover it with Jade takes as professionalism. The news that Jade exists seems to be a shock she had to brace herself against.

“I didn’t know. As I’ve said he’s very busy, but wait just a second.”

The receptionist places her hand at her back to steady herself as she rises from her seat behind the desk and walks the few short steps to the door to the room where Gunter works on patients. The moments that she’s gone from the waiting room feel like an eternity to Jade, her feet squishing in her wet shoes.

At last Martine emerges from the back tugging Gunter by his white coat.

“I’m in the middle of something, Martine,” Gunter is saying when his eyes rest on the spectacle of Jade standing before him.

“Jade? Is it you?”

“It’s me, Pop.”

“You’re all wet.”

“I didn’t bring an umbrella.” 

“Well. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I don’t suppose so.”

“You’re different.”

“Older. And I moved out of town a while ago.”

Gunter and Jade stare at one another shyly. Gunter had taken little time to imagine the woman his daughter had become, so he could not compare the sight of her to any projection of his mind. He is struck by how much she looked like him, the same heavy brow and his sharp chin in her face that water still dripped from.

“The time, it all runs together,” says Gunter. Jade detects something off-beat in him. He seems teetering on the edge of his composure. She could not know if this was merely the effect of being a grown person looking upon the parent who had seemed a larger than life superhuman figure with a new adult perspective, so their cracks and flaws are plainly and uncomfortably visible now. But she could trace a change.

“I just wanted to see you.”

“My dear girl,” Gunter finds a tenderness that shocks him. He tries with all his might to rein in that less predictable and controllable emotion.

“You don’t have to explain yourself. It’s too late for that.”

“At the very least leave your number with my receptionist, Martine. I’m afraid you’ve caught me in the middle of my work. Otherwise…”

“Sure, Pop, I’d like that. You didn’t have to, not having expected me and all.”

“You understand I just can’t help you right now.”

“But later.”

“We’ll see.”

Hoping to have neatly resolved the situation Gunter begins to hurry along with dismissing Jade. He begins to seem repulsed by the sight of her sopping wet. “Martine, can you show this young woman out? I left in the middle of my patient’s extraction and I need to get back to that.” Gunter quickly shuffles back into the back room without looking over his shoulder. Jade bites the bottom of her lip to keep from crying, not here with Marine eying her like that. She shifts from one foot to the other and says to Martine, “I need to wait until the rain’s over to go.”

In the back room Gunter yanks the tooth from Mrs. Laurel’s mouth in an act of pure concentration and pats her shoulder. She leaves him alone in the room for his break of a few minutes. He sits himself down on the dental chair, blinking, his eyelids become wet. It’s a sensitivity to Mrs. Laurel’s perfume, probably nothing.

While Gunter accepts the man in coveralls into the back room for his root canal, Jade in the next room watches the showers outside lessen and come to an end. Without saying a word to Martine behind the desk, she gathers herself and pushes the door open, ready as she would ever be to take the trek back to hotel room.

What she’d usually do when heaviness like this settled into her heart would be to call her mother, to get some relief from the maternal tones in Veronica’s voice. But she’d already decided that letting her mother know she’d even come was not an option. Nor would it be an option to travel just across town to her mother’s house, let herself in with the key and wrap herself up in a blanket on the sofa to wait for her mother to come and take her into her arms, knowing what was wrong and there to make it right.

She had forgotten in the rush emotions, surprise at seeing him, to leave her number at reception so he could call. She didn’t think it would be worth it. It was obvious his reception of her was cold. He hurried her along and said the first thing it would take to get rid of her.  There was no sign he wanted to keep her close to him and he had only even offered to call her as a formality. He had spied all possible exits from dealing with her there in front of him and to stall that way was his only option. She would not return. She could not, because she had been shamed.

Avoiding interaction with anyone in the sad lobby of her hotel, she takes the elevator that smells of the corn chips that had been ground into its carpet and finds her way back to her room. She peels all her clothes off with difficulty due to the glue that had formed between her clothing and skin by the sludge of the city mingled with rainwater. The heat of the shower she takes in the darkness of the bathroom cannot penetrate the chill of seeing her father again.

A person like her father was too proud to confront mistakes he’d made in the past and god forbid he atone for the way he had treated people. Listening to her mother’s ramblings where she’d curse Gunter and his weak character over the years should have burned that into her mind. Blood was not enough for him. Not her blood, not his blood in her veins. The shot she’d had to make a good impression had been ruined by the downpour that had forced her to appear before him all wet. She feels very small, nestling her chin over the musty covers she’d pulled up to her neck after the shower. She feels two feet high, two years old. She is the kid that her father Gunter had towered over, whose head might have been nestled in clouds so far was it above her reach. She is the one making eyes at him at the breakfast table, turning away if he sensed her glance, but still wanting it to be returned. She is the one who could never get his interest, who stared at the empty seat next to her mother at her ballet recital. She is the one who hated the poison of jealousy that threatened to eat at her adoration of her brother Orlando, for whom every word of praise, every gesture of devotion, was reserved.

She makes plans in the dark to return the next day. And not to worry about what she looks like, whether the jeans she’d packed are acceptable attire or not. She sees herself walking down the block to his dental practice, rapping on the glass window of the door like she means business, so that her father’s receptionist can’t help but to call Gunter back, and Jade would face him again and there would be tenderness for her in her eyes. She resolves to return as many days as it takes. She’ll call work and tell them she is taking more time off if she needs it.

But as sleep begins to clog her thoughts and take her under, she releases the idea that she’ll try again. Before her lids become too heavy to open she knows that the incomplete feeling in her will be with her for a while, because this day is the last she’d come looking for him and begging to be seen.

***

Gunter attended the first three birthday parties of his daughter Jade’s life. Veronica would’ve seen to it than that they be no less than extravagant affairs where the celebrated toddler was outfitted in a dress whose frills dwarfed her. Gunter’s family was never there. They’d never been to see him up here in all the time he’d been living in this city and he didn’t want them to embarrass him with their country ways. A phone call twice a year and a Christmas card was the contact he kept with them to assuage his guilt and assure himself they weren’t cut out of his life totally and he had fulfilled the minimum obligation to them. The one time his mother mentioned visiting him he envisioned how bewildered she’d be simply standing at a crosswalk watching the flashing traffic lights change and how that would embarrass him and he brushed it off saying something like “one day,” knowing the day would never really come and that in all likelihood she had only mentioned it to have something to say to bridge silence.

Veronica’s family were the ones who came to Jade’s early birthday parties. They filled the corner house with their laughter and perfume and came in their colorful Sunday best to toast to this small child who would not retain any memory of the events. Gunter would sit at a chair in some corner uneasily until it seemed adequate time had passed that he could excuse himself. When the room swelled with the chorus of the happy birthday song he mouthed the words but no sound left his throat, and it was fine because his silence was camouflaged by the gusto with which the others sang. In his concentration and focus on pouring his all into his son Orlando as his air and his continuance, attention to Jade had always fallen to the wayside.

By Jade’s fourth birthday, the first that would outlast the veil of forgetting cast over her memories of early childhood, Gunter was finding convenient excuses to be absent. Records needed tidying in his office. He had to take the Buick for an oil change. He had to get to the pharmacy before it closed for Veronica’s prescription. His friend had called him urgently requesting his help with something important.

The result was that Jade did not have any recollection of her father celebrating her birthday with her. Veronica made sure the parties continued every year and were as fancy as their budget would allow. Gunter’s contribution was financial but his emotional support was not there.

It was a contrast to Orlando’s very first birthday party some years prior, when he was a bewildered baby in a onesie, when Gunter had been there to enthusiastically hoist him over the candles on the cake and laugh as he blew the candles out for him. Second birthday, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and on until the eighteenth, Gunter had pulled out of the most outgoing part of his nature a zeal for being at the center of the festivities, for belting out the song as loud as he could when it came time, for wiping back tears of joy to see his son unwrapping and delighting in the many gifts he received.

By the time he was about eight Orlando had begun the practice of giving Jade one of his gifts, one that was on the more gender-neutral side. No one could put words to the favoritism shown Orlando, no one would dare, but this was Orlando’s way of compensating. He found others too. He had not chosen to be favored. It was not a result of his merit or his manipulation and there was nothing he could do about it.

Jade is having a wistful day at her desk, as has been the pattern since she’d returned from seeing her father, and these thoughts cross her mind sparking the realization—is it new, or is it merely something she continues to bury again upon its reemergence—that he had never much cared for her. She still doesn’t think her father dislikes her. Her mind will not permit her to go there. It’s just that she has nothing she could give him like her brother had. That’s the type he was, she supposes. It wasn’t that she wasn’t a pretty enough child. She took after her mother whose beauty was renowned and the best of Gunter’s angular physical attributes had shown up in her. It was not that she wasn’t dutiful enough because everyone knew she fulfilled every obligation and surpassed expectations. Careful not to raise ire in any of the grown people, she’d been well-behaved as a girl. Neither of her parents had ever raised a hand to her in anger. Whether this was because that wasn’t their parenting style, in part because she really didn’t do anything to deserve it, in part because they couldn’t be bothered, she didn’t know. She feels she’d lived a life of quiet excellence under the radar, hoping her good grades, her career success, her abiding by the laws explicit and implicit without any trouble, would merit her recognition. The recognition was hard to come by. She has to admit. It could have been a question that some unlucky few are allotted lesser capacities to love and that Gunter simply didn’t have anything left after he’d poured all of himself, not only his care but his ambition, into Jade’s older brother.

The wind howls against the window of the high-rise where she works. It reminds her to replace her fur coat soon, and she thinks she’ll give her friend Charlene a call and make a fun shopping trip out of it. She thinks of the puppy she could buy. Something young to love her that is utterly dependent on her.

She can’t derive most of her life’s satisfaction from this job forever. She doesn’t know what but something else has to appear for her to throw herself into, or she has to meet it. Gunter was giving her the gift of independence from him by demonstrating that he could absolutely not be relied on for anything. Until she’d visited there was a reservoir of hope that she could rely on. She could draw from it in darker times. But it was not based on anything real, was it?

She would hibernate this cold winter into a deep shell and hope to emerge with a new path waiting for her, new passions she could throw herself into. She decides escape would be the only way. She rises and goes to the water cooler to fill a flimsy paper cone with water and drink it down. As it slips down her gullet and brings a chill to her whole body she realized she doesn’t have it in her to sit at her desk much longer today. She’d hang it up. Tidy up her desk and deposit her pens and pencils in the cup. Take the L across town to her apartment, slip out of her clothing and put her bonnet on and get under the covers. Let the evening pass with no food in her belly. Trust the sun coming up the next day would find her closer to where she wanted to be.

She isn’t sure if there had been love between her parents ever. Gunter and Veronica were bonded together by the deep need to keep up the appearance of having it all. Their campus romance, if it could be called that, was a meeting of two minds who found in each other expectations they could fulfill, one to be allied with a promising young professional and one to be entwined in a family of good standing in the city. It all fell into place from there, two people behaving as it was patterned for them to behave. Neither had anything else much to compare it to so it sufficed for them for what love was.

They all did what they were supposed to do. Sat rigidly around the dining room table each night to eat the food Veronica had prepared without passion and robotically passed the pleasantries and obeyed the etiquette. Took the ballet lessons and had the recitals. Knowing what one wanted out of life was of the least relevance. Fidelity to the proper ways of going about things was better.

Tunneled beneath her covers Jade recalls the family meals. She supposes she could see it as though she was the only one who had failed the task set before them all of fulfilling expectation. It’s natural for Jade to internalize the blame to shield her parents’ image in her eyes. They couldn’t be held responsible or else they would fall in stature in her mind, so she would shoulder the responsibility for herself being unlovable. Gunter did not use the rod but he was sternly intolerant of acting out and her outward expressions of anger were forbidden in the household, unlike the constant leniency granted to her brother the golden son for his wild ways. Her rage turned inward on herself because there was nowhere else for it to go. Because she was the only one who had to accept a fraction of the love portioned out. Orlando had his rebellious break-out and made his own way but he was still longed after and sought after and yearned for to the extent that everything unraveled when his position at the center of their world disintegrated. Could she say she’d known the man at the head of the table when she was growing up well enough to mark him as changed? Gunter had been careful to show little of himself to his children, to rule with authority, to mask quirks with a rigid respectability. She knew things about him like that he didn’t care much for sports but respected them as a sign of something meaningful to people he aspired to please. She knew how tidy he had been and that the sight of an untucked shirt offended him. She knew him as a bland man of no quirks. Sometimes she’d catch him almost laugh at a joke and he’d put a fist to his mouth to stifle it or turn it into a cough if he could. He seemed now to be a man of all quirk.

Jade also knows there’s nothing she could do. Seeing Gunter again had sealed it. Shouldn’t she be freed? That same fierce wind that had howled at her office window earlier in the day is attacking the window of her bedroom now and hurling debris at it that makes a syncopated tinkling music. She pulls her head out of the covers to hear it better because in its odd wild way it is a comforting sound.

The opportunity for her to make her own way now is here. It is scary but there is also no other choice now and no going back. Anything could be out there for her when she relinquished the need for her father’s approval. She would wrap herself against the wind. She would rouge her cheeks and wear new fur, hide she would put better use to than the animal it had come from. The future would approach her with a cupped palm and cradle her. There was enough love for everyone somewhere and she’d find hers. No doubt.

Her neighbors behind her bedroom wall enter their apartment raucously, laughing drunkenly and knocking things over. This kind of mirth would be hers too. Everything she wanted was coming to meet her. She closes her eyes and a sweet sleep descends on her with a kiss. Vague dreams without images come to her, only the imprints of emotions like security and belongingness.

She jolts from these ambiguous reveries when a pounding on her front door comes. It is about four in the mourning and someone is practically trying to bust her door down, laughing.

“I know the bitch is in there,” he says to a second person in between his uproarious bursts of laughter.

Jade bolts upright and puts her hand against her chest as she tried to silence her heart and catch her breath. She throws on her terrycloth robe. Her hair is a mess and she hadn’t bothered to put on a bonnet or do anything to preserve her style before crawling into bed. It is sticking up at odd ends. She slinks into the kitchen and grabs her straw broom and holds it tightly to herself as a weapon. She creeps into her living room. At the door the pounding continues. Her drunken neighbors are trying to get in. Whatever they want from her can’t be good at all at this hour. Nobody came after borrowed sugar in the wee hours of the morning and nobody tried to beat down the neighbor’s door for it either. Baking a cake never had that urgency.

She is paralyzed with fear. When she looks down at herself holding her ridiculous weapon she almost could’ve laughed. But there is nothing funny about the danger she is possibly in so that urge quickly leaves her.

They keep knocking and the door bucks. She dares not speak because it’s better for them to believe no one is home if they were after trouble. She can’t grip her hardwood floor as well as she wants to in stocking feet. When her feet slide it increases her panic.

It feels like an eternity but they give off on knocking. The mocking laughter dies down and eventually Jade hears the two people shuffle back next door and she hears the creak of the door as it opens and the violent slam when it shuts. They are gone. But she knows she won’t go back to sleep so she cuts on the lights and pulls out a book of crossword puzzles and gets a pen to occupy herself filling in the ordered grids.

Classmates of hers were beat by their parents. They told her of this when she was a girl almost with what seemed like pride.  But neither of her parents had ever raised a hand to her. A different child might have acted out to seek her father’s attention. If she were not herself she might have grown mischievous, slipping live insects into her father’s shoes where he would step on them when he slipped into them, or taking crayons and staking her claim boldly across the pristine plaster walls across the house with colorful strokes. She never opted for activities like this. Even the rare time she brought home a bad grade, she was not chased into a corner by a parent wielding a belt like other kids she knew were. A part of her might’ve liked to be hit by Gunter because it would have been more attention and passion than he’d ever shown her. That was a sick part.

Her breath has become more even as she sooths herself by wracking her brain for trivia that will fit the tiny boxes in her crossword book. Things she had learned from watching TV and scanning newspaper headlines that had been useless to her until coming into play at that very moment. She supposes she is safe. She works to convince herself of that. She hadn’t been hurt or harmed. She would pass these people in the hallway of the building more than likely at some later point and no trace of recognition of the scare they’d caused her would show on their faces.

The sun is rising. She has large vertical blinds in her living room that its pink light is peeking through. At this time far away, though she could not know it, her father Gunter is only just making his way home from a foray into the nightlife and entering his humble disheveled apartment above the dental practice to collapse onto the pull-out sofa again, as had become his routine. That this had become his routine was something she was unlikely to ever know. Not knowing him very well at all despite having spent her formative years in his proximity it’s hard to say if the fact would have even surprised her.

She had come home from work early to rest but had ended up not sleeping very much at all. She misses Orlando now, doing her best to tidily wrap up her feelings for her father. Orlando had always been her cushion against hurt Gunter left her with. He had put a protective arm around her shoulder when her mother’s smothering wasn’t enough and her father refused to protect her herself. She missed him in this moment more than she could say. He was a godlike figure to her when she was a kid because he towered over her and was a few years older and had obviously mastered the art of gaining love and affection that she wished could be lavished on her. And he never made her feel she was less worthy of the attention she got than he was but always reached back to make sure she was taken care of. Behind their parents’ backs at the table he’d put his own chicken drumstick, the most prized part of the bird that had been reserved for him, onto her plate. He’d use his sway at school to convince the kid sisters of his friends to hang out with her so that she could sit at the same table as the girls at school the others looked to with jealousy and admiration.

It would be time to get into the office again soon and there was no point in crawling back into bed because only a few brief moments of rest were available to her. Closing her crossword puzzle book, she moves to the kitchen to put the kettle on for her aromatic black tea she drinks in the mornings. She takes the red box out of the pantry to make herself a bowl of cream of wheat, which she boils with milk instead of water and lavishes a heap of brown sugar and a generous lump of yellow butter on. Today is another chance. She is only in control of a few of the things that happen to her but as she has always been okay, had even somehow been preserved from the worst of what could have happened when her neighbors tried to drunkenly breakdown her door, she would be okay now. The forces who protected those neglected by the ones whose love they wanted most were unseen but steadfast in their work.

---

Chantal James lives in working-class Black Washington, DC, and has been published across genres—as a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and book reviewer—in such venues as Catapult, Paste Magazine, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, Obsidian, and more. Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship in creative writing to Morocco, a finalist position for the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction prize from the North Carolina Literary Review for 2019, and a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. Her novel None but the Righteous was one of Kirkus’ 10 most anticipated fiction books of its year and one of Library Journal’s top anticipated debuts of its winter as well as an Indie Next pick of the American Booksellers’ Association.