Make money doing the work you believe in
A Breath
Naida, given an orange. Between the Rocket Prologue and Chapter 1.
I need to give you a good thing now, and I need you to let me, because if all I ever hand you is the dark you'll start to think the dark was all there was, and that's the lie the road wanted me to believe about my own life, and I'm not passing it on to you.
There was a woman. One of the ones who'd learned to go behind her own eyes, older than me, hands that had done a lot of work. I never knew her story and she never knew mine, and we weren't friends, there was no room for friends, but one afternoon she had an orange. I don't know where she got it. People got things sometimes, in the machine, little things passed hand to hand below the level the men bothered to watch. She peeled it slow, in one long curl of rind, the way my abuela used to, and she broke it in half along the seam the way an orange wants to be broken, and without a word, without looking at me too long, she held a piece across to me.
I want to tell you what my body did, because my body is the hero of this Note, and it doesn't get to be the hero of many.
It came alive. All of it, at once, before I could even think. The smell hit me first and my mouth flooded so fast it ached, this clean sharp pang under the jaw. My eyes stung. My fingers, when I took it, actually shook, not from fear, from wanting, from the plain animal good of being handed sweetness. I put it in my mouth and the burst of it was so bright and so loud and so completely uninterested in everything that had been done to me that I made a sound, this small sound I didn't mean to make, the sound a person makes when something's just good, and I hadn't made that sound in so long I didn't even recognize my own voice making it.
For the length of that orange I wasn't cargo. I wasn't a line item or a debt with no bottom or a girl learning to disappear. I was an animal in the sun with sweetness on her tongue, and the machine couldn't get in there. It could take the road and the room and the door and the words. It could not, for those few seconds, take the taste of an orange from a body that wanted to live. My body didn't know it was supposed to have given up. Nobody told my mouth. My mouth was still flooding for oranges like the world was a place where good things happen, and it was right, a little, it was right for the length of a piece of fruit, and I have never in two lifetimes tasted anything as alive.
She didn't say anything after. We didn't turn into anything to each other. She went back behind her eyes and I went back behind mine and we never talked about it. But she did the bravest thing I saw on the whole road, which was to still have something to give, and to give it, in there, where giving cost you and bought you nothing back. I hope she got out. I've got no reason to think she did and I hope it anyway, every time I think of her, which is more than she'll ever know.
Hold the orange. I'm asking you to. Because the road goes dark from here and stays dark a long time, and there's a thing waiting for me in a desert that turns this faithful, living, orange-loving body against its own owner, makes it answer to a hand that isn't mine, betrays me with it in the worst way a person can be betrayed. And the only reason that horror lands the way it's supposed to, the only reason it's a violation and not just a fact, is that you saw the body first like this. Alive. Greedy for sweetness. On my side. Mine.
Remember it was mine.
