The Hard Way

What if the garden was within?

Written by: Christopher Mark Rose

Illustrated by: Ines Gradot

Dontae ate dirt. Not a lot of it, and not every day. All from the same plot of land.

Dr. Aguta, facing him now, had asked him if he was prone to eating anything unusual. Dontae saw no reason to share his habit with this doctor, if there was no advantage to doing so. He shrugged. “I like cheese curls with ketchup,” he said.

Dr. Aguta gave Dontae a long look from across the conference table. Back and left of Dr. Aguta sat Dr. Kam, in front of a white board full of equations. At the end of the table sat a young woman in a lab coat. She had said she was a doctor too, but Dontae thought she looked too young for that. “Just call me Jude,” she’d said.

“We thought at first that you were the victim of some kind of industrial contamination. Bad water, bad soil, something wrong in your basement. Heavy metals. We sent someone around. They took samples. Nothing turned up.”

“You sent people to my house?” Dontae looked horrified.

He never ate dirt from his backyard in Pigtown, in West Baltimore. The soil there was bad—full of yellow sand, with plastic and trash mixed in, bits of cement and brick. Nothing grew in his backyard.

“Yes. Your uncle let them in. He gave permission. He said he was glad to have somebody check the place out.”

“He never told me about that.” It wouldn’t be unusual for Uncle Mal to forget something like that. Most times Dontae was home, Mal either wasn’t sober or wasn’t awake.

Dontae would go down to the neighborhood garden, a couple blocks away, an old teaspoon in his pocket. His mom used to bring him there as a kid, and was unworried that he sometimes swallowed the dirt. He was a weird kid. She’d be working on her little plot, staking up tomatoes, picking cukes.

Serenely indifferent, she’d say “Well, you gotta eat a pound of dirt before you die,” and so now he’d eat a teaspoonful in her memory. He never told anyone what he was doing or why. The soil there was a dark loam, almost a bluish cast to it. The taste of it reminded him of her.

“Well, you gotta eat a pound of dirt before you die,” and so now he’d eat a teaspoonful in her memory... The soil there was a dark loam, almost a bluish cast to it. The taste of it reminded him of her.

“But it’s not that, or not just that,” Dr. Aguta went on. “It’s a concentration of cobalt, in your gut, in your stomach and intestines. That’s what the tests showed. If it were just a metallic alloy, something you ate, it would progress to your liver, or your kidneys, or out. It wouldn’t hang around in your system like it is. That’s what got our attention.”

Dr. Kam looked up from his computer, twirled a pen in his hand. The two of them shared a glance.

Dontae made a little I-didn’t-do-it motion with his hands. Dontae was dark, tallish, narrow like a drainpipe.

“So am I gonna be OK?” he asked. What the doctors were saying didn’t sound like any doctor’s-visit script he was familiar with.

“Yes yes, apparently you’re just fine. Clinical practice, you’d look just like a normal fifteen-year-old kid.”

“Thanks,” said Dontae, although kids his age resent being called kids.

“Cobalt. Cobalt is next to iron on the periodic table. They often behave similarly. We thought to look in the places that iron would appear, in normal bacteria. Nothing, we found nothing that way.

“Then,” Dr. Aguta went on, “we tried to sequence the genome of your gut bacteria. We wanted to menagerize your flora. This is supposed to be a core competency here—something we’re good at.”

“Half of it fell straight through!” said Dr. Kam, shaking his head. This was the first thing he’d said in Dontae’s presence.

“Usually,” Dr. Aguta said with a sigh, “if it’s something that’s not in our taxonomy, we still get big chunks of it. Very little genetic material is novel.

“But this is different. There’s biota here that either has absolutely unique sequences, all of it, or different bases than the alpha biome.

“Or, it doesn’t use DNA at all,” said Dr. Kam.

“Huh,” said Dontae.

“We can’t culture it. Remember we pumped your stomach, last visit—we thought we had it. Two hours later, it’s all gone.”

“What we believe,” said the woman—Dontae had forgotten about her, she’d been so still—”is that you’re carrying a shadow biome.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Dontae.

“Well, if you believe the archaeologic record, then at some point in time, there was no life on Earth. And at a later point, life was everywhere. At some moment in between, life arose spontaneously, it must have, from the molecules and forces that were present—the ‘primordial soup’. It was a matter of chance.

“But if it happened once, by sheer chance, there’s no reason that it couldn’t happen a second time. Or many times.”

“That’s what this institute is looking for. That’s its whole purpose,” said Dr. Aguta.

“OK…so?” said Dontae.

“So,” said the woman, “if there is truly a second, independent tree of life, a second creation, here on this Earth—well, the universe is full of planets. It would mean that life in the universe is ubiquitous.”

“It has ramifications for entropy, for the information capacity of the universe. Living matter is more ordered than non-living matter,” said Dr. Kam.

“Ramifications,” said Dontae. He felt like he was sitting in the back of algebra class, trying to understand quadratic equations.

“The universe wants to make life, if it can find a nurturing place,” said Jude.

“I don’t no way feel that describes me, most days,” Dontae said.

“Dontae, you’re a very special person. Proof for the prevalence of life in the universe could reside inside you,” she said, eyes searching Dontae’s. “Doesn’t that engage you? Don’t you need to see how it turns out?”

”What I need,” said Dontae, “is a job.”

****

They had wanted to dig up his mother. “Exhume her,” they said. That would just be wrong, he was sure, regardless of the implications to entropy in the universe. There was no sum of money they could offer that would make him agree to that.

He had no father he knew of. There must have been one, but his mother had never said anything. Dontae lived at home, in the room that used to be his mother’s; lived with Uncle Mal, and occasionally his brother, AJ.

This was the agreement: he would come to the lab when they called, maybe two times a week, and they could take samples of his blood, his stools, and maybe from his stomach. He would lie in the scanner again if they wanted. They would pay him $200 per visit.

At first they had argued that the price was too high. They’re running on grants, they’d said; they got very little support from Hopkins directly. Also, he was receiving very good medical care effectively for free.

Without him, they didn’t have nothing, Dontae had countered. Paying him was a whole lot cheaper than starting their search all over again. How long had they been looking? Maybe he was the only one.

That argument had owned. He saw it in their faces. When he’d said that, he knew he’d won.

“I’ll speak to the Bursar,” Jude said. She didn’t seem offended by the bargaining. She was kind of like the good cop here. He was her confirmation of something.

He was to come back, at the end of the day, around 6:00 pm, and they would pay him for the two visits he’d already done.

****

On the way home, he stopped in at the 7-11, hoping that Gina would be on shift. She was late again. He bought a box of cigarillos, pack of Twizzlers, big bag of cheese curls, six-pack of Red Bull. He was unconcerned about the money, expecting to come into much more of it soon.

He gathered some friends, the ones who’d been playing ‘Full Metal Gear 7’ with him lately. There was an Xbox in Dontae’s living room, that (he’d guessed) AJ had dropped there one night and never explained. Game on.

****

Hours later, the Twizzlers and Red Bull gone, cigarillos smoked, the gaming buzz wore thin. The front door banged open, and in came AJ.

AJ had been gone for years, and just recently showed up again at the house. Most days, Dontae and AJ’s schedules were such that they never interacted. “Ain’t today a school day? Get out,” AJ barked to the gamers scattered on the shag rug. He stepped over them into the kitchen. He assaulted the refrigerator, took whatever looked good that he found there into the back bedroom where he slept, and slammed the door.

Louis and Chesey and P-Wall all looked at each other then dropped their controllers, made an exit just casual enough not to appear hasty.

“Where you guys going now?” asked Dontae.

“Got somewhere to be,” said Louis.

“Gotta go,” said P-Wall. (This is something he said a lot.)

“Catch you at the court tomorrow,” said Chesey.

The game banged on, unaware that it had lost its players, as Dontae watched them go.

****

Dontae walked down to the market, bought some fries, poured ketchup and mustard and horseradish sauce over them. He sat outside on a cement pylon, looking over a parking lot as if it were an ocean. He was hungry, the last of the Red Bull rattling around in his head.

A seagull sat just beyond his feet, looking perturbed and defiant. This is a seagull’s emotional defense for its own constant driving need for french fries. What did they ever eat before french fries were invented, Dontae thought, pitching the bird a bent fry. If there were more than one seagull present, he wouldn’t have done this.

The seagull stabbed the fry into its beak, turned and set to wind. Dontae watched the bird cross the parking lot, wings beating, then glide low over the nearest row of buildings.

****

“Where you going?” asked AJ.

“Out,” said Dontae.

“Out?” said AJ.

“Gotta go see a doctor,” he said. “Got an appointment.” Dontae wasn’t used to AJ being home and awake, talking to him, much less asking questions about his plans.

“You sick?” asked AJ.

“No,” said Dontae.

“What then?”

“Just a checkup. Checking up.” Dontae looked out the window.

“I come with y’all, maybe we get some fries afterward,” said AJ.

“I just had some fries at the market.”

“You look like you could use you some more.”

Dontae walked through his life, shadowed by something that could have been called loneliness, but was so old and familiar he had no name for it. He tried to keep moving. He tried to stay ahead of it. But some days it caught up with him.

When that happened, sometimes he would look into the faces of strangers on the sidewalks and stretch to feel something, some understanding, some care—the things he knew the faces of family were supposed to make you feel. To imagine what that would be like.

Mostly he just couldn’t get there—he couldn’t reach that place. He felt on the outside of something, looking in and uninvited.

“Let’s go.”

****

“Stay here,” Dontae said, he hoped offhandedly. His insides were painted with unease. “I be out in, like, ten minutes.”

“Serious, you want me to just stand here?”

“Well, you could come into the waiting room, they got magazines. But, you know, medical exam, that’s personal.”

“I’ll wait here.” AJ was already fishing a cell phone out of his pocket.

Dontae went in.

****

Oil painting in a gilt frame—fields undulating under a Tuscan sky, glowing with August. Foreground, individual sheaves of wheat rendered in rust and gold. Above, in graceful Roman capitals: “IT IS UNNATURAL IN A LARGE FIELD TO HAVE ONLY ONE STALK OF WHEAT, AND IN THE INFINITE UNIVERSE ONLY ONE LIVING WORLD. — Metrodorus of Chios (ca. 350 BCE)”

Dontae took a deep breath, pushed open the glass doors. The secretary was gone for the day. He stood for a while there, thinking what to do next.

“Hello?” Dr. Aguta’s voice from down the hall.

“It’s me, Dontae.” He followed the voice.

A narrow paneled office, the far wall all windows. A bookshelf in front of that, filled with framed family photos and abstract ceramics.

Dr. Aguta spun in his chair.

“I’ve been thinking about your case, Dontae. You know, during the war, companies did industrial work down on the waterfront. Some of the piers became superfund sites, some were ‘graysoil’ areas. Who knows what was done to clean all that up?

“If there was a place you hung out at, someplace you played as a kid, where some of that stuff could have been dumped, it would be important to identify that.”

“I don’t know.” Guilt pecked at him as he said it.

“You should give it some thought.”

“Alright. Listen, are we in business, or what?”

“I think I have what you asked for, right here.” Dr. Aguta plucked a check from the side of his computer, handed it to Dontae.

“Dontae Williams. —– $400.00” it said. Dontae’s eyes flashed dismay.

“I don’t have a way to cash that.” He thought of the check-cashing services in his neighborhood, which would probably take 40% or 50% off the top.

“What? No bank account anywhere?”

“No.” Dr. Aguta seemed amused at this, and it bugged Dontae.

“Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll cash it for you tonight, and you try to get an account set up before next time. You’re going to have to have a way to manage your earnings.”

“Yeah.” Then, “How do we do that?”

“You endorse it, and I’ll go to an ATM machine on the way out. I’m almost done here.”

“Endorse it?”

“Just sign it, on the back.”

“I know you have to sign it,” Dontae said defensively.

****

It didn’t occur to Dr. Aguta not to hand money to Dontae on the street. As soon as Dr. Aguta walked away from the ATM, AJ was at Dontae.

“How much you get?”

“What? What you mean?”

“I saw him give you cash. How much?”

“Why you want to know?” Dontae was afraid he was going to be asked for grocery money, or some imagined debt.

“You providing him personal services?” (He might have asked a ruder question here.)

“No! I’m a research subject,” and then he explained what that involved. He didn’t get into the shadow biome business. The rest of it seemed incredible enough to Dontae.

****

Walking home, AJ kept asking for clarification. “Wait. You shit on a paper plate, piss in a cup, let them take some blood, and they give you four hundred dollars?”

“They pump my stomach too, sometimes, which ain’t fun. It’s $200 each visit.”

“And then what do they do with that stuff?”

“I don’t know. They analyze it, try to figure out what’s living there.”

“You don’t worry they’re doing something weird with it?”

“It’s $200, each visit.”

“Well. Why aren’t y’all going twice a day then?”

“It’s only when they call me. Just when they need it.”

“Never knowed anybody who need my shit before.”

“I can believe that,” Dontae said. AJ made half a smile, slowly. It was the first time Dontae remembered AJ smiling since he’d returned home.

“You should get you a beater. We go uptown, get some good food.”

“I can’t afford that.”

“What you care—you getting the same money again next week.”

“But I can’t drive.”

“I’ll teach you how. You want to get anywhere real in this town, you need a car.”

****

There was no registration. There was no insurance. There was no title. The seller, someone AJ apparently knew, zip-tied a cardboard license plate to the back bumper, and extended his personal forty-eight hour warranty to AJ, though not to Dontae.

Dontae paid $245. Chevy Malibu. A kind of blue called Cadet. “It’s a beautiful thing,” said AJ, visibly brightening. Maybe this was something Dontae wouldn’t live to regret, he hoped.

****

Behind the wheel, AJ became voluble, going on about gear ratios and the feel of a tight clutch. He drove them through familiar streets, shifting enthusiastically, one hand out the window waving to people he knew. People seemed genuinely happy, and surprised, to see AJ driving.

Dusk assumed Baltimore. “Hold up,” said Dontae, and was relieved that AJ did what he asked. There, in a street framed with formstone rowhouses, was an araber. Not an Arab, but a guy with a homely horse pulling a garish cart, the cart loaded with produce for sale.

They got out. Christmas lights blinked festively on the cart. Dontae bought a bag of oranges for the house, handed one to AJ. AJ pulled from the top of the cart a $3 hat, like a stubby fedora, and put it on Dontae’s head. “That’s a trilby,” he said. “Now you look proper.” They seemed to really look at each other for the first time in a while.

“Let’s go show Gina,” said Dontae. “But we gotta stop somewhere first.”

****

“You really like that girl?” said AJ.

“Maybe,” said Dontae. He was down on one knee, pushing dirt into a Ziploc bag with a tarnished spoon.

“I thought you just like Xbox,” said AJ, grinning.

“Gina’s OK. Maybe she’ll play Xbox.” Then a twinge, thinking about the Xbox’s mysterious arrival. “How’d the Xbox get there, anyway?” Mal said that AJ had bought it with drug money, but Dontae didn’t want to believe that.

“Old man drinking it up as fast as I earn it,” AJ said. “Might as well you have you some fun too.”

Dontae remembered staring open-mouthed at the console the morning it had appeared in the living room. He had started using it immediately, his curiosity about the game’s provenance drowned out by his glee.

“I thought maybe we could do it together. But then I busy at night, asleep when you up.”

“But where did it come from?”

“Customer of mine, couldn’t pay. Offered a trade, I took it.”

“Oh.” Dontae resolved not to ask further.

“What you doing, anyway?”

“Sometimes I eat some of this. Don’t know why.” He didn’t want to admit to himself that he had gotten addicted to the taste. “Now I got to thinking, maybe it has something to do with what’s inside me. The lab don’t know about it.”

“Y’all weird.”

“I guess,” Dontae allowed. “Just want to have my own stash, in case I get busy,” he said, straightening up, putting the bag in his pocket. “This is my earth.”

Driving again, AJ made a detour down a back alley. Someone had parked a brand-new, pure white Mustang up against a dumpster there. AJ yanked the wheel, the chrome trim on the old Malibu screeching as the sides of the two cars scraped by one another.

“What’re you doing?!” said Dontae.

“Payin’ off a old debt.”

“That’s my car!”

“Shut up, you could buy another of these next week, you want.”

“Hope nobody saw that,” Dontae said, looking back.

****

They stared out at the reservoir. AJ sucked in, causing a bright red ember to flare at the end of his doobie. He passed it to Dontae.

“I never knew that,” said Dontae. The smoke seemed to coil inside him, hum and melt into him. This was the first time AJ had shared pot with him. It seemed an auspicious moment.

“Sure Mom threw me out. Dumped a pan of spaghetti on my head. She furious—she didn’t want you growing up like me. You had grades. You going to be somebody.” He paused and scanned the far shore. “Always take my money, but won’t let me set foot in the house, afraid I bring you into the business.”

“You could’a done something else!”

“They ain’t nothing here. I got no options. City built to keep people like me hemmed in. Unless you got a car here, you stuck.”

“You waited ’til she died, then you came back home.”

“Had to. Had to.”

“Where’d you go, in between?”

“Here and there. Where I could.”

“How long was it really, you was gone?”

“Oh, about a minute,” said AJ. He took another drag.

Dontae thought. He didn’t like the business AJ was in, all the standing on the corner, being alert all the time for competition, and for cops. Carrying a gun, maybe, though he’d never seen it.

“Why you here now? Shouldn’t you be getting ready—”

“Ima quit. I had a sale go bad on me last night.”

“What happened?”

“Guy pulled a gun on me in the alley, wanted my whole inventory. We had us a moment, him standing there, gun pointed at me, me just standing, staring back at him.”

“Then what?”

“Users can’t stand still that long. I waited him out. His need got to gnawing him. He started shaking, then shaking, then shaking real bad, he point the gun somewhere else, then I just reach out and take it from him.”

“It’s a good thing he didn’t get you.”

“Oh, he did, he did. I never felt so scared like that before. He got me.”

“Wow. What you gonna do now?”

“Don’t know. The gun didn’t have any bullets in it, when I looked.” AJ shook his head ruefully. “Junkies.”

They were both quiet for a taffying moment.

“I still don’t understand this thing with your gut. What’s so important inside you, they want to pay for it?”

“It supposed to be a whole other set of creatures, life like they ain’t seen anywhere before.”

“Anywhere in Baltimore?”

“Anywhere. They been looking for years, before they found me.” He stuck his belly out. It made him feel important and obligated, like a president or a king.

“That’s hard to believe.”

“They wanted to dig up Mom.”

At first, AJ had no words to answer this. He just stared out across the water, shook his head slightly.

“That’s off.” Another puff. “You know that sister, Henrietta Lacks? I think you maybe like her. They take your stuff, they grow it years in some lab, never give you your due.”

“I don’t think it’s like that. It’s funny,” said Dontae. “It’s like I got this whole other world inside me now. I’m like Noah’s Ark.”

“How you know, then, what part of that is you, what part is not you? Is something else?”

“It don’t matter. It’s something I have to take care of, like a dog or a kid. I’m a caretaker.”

“Like, you could just eat a yogurt, wipe all that out.”

“I don’t eat no yogurt. Look, It’s something I been entrusted with.” He said the word carefully.

“That doctor, he tell you that?”

“No. I feel it.”

“You feel it.” The light seemed to change then, clouds blown away. Darker now, but clearer. “Well what’s it for?”

“It’s for nothing, it’s just there. For understanding the universe. Maybe.”

AJ grinned. “The universe. Maybe you ask for more money then.”

Dontae ignored this. The superstitious part of Dontae thought that somehow it was a gift from his Mom, but the logical part thought, how could that be?

“But then I think, why don’t they think everybody like that? Maybe everybody got a new world inside them, waiting to be discovered.”

“Yeah, maybe.” AJ flicked the butt out into the reservoir. He sucked air in, breathing the last echo of smoke.

****

“Hey Gina,” said Dontae.

“Hey you,” said Gina. Her name gleamed on the name tag of her 7-11 uniform.

“Got news. I gotta new gig. I workin’ for Hopkins. Research Center. I a subject.”

“What you mean, you a subject?”

“They studying me. Like, $400-a-week studying me.” He flashed her the interior of his wallet, just to show her he was serious.

“That’s something,” said Gina, peeking around him at the other customers accumulating. Then a look of concern. “They’re not making you try different medicines, are they? I had an uncle they did that to.”

“Nah, they just take my blood and stuff. They love my blood.”

“You ain’t sick, are you?”

The question was about him, how he was. He liked the warm color of her skin, the shine of her hair, the flash of her smile. But honestly, it was the asking that he liked best.

“Neva been betta. Maybe you and I go to the harbor this weekend. They got a Ferris Wheel there now.”

“Maybe,” and she flashed the smile for him.

There came a moment of silence, the two of them considering one another. Someone coughed in line behind Dontae.

AJ came up, elbowed Dontae. “Gina, this is my brother, Arnold Junior.”

“Hi Arnold. Nice to meecha.” AJ nodded.

“So what about going uptown? I’m buyin’ the burgers.”

“Can’t. I’m working ’til midnight,” said Gina.

“I take us up to Paper Moon Diner. They make great milkshakes there, make’em the hard way.”

The cougher behind them coughed again.

“Oh, and I bought a car,” Dontae said, for Gina’s benefit.

“You ain’t even old enough to drive,” she said, smiling again.

****

The burgers were great, all red-juicy and covered with melted cheese, on buns that were grilled crisp. The fries were curly. The shakes were thick. AJ and Dontae reminisced about meals and burger joints past.

One day Mal, flush with lottery winnings, had taken the brothers to a fast food place. After the meal, Mal had stood up, placed a paper crown on young Dontae’s head, and went down on one knee. “My king,” Mal had said. Dontae, having just seen a movie that showed how it was done, drew his sundae spoon from the counter, and knighted him with it.

Conversation at the diner’s counter died out. A big man with a blunt, angry face had come in the door, was coming down the aisle. He wore sideburns, a mustache and chrome aviators. AJ looked up, and his face seemed to do several things at once. He jumped up off his stool.

“I saw what you did,” the man said to AJ.

“What you mean, Bruce?” said AJ.

“You messed up my Mustang!” Bruce stood in front of AJ, but he couldn’t stand still, his hands twitching, grasping air.

“What you talking about?”

“Don’t lie to me!” screamed Bruce, inches from AJ’s face. “I SAW you!” The veins on Bruce’s head and neck popped out. People on either side got off their stools, started edging away.

“OK. I can explain.” said AJ.

“I don’t give two shits for your explanation!”

Dontae got down off his seat. He stood next to his brother. Bruce seemed to notice Dontae for the first time.

Sweat broke down the side of AJ’s face. “Bruce, I swear, I’ll make it up to you. I —”

“Who’s this?” demanded Bruce.

“I’m Arnold’s brother,” said Dontae. “The car’s mine.”

“Don’t—” said AJ.

Bruce stuffed his hand down his pants, came out with a snub-nosed revolver. He stuck the barrel into Dontae’s stomach, shot him there twice. The sound was terrific in the narrow space. Dontae jerked, doubled over. His new hat fell off.

For a second, Dontae thought of the doctors fixing him up, if AJ could get him to the medical center. He wanted to go back there.

“I kill you, but you owe me too much now,” Bruce said, again inches from AJ’s face. He scanned the barrel of the gun in a wide circle, silently threatening all witnesses. Then he jammed the gun back in his pants and walked out of the restaurant, unrushed, seemingly no longer concerned.

“Call 911!” shouted AJ, and he pulled his brother erect, looked into his face. “Dontae!”

Dontae said nothing, shook his head, then clenched his teeth. The next instant he was writhing, slipping out of his brother’s grip. His shirt was a mass of red. He made a horrible sound, and retched across the counter, the seats, the floor. There was blood mixed with the vomit. Dontae collapsed sideways onto the floor, slipping in his own mess.

“I’m sorry,” said AJ, his head sideways, trying to hold Dontae’s gaze. Dontae closed his eyes. “Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.” He tried to open Dontae’s eyes, his hands slick with blood.

“Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.” People around him started moving again, coming out of the corners they had crushed themselves into. “Don’t die. Don’t die. Oh, God!” He stood up, put his hands on top of his head. He shook his head, then shook it again.

“Ambulance is coming,” said a cook from behind the counter, phone in hand.

AJ swallowed. He looked slowly from Dontae’s body to the milkshake sitting on the counter, and then back again. He picked up his milkshake, took a deep breath.

He took the lid off. Holding the styrofoam cup under the edge of the counter, he used the flat edge of his hand and scraped the vomit and blood into the milkshake. Then he did the same thing with the top of the stool.

He pulled the Ziploc of dirt out of Dontae’s pocket. He opened it, dumped it into the milkshake. He got a long metal spoon from the counter, stirred the cup’s contents together.

“This is for my brother,” he said aloud, “so what was inside him won’t be lost.”

He stood up straight, tipped back his head, and drank the whole thing, swallowing loudly again and again until everything inside the cup was gone.

The whole diner was silent, listening to those swallows.

When he was finished, AJ wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, put the cup on the counter. He took his brother’s wallet and phone, and left.

Dedicated to Henrietta Lacks. All of her.

---

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