Metallically Black

A day in the life of young, trans foundling Zayn Youngblood living in Harlem in 1991, from waking up in her crowded, dilapidated tenement to sneaking off with her friends at night to seduce and rob a wealthy pedophile, and every misadventure in-between.

This short story represents an abridged, stand-alone excerpt from an ambitious literary fiction novel following a sisterhood of young, queer and trans foundlings surviving Harlem ghettos in the early 90s. “Zayn for a Day” is published by West Branch Literary Magazine and appears in their Spring/Summer Print Issue # 105, retitled “Harlem, 1991“.
Purchase a copy of Print Issue #105 here: Bucknell University Press

They were just particles of dust in beams of light that lanced through the blinds, but to Zayn who still had a presence in the dream, they were glitter and magic. She lay there a while to watch and wonder until all of their splendor was made divine and the mystifying thrill of waking up tingled through every inch of her body.

It was early enough that no one else had begun to stir — not the sister whisper-snoring on the top bunk over her head which she peeked to see, the twins in the room down the hall who never woke without a start, the baby-girls reverently silent in their closet, or Mama in the master on the other side of the shared wall. Providence, she thought with an exhilarated rush, and scrambled to seize the moment.

Quiet but urgent, she threw on a comfortable shirt with a collar so worn that it fell off one shoulder, and tattered jean shorts tight and ridged enough that she would not have to tuck. The room did not have a mirror, so she ran a hand over her wooly hair, dyed brown and cut short, and tried to see herself in the glass of the window, but the honeyed light was too stark. She had to squint those pretty cat-eyes against it to see outside, through the dust and glitter, to the simmering stone of the next building. The light was still directional this early and it made the world seem tilted on its axis, but she didn’t have time to think about that, because it was the summer, and the sun was whispering her name.

For the children of Harlem in the summer of 1991, the streets were hallowed ground where anything was possible and where everything was possible — because nothing really happened if it didn’t happen there. At meetings on crowded building stoops, lounging on playground equipment in municipal school yards, in shadowed and dingy alleys connecting parallel roads, in the fan-conditioned foyers of those buildings where the super wasn’t a live-in, and at corner-stores around every block inside and out was where the relationships that fed them were made, enforced, fractured, and torn apart — where they proved themselves to one another with fists, candy, spit, and grit — and where, sometimes, the measure of their futures were made clear.

Zayn crashed out of the building with an air of importance that quickly diminished in the harsh light of the rising sun — harsh because it was new and she was not conditioned. Squinting against it, she wrung her lips and studied the way that it gave the neighborhood a mournful glow, and seemed to make it more beautiful than it was —turning those dilapidated tenements into golden spires, the filthy trash-filled streets into remote pictures of a pitying sickness, and cracked windows into silvery mirrors. There was even an uncharacteristic softness in the sounds of the cooing pigeons and rattling tracks of the passing train, and something about that made it more severe. The divinity in the dust was out here too, and she got the distinct sense that this was where it came from.

Benjamin never surprised Zayn. He couldn’t because he was always around. So when she found him, scrunching his face against the light, and kicking at invisible pebbles with his hands so deep in his pockets that it might have torn the pants, she didn’t question it.

“Hey, Z.”

He was greeting her before they even came together, but she heard and matched his agitated grimace with a hand over her eyes to block the light. It was still at them — burning and endearing itself to them.

“What’s up, Benji?”

It was rhetorical, like it always was, and he didn’t bother to answer it.

They posted up close enough to feel heat and smell breath. They had stopped dapping each other up a long time ago, the peculiar intimacies between them having outgrown it, and just existed together instead, which was natural to them.

“You had that dream again?”

The closeness in his question embarrassed her and she looked around before she answered to know who saw.

“Nah, not last night.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

He spit on the sidewalk and there were the shells of sunflower seeds in it. He never had snacks unless he had money to buy them because, like her, he didn’t have a real home or anyone to give them to him. Before she could ask about it, he was talking again.

“It’s hot today.”

It was strange behavior — looking around with his hands on his hips, chewing on what she knew he’d spit out — and she didn’t have the patience for it. He was at least six inches shorter than her so she could have just pushed him to the ground if he annoyed her enough, but she didn’t want to have to do that today.

“It’s hot every day. The sun is blowing up, dummy.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yeah it is.” She scratched her itchy scalp and surveyed the nearly empty street. “I gotta pee.”

“Me too.”

She knew that he didn’t, or could have held it, but that was okay because it was more fun to go together anyway.

In the alley of the building, they traced patterns in the stone and crossed streams to see whose was stronger. They swung their dicks around with excited laughter in the absurdity of the moment — a moment only possible in a relationship free of pretense — lost in the dancing to avoid each other’s mess, and the contest to be the most grotesque. Under that magical light, in the morning chill, the urine turned to steam that burned their noses. People watched from windows but no one was bold or bothered enough to say anything, and they didn’t register them anyway.

Tempered and no longer scowling against the sun, they wandered the street on instinct to a place where they were meant to be. But while they were on the way, and still alone, Zayn asked a question that she knew he was dying to hear.

“Where’d you get money?”

His grin was too loud. She heard and felt it before she saw it.

“I got resources.”

That didn’t mean anything, and the look that she gave him was enough to let him know that he needed to say more.

“I did a favor for Robbie.”

“That fat creep? You let him touch you?”

Robbie: the local pedophile — every ghetto had one — preying on the children of broken homes and abusive families. She thought that they had outgrown his preferred demographic, but anything was possible for someone like that.

“It ain’t even like that. He just wanted to look.”

“You let him?”

“He was just looking. That don’t mean nothing.”

“You sure it don’t? Then why’d he pay you? Gotta mean something to him if he paid you.”

“Well it don’t mean shit to me. I got my money,” he grumbled under his breath, second guessing his own indifference.

Zayn sensed that unrest and sought to distract him from it.

“How much you got?”

They stopped so that he could rummage through his sock for the money. When he produced a roll of singles that looked as thick as a flashlight battery, she reached for it, but he was quick, and leaped away.

“See?” he grinned — she mirrored him. “It’s real money. I stay paid. I’m a hustler.”

“What else you got to eat?”

“I ain’t got nothing.”

He returned the money to his sock and glowered around the street for onlookers.

“Damn, your ol’ greedy ass. You couldn’t save me one seed?”

“I didn’t …” he seemed to decide not to lie and frowned at the ground, upset with her for the perceiving but also guilty because of the betrayal. “I mean, I finished them. I got half a Musketeers.”

“I don’t want that.” She didn’t like the gooey things much — the chocolates, nougats, caramels, and marshmallows — and it was probably mashed and melted in his pocket anyway.

“We could get more stuff.”

She didn’t say anything because she knew that silence would exacerbate his guilt.

They wandered with a sense of purpose that made it easy to forget that they had nothing important to do at all. When familiar faces graced their path, they stopped to chat, absorb neighborhood gossip, and build upon those invaluable caches of information for sharing and trading with the other vagabond youths.

It was impossible to explain how intimately they knew those streets. Zayn had arrived there at the age of twelve on the brink of collapse — homeless, starved, and full of hate — a foundling of the sadistic Mama who took in what no one else would. There was no telling for sure where she had been before that. A Bronx project maybe, two feet tall in a dingy hallway, underwear heavy with piss and grime, watching her mother service a man on her knees for a balloon of opium; on the porch of a rundown traphouse on a post-apocalyptic-looking road, scratching at bleeding bug bites and squirming from an itchy, infected anus; or outside of a dolorous hotel at the end of a freeway, beneath screaming tracks, watching her mom die with the band around her arm and the pain on her face. The memories were too mysterious to make sense anymore, and she had suppressed so many of them out of a desperate necessity to endure that those that remained were as meaningless and remote as images on a screen. None of that mattered anyway, because she was there now and could pretend that she had always been, if she squinted just right.

A group of Zayn and Benjamin’s peers, because friends was too strong a word, were posted up in front of the old community center that had had its doors barred for as long as anyone could remember. They lounged on the steps, the railing, and against the building itself, talking idly and squinting still.

There were three girls who mattered — Patricia, Roxanna, and Saipana — and three who were just nameless faces seen around that urban wasteland.

Drawn to them, and maybe having sought them in some subconscious way, the wanderers approached.

“Hey boys!” sang Patricia with an expectant grin.

“Hey.”

Zayn didn’t dap any of them up either, because girls didn’t do that to each other.

“Hey y’all.”

The girls usually hugged the boys to soothe the psychosexual tension but they had stopped hugging Benjamin a long time ago — a compliment to their familiarity. They never hugged Zayn because she wasn’t like any of them.

“What’s up with y’all?”

“Nothing. Just chillin’.”

And that answer was enough. She jumped up onto the railing between them to balance and glean. Benjamin stayed on the sidewalk to canvass the street.

“Y’all heard the shooting last night?” Roxanna was eager for the sharing which was evidenced by a grin and hungry eyes.

“Nah, what happened?” Zayn hadn’t heard a thing, but that wasn’t surprising because shots were ringing out every other night, and she was bound to miss a few.

“A fight over a girl, I heard. Some yellow-bone with three little babies.”

“It was five babies.” — a nameless girl.

“How can she have five babies? People don’t make that many babies at one time.” Benjamin was skeptical.

“Okay, wait, it was four babies. Let me finish. So, they was fighting over her and then they started shooting each other! You know they both didn’t get a scratch? Guess who got shot and bled out all over the curb? The girl!”

Some of them laughed in an obnoxious way that Zayn found grotesque because she couldn’t figure what was funny about the story. She smiled a little though, because it would have been weird not to.

“That’s so stupid.”

“Right? People be killing each other over anything.”

Benjamin scoffed, fisted his hips, and frowned at the sidewalk. “Now who’s gonna raise those six babies?”

“It wasn’t no babies!”

“Yes so, I saw at least two.”

“They was twins!”

They all laughed that time because it was an odd thing to disagree about, and none of them knew either way. Their cackling filled the morning void with light and life that seemed to reveal the neighborhood inhabitants, busying about across the street, in windows, on fire escapes, and in the cars that moseyed up the road. They had thought themselves alone in the world and were made awkward by the sudden fracturing of that illusion, scratching itches behind the ear that weren’t real and looking too eagerly up and down the street.

Zayn studied her nails: a little long but boring and unpolished. The thumb of her right hand had a black spot of dried blood beneath the nail and even though it didn’t hurt anymore, it was unsettling to see.

“What’re y’all doing today?”

The question was posed to Patricia because she had the most interesting mind that thought up things that Zayn could never.

“I don’t know yet,” she wondered, looking out across the street where the light was spilling out from around the corner to paint the sidewalk. “We was about to go to the store though.”

The other girls were having little indistinct conversations of their own, but Benjamin was trying to hear Zayn over and through them. She saw or felt that, it wasn’t clear, and projected herself in his direction to make sure that he could keep up.

“Which one?”

“Cecilia’s?”

It was a question and not an answer. Cecilia was a cart lady that had the most eclectic selection of snacks in the city — from pudding pie to Dr. Pepper chewing gum — always posted up at her regular corner from morning to night. People in the know came from all over Manhattan and the South Bronx to get that special thing that they couldn’t find in their own neighborhood. Cecilia’s would have satisfied them all but she was a half-hour walk away on the other side of town, and nothing Zayn wanted to do with her day was in that direction.

“That’s up there on St. Nicholas. I don’t wanna go all the way up there.”

Some of the others seemed to agree in a tacit, mumbling way.

“We should go to Abigail’s — it’s just over there.”

Saipana pointed down the road and it really was just there, a block and a half away, but Zayn wasn’t that easy to satisfy. She had been in there before and didn’t remember being impressed.

“She don’t really got the stuff that I like. She got sour worms?”

“Yeah.” Saipana stepped out onto the sidewalk and did a funny dance to shimmy her leggings up high on her waist. She was restless and probably hungry. “Sour, sweet, slimy, salty, whatever you want. Haribos, sharks, coke bottles, cherries. They even got the green fruit slices — the bright ones.”

“I don’t like those.”

“Okay?”

“They got peanut chews, Sai? The dark ones?” Benjamin poked at her.

“You playin’ now. Everybody got peanut chews.”

“The dark ones though?”

“I don’t know, let’s see.” She started down the road but he didn’t follow. No one did, and that seemed to annoy her. “Can somebody come with me?”

“Y’all all talking about corner store candy and ain’t nobody talking about getting real food.” Roxanna’s hoop earrings and plastic pastel bangles tinkled and clattered when she hopped off of the railing. “I’m gonna get me some ghetto chicken.”

Zayn’s expression glimmered with desire at the suggestion, but she couldn’t conscientiously pay for a hot meal — not with the food she had stashed away at the apartment. That didn’t stop her from thinking about how much she would have loved two biscuits and a thigh.

“All you eat is ghetto chicken.” Saipana was exasperated.

“No I don’t, I eat fruit.”

“What fruit?”

“You know, berries, plums, papaya.”

Saipana kissed her teeth and peered suspiciously through narrowed eyes.

“You ain’t had a papaya a day in your life.”

“Yes I have!”

“I’ll go with you.” Patricia volunteered and hopped down. She stepped in front of Zayn and presented her hand, palm-up. “Bread.”

It took her a moment to figure the meaning because it was so audacious, but when she got it, she remembered something clever and something owed, and nodded toward Benjamin with a sly grin.

“Benji got me.”

He tensed.

“Y’all didn’t know he ballin’ right now?”

The girls giggled and cooed and he kicked at the concrete in a kind of cool embarrassment — collected and suave.

“Benji big shot. Big shot,” one chanted.

Roxanna, who was taller than him by a few inches, moved out of his reach and snickered, “Big shot, little boy.”

The laughter caught in Zayn’s throat and she had to cover her mouth to keep it down there.

“Who’s little?” He puffed out his chest. “You nappy-headed lizard.”

She was a svelte girl with a dense, three-inch afro and beady, wide-set eyes, very much like an iguana. They laughed freely at that, even the girl herself, and not because she had to, but because it was funny.

Benjamin hid in a shaded part of the Community Center vestibule to retrieve the money from his sock.

When the girls returned from the store, they traded snacks and quips until everyone was satisfied and red in the face from laughter or rage. They regrouped on the corner when they fell restless and moody and were ready to move on.

Patricia was the implicit leader of that group of girls, but they grew anxious waiting on her. Her goodbye came without ceremony.

“We’re gonna be at the arcade later.”

It was as much an invitation as it was a statement. They knew the place, tucked away on Madison Avenue, across from the filthy promenades of the Harlem River, in a building that didn’t look like much of a building, with a sign that was sun-bleached beyond recognition. Secret and remote — like a special club — guarded by wayward youths. Some of the machines were a decade old and half of them didn’t work right, but the fountain sodas were thick and sweet, there was real money moving on the pool tables, and no one judged each other on the drugs they took or the people they snuggled with in quiet corners.

“Okay.” Zayn wet her lips, balancing a paper bag of treats and shielding her eyes from the sun. “See you later.”

“Later.”

The wanderers took to their whim and traipsed through the veins of the living body of the city. They ate peanut chews and sour worms while boasting about past urban adventures, unwittingly shared their most intimate thoughts and fantasies, and rapidly gulped down moist cans of crisp soda until one of them vomited, then laughed at each other for it before they could remember their thirst and lament the waste. When all the snacks were eaten, they went to the garbage depot to terrorize and chase rats the size of cats up and down the sidewalks into storm drains and giant piles of slimy trash bags. Sometimes they were chased too and would scream hysterically and climb any pole, railing, or fire escape ladder in sight. Their voices echoed through the afternoon streets.

On long stretches of desolate industrial roads lined with the factories and garages of businesses whose storefronts were in the heart of Manhattan, they argued nonsensical things and tackled each other to the ground to prove them. They only pretended to argue as an excuse to tussle: to roll across the concrete with fingers intertwined and bodies knocking together, to grab fistfuls of clothing in ways that they didn’t have to — shyly and slyly revealing those forbidden parts, and to lock eyes afterward, breathless and brimming with excitement. When they pressed their faces against each other to feel the heat of the flesh and the pulse of a beating heart, they lost all sense of their boundaries. Sometimes Zayn didn’t like to fight Benjamin because conquering him made her like him in a way that she didn’t want to. But she also couldn’t help it because liking him that way felt good. So they fought, wrestled, and postured, laughing gaily and showing their power and affection in a way that only boys could, because she understood them and could have been one of them in another life, and maybe was still, in part.

They took long and lingering breaks on familiar stoops and on corners bathed in the stark light of the afternoon sun. One of those breaks was taken in a grass lot blocked off by a broken down chain link fence that they easily overtook. From that hill, resting in the light, they could see the 145^th Street Bridge and the promenade where kids played with mechanical garbage and the scattered remnants of a past generation, their laughing voices faint beneath the sound of the rustling leaves of a solitary tree.

In the comfortable and serene quiet, while Benjamin was walking in circles with his head down thinking secret things, Zayn considered herself. Though she lied to everyone at the apartment about her age for respect and status, she was actually midway through her formative teenage years and fast-approaching a crossroads of possibility where all paths led to escape — a chance to strike out on her own. Not an escape from Harlem, because those streets were more home than the apartment that she shared with the six, and any of the dumps that she had shared with her mother, but from what it represented for her, from the self-appointed caretaker, Mama, a grinning, deceptive fiend. Zayn hated her. She hated everything about her, but had once had such love and adoration that the two were difficult to reconcile. Girls like her grew up fast, and after the first year, it was clear that that harem of chosen sisters meant nothing to Mama if they couldn’t fatten her pockets. She had seen girls come and go, reduced from hopeful smiling innocents to neurotic, brooding hellions, and sometimes helped push them along with her fists, feet, and teeth. Mama had a special gift for what she called “breaking” girls, but as hard as she tried, she couldn’t break Zayn, because Zayn had been broken long before. So they tolerated each other instead, sensing that they were never more than a step away from a disastrous confrontation, and exchanging favors that neither could live without. The elaborate maintenance of their relationship was exhausting, and it had begun to pick at her. Plotting escape became an obsession that she indulged in every quiet moment.

She took in a deep breath of the peculiar marine air and wondered where she would be next summer. She was speaking before she could help herself, but it was cathartic, so she didn’t bother to try.

“I’m gonna get outta here, Benji. I’m gonna get my own place and make it a home.”

A home was what they both desired. Benjamin grew serious and stopped pacing because he had heard this kind of musing before.

“Where you gonna go?”

“I don’t know, but a place with a balcony. There’s a lot of nice spots in the Bronx that’s going for cheap right now.”

“The Bronx? I should get outta here too.” He was wistful in the thought and, with his eyes toward the water, seemed to see it.

“You got money for that?”

She looked at him but he looked down at his shoe, surprised and maybe a little embarrassed. She felt bad about that right away but didn’t say so.

“I showed you. I always got money.”

“But that was like forty-three dollars. You need real money to move, Benji.”

“Whatever.” He kicked at the earth and at nothing at all. “At least I got something. What you got?”

“I don’t know.” She thought about the money that she had stashed in the vent in the bedroom that she shared with Paige and the sewing machine station and how meager it was when measured against the cost of things. “But I’m gonna get it.” And she meant it.

The kids down at the promenade had lost interest in those forgotten artifacts and had begun to leave in the direction of the bridge. Zayn thought about times when she was their age, freshly landed, adventuring those riverside lots with the other neighborhood kids, and building hope for the future.

“I’m gonna get outta here, Benji.”

“I know,” he said, sadly, like he had lost something.

She was grateful for the simple acknowledgement because she felt foolish having said it.

“It’s hot today.” Benjamin stood beneath the shade of the tree, touching his hips and acting strange again.

“It’s hot every day.” She repeated her earlier response absentmindedly but neither of them seemed to notice or care.

Back on the street, they were quieter and a little awkward, neither fully capable of navigating the complexity of their shared emotional landscape. It stayed that way for blocks, silently standing shoulder to shoulder at crosswalks and squinting up and down the road to follow disturbances in the city ambiance.

It took a different kind of disturbance to break the spell, but they would probably have preferred to stew in it for longer instead.

A group of older boys happened upon them too quickly. Those few moments that they had between spotting them on the corner and mixing together were not enough, even though they tried to slow them down. When Benjamin’s heart seemed to sink with dread, hers calloused over.

There were six or seven of them, the number didn’t really matter, and they were young men up close rather than boys. Without an exchange of words, they all sort of came to a stop together, the wanderers because they were bound by the mysterious parameters of hierarchical social rule, and the young men because they wanted to make trouble.

The brutes circled them, grinning, sneering, poking, and prodding. When words were finally exchanged, none of them would have been able to recite them because they were too many at first and spoken with nervous excitement.

Benjamin braved the disorienting babble.

“We’re just going to the arcade!” His gall was impressive but his voice quivered and cracked. “It’s just over there!”

“It’s just over there!” they mocked and giggled. “Who asked you that, little nigga?”

Benjamin tightened his lip.

“I know this one.”

An accuser pointed at Zayn and it seemed to draw everyone’s attention.

“I seen her — him …” he was quick to correct himself and glanced shyly around to see if anyone had noticed. “The other night, outside one of those buildings that look half blown to pieces. He had on a wig and makeup and everything.”

He stared into her pretty cat-eyes with longing and hate. She could feel him and knew what he wanted: her fear. But she didn’t give it to him. She didn’t give him anything other than a scowl. She hardly moved at all.

“For real? In drag and everything?”

“Yeah, he didn’t think I saw him, but I did.”

She remembered, and saw him too. At the time, his confusion was mixed with something too soft to manage, because vulnerable men were dangerous, so she had rushed into the building and up the stairs. He must have mistaken her behavior as confirmation of some shameful ruse, but he didn’t know and couldn’t comprehend the measure of her fearlessness.

Still, she didn’t move.

“So they’re a couple of faggots then?”

A wiry young man with a keloid scar along his chin seemed to be the most vocal of them, and the most vicious.

“No!” Benjamin was too bold and it was going to cost him. He probably knew that, because he tensed every muscle in his body.

One of them shot their fist into his stomach like a piston and he dropped to the ground. Zayn looked away from the sight of it with widened, expressionless eyes.

“You know what we do to faggots in the hood?”

“Cut ‘em.”

“Burn ‘em.”

“Fuck ‘em.”

“Fuck ‘em?” There was outrage. “No, you dumb motherfucker, that’s what they want!”

“I meant fuck ‘em up! Like beat on them!”

“That sounds right. We don’t play that Queer Nation shit here.”

The LGBT activist group had recently posted flyers all over the neighborhood but every one of them had been defaced, torn up, or burned in tin barrels.

The accuser crossed behind her while the others continued to threaten and terrorize. His secret, delicate touch on the small of her back was almost sweet, and something about that was worse than pain. She would rather have been beaten up. But she didn’t have to want for long.

When he punched her suddenly in that same spot, she clenched her teeth and fell to her knees. She tried very hard not to make a sound but a small one escaped, and that seemed to delight them.

“Run his pockets.”

They acted fast and she didn’t have a chance to think about much because she was preoccupied with tracking the touch of the accuser — whether or not it was his hands that lingered too long in the pockets of her shorts, or fiddled with the belt loops. She had nothing of value on her anyway, lest they cared for the crumpled wrappers of a few hard candies.

“Damn you ain’t got a dollar? A quarter? A fucking nickel?”

“Knock his ass out.”

“Nah, you don’t treat soft faggots like that. He wanna be a bitch, you gotta treat him like you would a bitch.”

Someone grabbed her from behind.

The one in front of her, the scarred one, smiled. The worst of them always smiled before something terrible happened, because hurting people made them feel good.

He reeled his arm back, like a pitcher in the field, and swung to deliver a stunning slap to her face. She thrashed only briefly against a tight grip that held her in place before going still again and staring at nothing in particular.

“What the fuck?”

Her inscrutable behavior was a mounting frustration.

“Is he dumb or what?”

“Get off him!” — Benjamin, on his feet again, posed like a gunslinger from the movies.

There was a knife in his hand with a blade glinting in the afternoon sun. The air about them changed at the sight of that, and something gut wrenching took the place of dread and fear — a thing that none of them had planned for.

“Are you crazy?” They seemed more angry than scared and were upon him in a flash.

Two of them wrestled him to the ground and, though he was much smaller than any one of them, he put up a good fight. When they got the knife from him, they beat him mercilessly for fifteen seconds before he gave up completely and collapsed in a heap.

One of them held Zayn on her knees even though she wouldn’t have moved. She didn’t watch them beat Benjamin either, just knelt there staring blankly ahead and sometimes away. When she finally did steal a glance, she wished that she hadn’t.

The scarred one held Benjamin’s head up, revealing the angry rim around his left eye and the cut above the right that leaked blood down the side of his face and onto the collar of his shirt. He put the knife to his throat and Zayn felt her body tense and change.

“I should cut your head clean off.”

There was so much venom in his voice that it felt like an attack as devastating as the ones that they had just endured. He seemed to think through that option, sliding the sharp end of the blade against Benjamin’s skin in a way that it would not cut.

They pushed him around some more and called the both of them harsh names while tearing through his clothes for valuables. When they found the roll of singles in his sock, they came to a collective decision to cut out. Before they did, the scarred one spat in Zayn’s face. She blinked and swung her head from side to side in bewilderment. Then they walked slowly up the road, counting out the money, laughing, and glancing back to savor their work.

It was a while before either of them got up, and by the time that they did, the older boys were long gone. They helped each other to their feet and one dusted off the other’s clothes. They would have licked each other’s wounds too, if they could have.

Benjamin was filled with an astonished anger, and he bared it while wiping his face with the rest of his shirt.

“Those rotten sons of bitches.”

Zayn licked the blood from her split lip, pulled on the hem of her shorts, then shrugged and started down the road. Benjamin followed.

“I don’t understand how you’re so calm. That guy got you good and you ain’t even move.”

“Move for what?”

“I don’t know. They spit in your face, Z!”

“What’s that mean?”

“What’s it mean?” He pushed her shoulder to make sure that she was really there. “What’s it mean? They spit on you! You don’t spit on people … or things. You spit on the ground or in the trash.”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t care?” He was amazed.

Using a tiny hole at the bottom of his shirt for leverage, he tore off a piece of fabric and placed it against the cut on his brow.

“I just don’t understand why you didn’t do something.”

“Something like what? Like what you did, and end up just like you did? No thanks. I know when to fight and when to be quiet. You can’t just talk to people like that — they’re not natural.”

Or maybe they were completely natural, she thought, acting on the thirst for violence and tribalism that existed in all boys, and that she felt in herself sometimes too. But she didn’t have the words to describe a thought so complex.

They walked in silence for a few blocks, and she softened along the way. While Benjamin was scowling and putting pressure on his cut, Zayn glanced at him and was overwhelmed with pity. She felt bad about the money because she knew what he had risked to get it, in dignity and refuge. No one deserved to spend it except him, and maybe her, and a perplexing rage grew inside of her at the thought that anyone else would. But she said none of that, and only walked a little closer and kept a little quieter to let him stew in his rage, a right that she believed he deserved.

A clerk at a nearby corner-store took pity on them and gave Benjamin gauze and a few bandages from a box behind the counter. While the tending of his wound commanded all of the attention in the store, Zayn stole a cream soda and a bag of cheese puffs because she knew that they wouldn’t be able to get anything later.

They split the snacks on the last stretch of road.

At the arcade, they found Patricia, Roxanna, Saipana, and the nameless girls lounging on decommissioned machines and decrepit, peeling folding chairs by the backdoor, open to the frame to let in the breeze, sipping soda, fiddling with a deck of playing cards, and passing around an oily box of curly fries. The air was dense and the humming fans offered little relief, but the atmosphere was buzzing with excitement.

Patricia greeted them with that same anticipatory grin.

“Hey boys!”

“Hey.” — a chorus of them both.

They had to get really close in that dim, moody lounge before anyone noticed their faces or Benjamin’s shirt.

“What happened to y’all?”

“We got jumped.”

“I’m sorry, Z.”

She shrugged and glanced around the room without a word. She was disinterested with their sympathy because it didn’t have power enough to change anything.

“You could be sorry to me.” Benjamin pointed at the stick-on bandages over his eye. “I’ll take your sorry.”

“What else you gonna take?” Roxanna was smirking and poised to battle.

Exasperated, Benjamin kissed his teeth and braced himself.

“Damn, Rox, you wouldn’t leave me alone if I was bleeding out on the street, would you?”

She shook her head.

“If my head was rolling down the sidewalk you’d grab it so you could bother me one last time.”

“Then toss it down the sewer.”

“I knew you was a goddamn snake! No regular person got a back that long!”

The girls burst with giggles, Roxanna included.

“And no regular boy is as tall as a garden gnome. The top of your head barely reach my neck.”

“Your neck? Don’t nobody’s head reach your neck!”

They wouldn’t let up until one of them made a sore admission of defeat, which was their custom — to dance and spar with their words, but to love and jest as well, hard and with youthful abandon.

“Did my worms abuse you?” someone asked.

Zayn had to focus on the faces to find Abigail lounging there with a placid smile and a piece of a chewed fry on the corner of her mouth. Saipana sat beside her trying to hide her irritation with the lapse in attention.

“What?”

“My worms.” She sobered a little and suddenly became aware of herself. “Pat said y’all went to my store. I’ll tell my mom to throw ‘em out if they were stale.”

The store wasn’t really her namesake but her grandmother’s, born on the same day fifty years ago, but they called it hers anyway, because they knew her, and because she had power there.

Zayn wrung her lips and shrugged.

“Nah, they were good. We ate the whole bag. My mouth is still sore.”

Abigail was relieved. Saipana dangled a fry inches from her face as if she meant to feed it to her, which secured her undivided attention. Zayn watched Benjamin and Roxanna’s duel for a bit before seeking out a lively ping pong table to bum a match and a wager even though she didn’t have a cent to her name.

The afternoon faded in the grip of that place and time seemed to grow unfair, quicker and somehow less forgiving than ever before. That was why they made the most of it by ignoring it entirely, because they believed that it couldn’t be a bother to them if they paid it no mind. That worked for a while, but it crept up on them, like it always did, and forced a desperate energy into everything that they did.

Late in the afternoon, Zayn found her people, and they clung to each other like the links in a fence: Kingston, a girl like her — and a boy like her — who preferred the name Kitty because she had seen it in a Playboy magazine and figured it was the kind of name that real women had, and Zero, an almond-eyed boy as soft as cotton with a penchant for hair grease and fingerless gloves, whose real name she never learned. For Zayn, the two of them were cherished representatives of the queer underworld that existed just below the surface of the ordinary one, where she lived most of her waking life, and where she had firmly pitched her tent. Kingston and Zero were more than peers like Patricia and Roxanna, and more than friends like Benjamin, as much as she cared for him and knew that he cared for her. They were a brother and sister, and not like the five girls at the apartment, because, as much as she hated that place, they were more tender and familiar to her than anyone had ever been, but like the children of a common world who could understand and relate to each other’s lived experiences in a unique way because they lived them too. Their company was refreshing, and their cache of information was priceless.

“Things been getting real tough at the piers. Hardly anybody comes around with more than twenty dollars in their pocket anymore.”

Zayn watched the thick root beer syrup fill the paper cup while Kingston talked. Patricia had lost enough rounds of air hockey by then that she had had to pony up three quarters and a dime, and Zayn put them to good use at the refreshment counter.

“I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t wanna bring money around a place like that if I didn’t know it already … it’s gone to shit.”

“For real?” She had seen what those western Manhattan docks had become — had sifted through the stacks of garbage for lost treasures, peeked into the gaps between plywood boards and sheets of galvanized steel for glimpses of the impoverished life she had narrowly escaped, and drowned in the searing smells. Kingston had seen it too, and knew it much better than her because she had lived in it, so to hear her claim that it had “gone to shit” was a surprise, because Zayn had thought that it was already shit. “How can the city let people live like that?”

“Trannys don’t get no love out here, baby. You got better odds of winning the lottery than getting help from this city.”

It was true — of the city and the queer community — because girls like them had always been ostracized.

She didn’t want to think about that now, and focused instead on the Jockey pouring the soda water into the cup. It ended up darker than she had hoped for, and so sweet that she could taste every sizzling, bursting bubble with her nose.

“We got lucky the other night, though.”

Kingston’s smile was wide and mysterious. It drew Zayn’s curiosity and attention. She quickly paid for the drink and the three of them rushed into an abandoned corner booth in the drab dining area.

Before they started, she looked around for Benjamin and found him by the pinball machines, dripping sweat and blood with shining eyes, and Roxanna fussing over his wounds — and blowing on them.

Her voice was hushed like it told something secret.

“Alright, come on, Kitty, what’s up?”

“What’s up?”

“Yeah what’s good?”

“I’ll tell you what’s good.”

Zero snorted and flashed shiny teeth and wicked fangs. Kingston hissed for quiet.

“We got a new guy.”

“Trade?”

“Nah, a real chaser. Loves the dolls. Loves them young too, like us. Loaded. Lives in a fancy building in Chelsea.”

“A penthouse!” Zero’s whisper was intense and his expression held so much excitement that it rubbed off on them both.

“What’s the deal?” Zayn sipped the soda and her brain spun from the sugar.

“He gives me two hundred a night, and I’ve been clocking his place. He’s got a lot of nice stuff just lying around. Stereos, silver, jewelry, wireless phones, fancy TVs.”

“How we supposed to carry a TV?”

“We don’t have to take it, I’m just saying. It’s all nice stuff, good stuff that we can take to the Chemist. Lots of cash too — two fingers in his wallet every time I see him. Me and little Z are going there tonight. You gotta be there too — we can’t run this one alone.”

“He’s not gonna feel a type of way if you bring another girl?”

“His pants might blow right off. I told you, he loves the dolls, and you’re just the age he’s looking for.”

Zayn scoffed, rolled her tongue around in her mouth, and swallowed the viscous saliva.

“Well, you’re gonna lose him as a regular now.”

It was obvious to all of them then that she was on board, and Kingston seemed to relax in that knowledge.

“I don’t care.” She sighed, pulled out a pack of salted peanuts from a hidden pocket, and poured some into her mouth. She poured some into Zero’s waiting hand too. “I’m tired of that pockmarked dick anyway.”

“It’s got warts on it — I seen it!”

“And sat on it.”

“Gross.” Zayn grimaced, but the next sip of that drink washed the expression away.

“What’s up, King?” Benjamin approached with a bit of caution because he didn’t know them very well. He was trailed by three girls including Patricia.

“What’s up, Ben.”

“Not much.” Benjamin squared his shoulders and kicked at the ground. “What y’all up to?”

“Business.”

“Business?” Patricia slid into the booth next to Zayn. She eyeballed the drink just long enough for it to be offered to her for a hasty, deep, and greedy gulp.

“That’s right, Pat. Business.” Kingston slid back in the cushion, crossed her arms, and exchanged a knowing look with Zero. “And, baby, business is good.”

The sun set late that summer, but it was still too early for the inhabitants of the Madison Avenue arcade who, through exhaustion of each other, dwindled their own numbers. It started with a few younglings, nervous about the receding light, who slipped away in spite of jeering peers, and then the older ones who pretended to cool indifference and boredom but were really trying to make it home before nightfall. Zayn and Benjamin lingered too long and left an hour after they probably should have, but they always did that. Saying goodbye to the girls wasn’t much different at the end of the night than it was in the afternoon, only now there was a touch of something somber in it that would serve to quicken the heart when they saw them again.

The wanderers, who had started that day on the street under the brilliance of the morning, ended it in front of the library, which was the halfway point between their buildings. They stood opposite each other in silence for a while, frowning at the ground, canvassing the street, and checking their pockets for things that they knew they wouldn’t find, before they were satisfied and ready to go home.

“Tomorrow?” he asked.

“Tomorrow.”

This time, they bumped fists, because their lives had taught them that tomorrow was never certain, and that parting ways without ceremony weighed heavy on the conscience.

Before they were out of earshot, Zayn set the intrusive thoughts in her mind free.

“Hey, Benji.”

He stopped and looked at her.

The dying light was heavy in her eyes and she had to squint to make out his features.

“Don’t carry a knife anymore.”

After a while, he nodded, and it satisfied her. But he had things to share too.

“I lied.”

She frowned and used her hand as a visor to better see him but didn’t say anything.

“I did have the dream last night.”

Both of their grins came involuntarily then, a mirror image, one obscured by the setting sun behind them, and the other by golden light that seemed brighter than the day — burning and endearing itself to them one last time.

Her voice was soft as if she were afraid that someone might hear.

“Were you flying?”

“Yeah.”

“Was I flying too?”

“Yeah.”

They simpered together and grew startlingly shy. A flock of pigeons took off from an invisible perch beneath the library vestibule and disappeared in the light.

“Did we make it?”

Benjamin laughed a little and it made her want to cry.

“Yeah,” he said, and wanted to cry too.

They held themselves and each other inside with a shared and inexplicable energy. They felt lighter, and knew that the feeling would last, because, in another world far away from that one and in another way that was somehow just as important, they had escaped.

There was a divinity in that directional light that traveled through particles of dust, the cool evening gasp of a breeze, and themselves, which they saw and felt, and knew in some preternatural way. Together, they kicked at the concrete, pebbles, and at nothing at all.

“See you later, Z.”

“See you.”

And the day was ended.

She took a lot of time on the walk through those emptying streets and on the stoop of her building to watch the last rays of the sun fall beyond the horizon and to remember the feeling of freedom. It was a long time passing in the stairwell too, and a warring with herself for the strength to endure.

It wasn’t long after she was home that the night seduced her in ways that she couldn’t comprehend or resist. She was drawn to the freestanding mirror and foam mannequin head graced by a silky-smooth lavender-blonde wig on the floor where she knelt and produced the tools for her ascension: pristine makeup palettes, foam blenders, lipsticks, eyebrow pencils, lashes, essential oils, shea butter, and a sandwich bag of pills.

Her secrets were not well kept, and weren’t really secrets at all, but privileged parts of herself that she presented to the city under the grace of the moonlight. She dolled up better than anyone and was the envy of her sisters, and Mama too because she hated for anyone to look better than her.

In no time at all, and still more than she could track, with the aid of her life-affirming glamour, she transformed into the impossible siren. Her dark red lips and cat-eyes, which were more cat-like than ever before, were striking when framed by that lavender hair, and accented by the outfit that she squeezed herself into: a strapless tube top that pressed her little breasts flat on her chest, fishnet stockings that were snug in all the right places, and a leather miniskirt hiked high on her waist to make sure that she could easily flash a lustful man a glimpse of her neon green panties. She looked years older and decades more sophisticated, which was the point — a young girl in the body of a woman with a woman’s mysteries, and the mysteries that she shared only with her sisters. There was something depraved and marvelous about that to her that made it impossible to deny, and as she measured herself in the mirror with those chunky black heels, she tried to figure if her ass was fat enough or her chest flat enough to exemplify that androgynous epitome. Both were to her liking enough to swell her pride.

The tapping of pebbles or pennies at the window was an alarm, and just in time. Kitty, not Kingston, was out there on the street in an outfit just as mischievous and forbidden, along with Zero in a half-shirt and shorts that left little to the imagination. She waved to them, put the small screw driver from the sewing machine station into a hidden pocket, for protection, and crept out of the room.

Down the hall, from beyond the closed door of Mama’s room, there were muffled cries and the clinking of a belt buckle. She was beating one of them again — or fucking them — it didn’t really matter because either was as harrowing as the other. Zayn was grateful that it wasn’t her this time and tried not to think of it being anyone else. Still, she imagined bursting through the door to save them as she crept by, and kept imagining it while the noise intensified, through the kitchen, down the other hallway, and out the door.

Once out on the street under those orange lights with her simpering friends, the transformation was complete. The day may have ended some time ago in front of the library with a dream and a smile, but the night was just beginning, and it belonged to her entirely.

This has been an abridged excerpt from an ambitious literary fiction novel following a sisterhood of young, queer and trans foundlings surviving Harlem ghettos in the early 90s.

Find an unabridged version of the story on my Patreon = Here.

Look out for additional excerpts “Out Getting Gyros in the Nightshape“, “The Midnight Baby of Harlem“, and “Honey Buns and Cream Soda in the Stairwell” in Winter 2024 – 2025.

Support this kind of literary art! Find me on Patreon!

I hail from the same world as the one that my characters inhabit: Bronx homeless shelters, the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem, Brooklyn projects, and the Manhattan piers of yesteryear. My project utilizes years of hands-on research inside NYC’s underground queer community and my own life as a queer black boy in hostile ghettos. I feel uniquely positioned to tell these stories because I have lived them and have the drive necessary to bring them to life in a way that I believe can change the landscape of queer black fiction.
– A.T. Steel