Nearly two centuries before the boy who was shot dead at the intersection of First and Bank stood up in his own blood and spoke his name as if it were just given to him, there was a town named Ours, founded by a mysterious and fearsome woman right where the boy had been shot. But perhaps this story begins centuries before then, at the muddy waters of the Apalachicola River, or further back on a ship named the Divider carrying those misunderstood to be the future of slavery to the Western World.
To begin in any of those three places would lead back here, to this boy, age seventeen, fresh out of his junior year in high school, a bottle of orange Fanta rolling and emptying onto the street just feet away from his body from which blood spilled until it stopped, until the boy with his closed eyes opened them with a new mind and breath and understanding that shook him. He had been lying in the middle of the street for three hours with police tape squaring him off from his neighbors, friends, and family. The whole hood had rocked at the sound of the bullets popping off. Then he dropped and they all gathered, hymn-less and weathered, to see yet another one of their youngest take his last breath.
But he stood, his wounds no more than memories as he touched himself where he had been shot, a resonance of pain still there until it, too, departed, the smell of burnt corn bread in the air that someone had abandoned so that he wouldn’t have to lie there for hours alone. Yes, they had all left something behind to stand in that street together, blocked off from touching him and told to “Back up,” had it yelled at them as though they were to have as little care and consideration for the boy as the ones who had shot him.
He dusted himself off and looked around at the faces looking back at him, “What the fuck? My nigga . . .” peeling from a mouth astounded into a beautiful circle. The whole block went quiet except for that question and the loud suddenly sparked up in the crowd despite the cops right there, but who could give a fuck now when the dead have risen?
And he heard his name screamed from someone in the crowd, the voice bright and familiar, but a part of him didn’t recall exactly who had said it. He had two minds now: one in the future and one from the past.
To begin this journey, move backward. The boy’s body returns to the hot asphalt; the orange soda slides back into the bottle, and the blood back into the boy’s warming body; then the boy’s corpse rises and the bullets spin out from the right lung, the neck, the back of the head, the left hamstring, the right buttock, the right triceps, the left scapula, the—; his corpse becomes a living him as flecks of bone restructure and reenter the red-black wound, the broken wet resealed, the white meat sucked back into unbroken muscle, uncooked fat, and closing behind the retreat of the backward-flying bullet; the air the bullets once displaced returns from the curve of its displacement; the silver bullets return into the black gun like an unspeakable organ moving back into its dark element, the explosion of gunfire now the sound of wind hissing, then roaring, then suddenly silent; and the brown finger lifts from its trigger; the boy with his back to the police as the Fanta rises back into his pocket; and further back, weeks ago, the boy is asleep in bed and a small circle of light leaves his body. The legend begins where that light leads. At the end, the boy may teach you his name.