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CHAPTER ONE — INTERMENT

The sky should hold its breath while we give you back to the ground. Instead, it breaks open, spilling a gray so heavy our heads bow without meaning to. Rain stripes the casket, beads along the carved edges, runs cold over my knuckles, clutching the oak. Water climbs the hem of my dress, slides down my spine, fills the hollow at the base of my throat. Somewhere under all this weight, your body waits for the final cover. I want the rain to stop—just for a breath—so I can listen for yours. But it keeps pouring, keeps pressing, until I can’t tell if the sky means to soak the earth or pull me under with you.

Gears grind as they lower you. Brass handles catch dull light and vanish. My shadow slips its leash, sliding out from my shoes, past wet grass and the slick heel of your aunt’s pump, until its fingertips rest on your casket—twenty feet away, though the sun says it should stop at six. It reaches with intention no shadow should possess. Rain runs everywhere except the oval of soil it touches. That patch stays stubborn, a dry mouth refusing to drink from the sky.

The earth knows shadows don’t choose where they fall. Don’t defy the laws that bind light to matter. Don’t move like living things with their own grief to tend.

I stand frozen while mine does what I can’t. It touches you one last time. My pulse stutters. My ribs tighten. Is this how it starts—madness—watching a part of yourself break faith with the rest?

Across the cemetery’s edge, blue uniforms huddle under the trees. A single glance at them and heat spikes my throat. I’m back with the one who wore the badge, the press release, the open palm.

You tell me about training and protocol, and I’ll tell you about a skull striking asphalt. About how a twenty-seven-year-old Black woman’s blood thickens when it meets winter air. You claim individual actors. Harlem remembers patterns. But places can’t take the stand. Can’t file charges. They can only hold blood until rain washes it into sewers, where it joins all the other blood this city has swallowed.

I mixed colors for three days after you died. Forty-seven attempts. Forty-seven failures. 

Cadmium first—I squeezed the whole tube out, added sanguine drop by drop. Too cheerful. Too bright. Like calling it an “officer-involved incident.” 

Then crimson, but it lied the way police reports do. 

Vermilion tried to speak—thick with iron and heat—but went hoarse under what it had to name: Eleanor killed in her bathroom, sixty-six years old. Atatiana through her bedroom window playing video games with her nephew. Aiyana on her grandmother’s couch, seven years young, sleeping when they burned her with a flash-bang grenade. And now your name joins theirs: Shania Williams. 

This black-red blooms on American asphalt with the regularity of rain. A litany that never ends, only pauses between funerals. The machine works exactly as designed: manufacturing us dead, on schedule, on camera, then swearing it’s never seen this color before.

You would’ve told me to stop hiding in work. To call Marcus. You knew I stayed up sketching him when I should’ve been sleeping: his hands curled around a spray can, shoulders hunched in paint-spattered denim, and the curve of his mouth tipping toward a smile.

Your mother wears church black that drinks the storm. Mrs. Williams, steady as a pillar, folds forward without tilting her wide hat. I recognize the practiced grace, the way my mother taught me to collapse after Daddy’s knuckles rearranged the geography of her face. 

“Never let them see you on the ground,” she said, reapplying lipstick on a split lip. I was nine. I thought she meant the neighbors. Now I know she meant me.

I have always been the watcher. Seven, counting my father’s jaw—one, two, three—before the hand moves. Eight, mapping the floorboard that betrays; nine, learning to pee without sound; ten, crackers in my pillowcase so I don’t risk the kitchen. My body learned how to vanish before long division. Eyes converted to cameras; ears to microphones; skin to a seismograph for violence.

You never watched from the wall. You walked between danger and whoever didn’t deserve it. At the protest last spring, you stepped in front of a baton, wore the sling for six weeks, then went back to your classroom to teach teenagers the history the district feared. You passed them photocopies of Seneca Village maps and said, “Label what they took.” 

You stacked books on your desk the district told you to shelve. I stood twenty feet back and drew the officer’s arc with perfect accuracy, the kind that keeps you awake.

“You see what others miss,” you told me. “That’s your superpower.”

What good is a power that keeps your feet planted? What good is seeing if you never stop what you witness?

The minister’s voice grinds on about purpose and plans cut short. Your mother’s shoulders quake. Behind her, your students, thirteen-year-olds drowning in borrowed black. Two girls from your third period sob into each other’s necks. A boy wipes his nose on his suit sleeve. My fingernails dig crescents into my palms, the same hands that should have been painting the panels these kids would have walked past every morning. 

We called it Foundations. Seven panels to name what holds this city up: bones and wages stolen to build the skyline. After lesson plans and detention duty, you walked to the archive until your nails turned gray with dust. Columbia raised by hands called property on paper. The Brooklyn Bridge took Black labor below the river while history crowned Washington Roebling and footnoted Emily. Seneca Village evicted into the ground so white families could promenade. 

I created images for what you found: hands breaking through stone, drowned faces surfacing in every rainstorm, blood threading mortar in Grand Central where tourists take photographs without learning to look. You did the dangerous work, confronting archives, fighting the school board, getting threatened by email. I painted in my safe studio.

A trumpet stutters from the back of the mourners. Who thought a horn would make sense here? The notes drag up a memory I don’t want: the hospital monitor that flattened three winters ago when my grandmother exhaled and wouldn’t inhale again. The same wrongness coils now, the same film over the eyes.

I should step forward and touch your mother’s arm. I catalog six reasons why: basic decency, shared grief, she held me after my grandmother died, she taught me to braid when my mother was too bruised to lift her arms, she needs to know someone else remembers you were a wonder, she needs—but my body refuses. My feet are in a vise. The oak presses knots into my spine. People tell me I’m reserved. Thoughtful. The truth is uglier: I hoard distance. I ration proximity and pretend abstinence is virtue.

You told me, “When we hang the first panel on Malcolm X Boulevard, I want the street to breathe differently.” You wanted air to change. You wanted your students to stop in their tracks and learn a lineage no textbook loves. You wanted the building at 413 Malcolm X Boulevard to open its old eyes and make room. We planned a Black History Month that would not be domesticated into inspirational posters. Now the month has arrived, and you’re below me, and I am above ground, tasting failure. The panels will never hang. Your students will get posters: King smiling, Rosa seated. Nothing about Shania Williams killed by a cop.

They lower you the final feet. Earth hits the lid with a blunt drumbeat. I think about paint, about the forty-seven jars of wrong reds waiting in my studio. Your mother’s shoulders quake. I catalog pigments: burnt umber, lamp black, and alizarin. Your cousin reads Corinthians. I’m mixing colors in my head—two parts mars black to one part cadmium—while she says “O death, where is thy sting?” 

My palm digs into the oak tree’s bark. Everyone else clings to each other.

When the crowd thins and casseroles begin to plan their routes, I pull away from the oak and move because not moving will become a habit I won’t survive. My shadow retracts to my heels like a loyal dog. For a breath, before the umbrella tilts, I see the ground beneath where it lay, still dry, a circle of refusal. 

I walk home. Weather slaps my cheeks until I can’t tell tear from storm. A man under a butcher’s awning sells bootleg DVDs on a folding table. The sidewalk reflects laundromat neon, pink flicker advertising normalcy. The world refuses to pause. 

 

CHAPTER TWO — THRESHOLD

The Lafayette building greets me with its old breath. Plaster dust. Radiator steam. The ghost of soap from a generation of baths. I climb three floors and let myself into an apartment that still feels like a coat I haven’t tailored.

Dissociation arrives on cue. Naimah-who-watches lifts and fixes on the ceiling seam where paint misses plaster by a thread; Naimah-who-moves trails each thought by half a second—keys on the counter, boots aligned, coat over the wobble-backed chair. The neighbor’s TV switches channels into sonar bleeps. The watcher checks the locked door three times, notes the window sash that sticks. The mover slides a palm over a chipped bowl, fingertip along the crack in the sink, straightens the paint cloth. The watcher sends the order to cry; the mover declines delivery.

Smell arrives and pulls both halves into one body: cumin, garlic, onions from 3A, a pan catching fire. Beneath that, wood swelling with steam, the warm iron scent of old pipes. I breathe once; hunger knocks. I don’t answer. 

The canvases crouch in the corner where I left them, some turned to face the wall like children in punishment. One still hides under a paint-stained sheet. My hands find the edge and pull it free.

My face stares back—bistre grounded and stubborn—with vitiligo interrupting it: alabaster archipelagos widening borders. I made those islands bright and deliberate, plates shifting. Light takes the cheekbones hard. The jaw holds a line. The collarbones mark a border where the map runs off-frame into a body I once hid under high necklines.

The day I started this canvas, I gripped the brush until my knuckles split and bled into the wood. You watched and said, “You’re finally angry.” 

Anger requires risk. Anger needs a body that refuses retreat. The woman on the canvas does not ask for permission. She does not apologize for existing. The question that kept me up: Can I become her? 

You shook your head. “She’s already in you. You’re holding her hostage. Every stroke turns the key.”

My phone buzzes across the table. Marisol’s face flashes, fist blocking the sun. I let it ring five times before I pick up.

“They’re calling it an ‘unfortunate incident,’” she says without hello. “As if she tripped and the cop’s aim was a coincidence.”

“I know.”

“You holding up?” Three words straining to hold three years of friendship.

“I’m working.”

“Liar. Your Insta’s a graveyard. I’m coming over. Jerk chicken from the spot on Lenox where the auntie calls you skinny.”

“No.” It cracks out of me. “I need to be alone.”

“Being alone is eating you. Listen, my mother is still with the man who broke her arm twice. Needed a father in the picture so she could breathe at church. I get it. We all run. But at some point—”

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t build a sentence that starts with what Shania would have wanted.” 

Silence rolls through the line. I can picture her nostrils flaring, the sharp inhale she swallows before it escapes. Her shoulders squared, one hand on her hip, thumb tapping against denim like a metronome counting down to an explosion she refuses to give me. Even her jaw clenched so tight the muscle jumps at the hinge. That careful stillness is its own kind of fury. I love her for the discipline it takes to hold it. I hate that I’m the one making her use it. 

On the floor, a crushed tube of cadmium leaks into a cardboard box. The stain blooms, a red tide absorbing corrugation inch by inch. I watch it because it asks nothing of me but to witness, and I know how to do that. 

“I’ll text you later,” Marisol says, her voice held on a short leash, not to keep me out, but to keep her worry from breaking into a run. The softness makes me ache more than shouting ever could. 

I nod into a phone and let the line die. Marcus texted three times during the funeral. I haven’t read them. No one knows I practice saying “I love you” into his voicemail, timing it for when I know he won’t pick up. 

I reach for a sketchbook, then freeze. Inside are seventeen sketches of you I drew when you weren’t looking. The last is half finished. I was going to complete it after the protest. There is no after now. 

I go to the bathroom because the body demands water. The claw-foot tub claims most of the small room. I turn the faucet. Water begins clear, then roils through shades I know from old buildings: faint tea, then tannin. It darkens further, obsidian depths that devour light. The water turns the exact shade of Shania’s eyes when she was disappointed in me, that particular charcoal that pools in brown irises when hope dies. Which was often. Which was earned. 

“You’re so talented it makes me angry,” she said once, while I sketched the aftermath of a rent strike from across the street, my hand steady as the tenants wept. She’d grab my sketchbook sometimes, flip through my perfect renderings of other people’s courage. “You draw revolutionaries like a tourist. When are you going to BE one?” 

I told her I was building a record. 

“For whom? The people who won’t look unless it’s in a gallery?” 

Because we both knew I wanted galleries, wanted white walls between me and violence. My body learned young that confrontation means bruises. That resistance means broken ribs. That the quiet ones survive. Daddy taught me that. 

“Your fear is colonizing your gift,” she said once. 

She didn’t understand. Fear kept me alive for twenty-three years. I measure every room by its exits. Raised voices liquefy my spine. She grew up with parents who disagreed without fists. Never hid under a bed. Never learned which floorboards sang warnings. Never practiced breathing shallow enough to disappear. I hated her for that sometimes, for expecting courage from someone who’d spent childhood learning its opposite. For her compassion having limits exactly where my damage began.

I sink until water holds my collarbones and I hold still. Grief dismantles me from the ground up. Takes the feet first, numb against porcelain. Then the hands—traitors that drop brushes, miss buttons. Then the voice—shrunk to a calcified pebble lodged where breath wants to climb. Hunger shuts like a locked door. Sleep fractures into ninety-minute shards. I’ve been awake thirty-six hours. If I sleep, your laugh might dissolve. I can’t risk waking to a world where I don’t remember it.

The bathroom light flickers. Once. Twice. On the third, the room stutters; the wall exhales the past—

I am back in the hallway with Mr. Washington tapping the paneling. “They’re still there under the plaster,” he says. “You listen to the pipes long enough you’ll hear that night. A place keeps a reel of its own life.”

He isn’t joking. He never jokes about history. He leans closer, voice dropping. “Building’s got a memory deeper than the foundation. It chooses who gets to hear the stories. Chooses who gets to carry them forward.” His finger traces the bullet holes, reading braille the wall kept.

“You tell all your tenants ghost stories, or am I special?” I say, a half laugh slipping out, fingers tightening on my backpack strap.

“Ghost stories?” He snorts. “Girl, I’m talking science. Ask any old house. Material memory. That fancy art degree don’t teach you nothing worth knowing. Seen apartments reject people. Lights burn out when they walk in. Pipes burst. Locks jam. Then someone else moves in and suddenly everything works fine.”

He stops, turns to me. “Why you think them white folks in 2A can’t sleep? Why the couple in 4C been fighting since they moved in? Building remembers who it was built for. And it ain’t them.”

“And who’s it for, then?”

His eyes hold me the way a mechanic looks at an engine he’s already diagnosed, like he knows exactly where the break is and how long I’ve been driving with it.

“People with ghosts riding their shoulders.” His knuckles, swollen with arthritis, rap the wall. “People like you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Don’t need to. Building does.”

The light steadies. Water presses my ears until the apartment narrows to the inside of a shell. I hear the pipes knocking their code, the building remembering. A gunshot rendered as two knocks and a pause. A woman’s scream translated to steam shriek. A baby’s first cry in 1978 whistling through a radiator no one has replaced. 

You—God. I bargained. I offered you my good years, my mother’s clean memory of me, the children I might have carried. Take my hands’ steadiness. Take my eyes’ precision. Take the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program acceptance letter that came last month. Take the collectors circling. Take the ARTnews “30 Under 30” mention. Take the Hauser & Wirth solo next spring. Make me invisible to every curator who finally sees me.

Take the graffiti walls too, the ones nobody knows are mine except Marcus. I only started a month ago, when sleep broke and the grants kept calling me respectable. The drowning figures I lay in gold leaf on condemned facades, hands breaking through brick. The style they keep reposting, Black bodies unfastening into constellations, into coordinates, into exits. Twenty million views on the 125th Street underpass video. They named the unknown artist The Alchemist because I turn pain into gold. #FindTheAlchemist trends while I sit through gallery meetings with my mouth closed and my pulse loud. Only Marcus knows the woman signing contracts in daylight and the ghost spraying at 3 a.m. are the same pair of hands.

At the abandoned school, I painted a hundred children rising from desks in smoke, each face a real unhoused kid the city filed away. Take it all—the galleries and the gold leaf, the recognition and the rebellion—if it brings her back.

You—Shania. You would have grabbed my cheeks and said: This is who you are. 

You never knew your careful friend is the one making the city stop and look. Why didn’t I tell you? Because the gallery people would domesticate it, mount the underpass on a white wall, give it a placard, call it site specific and walk away clean. Because the watcher in me needed one place the mover could practice unseen. Because you would have made me claim it out loud, and claiming is a door that doesn’t swing shut. Because I wanted the city to feel it without my name to soften it. Because secrets kept me alive in my parents’ house and I mistook survival for virtue. I should have told you. Now it’s too late.

The water’s temperature drops. My fingers open underwater. For once, being a body is bearable. For once, I’m not watching myself exist. I’m just existing.

The crystal chandelier above the tub does its old-building shiver, three flickers I’ve learned not to trust, and then dies outright, leaving only the sink bulb burning. It’s a weak little filament, buzzing like it’s arguing with the wiring, throwing a tired halo over chipped porcelain while the rest of the room sinks into shallow gradients of shadow—an uneven dusk the tiles don’t bother to reflect. When I finally stand, water sheeting off skin, the air closes back in, thinning into the building’s warm, metal breath. The bulb hasn’t revived. I leave the bathroom. The canvases loom to my left. In the corner, the cadmium stain has widened into a lake. 

I lie back on the floor, towel a thin border between me and wood that has memorized other bodies. Damp hair spreads into a halo. The ceiling’s water stain drifts. It’s shaped like my mother’s bruise the night I left. The night I chose my own safety over hers.

I close my eyes. The day keeps playing, but the volume dims. You are still down there. I am still up here. That’s the geography that matters now.

I sit up. The shadow stays horizontal, a body laid out. A second shadow rises with me, obedient to the lamp. Two shadows: one that minds the light, one that refuses. 

The pipes knock once, twice, three times. Then a fourth. A fifth. The sound hardens—metal to wood, then bone. The bathroom answers from inside its walls. 

I stand on shaking legs. Both shadows follow; the rebel shadow trails a beat behind, late to every step.

From the bathroom comes water touching ceramic. I drained the tub. I watched liquid spiral down, heard the pipes gulp and settle. The faucet’s been off. I know because I twisted it three times. Old habit. Everything in threes for safety.

Splash.

I move to the door, pulse crowding my ears. The rebel shadow reaches the threshold first and pours under the gap, a spill of dark that does not wait for me.

 

CHAPTER THREE — SUBMERSION

I push the door open. The tub is overflowing.

The claw-foot brims with shuddering obsidian water that moves without current, viscous as molasses, surface tension holding it an inch above the rim while gravity weeps down the porcelain sides in dark rivulets that pool and spread across hexagonal tiles.

The medicine cabinet hangs half-open, showing a row of brown bottles and one chipped cobalt mug with a toothbrush spine up. The air carries copper and brine and a tar-deep scent that doesn’t belong to this century.

The faucet is off.

I lunge forward, feet skidding on slick tile. The brass cross-handle gleams wet. I grip with both hands and twist counterclockwise. It turns and turns but nothing answers. Water keeps shouldering over porcelain, keeps rising.

I reach into the water to find the drain and the moment my fingertips break the surface my body refuses my orders, muscles going slack when I say fight, jaw unlocking on its own, air leaving without permission as water rushes in to occupy the rooms where breath lived. My fingers scrape porcelain that granulates under my knuckles, floor joists bend like ribs. Tiles expand and contract the way a hull takes pressure. Gravity looks away; the black does not ripple when I touch it—it holds my arm and pulls me into the bathtub. 

Cold on the wrists. Cold on the ankles.

Water presses into ears, into eyes, into the hollows under my cheekbones until the white lip of the tub softens—widens—falls away.

My breath tries to rise, but the water holds it. 

The walls shrink to pinpricks. The rim, gone. The ceiling, gone. Harlem, gone.

There is only the drop.

A voice I know is yours says my name the way people say stay.

I try. Legs kick. Hands claw for the rim that isn’t there. But the dark opens wider than my body knows how to fight. Drowning becomes falling becomes floating becomes a membrane that stretches—and then tears.

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I am floating in the cipher,
warm liquid scripture,
heartbeat speaker,
bass line deeper than any rhythm ever heard—
mother’s heart: lub-dub, lub-dub.

In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was water.
In the beginning was the beat
and the beat was lub-dub, lub-dub.

Ọmọ-omi they name me,
water baby.
The womb becomes the tomb,
becomes the room
where breath learns its first lesson.

Pressure builds,
walls contract,
caul wrapped tight,
right around my skull.

 

Bones compress, ribs hold,
shoulders fold,
a body blessed with flexibility,
ability to be pressed through passage.

Pushing down,
pushing out,
the water route gets severed
and I’m tethered to silence
because the world doesn’t give a damn—

POP.

Veil tears.
Membrane clears,
promising escape
without knowing
what unknowing means
until the cold cuts through,
admitting me to the reckoning.

First slap,
skin snaps awake.
Air like a knife,
cut precise into lungs
that never knew the price of breathing,
this grieving,
this body leaving with its very first—

SCREAM.

Throat raw.
Sound draws blood.
Sound tears from me like hope from the rope,
like scope from the vote,
first word, heard word,
birth word,
not understood.

Eyes sealed.
Light peels lids.
Pupils dilate,
learn to hate
what brightness demands.

Salt taste.
Air displaced.
Smell tells the story,
death and birth
compressed to one shared breath,
rehearsed in cellular memory.

The heartbeat fades,
like promises made 

in the womb-tomb-room
where love flowed through maternal blood.

What remains?
The stain.
The pain.
The human refrain.

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Did I just watch my beginning? 

Between one breath and the next, time holds. A single beat, then another—the heart setting a needle to vinyl, finding the groove again. The water thins to glass—no up, no down—only the beat working in my ears and the cool whisper of caul on skin.

Grandmother’s whisper circles back—caul babies see between worlds. 

If that was birth, what is this?

The liquid obsidian folds and unfolds in slow spirals. Each turn pulls harder—hips first, then ribs, then the soft cup of my skull—threading me toward a glow that isn’t light but an opening. It waits. 

Salt brushes my tongue. A wind that doesn’t exist here slides over my skin, smelling of iron chains and wet rope. Somewhere in the black, wood groans like the hull of a ship taking on water.

The closer I draw, the more I feel the weight of what I’ll have to leave behind: skin, voice, the rooms I memorized for danger. Who I’ve been my whole life hangs on the edge of the spiral, watching me go.

I wonder if you’ll still be there when I come back. I wonder if I’m meant to.

The opening widens. I let go, or it takes me—I can’t tell which. 

And I am not Naimah anymore.

 

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AISHATU ADO is an Afro-German author, poet, and peace technologist dedicated to social justice. She is the 2025 winner of the Fractured Lit Ghosts, Fables, and Fairy Tales Prize, and the 68th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest. A 2025 Clarion West graduate, she has received fellowships from Tin House, VONA, Voodoonauts, Roots Words Wounds, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Her work is published or forthcoming in Afrofuturism Short Stories Anthology, Heartlines Spec, Obsidian, Kelp Books’s 2025 Ocean Poetry Anthology, and Liminal Spaces. You can find her on Instagram @miss.aishatu and Bluesky @aishatuado. 

 

Featured image by Ben Wicks, courtesy of Unsplash.