Quinn vaults over the sill of his bedroom window onto the patio roof. His feet trigger a heart-stopping cascade of pebbles. He crouches, scuttles, lowers himself from the roof’s lip into empty air. His arms shake and a sour scum of fear coats his tongue. 

Jahan arrives as footsteps, the sound of worn leather chappals slapping against the wood floors of the corridor to his study. This is new. Usually, he is shadowed against his trees or his now-empty bee house.

“Yuh sure it will work, mama?” Faye asked.  She often stood on the sidelines, watching her son drink the tea that smelled like rotten eggs.  “It will mek him bettah, Faye…trus’ me…have I evah lied to yuh? In di country men who couldn’t perform use to drink dis…It wuk miracles.” 

Her mother responded with the authority of a doctor.  A woman who knew the science of the herbs she picked.  For every ailment there was a bush Mama Elise had in mind.  She picked them herself, squatting in the backyard, hovered over some plant like she could see into its compounds; the science of it.  Its use.  She would grasp the plant by the stem; brown, calloused fists wrapped around it like she would do the neck of a chicken and uproot it.

My cousin Ariel comes over after we close the restaurant to talk shit. He’s holding a V8 can full of Hennessey and smells like he just smoked a blunt. He’s wearing those aviator shades, the fake Gucci ones with the rhinestones, even though it’s past midnight.

When she thought back on her adolescent years, Min remembered her busy hands. She stood behind the family’s butchering stall, a stained apron around her waist; she pounded her cleaver down on the limp, featherless chicken before her, cutting through the skin, crushing through the bones, slicing the meat into neat, equal pieces. Chop chop chop.