Just Different

Florence had made up an excuse to Justin—that’s why she was lost in a crowd. She was on Jamaica Avenue, a commercial strip in Queens, on a Friday afternoon, the sun bright, with people she didn’t know, with street pitch at some height, elevation—the chatter, the clatter of sound sharp with spine and spike. And there she was in this crowd of mostly Black and Latino people on Jamaica Avenue, lost inside herself, somewhere where she could think. And she was walking on the left side of Jamaica Avenue, and when she ran out of crowd, people packed in, she’d walk on the other side of the avenue to pack herself back into the thick tide so she could think, be alone, closed off to herself; the shaded side of Jamaica Avenue. She had told Justin that she was going to her favorite yarn store, Nel’s Nits an’ Things, for sewing material, sewing patterns, but that was a lie—a big, big lie. She had to get out of the house. She had to get away, be alone. James was gone. It was as though she could feel him moving inside her, kicking her stomach, his feet and hands striking her—whatever he was using at the time. Am I going mad? But to Florence it was how she felt—as though James were back inside her womb waiting to come out, to be born. But he had been out for eighteen years.