Blood Is Another Word for Hunger Read online

  What bothered Sully most about Ziza’s relentless happiness was that it was not the result of obliviousness, naivete, or ignorance. It was a happiness that knew pain and had overcome it.

  “How come you smile so much?” Sully asked.

  Ziza walked to the edge of Sully’s bed and took a seat, her bottom a few inches from Sully’s feet. “Just always been like that,” she said.

  “I don’t know how to feel nice.”

  “You’re not a nice-feeling kind of person. I suppose that’s not who you’re meant to be. That’s all right. I like you mean and crotchety,” said Ziza.

  “In another life I could’ve been sweet. I could’ve been just as happy and sweet as you, had it been different. Had everything been different. Had the world been different,” Sully said, wiping a stray tear from the corner of her eye.

  “We’re already on our second lives. I don’t think there’s anything different,” said Ziza.

  Sully held a pillow tight to her chest. “I’m bored of hurting,” she said. She thought of the ancestors she’d vesseled and brought back to life with the baptizing waters of her womb’s amniotic fluid. With Ziza, she’d cultivated a small sanctuary for them on this farm, a sanctuary that would grow to include the nearby town. But it was not enough. She needed the whole world for them.

  Before, Sully thought it was her lack of want for anything that made her feel so shapeless and void, but her relief at seeing Ziza upon her rebirth upended that notion. She wasn’t numb for lack of want but for wanting too much. She was ravenous for the whole world. The sky and the oceans and the creatures in those oceans and the cities and heartbeats and Ziza and Miles and Bethie and Liza Jane and Nathaniel and the mountains and brass and harps and pianos and wildflowers and glaciers and brothers and sisters and cousins and picnics and the sun and telescopes and a treehouse and sausage and winter and the height of summer, when the air was so thick it stuck to your skin like pecan brittle in your back teeth.

  Even as she imagined possessing all these things, she wanted yet more. It was strange, she thought, how limitless a void inside of a person could be. It was strange that a person could be killed, but not anything that that person had done.

  Ziza scooted up on the bed and laid her hand on top of Sully’s and hummed a hymn about battle. The pitches were low, and the key was minor, a haunting caress of song against Sully’s skin. How many moments like this would it take for her raucous, angry soul to be soothed? How many songs? Were there enough in the world?

  When the song finished, Ziza climbed into the bed with Sully and held her close. She sang yet more, no theme uniting which tunes she chose. Sully let a single hot tear fall onto Ziza’s hand when she understood her spirit would never know true soothing, but wrapped up in Ziza, she saw pinpricks of true glory, a grace big enough to make it worth it. Perhaps there would not be peace, but there would be Ziza, and with Ziza, there was a future. Ziza hummed on, and in that moment, Sully was content just to listen.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Rivers Solomon

  Art copyright © 2019 by Xia Gordon

 

 

  Rivers Solomon, Blood Is Another Word for Hunger

 

 

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