“There would be no lynching if it did
not start in a schoolroom. Why not
exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class
that everybody is taught to regard as
inferior?”
—Carter G. Woodson,
1933

 

“Like desire, language
disrupts,
refuses to be
contained.”
—bell hooks,
1994

Alletheia was going to beat the ish outta him.

Malcolm cursed. Just like lastime. Soon as the bell rang, he tore outta that classroom fast, hung right at the flagpole, down the hill towards the weed-ridden pathway to Cedar Woods and, eventually, the isolating comfort of the wilderness. Today, for the first time in awhile, he didn’t have the t’mwan weighing down his neck.

Alletheia did.

To be fair, he wasn tryin to trick her. He’d just axed her a question, and she coulda been like the rest of them and ignored him.

But she’d answered—in vernacular (a fancy word for not-school-language)—a phrase that Alletheia and Malcolm used often but most of the other kids didn cuz their families already talked school-like at home.

And now he was running for his life and dignity. Not that he wasn’t customed to getting his tail kicked. He jus didn’t want to have to deal with the consequences of accidentally tricking her into stuttering out her home language in the classroom for all to hear. Usually people, Alletheia included, picked on him because he was short and had a funny mountain boy accent, so he was used to a good scrap. Cept, the kind of whoopin you get when someone was bored and the kind of whoopin you get when you’ve pissed em off was bigger than a cow’s ass.

She was also taller.

Her legs were longer.

And—dang, girl—didn’t seem to be tiring out anytime soon.

This wilderness, this calm, was supposed to be his place. He’d hang out after school and forage until it got dark, then venture home. But not now. Now, it seemed to be responding to the energy he brought, ablaze with life and survival and please please don let homegirl catch up—words he muttered in remix to carry his legs faster.

He didn know how he stayed ahead but he did, she followin him at his heels. He tore through the leaves and the branches and the weeds, tried to lose her by darting in unexpected directions, leapt over poison ivy, jagged stones, poking roots, and the whatever else there was—

He was running so fast, he didn’t notice a slight change until he was in it. Although he slowed his pace, he barely noticed that he’d started breathing heavier.

He’d stumbled upon some kind of small clearing. Not one made by nature. Something in it made him pause, the smell hitting first—a strange, non-earthy smell, not unpleasant, just off. Then, about the way the grass folded beneath his feet. Malcolm stopped against all his instincts and looked around. To the untrained eye, it would seem like any other part of the forest, but Malcolm knew better. There somein’ bout how the branches had fallen, scattered across the ground. Way the light shifted in the trees—distorted—tho he were in some kind of bubble. And what about that smell? The scent came to him again. Several trees and shrubs here that Malcolm knew well and could identify, but what he smelled was unfamiliar to this place. Salt. Minerals. Herbs? The smell reminded him of the days his grammama made him pull up fresh pokeweed from their backyard, in their friend’s lawns, and sometimes the roadside. Toxic and sweet at once.

In the now his mind raced, trying to place his senses in order, but none of them quite matched. Did I fall an hit my head? No time to worry about that—he heard Alletheia well before she arrived, crashing through the trees behind him, the t’mwan around her neck flinging while she came in swinging, without thought to shape or form.

Malcolm held his breath. He was good at climbing trees and scrambled up the nearest one to perch on the highest branch his short arms could get to. He could hear her and leaned against the trunk of the tree, trying to steady his breath. She’d paused. Maybe she’d felt it, too. The strangeness of this place they’d stumbled upon. He closed his eyes because it helped everything seem so calm, and his breath regulated to a short puff instead the long heaves he’d been doing moments before.

Safe!

…Not safe! A hand now gripped his ankle, and Malcolm’s eyes flung open just as he was pulled off the branch.

How did she reach him all the way up here?

Oh. Right. Tall. Long arms.

It didn’t matter, now. With a quick leap Alletheia had caught him; with a small yelp he came tumbling down and fell with a crunch to his back, onto the yellow leaves below them. She had to follow through on her threat, now, because she had chased him all this way, so she began punching him, the t’mwan bouncing around her neck. He held his arms up to block. After a moment she resorted to a swift kick in his side. He screamed.

He knew it wasn’t as hard as a kick as she could have given, but there was no such thing as a light kick to the ribs.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

She glared, gesturing at him to stand up.

“My daddy gonna kill me when he see me with this,” she hissed. The distorted glow from the light in that strange place lit the edges of her fro, still perfectly round despite the chase. It didn’t help that he thought she was kinda pretty, for a girl. “I don got no time to get to school early to sweep or clean them toilets.”

“My bad!” He didn know how he always get in trouble for askin simple questions. He wished he knew how to shut up on purpose.

He knew many things, like how he wasn’t stupid, despite how his teachers tried to make him out to be. And he couldn’t navigate school unless he pretended to be their version of stupid, so pretend he did, earning with regularity the t’mwan, even if it meant that while he spoke many languages, his teachers could speak and recognize in him only one: school language.

Alletheia advanced on him again, this time with the intent of giving him a black eye, no doubt, so there would be evidence of it tomorrow and everyone in class would know not to trick Alletheia Q. Jenkins, age 10, and not to be messed with. Just as she was on him, the jerk scuttled backwards, arm hooked left, so that she had to move forward more quickly, when suddenly—

KLANG.

Malcolm’s skull rang. Something’d hit his head. Hard, like a rock. Only, denser, and smoother. 

“You finna kill me?” This was the loudest Malcolm yelled since they began the fight. Fists was one thing, but a flippin weapon?

“Wasn me.” Something in Alletheia’s voice made him shudder. She musta sensed it, too. A ringing in their ears. Malcolm turned and opened his eyes widely. There was something like a large…thing. A thing like no thing Malcolm had ever seen before.

His head had hit a massive container, bigger than the trailer Malcolm lived in, but this was much less boxy, with rounded edges. If he could guess, it was some kind of vessel, for traveling. On its side was something like a mighty, leafless tree, with branches thinning into roots, stretching out to disappear on the other side. He couldn’t decide if it grew out of the ship, embraced it, or suffocated it. Malcolm reached out to touch it, then jerked back. It was warm. He put his hand on it again, brown against bark.

Then from above, there came a bizarre sound, like a rhythmic clicking in a low pitch. This sound wasn’t joyous to their untrained ears—later they would learn that this was laughing, but as for now, it sounded like a warning.

Both Alletheia and Malcolm froze. The sound was coming from a distance over their heads, even further than the branch Malcolm had tried to hide in. Alletheia’s fist was poised, hovering and ready.

In the next moment, there was one creature, then not long after, two, skin like coal or shale (they would work the difference out later) who leapt down from somewhere in the branches above. Well, it looked like they had leapt down. One had actually fallen. He was making a rough, repetitive sound, with the other following down not far after.

Alletheia and Malcolm might have both screamed in the moment, but they were both so shocked that they stood there and watched the bizarre scene unfold in front of them.

Two creatures, with a thin frame, rose, both slightly taller than Alletheia. Malcolm squinted, his mind taking note: They eyes were all black. Both of em were bald, but on they heads, extending from the back of the head towards the front, were two twisting branch-like shapes, like a semi-circle crown, the color of charcoal on one creature and damp earth on the other. They both like the color of a school blackboard…wit something like chalk-dust, hoverin, over the surface of they skin.

The Humans stood there, frozen, while the aliens peered at them. They made sounds with their mouths and the textures on their skin, like liquid tattoos, began to twist and swirl in various patterns. They looked at one another. Then they began to move, not at them but towards one another, while the Human children watched on in confusion.

Malcolm was the first to break the silence, cursing through a large grin on his face. “They…uh…wow.”

After a brief time watching them, he’d realized: they recreatin the fight, move for move. 

What was astounding was that it wasn’t just the physical movements, but even the sounds they made, from Malcolm’s screams to sentences that they’d uttered, although it sounded more like they were approximations—the creatures could replicate the rhythms and intonations and near-sounds, not any specific word. Malcolm’s I’m sorry uttered by the creature sounded closer to ‘aye oh-wee and finishing with Alletheia’s My daddy gonna’ kill me with a muffled, Mtattee uzaint mi.

And then their shrieking. Alletheia looked like she was bout to bolt, but when Malcolm whispered, “They’re playing. Like children.” She nodded. He wasn’t sure she really understood. When the creatures finished, they stopped and looked at them with those black eyes. Malcolm realized now: they night-black eyes held flecks of bright blue. Like the sky when it was mid-day, when I want to do nottin but look up and rest.

“Punch me,” Malcolm turned to Alletheia, giddy with this sudden spurt of an idea. In school he wasn’t allowed to have these—ideas—but in this forest the light, the movement, the stretch of air, these beings only meters away, made him feel as though he could do anything.

“What?”

“I think…I think they like fightin. I think issa way to communicate with them. Or playin? Or practicin.”

“Oh my God, there are…these…things right in front of us and you want me to punch you?”

“Les just try. I think they been watching us. I think they know we been around these woods. Punch me, you know, not as hard as before.” Malcolm pleaded. “You didn have a problem wit it fi minutes ago.”

“I didn’t,” Alletheia said assuredly. She did as she was told, this time a lighter punch that braised his cheek up to his nose.

He took two steps back, his eyes immediately watering. Part of his face rang.

“Sheeeeet.”

“Sorry.”

He wasn’t sure she meant it, but he decided his response needed to be gentler, not because she was a girl but because he didn’t know how long this was going to go on for. He pushed her and took a swipe; she was faster but he had better reflexes, and he slapped her jaw then tried to throw her back from her shoulders. She dodged but didn’t expect him to headbutt her immediately and then they were on the ground scrapping until they were out of breath. Malcolm called “Time” with his hands, and looked at the two aliens who had been watching them quietly. The one with the cedar branches had a funny mark going across his skin, kind of like ocean froth pulsing in and out and moving over the course of his coal form like waves.

Malcolm didn’t know what it meant—didn’t know that somehow it did mean something—but since they standing there watching them he stepped forward and held out his hands. “Your turn?”

After a moment they did just as Malcolm predicted: repeated the gesture with frightening accuracy, sound included. When they were done, they stopped and stared directly at them. 

“They…definitely…tryin to talk to us,” Malcolm said.

“Or maybe they’re waiting until we’re good and tired so they can eat us,” Alletheia pulled Malcolm’s arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Don’tchu wonder who they are?” Malcolm stepped forward again, and one of the creatures’ skin flashed spirals, the one whose earth-damp branches trembled. The other, the one with charcoal branches, took a step back, the flashes on its skin erratic.

“How about what they are?” Alletheia said. “Let’s start there. Let’s start with some kind of creature that wants to kill us.”

“Maybe they’re radioactive deer.” Malcolm was fascinated by the branches of their head, how they twisted and seemed almost alive. He wanted to touch it, but that wouldnta been right. Plenty of his teachers tried to touch his locs, sometimes without asking, and he always hated it but never felt like he could say no.

“What?”

“Like maybe they’re deer that fell into some radioactive tar in an abandoned factory and—”

“And they gained a new language and then built machines like this one,” Alletheia, who didn’t bother to mask how annoyed she was, thumbed towards the ship, “Or maybe, they’re not from around here?”

“Like Delaware?”

“…a lot further’n that.”

Malcolm looked at them again. “Do they want to kill us any more than our teachers?”

Alletheia started. “The hell?”

Malcolm repeated himself. And then he stood, and at great risk opened his arms wide before the alien, who only seemed disturbed by this movement and moved a few ways back. Malcolm closed his arms over his chest, and then, stretched his arms out to the side again, his fingers spread wide, hoping it understood: vulnerable. In a fight, this is vulnerable.

“What are you doing?” Alletheia hissed.

“I think,” Malcolm whispered to Alletheia as they watched to see how the aliens would react, “that these people, no matter how far away they are from, prolly are less dangerous than our teachers.”

Alletheia looked at them. A light seemed to shine on her face—a burnt orange evening glow, signaling that it would not be long before sunset began. “You feel safe heyuh?” Malcolm noted that after she said this, she thumbed the blunt hook, the t’mwan around her neck, grasping it for the shackle it was. She must have heard herself because she glared at him and pronounced very intentionally. “Do you feel safe here?”

The aliens were both staring and not-staring at them. Their eyes seemed to be shifting back and forth, but it was not their eyes that Malcolm started watching. He wondered about their skin, where certain patterns were forming and dissipating and reshaping at great speed. He suspected that these patterns were to them as what was to Humans their eyes, their mouths, their smiles, and their furrowed brows, their cheekbones and their arched eyebrows—their expressions. The faces of these aliens, their sharp noses and bony cheeks, almost didn’t move much; their mouths remained even.

“Yea…” The forest had always been his refuge. Safe?

The least safe he ever felt was when their teacher, Mr. Cannon, stood up, tall as he was, when Malcolm had contradicted him once on a lesson. Mr. Cannon lectured him, sharply, ‘bout how the Previously United States offered Negroes like him, dark folk like him—but not as dark as the aliens who stood before him—an opportunity to thrive. Mr. Cannon was also dark. Malcolm was a liar, teacher had said, humiliating him in front of the class. Malcolm suffered an automatic week of the t’mwan, the labor that came with it but also the shame. He was not allowed to speak in class, was forced into extra homeworks, was the last to line up, and was deprived of all joyous activities, expecially music class, which was the only reprieve he had at school at all. “Count yourself lucky,” Mr. Cannon had said at the end of it. “In my day, they beat you physically.”

Malcolm quiet-scoffed in his head. He had learnt from this lesson that silence for him meant less violence. So he tried to resign himself to keep his lips sealed, and only squeak when squawked at.

That moment was not safe. Here, among these aliens, Malcolm did not feel danger. He looked at them again. The patterns he watched did not seem like accidents. The aliens’ skin was vibrant. He noticed, now, that on the lower part of their arms, were three sharp blades, blades that looked sharp enough to cut through him, if they’d wanted.

Yet. His curiosity overwhelmed his fear.

In a sudden jerk, one alien with the black branches on its bald head had grabbed his hand. It pulled him up into a tree and then let go once they’d found a strong, stable branch, and Malcolm scrambled to try and follow it. Its movement was magnificent: its hands and muscular legs scrambled through the branches and disappeared quickly, leaping almost effortlessly like a gymnast from branch to branch. Its companion followed. After some time it realized that Malcolm could not keep up. It returned, making a frantic clicking sound, then opened its mouth and releasing a series of sounds that Malcolm chose to interpret as some kind of encouragement to keep him going. He took deliberate, cautious steps, looking back to see Alletheia struggling in the same way. She would hop, her feet catching the branch she aimed for, paused, looked down at the looming earth below them, and hopped again.

“Guess this is how they move?” Malcolm said. He looked at the creatures again; the both of them who had dropped down from the upper branches and were making a sound—perhaps laughing? They swung up again with envious simplicity, their muscular legs catching each branch they aimed for but did not go far, calling down with sound from these branches in their impossible language. Calling them? Or shouting? Or singing?

After a brief amount of time, they stopped at one tree. The creature with cedar-colored branches grabbed Malcolm’s hand, quite suddenly, and pressed it onto the trunk. It clicked and spoke some more. Then Malcolm looked. The color of his hand was almost identical to the tree. He did not know that this meant or why it was meaningful to the alien, but he looked over at Alletheia, and the aliens, in excited, frantic clicks, leapt towards her. This time, after they spoke frantically at one another, one disappeared, and reappeared moments later. It held a leaf full of water and splashed it against the tree, then grabbed one of Alletheia’s hands and pressed it against the trunk:

The color was a perfect match.

Alletheia and Malcolm looked at each other in disbelief and burst into laughter. “They crazy.”

Malcolm didn’t know why he did what he did next, but he grabbed a claw, one from each of the aliens, and touched them to the cheeks of his face.

“I don’t yet know em,” he said, looking up at Alletheia. “But I like em.”

Alletheia wouldn’t tell him that he looked like a giant goof, holding the claws of two aliens he’d only just met to his cheek like that. But she respected him for it. She couldn’t tell what the aliens thought of it, but they looked at one another and seemed to tolerate Malcolm’s outburst as much as they had tolerated theirs.

They spent the rest of the afternoon leaping through trees, speaking their own languages, but not seeming to care whether or not their words were understood.

Play transcended language.

By sunset, when their energy had waned, Malcolm pointed to the disappearing glint of light, looked at the aliens, and said, “See ya tomorrow,” with his strange grin. The aliens blinked, but did not follow as the two Human children headed back towards town.

When they made it out of the wilderness and to Cedar Woods, Malcolm’s hands suddenly shot out towards Alletheia. She jerked away but wasn’t fast enough, and within a brisk moment the t’mwan had been lifted up from around her neck and was now placed around his.

Alletheia looked at him and then back at the wild. She realized why he was able to take it back so quickly. The t’mwan didn’t seem as heavy as it felt before. The heaviness came from elsewhere—it was in the air, in the unknowing. And now, thrill of the new, a heaviness was with both of them, and this trinket that they were forced to put around their necks was not so important anymore.

“You don’t…you don’t have to do that. It’s mine for today,” she said, hesitantly. She really didn’t want it back—didn’t want to say aloud what her father would do to her if she came home with it.

“Nah,” he grinned widely, showing some of his missing teeth. “I take this thing home so often, they won’t be surprised if I have it in the morning.”

He walked with it a ways before they would have to part to go towards their own homes, the secret of their finding, bubbling in him as bright as new life.

“We good.”

© 2023 Parlei Rivière