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Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2021 by Dantiel W. Moniz
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Thank you to the editors of the journals where these stories first appeared in different form: “An Almanac of Bones” in Apogee Journal, “Milk Blood Heat” in Ploughshares, “Tongues” in Pleiades, “Feast” in Joyland, “Outside the Raft” in Tin House, “Thicker Than Water” in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, “The Hearts of Our Enemies” in the Yale Review, “Snow” in American Short Fiction, “The Loss of Heaven” in The Paris Review, and “Necessary Bodies” in One Story.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: February 2021
This book was set in 11.5-pt. Scala LF by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-5815-4
eISBN 978-0-8021-5816-1
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
For my mother. For Jason.
And for all of us still finding our way.
Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers.
Real gods require blood.
—Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Contents
Milk Blood Heat
I. Monsters
“Pink is the color for girls,” Kiera says, so she and Ava cut their palms and let their blood drip into a shallow bowl filled with milk, watching the color spread slowly on the surface, small red flowers blooming. Ava studies Kiera. How she holds her hand steady—as if used to slicing herself open—while sunlight falls through the kitchen window and fills her curls with glow. Her mouth is a slim, straight line, but her eyes are wide, green-yellow, unblinking. Strange eyes, Ava’s mother always says with the same pinched grimace usually reserved for pulling plugs of their hair from the bathtub drain.
The girls are at Kiera’s because her parents believe in “freedom of expression,” and they can climb trees and catch frogs and lie on the living room floor with the cushions pulled off the couch, watching cartoons and eating sugary cereal from metal mixing bowls for hours. At Ava’s house they are tomboys, they are lazy, they are getting on her mother’s last nerve. Her mother doesn’t approve of Kiera, but they’ve been friends for two months—ever since late August, when the eighth grade started, and Kiera came up to her during gym and told her: I feel like I’m drowning, and though there was no water in sight, Ava knew what she meant. It was the type of feeling she herself sometimes got, a heaviness, an airlessness, that was hard to talk about, especially with her mother. Trying to name it was like pulling up words from her belly, bucketful after bucketful, all that effort but they never meant what she wanted them to.
This is one of many differences between her and Kiera—that the truth about the two of them changed depending on which mother was telling it—and Ava often wonders if their differences are only because Kiera is white, or if there’s something more. Something beneath the skin. This year she’s become obsessed with dualities, at looking at one thing in two ways: Kiera’s eyes, strange and magic; her own sadness, both imaginary and pulsating.
“Get a spoon,” Kiera says, and from the drawer Ava grabs a large one with slots. She stirs the milk and blood until it is the desired shade, the pink of Kiera’s lips, a soft, hopeful color. They tip the bowl up to their mouths, one after the other, sip-for-sip, until there are only dregs. They wipe pink froth from their faces with the backs of their arms and sit still for a moment, solemn in the wake of what they’ve just done.
“Blood sisters,” Ava murmurs, feeling somehow stretched in time—another sensation she can’t explain. She imagines she can feel Kiera’s blood absorbing into her system, passing through the mucous membrane of her small intestine, assimilating until there is no difference between her blood and her friend’s.
