Powerful Piece- I Will Only Bleed Here
by Bijan Stephen
I spent last night at a bar, very drunk, trying to figure out what I’d say. I’d spent the day trying to accept what I already knew—that there’d be no indictment, that justice didn’t and never has lived here. I don’t know that she ever will. I’d blind her if I could.
After work, a friend and I split a bottle of wine at some place downtown. We sat outside, in the unseasonable warmth, and I thought about the heat in Ferguson on that Saturday in August, five days after my birthday; that heat from the summer that hasn’t died down. I didn’t tell my friend what I was thinking, but on the way there I told her how my body felt. My mouth is dry, I said, and there’s a lump in my throat. There is a tight low ache in my stomach. “Those are classic symptoms of anxiety,” she replied. The wine didn’t help.
A few summers ago, while I was back at home in Tyler, Texas, after my first year in college—I was 18 then, Michael Brown’s last age—a few friends and I decided to go to the lake. The heat was seasonable then, hot and wet. We jumped in my friend Jamie’s car—he was always the driver—and raced 10 over the speed limit because we were young and invincible and full of life, piss and vinegar. There were a few country families who probably lived near the lake, white and southern, enjoying the water and their watery beers that come in shiny blue cans.
Of course something had to change. I think it started in the air. But suddenly there was yelling and then there was a gun in someone’s hand and I was flying and I couldn’t feel anything but alive, my body on autopilot, thousands of years in the past, still stuck on the savannah plain. There were shots. I was crouched behind Jamie’s car.
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