Free Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

loped past her. The brightness of the sun, the sky, the red
dirt of the driveway, the flowering fuchsia and green of the azalea bushes
was blinding after the inside of the house. He slammed into the side of
the trunk of the Caprice and leaned over Dunny, his forearms braced on
the warm metal. Why was it parked? It wasn't enough for him. He needed
motion: he needed to move.
    "Leave it."
    "What the fuck you talking about leave it? We almost done,
young'un."
    "Man, I don't feel like working on it right now. We can work on it
later. You got a cigar?"

    Dunny stood straight, his white T-shirt brown across the stomach
where he had been leaning on the car, his braids tight and clean over
the curve of his skull. Christophe glanced at him and looked away. He
realized his leg was kicking by itself at the tire, rousing red dust in clouds
across his worn white Reeboks.
    "Let's ride," Christophe said.
    "What's wrong with you?"
    The hurt and love and jealousy in Christophe's chest coalesced and
turned to annoyance that bubbled from his throat.
    "Shit, ain't nothing wrong with me." Christophe heard this come
from him in a hiss. "I don't want to talk about it right now. Can we
just go?"
    Dunny closed the trunk. The metal sounded hard and loud, as harsh
as the burning sun, when it clattered shut. Dunny pulled a black from
behind his ear, a lighter from his pocket.
    "You need a smoke." This trailed behind him as he ambled toward his
car. Christophe beat him it, jumped through the window, and slid into
the passenger seat, Dukes of Hazzard style. Sometimes the passenger door
jammed and stuck when he tried to open it. He didn't feel like jiggling
the handle for a good three minutes. Dunny leisurely pulled his own door
shut.
    "Don't be putting your feet on my seat when you jump in the car."
Dunny lit the black and handed it to Christophe.
    "Fuck you."
    Dunny laughed, and the car growled to life. The stereo intoned. The
music shook the air; it squeezed Christophe's throat. Christophe saw
Laila, her shirt pulled tight against her chest, her hand on the front porch
screen door, watching them leave. He pulled on the black, the tip of the
filter hot and malleable between his lips, and felt a cool tingling coat the
simmer in his chest and begin to eat away at it in small bites. He blew out
the smoke, and inhaled deeply on the second toke. As they turned from
the red dirt driveway to the rough gravel of the street, he draped his arm
out the window and tapped the ash away. Three small brown children
with overlarge heads and bony knees were in the ditch as they passed,
picking blackberries and dropping them carefully in large white plastic ice cream buckets. Cece, Dizzy, and Little Man. They jumped when the
bass dropped in quick succession like a trickle of pebbles turned to an
avalanche. The smallest and skinniest one, his belly showing through the
front of his red jumpsuit with the curve of a kickball, dropped his bucket.
When Christophe passed, he could see gnats in small glinting bronze
clouds around their heads, illuminating their bulbous skulls like halos.
Christophe saluted them with his pointer finger, and leaned back into the
seat as Dunny accelerated.

    They rode until the sun set, until it slipped between the chattering
branches of the trees and painted a broad sweep of the sky in the west pink
and red, until the heat wasn't so oppressive in the car. When Christophe
got out at a gas station in Germaine to grab another cigar, he could feel
the heat rising from the concrete of the lot. The streetlight over the gas
pumps had attracted great swarming gangs of large black flying insects
that were intent on racing each other into the bulb and dying. They met
their deaths with loud pops. Christophe bought the cigar and was glad to
get back in the car, to ride away from the buzzing lights, the streetlamps,
the lonely, dusty gas station and the red-faced forlorn attendant, to drive
along the highway on the