The Orange Houses by Paul Griffin Page A

around by the highway. No sight of Fatima.”
    â€œYou’re a good man.”
    â€œYeah? There’s things y’all don’t know about me. Mik, I watched people die over there. I didn’t stop the killing.”
    â€œJimmi, you didn’t start it.”
    â€œI wonder, kid. I ask myself. Is it worth it, the living? Why bother, you know?”
    â€œSit with me. Give me that gun.”
    He did.
    It was a lot heavier than she’d have thought. She set it behind her, pushed it out of reach. “Hold my hand. Without you, I wouldn’t have met Fatima. Without you, Fatima wouldn’t have met the kids at the hospital. Without you, people wouldn’t have smiled that day you stood on the mailbox and set the angels flying.”
    â€œI just wanna be someplace bright and clean,” he said.
    â€œI’m-a take you there. Close your eyes. Squeeze my hand tight now, we gonna fly. If an ocean.”
    â€œIf an ocean.”
    â€œNot the shore, Jimmi. The water. Not in it. Above it. We’re dancing on it. We soaring now, thirty feet over the seas—”
    â€œNo land in sight, middle of the night, but lit bright, every star a kite, planets burning might.”
    Mik bopped her head to Jimmi’s mix. “Nobody’s uptight. There you go, man.”
    â€œPeople be playing, everybody saying, ‘reeling this day in, to my heart, my heart, my heart.’ Where we at now, Mik?”
    â€œOh we far, far out now, Jimmi. Just the warm wind and us. See them waves?”
    â€œBig as countries. Rolling the moon. I’m reaching up—”
    â€œReach up, Jimmi.”
    â€œI’m grabbing two moonbeams.”
    â€œOutta sight.”
    â€œThey’re our surfboards, Mik.”
    â€œWe flying off the top of that moon wave, man. We’re way high now. The world’s small. We in the sea of space.”
    â€œThe sea of space.”
    â€œAnd the stars are our people. Everyone sparkles. Everybody you ever loved and who was kind to you is with us.”
    â€œJulyssa?”
    â€œShe’s with us, Jimmi.”
    â€œMy baby?”
    â€œShe’s with us.” Mik shut her eyes to see it all. “Out here the party goes on all night to the tune of a sweet-strummed guitar. There are no accidents out here. No injuries, no fighting, no hunger. When folks smile, you feel like they’re hugging you. Out here promises are kept. The snow never turns to slush, nobody’s sick, and everybody has a nice safe house and Moms doesn’t have to work so hard and nobody’s lonely and nobody fears and I can hear it all pain free.” She opened her eyes.
    Jimmi nodded. “What all you hear, angel?”
    Mik smiled. “What’s real.”

chapter 38
    JIMMI
    The hanging . . .
    Jimmi and Mik rushed through the streets toward the VA hospital where they would find medical attention and—please—Fatima teaching her class.
    â€œIf she’s not there, we’ll call my apartment,” Mik said. “You got quarters? Lost my phone in the cave.”
    â€œSecurity guard’ll let us use a phone,” he said.
    â€œAfter that, we check her house.”
    â€œAfter that, we call the cops.”
    â€œShe’ll freak, we get the police out looking for her.”
    â€œNo choice. And anyway the police ain’t mandatory reporters.” Not yet, he almost said.
    â€œYou said Fatima and I were gonna create the most beautiful thing in the world,” Mik said.
    â€œYou did.”
    â€œThe Liberty we painted on the PD garage? It wasn’t that good.”
    He shook no. “You still haven’t figured it out. The bombs can fall and waste us, but what you two made will last forever.”
    â€œThat’s him, the dude on the TV,” some cat said to his boy as Mik and Jimmi passed. The men were scoring malt forties on the tailgate of a parked car.
    Jimmi followed the men’s eyes to Mik’s lips and