1.

Our first day in the projects, I witnessed —— beat his woman bloody in the courtyard while several grown men watched from their doorsteps. I grabbed an aluminum bat—Black Magic—from the house, but my mother would not let me swing. We can’t create problems for ourselves, she whispered. I was fourteen.

2.

$$$$, whom I’d befriended when he first moved down Washington from New York City, stripped a bound man naked and shot him execution-style by a lake. We used to play Madden in my bedroom and smoke weed and chase coño. When I saw his face in the paper, he looked exactly the same yet utterly unrecognizable.

3.

My ex-girlfriend’s uncle had raped her. We were dating when he got out. I used to walk past his house with a revolver in my pocket, but the time was never right to kill him. Should I have? At the least, me and the homies could’ve left him slumped in some alley. Is that a worthy regret?

4.

####, who I’m on my way to visit for the first time in four years, was involved in a drunken brawl that left one man irrevocable. He calls every few weeks, and I can’t help but hear the same kid who packed my mother’s entire apartment inside a U-Haul and drove her across town for me when I was off at NYU, too busy getting an education to return to the slums, the womb, that raised me. Most folk meet their graves before a friend like that.

5.

My father killed a man down Texas. Almost hanged for it. After an episodic drama I hope to one day make a film, they let him off on self-defense. He stayed in Dallas another five years before heading back North and meeting my mother. I often wonder if he left me an older brother down there, a face like my face with a heart just as broken.

6.

****, who made me laugh more than anyone, overdosed on heroin. We got shot at together once, by the friends of this dude whose baby mother **** had stolen. A gang of niggas fired into the woman’s house,where we sat drinking, while the jealous ex’s daughter danced around us. She wore a pink dress and tinfoil tiara. I never felt so sure of God as in that moment, because I never seen something so wrong.

7.

I went looking to kill men three times. The first, I knocked on this white boy’s door, gun loaded. His girl answered, dazed by the bright winter sun. Where he at? I asked. Police come took him to jail. Well you tell him I said…tell him I said what?

8.

^^^^ and !!!! killed —— and @@@@, and everybody knew it. ^^^^ is serving a life sentence now, six or seven kids spread out across the country like rain. He did not rat on !!!!. When —— died, girls I knew cried. But I only remembered that first day in the projects. I only remembered the blood on his girlfriend’s face.
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David Wade received his MFA from the University of Michigan. His fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review Online and Kweli Journal. Follow him on social media @kdavidwade. 

Photo by Paul Bilger