by Skyelis Tyler
In the dream, I woke up from unconsciousness in a hospital. My mother told me I had had a baby, like those girls in news stories who don’t know any better.
The baby was black. Though I’ve never seen her, I called her Felicia.
The most likely patron was my butch dyke boss, though hardly any explanation at all.
They took her to someplace on the southern tip of Mexico called Cranberry Paradise and when they returned, they picked me up in a mini-van. They handed me a cupcake with the ashes of my baby in it.
I walked home through highways and cried. Inside the cupcake I found a small mouse, dead. We had a horde of kittens who ate away the mouse and then I knew. Felicia didn’t die in Mexico at all; however it happened, it had gone down in a housing project in Pennsylvania.
My baby: I wanted proof. I never wanted her, but I searched for her everywhere.
That morning I woke up bleeding.
