She may have looked completely black, but Alyssa was really only half African. Her mother was a second-generation immigrant of pure Irish decent and her father was superlatively African, which accounted entirely for her dark pigmentation.

Her hair was naturally auburn and cut just underneath her ears and, like most of her facial features, it looked Caucasian, not stringy and curly like most African hair. Her lips were pert but very thin, and her nose was delicate, more like a cavernous, seedless strawberry than button, which was what her mother said that it resembled. Her eyes were large and almost entirely painted a fiery orange shade of brown, but when she moved them to look at something without also moving her head the white of her cornea struck out ghastly against her dark face. She hated the way that looked, so she moved her head like an owl around company, always looking straightforward and turning her neck to spy things out of her immediate plane of view. Of course, she would move her eyes every once in a while, no matter how careful she was, and if she caught anybody looking at her without smiling afterward she would shield herself and her eyes from them with her hand and look down at the floor until they were out of sight, no matter how long it took.

Culturally, she was about as Caucasian as a woman could be. Her dialect was flawless Middle American and her grammar was as proper as a headmaster’s. Her mother equated certain idiosyncrasies to the influence of Negroes, and Alyssa was punished as a child if she spoke out of turn, ever asked for anything that was brightly colored or had too much sugar in it, skipped rope, sang songs that followed a definable rhythm, or braided her hair.

Her mother was not a racist, at least as far as she understood the term, so much as she was xenophobic. She made it clear that she hated no one based on race, though she was certainly afraid of black people. You didn’t have to hate someone just because you feared them, rationally or otherwise, she would explain, and this was why she took such great care to ensure that she never ran into the company of dark skinned people, even if it meant never taking public transportation and long detours to avoid “bad” neighborhoods.

How it happened then that she was impregnated by a black man was not a matter of rape, which she often claimed and which people often assumed without asking, though it was also not a matter of love. Her pregnancy and Alyssa’s birth were both brought about due to necessity; namely that of her not wanting to spend any time in prison. Her father, Alyssa’s grandfather, had strong ties with some rather smalltime crime in their community which included but was not limited to: stolen cigarettes, venal policemen, and a whorehouse outside of city limits that everybody knew about but no one spoke of. She ignored her grandfather’s criminality until at age seventeen, as a recent high school dropout, she decided to pursue an exciting career as a drug mule. The pay was fantastic and she would get to travel. She failed awkwardly and miserably, though, needlessly offering herself for arrest before even crossing the border, and was informed while awaiting a bail hearing that since the privately owned and operated company that provided health care for the state’s prisons was so poorly run if they found that she was pregnant she would be sent home to await trial under minimum surveillance. An unpleasant but not horrible series of trysts were clinically scheduled between herself and a county jail guard and Alyssa was born nine months later to a mother who had since broken her own nose, dyed her hair, and changed all three of her names twice over. Her mother settled into a life consisting of mildly laborious factory work and television while Alyssa settled into public education, where she met Terefy as classmate, fell in love, and at his behest left school before graduation even though she was getting good marks.

She hadn’t been the same since the stillbirth.

And it was a stillbirth, too, not the miscarriage that everybody assumed it was when they brusquely corrected her medical ignorance. It had nothing to do with how the pregnancy was terminated, the doctor told her after Terefy had struck two parked cars in the hospital parking lot, screaming though she was silent, rubbing sweat away from the cusp of his Adam’s apple and forming long sentences that contained only nouns and verbs. “Run baby house jump. Penny loafers, shoe sky moon. Fountain water air handle ran.” He was taken away and she explained to the doctor that her baby had died a miscarriage and he told her that no, as late in pregnancy that she was it was called a stillbirth. She spent the next few months correcting everybody’s error, even her husband, who thought that a miscarriage sounded more like the mess of blood and goo she had described than a stillbirth, which aroused in his mind the sight of a cold and clean baby born without tears.

Her mother worked nights and slept in the mornings and sat in the afternoons drinking coffee and watching television. During the mornings and at night, if she had any problems that needed immediate attention, her effective guardian was the building’s superintendent, a man with gray hair and thick glasses who seemed physically more suited for work in an office than maintaining an apartment building. He was a stupid man, scientifically tested as existing well below average intelligence, though he was very kind and treated his obese wife well. The greatest thing that he ever accomplished with his life, he said, since he couldn’t have children and since he wasn’t allowed in the army, was writing a poem that came to him a dream that was once published in a magazine, which no one had the heart to tell him was actually a mail-order compilation of amateur poetry sold only to the poets it published. He would repeat the poem often and Alyssa could still remember it to this day.

“Bugger hats and ladybugs

The cricket jumps

The grasshopper flies

And hungry birds with beady eyes.”

“Whoever you meet, they’re going to be food someday. And everything you see, it’s going to be food someday. Everybody wants to eat everything else.” He told her.

“Do you want to eat me?”

“No, sweetheart, no people want to eat you. But worms, when you’re in the ground, they want to eat you. And then birds want to eat the worms. Or maybe you get eaten by dirt that turns to grass that feeds the bugs that feed the birds that feed the kitty cats.”

Thinking about one day being food actually made the girl feel happy. Someday good would certainly come from her and she could picture herself as part of a grassy meadow. Whenever she saw the sunset, even at a very young age, she would thank everyone and everything that had died and been eaten to make the scene so beautiful.

As a student she seemed vibrant and playful, the kind of girl who seemed so happy with herself that despite her good looks most boys didn’t pay much sexual interest to; she seemed to confident to take proper advantage of. She wore cheap clothing with the flare of designer wear and styled her hair in the plainest but most playful fashions and although it required only minimal effort every morning, it had more zest to it than the expensive designs and tedium that covered the heads of all of her female classmates. Her spirit wasn’t free from the crass superficiality of her peers, it was just set in another standard of it. That is why people avoided her. She was like an incredibly desirable cassette tape that could only be played in a foreign machine or a very cheap and powerful sedan that only runs on leaded fuel, perfection with an invisible underlying flaw perceptually implied, not worth the assumed effort.

Terefy was the first man to ever show serious interest in her. In the springtime their High School served lunch outdoors and Alyssa would always sup quiet and unnoticed beneath one of the sycamores that lined the school’s athletic field, reading to herself. Waiting one afternoon in a slow-moving line for his choice of a hotdog or a hamburger, each served from a steamer pot with salad tongs, placed upon two slices of white bread next to mashed potatoes, Terefy allowed a polite teacher to cut in front of him. She joked that he was being obsequious and that it would not result in a better grade, which made Terefy forget where he was and picture his Uncle Solomon. Solomon chugged from his jar like an animal for a short while, and when he noticed his nephew staring at him he wiped his face with his greasy T-shirt and belched loudly. He hadn’t been up to much lately, he said, and he asked Terefy how he had been. Terefy didn’t answer but Solomon nodded his head approvingly nonetheless. Solomon said goodbye and Terefy found himself sitting under a sycamore tree next to the most beautiful girl he had ever laid eyes upon, and he told her this, and about his Uncle who he saw whenever a certain word was mentioned, and that he wanted to have lunch with her again tomorrow. She listened to him with a smile, not knowing what to make of a strange daydreamer wandering over to her and babbling his head off. He could have been crazy. He could have been playing a mean joke. By the time lunch had ended she felt like she trusted him, though, and when she found him at the sycamore waiting for her the next day she realized that his intentions were upfront and listened with reverence to every word that he had to say to her. For three days she listened to him talk. They had both fallen in love.

Outside on the windowsill a small yellow kind of bird that she had never seen before, not in her whole life, pecked at the seed she had placed for robins. It was about the size of a medium robin, its eyes and center of its breast were feathered white and down its back was a thick black stripe, but the rest of the bird was completely yellow. Synthetic yellow. The kind of yellow that she had seen before in highlighter markers and on powdered lemonade packages, not in nature, not in sunsets or flowers. It was a darker yellow than a dandelion, a yellow bolder than a dying leaf. Her superintendent’s poem came to mind. The front door opened and Terefy, followed two feet behind by Phillip, walked in wearing their dusty work uniforms.

“I hope you made enough dinner for three!” Her husband exclaimed.

She smiled shyly, abashedly thought Phillip. She was wearing an elaborate but domestic dress, the kind of garment Phillip would have had an easier time of recognizing were it black and white, the way that seeing color stills taken from the set of “I Love Lucy” always seemed fake in comparison to his grainy and gray memories. The dress had a floral print of yellow and red and it looked like it might have been hand sewn. As out of place as it may have been it was still incredibly formal, considering her meek expression of greeting seemed to suggest that Terefy had not told her beforehand that he would be bringing home a guest for dinner. That dress was what she wore on normal occasions. A housedress. He didn’t even know that they really existed.

After a long and awkward pause Terefy acted startled and rushed an introduction, like someone mocking the whole process of introductions. “Phillip, this is Alyssa. Honey, this is Phillip, the guy I work with now.”

Phillip leaned in to shake her hand and she obliged. Her skin was firm and her grip was strong. Her eyes sparkled and the submissive look was gone.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Phillip. He’s been talking about you for a while now.”

“It’s very nice to meet you, too. You seem to be all Terefy ever talks about yourself.”

They were both lying. Phillip didn’t know that Terefy was married until he noticed a wedding band a few days before and he wasn’t told of Alyssa until they had dropped off the van at Lanwire and were in Terefy’s Oldsmobile heading to their apartment. Terefy had mentioned Phillip twice to Alyssa, the first time when he first started working with him and again just a week ago when Phillip had done something that Terefy thought was funny.

“Soup’s on with bread and bacon. That and there’s some chicken breasts, too. I might need to stick some more bread in really quick but there should be enough food for everyone. Let me go check.”

Terefy and Alyssa walked into the kitchen, leaving Phillip standing by the doorway not knowing what to do. His work uniform was smelly from dried sweat. The apartment they were wiring had been getting unbearably hot and although the building’s owner had agreed to let them turn on the air conditioning the only unit in the apartment was in the room they were currently wiring and unable to receive power. It was hotter in the apartment than it was outside, in the van, at Lanwire, in the halls of apartment building, or here in Terefy’s apartment. The work wasn’t physically arduous, but having even to pay attention to the wiring made Phillip sweat. The sweat would stick and dry quickly as soon as he left the apartment, which left hard and crusty patches colored a darker shade of blue under his armpits and a nearly invisible ring of sweat around his collar that smelled funny, like a storm cellar or old books that had been held in a damp place. Phillip lifted his collar to his nose and sniffed it, taking in a deep breath. Terefy’s apartment was clean and well kept. Domestic. He didn’t picture the goofy, puffy haired Terefy living in such a decent place. Terefy seemed like he would be more at home surrounded by piles old magazines and yellowed newspapers, couches with white foam pouring from tears and a sink full of dirty dishes. This carpet was thick and blue, and the walls of the apartment weren’t the depressingly textured plain white of most apartments, they were painted to match the carpeting. The furniture was nice, middle class, direct from a full color department store circular where well-dressed white children would have been sitting on the love seat and paying while their father sprawled himself along the sofa smiling at them. There was no television in their living room.

The crusty patches below his arms started to itch. He couldn’t take off his suit though, since underneath he was wearing only a white tank top that probably had holes in it. If Terefy’s apartment had been as Phillip pictured it, then the tank top would have been no problem, but this place was too nice. His work outfit matched their carpeting and walls and distanced him from them, in a way, if they grew tired of his company or if he did something to upset his hosts they could just pretend that he was a repairman or a cable man or deliveryman. He wasn’t a guest in his work clothes, he didn’t have to act like one.

He pulled his collar away from his nose and took in the smell of the apartment. In the air was the mild odor of rotten meat that he always associated with bachelor apartments. It was the kind of odor that he always smelt when he was with other men but never around women, and it clashed with the austere of the place. Terefy walked in from the kitchen holding two large glass tumblers filled with a dark soda. He didn’t seem to find it odd that Phillip was still standing by the door as he handed him his drink and offered him a seat on the couch.

“How do you like the place?”

“It’s nice. Really nice. A lot nicer than I expected.”

Terefy looked confused. He wasn’t sure if Phillip’s comment was a compliment or an insult. He pointed down. “Like this?”

“The couch?”

“Yeah. Just paid it off.”

“It’s nice.”

Phillip drew the tumbler to his face and took his first sip of the soda. It was diet something or other and tasted simultaneously bitter and sweet the way that artificial sweeteners do to people not accustomed to them. He winced and puckered, drawing his lips sharply to one side as a reflex. Terefy could feel his evening slipping away and his eyes filled with what Phillip thought was looked like genuine, honest to god sadness: widened and moist yet completely focused and concerned. He knew then that the dinner must have meant something to Terefy, something more than it meant to himself. What could it have been? What secret motive could he have possibly had inviting him over to dinner so abruptly, insisting to take the silent drive to the apartment in one car, not offering to stop so that Phillip could get a change of clothes or maybe a shower. A picture of unionization flashed in Phillip’s head, Terefy as Charles Foster Kaine or Jimmy Hoffa’s outline now taller and bloated sticking comically above the grass at Shea Stadium. Terefy’s eyes grew more desperate and he seemed to stammer for speech, looking straight at Phillip’s face. This was the simple look of desperation that a child would have after being refused candy because he had been bad. This look was without pretense, really worried that he would slam down the glass of diet soda and scream and never show his face around Terefy again. There was no way this was about anything so romantically literate as unionizing, it had to be about something else. Was he onto Phillip’s licensure and had brought him here to confront him? No, that wouldn’t explain his forthright kindness. Terefy’s eyes grew even more desperate as the silence persisted and since Phillip had no other immediate theories he decided to change subjects quickly. Whatever Terefy wanted he would figure it out soon enough.

“Nice wife you have there.”

Terefy looked down at Phillip’s glass of soda and smiled, almost forcing up a giggle but coming out with a blunt whisper of agreement.

“You two been married long?”

He kept looking at Phillip’s soda. To prove that there was no problem, Phillip took a big swig, braced this time for the foul taste, and made no special facial gesture. This seemed to relieve his host exponentially. Terefy straightened back against his seat and answered Phillip. “Yeah, we’ve been together really long. Since high school actually.”

Alyssa called from the kitchen and Terefy sprung to his feet, motioning for Phillip to follow. The kitchen was long and narrow, carpeted the same as the living room. The door leading from the living room opened facing the kitchen sink and the men had to walk around Alyssa down the narrow preparation pathway to where the room widened a little, housing a small circle table that stood on newer looking metal legs and was finished in a 1950’s green paisley pattern. The chairs were tiny and Formica, barely able to hold Phillip’s ass and he marveled at how Terefy’s much more ample frame could have held its balance. The back of his chair ended a half foot above his natural waist and pushed hard against his back. He rocked himself into the most comfortable position he could attain, his back held straight and his chest sucked in against the grated metal lining the side of the table. Alyssa sat a steaming loaf of reheated bread onto the center of the table, near a glass pan holding several skinless chicken breasts and a pot of soup. She sat directly across the table from her husband, right next to Phillip. She bowed her head to pray.

“She does this.” Terefy said in a plain speaking voice, embarrassingly explaining to his friend that what he was seeing happening was indeed happening, as if she were conducting a black mass at the table or slaughtering a lamb before taking her seat. Phillip nodded and Alyssa finished her prayer, lifting up her head and reaching for the cut loaf of bread.

“He doesn’t like my saying grace.”

“I don’t not like it, I just don’t do it anymore and I don’t think that anybody really does it anymore.”

“I do.” She handed Phillip a bowl of soup and motioned for him to pass it to her husband. Terefy expected the bowl and nodded.

“I like it. I like the way you pray before eating, I really do. I think it’s cute. But some people might not expect it, is all.”

Alyssa handed Phillip a cup of soup as he spoke across the table. “I really don’t mind. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people still say grace.”

“When I do it, it’s a crime.” Her eyes were focused on passing food around the table, she didn’t look up when she spoke.

Phillip found her indifference while professing victimhood to be disconcerting, and so as Terefy started to talk to him about an old building he had once wired he tried again to figure out why he had been invited. There had been rumblings from other employees about a management change at the main office, but Terefy hadn’t mentioned anything.

“What about those things going on at the main office? Something about a new boss or something? You heard anything about that?”

Terefy seemed confused, having been cut off mid story. “I really haven’t heard enough to say.”

“You haven’t, really? Everybody’s been talking about it. You know, not out in the open but whenever there’s no one really around.”

“”No, I don’t know about it. If something happens, it happens.”

“What happens?” Alyssa asked.

“There’s some people saying that Mr. Langstonhewitt might have to merge the company soon.”

“Who wants an electric company?”

“He’s got some gas stations and car washes, too. What I’ve heard is that it’s just a downswing right now since there’s really not any private interests that want to get any wiring done because no one has money to do so, and something about laws saying that they don’t need to have wiring checked as much as they used to, which is bullshit. But they got enough money, I’ve heard, from secured contracts so I really don’t know what to think, like I said.”

“Ever think about doing a union?” Phillip asked.

“Like a wiring union?”

“Yeah.”

“We couldn’t form one. The reason anybody works for Langstonhewitt these days is because they can’t get into the union. It’s all bullshit and politics and stuff. We don’t need Union assholes telling us how to work.”

Phillip was tapped out of ideas and Terefy had forgotten what story he was telling. Alyssa coughed a little and put her hand to her throat.

“Wrong pipe.” She said with a small smile, taking a sip from her glass of water.

“The soup?” Asked Terefy, seeming to question the validity of his wife’s complaint. Had it really gone down the wrong pipe?

“No, the chicken.”

Terefy nodded, satisfied with her response. Phillip found himself talking without thinking; not waiting to swallow before opening his mouth. “You buy this chicken at the supermarket.?

Alyssa nodded.

“’Cus it tastes really good.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank the chicken.”

Terefy laughed.

“No, seriously. These chickens were female. Know how I know?”

Alyssa shook her head, seeming interested.

“Because most every chicken you eat, if you buy it at the store, is a female. They only keep the females mostly, to lay eggs.”

“Makes sense” Said Terefy, enjoying Phillip’s conversation.

“When they’re born, you know how they sort them out, the boys and girls. The little baby chicks?”

“Boys to the left, girls to right?” Terefy joked.

Phillip smiled, shoving a fork full of chicken into his mouth. He panicked. Why was he telling them this? He didn’t want to upset them. He feigned chewing a tough piece of chicken to afford himself some time to figure out what he wanted to say. He swallowed, took a drink of his diet soda, and kept on reciting his conversation. “No. Not at all. They have this guy who sits on a line and they bring all the chicks by him, he picks them up and sees if they’re boys or girls. Girls go down the line further, boys do not.”

“Makes sense.”

“Yeah, but you know what they do with the boys?”

Terefy and Alyssa shook their heads.

“They just throw them in a big garbage bag. One by one. Don’t kill them or anything, they just throw them into a Hefty bag and let them suffocate on top of one another, real slowly. Horrible, really.”

He took another bite. Terefy’s smile went away but was not replaced with a look of panic or confusion. His face was simply blank. Void. Static and confused, thoughtless and frightened. Had his story made that much of an impact?

“That isn’t how they used to it. I heard. They used to kill them a lot more humanely.”

Phillip shifted his glare to his side, toward Alyssa, who looked as emotionally disinterested with him as she did when they first sat down to eat.

“Yeah, I know. Is Terefy okay?”

“You just probably said something that made him think of something else. He does that. You said ‘Hefty Bag’ and now he’s off somewhere else. “

“I’m confused, is he dreaming or something?”

“I can’t explain it. But back to the chickens, it’s funny you brought that up because my Uncle used to raise them, he had a farm, and he’d let the egg laying hens grow all old and fat until they could barely walk and then he’d kill them, real humanely, after a nice life. They used to sit all night in the chicken coop and sing. They say you don’t hear them singing anymore.”

Phillip was still looking at Terefy, his eyes sunk into his cheeks and a little ring of spittle forming around his lips. He turned again towards Alyssa, who was staring right at him, and for the first time he took a good look at her. She was beautiful, he thought. Stunning. He had never been so immediately attracted to a black woman before that he had met in person. Her teeth were showing a little bit, bright white against her cheeks. Her hair rolled down to her shoulders and curled up like reverse J’s. He wanted to reach out and touch it.

“And those birds, the meat was so good. Today you can really tell white meat from dark meat it’s all just gray and kind of sludge. Back then you really could. My mother didn’t ever want me eating chicken though, said that I wasn’t allowed to. So my uncle would always fix a plate up special for me either before my mother got there or after she had left, I staid at his house a lot in the summers.”

“Was he your father’s brother?”

“Nope. My Mother’s.”

“She didn’t really have a father.” Phillip turned and faced Terefy, his face again bright and shining, as if he hadn’t even been staring at the ceiling.

“Are you alright?”

“Me?” Asked Terefy.

“Yeah.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because you were just looking at the ceiling there and not saying anything for like two minutes. It looked kind of like you fell asleep—“

Alyssa hastily interrupted and Phillip turned to hear her speak. “I never met my real father. He worked where my mother worked and they never were really together. My mother was white. She never wanted me to act black so I never got to eat chicken, because she said that was what black people ate, even though she ate it all the time and she was white.”

“That’s horrible.”

“No, like I said, my Uncle would give me chicken when I wanted it.”

“But didn’t it go deeper than the chicken, her not wanting you to act black.”

“Not back then, not that I cared about. Chicken back then tasted better, it was raised better, like you were talking about. Back then all I cared about was the chicken. “

Phillip finished his meal and excused himself to the restroom. When he had finished, Terefy showed him his stereo and record collection and then drove him back to Lanwire. Phillip thought about asking Terefy again about his seizure or whatever, but decided it would be best not to. Terefy told him about voltage drop and he half-listened, trying to get Alyssa off his mind. He thought about asking Terefy how they had met but he decided not to. Terefy dropped him off at the building and sped away before he had taken two steps to his car. He smiled the whole ride home.