Rockland ─ Miles Morales

foreword

I was never a child /
I was pulled right out of the
sea / And the salt, it never
left my body.

Chelsea Wolf, They'll Clap When You're Gone

...

     Shannon Dhoerty's face is on the television — a big black thing with a comically sized box on the back, technicolor pixels that blend together, and the triple-colored cords connected to the VHS player. They're too far out to get internet or cable, so the Kensington's survive on tapes and DVDs bought from the flea market, and whatever the library ends up selling for fifty cents. Now, they're watching Charmed, with Freya's face pressed to her mothers stomach, listening to the gurgles and thumps of her heart beating.

     Rockland is settled so far North that at some point, it's basically become the South again. Freya's living in the same house that belonged to her great grandmother, with the same flowered wallpaper and the same burnt tea kettle, with her mother cooking out of the speckled dutch oven. They talk with the ebbs and flows of the slurred speech they've heard from countless sailors, words her momma picked up from the ships.

     "You know, we got magic in us," her mother said, a lady named Jackie with pearlescent blue eyes and eyeliner permanently tattooed onto her creped skin. She wore the same tattered jeans to her job out on the dock everyday, with tank tops covered by windbreaker jackets. Her voice reminded Freya of one of those people you would see on TV, who came from the depths of the Appalachia.

     "Really?" Freya had asked, so excited. She tore herself from her mother's stomach to hear her voice instead. "What kinda magic?"

     Jackie shrugged, "well, what kinds of magic are there?"

     Outside, the sun started to set over their crest in the valley. It cast shadows onto the side of their tin-can house, small enough that they only sometimes felt like sardines. Freya didn't mind, because it smelled like cranberries and the couch was broken in.

     "I dunno," Freya shrugged back. "Like in Avatar. You got fire, air, earth, and water. Which are we?"

     "I suppose we're probably air. I don't got the magic, though, my momma did. And you know things like that skip a generation."

     Freya grinned when she realized what that meant. "You mean I got magic?"

      She remembers the look on her mother's face, clear as day. She could paint it from memory. It wasn't a look of happiness; Jackie was looking at her with pity, so pathetically, like a dog who didn't know it was about to be put down. But there Freya was, grinning like she'd won the greatest prize in the world.

     "Only time will tell," Jackie told her. Freya tried not the think about the grimace when she realized what that meant.