The smell of roast duck hung in the air like a heavy fog – thick, buttery, laced with sharp cinnamon sweetness. To anyone else, that aroma promised celebration, family warmth. But sitting at the head of my own dining table, it was just a cruel reminder of my helplessness.
The scent of my own starvation. I stared at my plate—bone-white china with gold trim that caught the chandelier light. Part of a set William and I bought in the French Quarter forty years ago.
We’d laughed that day, worried the porcelain wouldn’t survive the flight home. Now the plate was empty. Perfectly, mockingly clean.
Where my hand should have rested on the linen tablecloth sat a heavy plaster cast instead. It felt cold and alien, like a stone tied to my body, dragging me into ocean depths. The swelling under the rough plaster throbbed with malicious rhythm.
Every heartbeat sent dull, aching spikes through my forearm, shooting to my shoulder and settling at my neck base. Radius fracture with displacement. I knew the diagnosis before seeing the X-ray.
I’d spent thirty years as a trauma surgeon—I knew the sound of bone giving way. That dry, sickening snap like a dead branch cracking in winter storm when Tavarius shoved me into the doorframe. “Come on, y’all.
Don’t be shy.” Tavarius’s voice, loud and dripping with unearned entitlement, rolled through the room, drowning out polite silverware clinking. “The duck today is magnificent. Javisha really outdid herself.”
Tavarius sat in my husband’s seat—the high-backed mahogany chair upholstered in dark velvet.
He looked ridiculous there, like a child playing king. He’d unbuttoned his charcoal suit jacket, belly pressing against his white shirt. His face was already shiny from room heat and liquor he’d consumed since noon.
He wielded his knife and fork with barbaric energy, sawing huge chunks and shoveling them into his mouth, barely chewing. Grease ran down his chin, wiped carelessly with the back of his hand. Around the table sat his guests—two men in ill-fitting suits and a woman from City Housing.
They ate in terrified silence, eyes glued to plates like the universe’s secrets were written in gravy. They felt the tension hanging thick as Delta humidity before a storm. They saw me—gray-haired Black woman with straight back and cast, sitting without a crumb—but they were paralyzed.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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