Nehemiah’s mother was a short lady, wearing the fat of the rich along with all the jewelry too. She had long, blonde hair though and in her face was the remnant of a woman who George guessed must have been quite nice to look at when she was he and Chito’s age. She met them at the door on the day they were to board the train to Jackson wearing a white house dress. When she opened the door, she just stood there in the frame for a moment taking George in. She even put her right hand on her hip and her left on her chin, pondering openly about them as the door swung in and hit the wall beside her. After a beat, she spoke directly to Chito.

“Now Nehemiah told me you were bringing your brother,” she said.

“Yes, yes, ma’am,” Chito stuttered, giving a quick nervous glance over to George. “Well, he is basically my brother.”

“But he looks about white, Chito,” she said with a long drawl on the first syllable of his name and a sharp upwards movement of the final vowel. George figured she was from somewhere else with the accent she had, but he had no clue where it might be. George looked at his friend who seemed to be lost for words.

“Miss, um,” George said.

“Joy. Miss Joy.”

“Miss Joy, my mammy was Choctaw just like Chito here. But I didn’t know my pa, and still don’t think I know him. But by the color of my skin and a few things people have said to me, I can only guess he was or is white.”

“Mm,” she grunted, before smiling lightly at him. “And what would your name be?”

“George, ma’am. My name is George.”

She nodded and, apparently considering this all satisfactory, turned and walked back into her home, raising her right hand and moving it just enough to indicate the boys were to follow her in. They followed her down a long hallway that was dark from lack of windowlight until they came to a parlor in the back of the house on their left that was nearly all windows on two of its walls and which looked to lead off to another room. 

“George, please have a seat here in the parlor. Chito, you come on in here with me first.”

And so George did what she asked. He watched his friend enter the open doorway off from the parlor and saw the mirror on the wall then and the bench of makeup and then she went in behind him and closed the door and George was left to his thoughts. 

He took to looking around the room from his seat, afraid to get up and touch anything in case it might go missing and he get blamed, or even getting caught looking around and being accused of the desire to make something go missing. The room was full of knick-knacks, just like the kind that he knew his friend made. There were at least seven different types of birds that he could count of varying size. Some looked so small that he’d be worried about breaking them if he was offered to hold one. Beside him was an identical chair to the one he was placed in. He hadn’t noticed as he was sitting down, but it was a beautiful thing. Its seat and back cushions were green with beautiful red embroidery that looked like trees and bushes against a lush forest. 

All was quiet in the room and the rest of the house that he would’ve been able to hear for some time. He guessed at least a half hour. And then, the door opened again. His friend emerged from the room and stepped into the light of the parlor and George had to stop himself from sneering at the boy. He was white, that was for sure. 

“Don’t laugh at me,” Chito said, seeing his mostly failed attempt at keeping it together. “You have to do it too.”

George heard Miss Joy calling his name from the room but he couldn’t see her. Chito said it was his turn so he got up and made his way past his friend, still smiling at his transformation. 

“Who’s whitey now?” He whispered in Chito’s ear as he passed him. 

When he entered the powder room, he was met with a myriad of smells, most of them floral in some way. He turned and closed the door behind him, seeing a quick view of his friend trying to look at himself in the reflection in the window glass, before turning around and surveying the place. George saw chairs to his right with pink upholstery and a row of mirrors that went the entire length of the room, much longer than he could see from his angle outside, with a bench in front of them the whole way down. The room was long and narrow and at the very back was a baby blue curtain that seemed to section off another part of the room that he assumed couldn’t be very large unless the house really did go on forever in the way that it seemed to. He felt that he might get a headache if he was in this house, or at least this part of it, for too much longer from the sensory overload of smells and colors around him. But, with all of that going on, there was no sign of the matron of the house anywhere in the room. 

“Miss Joy?” He called out as he started to look around for any other doors he might have missed. Just then, he heard a rustle from the back of the room behind that curtain.

“George, just one moment,” she responded from back there. “Please, make yourself comfortable.”

He sat down then in one of those chairs with the pink cloth. They seemed to be extra cushioned, and he couldn’t help but feel comfortable. He sat there and waited for a couple of minutes and she didn’t come out, despite a random rustling sound every once in a while. Eventually, he got so comfortable sitting there that he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Within just a moment, he was asleep. 

George woke to a touch on his thigh, a gentle caress. He opened his eyes, with his head still back, and didn’t see anything but ceiling at first. But when he lifted his head off the top of the chair and lowered his gaze, he couldn’t believe what he was looking at. Miss Joy was there, on her knees in front of him, one hand on his thigh slowly moving a finger up and down on it, and she was as naked as the day she was born. She had put extra makeup on her face to make her cheeks pink and rosy and her breasts hung there in front of him plump and soft like something he’d never seen before. And he hadn’t. Not really. His view of her stopped just above her naval, but behind her he could see in the mirror her back and buttocks and legs and feet down there on the ground. 

He started to say something, but she reached up and placed the hand that had been on his thigh to his lips and whispered a shush. When she moved her arm, he couldn’t help but to see her corresponding breast jiggle and he couldn’t hardly believe what he was looking at. He wondered if he was dreaming still.

“Am I dreaming?” He asked aloud, on accident. 

She looked like she might laugh, but the face she was making that he’d later recognize to be an attempt at sultry did not break. 

“Don’t sound an alarm,” she said, still whispering. “If you do, I’ll say you forced yourself on me. Do you hear me?”

George thought for a moment. Her southern drawl was so awful and drawn out that his first thought was that he could stand to never hear her speak again. But here was a woman, a full-grown woman, naked in front of him. Alas. 

“Yes ma’am,” he said, his own voice coming out of him like there was a ghost inside that had been waiting to take control of him at some point, and the point had been reached. When he said this, she smiled and winked at him and proceeded to yank at his pants legs to get them off. He felt compelled to help her with this, to make things easier for her so that the woman could maintain some amount of decency and keep up that shroud of whatever it is you’d call that she was putting up. With his trousers off, she leaned back for a moment.

“That’ll do,” she said. Then she leaned forward again, taking his privates in her hands and putting her mouth to them. He felt like squirming all the way out of the chair and into the dirt and just dying and staying there but there was nowhere to go and it wasn’t all that bad after all and eventually he felt like putting his head back again and closing his eyes. 

After some amount of time, he felt her stop and he looked back down and she got up from her knees. Her stomach appeared above his legs and she would have been less appealing to him, had she not immediately climbed on top of him and made his view nothing but breasts. For the next few minutes, she rode him on that chair with the pink upholstery that surely her husband had made, or at least had ordered someone else to make like her very own son or Chito. And she told him to let her know when he was close and at first he had not the slightest idea what she meant by that but when the time came he understood and told her and she stood up off of him and he excreted onto his leg for the first time in his life. 

“Can’t have no mixed babies, no I cannot,” she said, standing over him watching it happen. Then she turned around and grabbed a rag and handed it to him and told him to clean up. Once he’d wiped his leg off and pulled his pants back on, tucking his shirt back into them, he looked up to see the woman standing there with powder and a brush in her hands. She must’ve noticed the look on his face because she stopped and smiled and spoke with an air of detachment he’d rightly never seen.

“Did you forget the reason you came over here, honey?” 

It only took a few minutes to make him a shade whiter and for her to feel satisfied with her work. She leaned back and looked at him real hard. She turned around and placed her tools back on the counter and he tried to stand up but she turned back to him and placed a hand on his chest to stop him. Then she leaned in and kissed him one time. He realized then that this was the first time she’d kissed him throughout the whole thing. 

“That was fun. Don’t get hurt down there in Jackson and we ought to do it again,” she said with her nose nearly pressed to his. Then she backed up and went back to her business, seeming to forget about him completely. 

So, George stood up and checked himself over one more time, shaking his head at his own reflection. There was no time to consider the damage. He headed out to the parlor where Chito sat there. Chito looked him over and George thought he saw a trace of a laugh on his face but nothing else and his friend asked him what took him so darn long. He just shrugged instead of trying to think up a lie and they headed out to catch the train to Jackson.

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The Walls Are Closing In On Us is available now from Malarkey Books. You can order a copy here.

Joshua Trent Brown is a writer from a small town in North Carolina. Website: joshuatrentbrown.com