NATHANAEL JONES

TWIN

I realized I had forgotten, or perhaps it's more accurate to say I misplaced it, when, walking into my neighbourhood library on the lower west side of Chicago, he asked me where I had been, and the concern in his voice, eyes, and body language as he turned into the conversation seemed to add further, what happened to you—this was the moment where I found it again, or rather, found it first, in the hallway of what was then a high school I had attended (but the year prior had been my high school), talking to a young woman who, in the three years during which time we went to school together, I had perhaps never spoken to before, but because I had changed schools and apparently not told many or enough people, and because I seemed representative of a certain kind of blackness to her—or even just because I was black, in that part of the world, in that time—she seemed relieved to discover that I had not been incarcerated, and, upon learning that I was attending a private school across the harbour in Dartmouth's more elegant sister city, Halifax, this sigh of relief gave way to joy; and it was here, at the crest of our relationship (I never saw her again), that I began to understand what I had been witnessing a year earlier but, for one reason or another, was unable to read as she had, that, statistically, the odds were overwhelmingly in favour of our being incarcerated, or at least arrested, sooner and/or in lieu of our finishing secondary education, so where I may only have thought it irresponsible of E's twin brother to stop attending classes for a month in the middle of term, others were instead fishing for information as to which detention centre he was being held at—when I walked into the Lozano branch library Monday afternoon as if I had not last left it two months before (without so much as a word on my intention to not return), I walked also again in ignorance of society's inscription resting like a second skin on my own. 

Like Water for Chocolate

I walked into the drugstore and quite haphazardly saw myself in a video monitor. She asked me if I liked to tan because she had a friend who took efforts to keep her complexion as light as possible. I was surprised by how dark the security camera made me look. She searched my face to see if it was true. During the OJ trial it had been observed that photographs of him circulating in the media were purposefully underexposed. Her black friend, she said. I told her that I preferred to tan because it evened out my complexion. It was a chocolate lake. At the head of the cold medicine aisle I checked the back of my hand in disbelief. It contrasted so sharply with childhood photographs. Her eyes on my face, my eyes searching for my reflection in hers.

from Voids, Mirrors, Blind Spots

4.

My earliest memory of looking at my own reflection is marked by an acute awareness of being too small to have caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, which was above the sink, with any regularity, and that even though I recall being held over this sink by my parents twice a day to brush my teeth, or to wash my hands after using the toilet more times than that, even though it is highly unlikely that I had never before seen myself—old photo albums attesting to the amount of time I spent in front of cameras—this memory of walking into the bathroom alone, climbing up onto the sink, and sitting up on my knees is marked by an acute awareness that I did not and would never look like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Nathanael Jones is a Canadian writer currently based in Chicago where he earned an MFA in Writing from SAIC. He has published two chapbooks: ATG (HAIR CLUB, 2016), and La Poèsie Caraïbe (Damask Press, 2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Parallax, Present Tense Pamphlets, Homonym, Infinity's Kitchen, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, Aurochs, and Ghost Proposal.