Concrete Bloom

The first thing I ever painted that mattered was my brother's face, and I did it at 3 a.m. with a can of Krylon I'd stolen from the hardware store on Michigan Avenue, and I did it because I couldn't sleep and because Marcus had been dead for six months and because the wall behind the bodega on Ferry Street was the exact color of his skin in summer.

Not the color of his skin in the casket. That was wrong. That was embalmer's work, too much rouge, too much wax. I'm talking about August Marcus, the one who taught me to ride a bike without training wheels by pushing me down the alley and letting go before I was ready. The one who smelled like sweat and cheap cologne and the peppermint gum he chewed to hide the cigarettes. That Marcus. The one whose face I could still see if I closed my eyes hard enough, which I did, constantly, like a woman checking her purse for keys she knows she didn't bring.

The wall was brick, old, crumbling at the edges, and I remember thinking it looked like skin that had been scraped too many times. The kind of wall that holds onto whatever you give it.

I painted him from memory. Not a portrait, exactly. More like a feeling. The tilt of his head when he was about to laugh at something stupid I said. The way his left eye squinted a little more than the right. The gap between his front teeth that he used to whistle through when he wanted to annoy our mother.

It took me four hours. My fingers went numb around hour two. I didn't stop.

When I finished, I stepped back and looked at what I'd made, and something in my chest cracked open like a window in a hot room. There he was. Not perfect. Not even close. But there. Alive in the way that paint can be alive, which is to say, not really, but enough. Enough to make me sit down on the curb and cry until the streetlights flickered off and the sky went gray over the empty lots.

That was the first one.

The second one was a dog. A big one, the kind that used to run wild in the neighborhood before Animal Control started patrolling. I painted it on the side of the abandoned house on Trumbull, the one with the porch that sagged like a tired spine. I don't know why I chose a dog. Maybe because I wanted to feel protected. Maybe because I was tired of feeling like prey.

The third one was a woman with her arms spread wide, like she was holding up the sky. I painted her on the overpass where the kids used to play chicken with the trains before the city fenced it off. She had my mother's hands.

I didn't think anything of it. Not then. I was just a girl with a backpack full of spray cans and a head full of ghosts, trying to make something beautiful in a place that had been told it wasn't worth saving.

The thing about Detroit is that it's always been dying. That's what they say, anyway. The news people, the politicians, the developers who come sniffing around with their glossy brochures and their promises of revitalization. They look at the empty lots and the boarded-up houses and the streets that haven't seen a fresh coat of asphalt since I was born, and they see failure. Decay. A problem to be solved.

But I see something else.

I see the way the light hits the broken windows of the old Packard Plant at sunset, turning them into stained glass. I see the gardens people grow in the shells of burned-out cars. I see the murals on the sides of buildings, the ones that have been there for decades, fading but still standing, still saying something.

I see a place that refuses to die.

Which is probably why I was so surprised when it started fighting back.

---

The night it happened, I was working on a new piece. A phoenix, rising from the ashes of a demolished house on my block. The house had belonged to Mrs. Patterson, who used to give out full-size candy bars on Halloween and who died two winters ago when her furnace broke and she couldn't afford to fix it. The city tore the house down in the spring. Now it was just a foundation and a pile of rubble and a For Sale sign that had been there so long the phone number had faded.

I was halfway through the wings when I heard something behind me.

Not footsteps. Something softer. Like the sound of paper rustling in the wind, except there was no wind. The night was still, heavy, the kind of still that makes you feel like the whole city is holding its breath.

I turned around.

The phoenix was gone.

Not gone. Moved. It was standing on the sidewalk, ten feet away from the wall, its wings still wet with paint, its eyes, my eyes, the ones I'd painted, blinking.

I dropped my can. It clattered on the concrete and rolled into the gutter.

The phoenix tilted its head. The way a bird does. The way Marcus used to when he was confused.

"Okay," I said, because I didn't know what else to say. "Okay."

It didn't attack. It didn't burst into flames. It just stood there, looking at me with those eyes I'd given it, and I understood, somehow, that it was waiting.

For what, I didn't know.

Then I heard the sound of a truck engine, low and growling, coming from the end of the street. Headlights swept across the empty lot. The phoenix turned toward the noise, and its wings spread wide, and I saw the fire I'd painted into them, the oranges and reds and yellows, start to glow.

The truck was a demolition truck. I knew because I'd seen them before, the ones that come in the middle of the night to tear down buildings before anyone can protest. They'd done it to the church on Jefferson. They'd done it to the community center on Chene.

They were coming for the houses on my block.

The phoenix launched itself into the air.

I stood there, paint on my hands, heart in my throat, and watched my creation fly toward the headlights. Toward the men who had come to erase my neighborhood. Toward the thing I'd been trying to fight with nothing but color and memory.

And I thought: What have I done?

And I thought: What else can I do?