Later, in the suffocating stillness of his grandmother's apartment, the hum grew louder. The air was thick with the scent of cayenne and thyme, a fragrance that clung to Mama Ayo like a second skin. She moved in the kitchen, a slow, deliberate current in the dim room. Her silence was a heavier judgment than any shout. She was from a place where the ocean touched the sky, and she carried the weight of that crossing in the slope of her shoulders. When she looked at him, her eyes, the color of dark river stones, seemed to see past him, to the long, pained line of men who stood at his back—a spectral genealogy of clenched jaws and extinguished fires.
That night, he dreamed of drowning. Not in water, but in a thick, cloying mud that smelled of rust and saltwater. Chains of a weight he could not comprehend locked his ankles, and a scream was trapped in his throat, a silent bubble of terror that had no beginning and no end. He woke gasping, the taste of the dream still on his tongue, a metallic tang of fear that was not his own.
The body keeps the score, Mama Ayo said the next morning, her back to him as she stirred a pot of grits. She had not heard him cry out, but she knew. She always knew. The bones remember what the mind works to forget. The pain is a song, Marcus. And you have been humming the chorus your whole life.
He shrugged her off, a familiar gesture of dismissal that felt flimsy, paper-thin. He returned to the set, to the brothers who were his fortress. But the hollowness had followed him. The complex handshakes were empty calisthenics. The boasts of vengeance were rote incantations, spells they chanted to keep the cold out. He watched the young ones, the twelve-year-olds with eyes like shattered windows, and he saw the reflection of his own past, and the ghost of his future. He saw the loop. And for the first time, he felt its teeth on the back of his neck.