Odetta’s knife was warm. It had been covered up in the stuffy everything drawer since last year and the day had come to use it. It was her cake knife, the one for special occasions and special occasions only. The matching server got misplaced some years earlier, but Odetta swore someone must have stolen it. She didn’t lose her belongings, everything had its place, even though her apartment didn’t look like it sometimes. Each corner was packed with shoes, clothes, perishables, and whatever else she could get her hands on. Some would go back home, others to shelters, and some right there to neighbors and children from the building. Some of the items were from thrift stores, cheap antiques that only needed a dab of polish, and some were from commercial and condominium dumpsters that lined the back of buildings throughout the city. Those usually required a bit more soap or polish, but Odetta could get them clean. She’d carry her bags around and grab whatever she could carry, knowing there’d be some use for it all, eventually.

She sat the knife down on the table, placing its handle parallel to the forks she laid out prior. Odetta got the deep and delicious cake from the fridge next. She uncrinkled the corner, sliding her nails around the edges to smooth them out before she lifted the plastic lid. She sliced the cake down the middle with her knife, gently pressing through the whipped icing so as to not disturb the dessert’s uniformity. She placed a large piece onto a saucer, and a smaller one onto another. Odetta doubted she’d eat her piece, her stomach had been in such intense pain the past few days, she’d eaten little to nothing. Still, it was one of the special days, Okri’s day, and she wanted to celebrate his birthday with him.

She went to her room and tied her hair up in her signature headwrap. Odetta had been wearing the same white scarf since she moved into the building. She’d wear it as she scoured Black Creek for collectibles and she’d wear it down Eglinton where she’d shop and grab supper when she didn’t feel to cook. She’d complain that Eglinton wasn’t Eglinton anymore. After Randy’s and the beauty supply store steps away from the smokey smell of oil drums grilling jerk, plus too many of the other shops closed down, it didn’t feel the same. She’d walk the street some days, between Dufferin and Oakwood, if she hit the Coffee Time she’d know she’d gone too far, and would be the only Black person there. She’d double take over her shoulder at the pale legs and arms pushing strollers and licking their ice cream and say out loud, “A wah dis?”. Then she’d see a few familiar faces or hear the buzzing at More Than a Haircut, and smell the taste of home at Roti King, Wraps, or Hot Pot. She’d hear and smell those things and know she was not alone, but felt, like a lot of people, that eventually somebody would be. Whether it was her or someone that lived closer, there would be a last one soon, and everybody knew. Odetta worried that with the completed road construction that seemed to be taking a millenia, there would be a new Eglinton, one where she didn’t walk anymore. She worried Black Creek would be next.

Her phone rang and Odetta rushed to answer.

“Hello,” she said.

“Junny, yuh package here.”

Odetta hated her nickname, Junny, Ms. Junny, June Ting, any variation of it. She couldn’t remember how she got it, but it stuck.

“Alright,” she replied before hanging up. “Soon come.”

She started having her mail delivered to Rita’s house a few years before. Packages and pieces kept going missing, and she was sure someone was taking them. She asked around the building to see if anyone else had noticed their mail being tampered with, but no one had.  A few people laughed and told her she was mad and a few others shrugged as they hurried along.

She tightened her head wrap and felt another pain shoot through her stomach. This one was deeper than the others.

“Okri,” she called out.

The apartment remained quiet.

“Okri,” she called out again, this time heading towards her grandson’s room.

She pushed open the door and watched the dust unsettle in the daylight pouring through the blinds. His comforter was neatly tucked under the mattress and desk tidy and organized. She exhaled as she looked in the tiny room and closed the door behind her.

Odetta would forget that he was gone some days, but on most she’d remember and act like she’d forgotten. On others, she’d make something up just because she felt like it. She told some strangers that he had been shot once, hit by a stray bullet near the apartments. She told them she couldn’t believe when it happened, that her world had come to an end; so not all of it was a lie. Tenants from the building had caught wind of her stories eventually, and figured out that Okri had been taken by child services. It saddened them, but no one was surprised. Most were stunned she had been able to keep him as long as she had.

She felt her stomach pain expand deeper inside of her. Odetta decided to head to Rita’s for her package, the herbs she’d take to ease the pain, because she didn’t know how much longer she could take it. She looked at the table and two cake slices before leaving the house, shouting to herself, “Stop wastin’ tings, jus stop it,” as she got in the elevator and walked past the children playing out front. She looked at them and thought she spotted Okri.

“Don’t stay out too late,” she said to one of the children. “I’ll be back soon.”

The boy glanced at his friends before resuming with their game.

Rita lived off of Eglinton so Odetta made her way on the 32, still telling herself to stop wasting food on the bus and bending over in the pain that was rapidly worsening. Her stop came and she walked down Eglinton past Dufferin like she often would. Odetta dragged her feet and looked around and the boarded up shops and new renovations peeking from behind the familiarity of the place. She noticed the pale arms and legs around her again, and realized it was another one of those days.

“God as my witness,” she looked up and said.

She shook her head and held her stomach, smiling at those passing by the way she always would. Odetta asked Okri once why smiling at people made them think she was crazy.

He shrugged, “I dunno Grandma. I guess not enough people do it anymore.”

She remembered smiling at him after he said that. She remembered him smiling back. Their smiles turned to laughter and she could hear it as clearly there on the street as she could that day in the kitchen with him. She listened to the sound of his voice running through her mind, but didn’t smile this time, she wailed. She wailed so loudly even people in cars turned to look at her.

Odetta’s pain became too much to bear, and she could no longer stand. She lowered herself onto the sidewalk and shouted, this time, for help.

“Please,” she yelled. “Please help me. Okri, help me. Somebody, please.”

Okri never came, and neither did anyone else. She looked around at the pale bodies whizzing by pretending not to see her lying there. She looked around and felt like she might die, right there on the street, the last Black woman on Eglinton. Odetta nearly passed out before someone came over and called for help.

News had gotten back to the other tenants that she had been rushed to the hospital and was being held for observation. They heard it was something called malrotation that put her in there, but were all pretty sure it was something deeper that would keep her there a while longer. When the children heard what happened, about her crying in the street, begging for help and for her grandson, the same boy she mistook for Okri said to his friend.

“I’m not surprised she ended up in a hospital,” he shouted a bit as the 32 bus drove by, “Mom always said she was all twisted up on the inside.”

Morgan Christie’s work has appeared in Callaloo, Prism International, New Delta Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. She is the author of five chapbooks and a short story collection ‘These Bodies’ (Tolsun Books, 2020) that was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in fiction. She is the recipient of the 2022 Arc Poetry Poem of the Year Prize, 2023 Prairie Fire Fiction Prize, 2022 Digging Press Chapbook Series, and the 2023 Howling Bird Book Prize.