I hate the smell of trapped cigarette smoke, especially when it lives between the walls and the thick coats of piss-coloured paint in the kitchen. Smoke gets beneath your fingernails and into the fibers of your shirt. It coats your lungs and makes your spit all phlegmy and shit. Imagine forty-five years of trapped cigarette smoke—that’s my grandmother’s house. A film of filth collects on windows that have been painted shut. If you pull up the floorboards, I bet you’d find smoke. And maybe fire, too.

Across the street, the grass grows long and wild. Its long blades burst through the memory of a home torn down. The tattered house was blue, a cerulean shade, with broken steps and a screen door that flapped open recklessly on windy days. The house blended in with the others around it, aged by Cleveland’s harsh winters and the neglect that poverty begets. It hadn’t stood out to me until the summer I discovered death.

At the ripe age of eight, I was partial to pigtails and soft colours. Cotton shorts draped my waist with little to hold onto. Yellow was quick to get dirty but I wore it anyway. My mother trusted that I’d stay clean—that I knew how to keep my hands out of the dirt. But dirty was easy on 117th street. It was harder to stay clean.

That summer, the man that lived in the blue house put a gun to his head and shot himself with his daughter downstairs. I remember that day and I remember him because his daughter and I have the same name. I didn’t hear the gunshot. His daughter emerged on the porch with charcoal eyes and her mouth ajar. When she screamed, the horrid sound leapt from the broken steps like a bolt of red lightning. A jump rope fell from my cousin’s limp hand and we froze. My grandmother loomed on the porch with varicose veins the shape of the Mississippi River snaking up her legs. One hand on her hip, the other balanced a cigarette between her fingers. She welcomed the smoke, drew it into her lungs with long, deep drags. Blurred figures ascended upon the broken steps and into the blue house while a storm stirred in my chest. He shot himself. Adults knew how to whisper, but they didn’t. They wanted us to hear. And we did. We heard all of it. My older cousin, fourteen then with hips that belonged to someone much older, gathered rocks in her hands and passed them around. Seven of the “little cousins” assembled on the porch steps for a game we’d grown accustomed to playing while the adults gathered. The sun melted, stretching out long and wide like a pumpkin-coloured puddle across the horizon. The street lights flickered. The adults whispered and we listened.

Death felt tangible then. Before, it was some distant phenomenon that swept people off of the earth and into a cosmic dustpan. Like we were all pieces of dust waiting to be cleaned up; like we were just dirt. As the day disappeared, 117th crawled with the chalk outlines of black boys we’d lost in previous summers. Alive in the nighttime, they shimmered and shimmied past us, dancing to the sound of death on the concrete.

Frustrated with the conversation among the adults, my mother snatched me and my brother off of the porch steps. The longer we sat on 117th, among the ghosts and the day’s events, the dirtier we were. We walked to her car, a candy apple Plymouth Breeze that almost always sparkled, even at night. My mother’s car was “clean clean,” with floor mats free of dirt and large bath towels spread over the backseat. To her, cleanliness was next to godliness—or at least next to class.

“Don’t get anything on my seats,” she said. I dug my hand into a McDonald’s happy meal box and watched my brother stuff a chicken nugget into his mouth. Small pieces of breading and salt accumulated at the corners of his lips and he licked them wildly, missing the crud every time. My mother was quiet, the passenger seat empty. Her glassy eyes bounced between the road and the rearview mirror. I realized much later that she was looking at my brother with tears in her eyes. Our faces were smeared with smoke and she couldn’t wait to get us home to a bath. We went up the hill to our suburban home, less than five miles from the street full of smoke and chalk outlines. We licked our wounds and cleaned ourselves until we were recognizable again. And we didn’t talk about death or guns.

*

I saw a gun for the first time a few summers later. I was eleven then. The blue house on 117th was torn down and the plot of land was for sale. It was less than a hundred dollars, but no one bought it. My cousin and I walked past the lot, kicking rocks and singing aloud. Our summer days felt endless, filled with trips to the corner store, high-fructose corn syrup and chips doused in hot sauce. Trading CDs and fantasies about the boys we liked on the porch, we’d welcome the occasional breeze from the lake as it cut through the thick August heat. My grandmother would sit on the couch with the front door open. She’d smoke and drink while she waited for her stories to come on.

We walked down the street one afternoon to play with a group of kids whose two-family house was next to an empty lot. The neighbourhood was dead, its colour ashen and grey. Things didn’t move on 117th, just sat stuck and stiff like rigor mortis. We explored the cavities of the corpse-like street as it decayed from the inside. We ventured into the dark parts, toyed with what was no longer living. We emerged from behind the two-story house when a fight broke out in the middle of the street. I looked to my cousin for guidance with fear stitched into the space between my eyebrows. I hadn’t ever seen violence in its purest form, close and real. Not like the movies. There was no panning shot or dramatic music and fuck you nigga and I’ll kill you weren’t lines rehearsed from a script.

A dark handgun was suddenly center stage, cradled by the hand of a black man, maybe a black boy. Death doesn’t discriminate and I knew that then. The one with the gun didn’t shake and neither did the one in front of it, almost like they were trained for this. Black boys run marathons through barrages of bullets, conditioning for days like this one. The spectators darted inside, fearful of stray bullets and intentions gone astray. I watched from behind a screen door and looked down at my shorts. They were filthy. Was I dirt, too?

When my mother arrived to pick up me and my brother after work that day, I climbed into the Plymouth Breeze and she looked at me through the rearview mirror. I didn’t mention the gun, just apologized for my shorts and for my carelessness. I didn’t leave my grandmother’s porch for the rest of the summer. I wanted to stay clean.

*

I didn’t think about guns up the hill. Cleveland Heights was my safe haven. A suburb of Cleveland, “the Heights” was a beacon of opportunity for working and middle-class black families. Two-parent households sat atop manicured lawns. We had “good schools” and “safe neighbourhoods.” We walked to school without worry lining our backpacks, and we never had to look over our shoulders. We stayed clean. Our shirts and jeans were ironed. We were presentable and respectable. We were suburban. But guns found us there too, like black boys were magnets for bullets. With time, Cleveland Heights decayed and its edges were frayed and fried by fire. On Lee Road, you could see a trail of smoke coming up the hill. Doom awaited us.

On December 18, 2013, I woke up to two notifications on my phone: a text message and a voicemail. The time stamps were 4:02 and 4:03 a.m. Very little light filtered through the window of my ground-level apartment. The sky was the colour of ash that morning. I didn’t get calls from childhood friends very often, but when I did, smoke danced up the sides of my throat like it was latent until provoked. At the sight of my phone that morning, my heart fell to the pit of my stomach and landed on something as hard as concrete. I opened the text first, for I couldn’t bear to hear the bloody sound that awaited me on the voicemail. There were two words: Fela dead. The room suddenly filled to the brim with smoke and breath fled from my chest. I fell to my knees and asked God why he’d stirred the mourning awake.

I was twenty when I found out that Fela was shot and killed in the city full of smoke. The boy with the big smile, big cheeks, big ego, big future. They shot him in the chest because he had a big heart, too. Pumped him full of smoke, full of fire and death. He lay on Harvard Avenue, closest to dirt, waiting to be swept up in a dustpan. No longer clean, no longer suburban. City boy now.

At the vigil, his mom said that Fela means “war-like.” I imagine the war that ensued when his soul left its corporal shell somewhere on I-90. The long stretch of road between the east side and the trauma center for the poor became a sacred battle ground that night. His heart beat like war drums until it didn’t. A beat like a rallying song, a battle hymn, never to be heard again. Some death is gentle, quiet. His echoed for miles. The local newspaper reduced him to a headline, but Fela was a warrior. Today, his ghostly spirit fights his untimely departure. He trails behind the others as they wander down Monticello Avenue, haunting the homes they once inhabited. The lost boys with battle armor nicked and bruised by bullets seek refuge in Smoke City.

Sometimes, I have to remember why home is home.

Many of us have moved away, gasping for air in other parts of the country. But when we return, we can’t worry about the smoke anymore.

We just wear masks.