Read Jazmine Hughes' Summer of No Fear
For most of my life, I never feared bumps in the night. They could’ve been anything: the dog, for instance. Or my father, an insomniac. Or the house as it settled. They could have been the drunk boys in south campus, or church services down the street, or my next-door neighbor’s alarm. The bumps could have simply been New York: a train, a house party emptying out, or more recently, helicopters, or fireworks—their fizz, hiss, boom.
But last summer, things changed. A far-right news site turned its firehose onto me, and my inbox and timeline and mailbox became engulfed in white rage: threats and epithets and warnings. One found its way to me in a physical letter, a phony address in the upper left corner: Lynchburg.
I spent the following days trying to recuperate my laugh, pretending to agree that it was a rite of passage, nodding when the Well-Meaning told me to just ignore the letter. At work, the security team wiped my address from the internet. The night the hit piece was published, a worried friend sat me in front of her at her dinner table. She said, “Eat,” and sent me home with two pudding cups.
When I returned home, I made sure to latch my door twice, the two locks suddenly useful, even necessary. I walked towards my kitchen and as I was bending over to put the pudding in my refrigerator, I heard a bump outside my front door. I had been found. …
*Excerpt of MARKET RESEARCH: VANS’ “OG STYLE 43 LX SNEAKERS” via SSENSE written by Jazmine Hughes and illustations by Megan Tatem
*DNAMAG uses affiliate links, but these do not influence our editorial content. We may earn commission for any sales from affiliate links.
