Witness Statement, by Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera

STATEMENT

I’m just glad everyone knows now.

The neighbors know. The children know. The visitors know. It’s not just the chair legs and the light up pineapple sitting with the imprints of things that weren’t supposed to happen anymore. Even if you don’t believe me, now everyone else does—which is good because that’s probably the only revenge she’ll ever have.

Her friends wanted both more and less for her. They’re the type to do that—want things for others, call it love. The magnanimous kind—you know the type: always handing out enormously generous bouquets of forgiveness to those who never asked for them.

It’s not their fault. They were raised that way, held with arms of fear, gilded in praise and joy, until they lost the ability to register it anymore. To register anything, it seems, they need a high vantage point—you know the kind, up on a hill, so they can feel like they’re bird’s-eye-viewing everything. So they can forget for a moment that we’re all rats, paws skittering around the exterminator’s feet, moments from being stomped out.

They were good friends. They’re actually the ones that gave her that light up pineapple, all teeth-out, all bold laughter when they offered it. A gag gift, they laughed. And she laughed too, probably. Self-consciously, hand over her mouth—that was her way. A way that incorporated itself a little too nicely into the scenery on the hill, with its hedges, with branches that, from far away, always seemed to bend just so.

It’s really about that—about how things seemed to be. Down to the teeth. Because that’s the thing about big teeth, isn’t it: you can’t see them anymore when the mouth is closed. After long enough of eyeing the hairline seam of sealed lips bent into wide smiles, you forget the teeth are there at all. Even if you’re one of us, or were.

The last time she was with them was for a birthday party. A stupid one, with an even stupider theme. Neighbors were invited, visitors—except her—were told about it after: skirts from the catalogues they only distribute up on the hill swung wildly all night, velvet crushed under their weight when they collapsed into puddles of giggles. The children were put to bed as the sparklers came out, icing clinging to the corners of their mouths, carving still-indiscernible holes in their milk teeth. With the lights off, they held the small explosions up and out, away from long tresses tousled by the hill wind, to scream against the backdrop of thorough darkness.

No, we weren’t invited.

We’re awful friends, to be clear. We get told this daily. We were raised on points of view that zeroed in on things, grew to be the type that, with nothing more than a head tilt, were able to find the spot on the chair leg with less dust than the rest. We grew to love the finger-point, the laser-point on Exhibit A, the point at the end of an argument. And listen, it’s not our fault either––we have a lot to prove, not being able to read and write like them; we have to make up for it by seeing, by not letting anything get past us. Least of all a snatching, a poisoning, a disappearing of one of our own.

What’s worse, we have no teeth at all. And worse still—we talk. We’re ALL talk. The first to say that something isn’t right, the first to ask: who’s been in the dead girl’s room? Who touched her things? And why?

It’s just—hills, valleys, you can’t just cross those boundaries. They’re there for a reason. We may be awful friends, but we told her: we just don’t mix with them. Too much of a vantage point difference.

See, we’re different from her friends. We know we’re being stomped out. We know how to smell violence—how to fear it. And we told her not to, we just don’t mix with them, but she would go with them anyway. And the time she came back, but strange, so strange, we asked her—what is it? What was it that had her dripping fear, overwhelming our senses with it? And she said nothing, and said nothing, until she was nothing and we were left there, in the room that saw her last breath, zeroing in on everything that was touched, moved; everything where the layer of dust had been displaced, touched by a hand unexperienced when it came to fear, covered with a nasty-ass catalogue doily.

No, I’m not going to tell you about the last time I saw her, the last things I said. None of us will.

We will tell you what we know, what we told her. And we’ll never know what they told her; but now we all know who she listened to, and it’s not the people who are from where she’s from, who grew up seeing the way she grew up seeing.

We will tell you that the reason everyone knows now is because we fucking knew, and we fucking told them, and we fucking tried, and tried and fucking tried everything—just everything.

And then we gave up.

Everyone has to know: it wasn't right away–never that. Or easy–never that either. And before that…we did try. Dear God, did we try.

Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera is an AfroLatinx writer and educator based in Brooklyn. She is the 2020 Oyster River Pages Creative Nonfiction intern and a recipient of the 2020-2021 HUES fellowship. She was the winner of the 2019 Cosmonauts Avenue nonfiction prize, and her words can be found online at The Offing, Watermelanin Magazine, and on twitter: @awildyam.