Zibowetto

Zibowetto

Zibowetto had black skin.
Skin so black even the night was jealous.  
Even the night was red boned in his presence and when he smiled, lightening bugs were his halo, circling around him like he was a wave of moonlight.
But Zibowetto was afraid of the dark.

He was afraid of police officers bloodying his mouth so that his teeth, white like bleached corn, would become a Red Sea, parting between his fingertips, bloody on the ground.
Zibowetto’s father died that way, not even six years earlier.

He was pulled over onto the roadside when his car was mistaken for a man’s who was 5’ft 6 and slender. Zibowetto’s father was 6’ft 4. His shoulders broader than a linebacker’s shoulders, with strong arms and eyes that were brighter than the reflection of street lights at night on a ground covered in rain. Everyone called him Jimbo and no one ever mistook him for being slender.

The officer eyed him sideways, too tired to keep searching, and pulled out his gun on ol’ Jimbo. Jimbo’s hands were never so shaky as they were that day; way up in the air like mist. Pleading with the sky to blanket him into the air. Six shots entered him. Two in each armpit and two in his head. Ol’ Jimbo laid dead in the mist he prayed in. His black body erasing into the tar. His blood parting onto white highway lines; anointing the ground with his tears.

Not even two days later his wife buried him in a cheap wooden box that she knew the maggots would eat into. She fasted for forty days after the funeral, praying to God. Asking Him not to let anything eat Jimbo if she promised not to taste life either.

Zibowetto knew his mother had no weight left to lose. He could hear her screaming, “Jimbo! Jimbo!” And she near half lost her mind almost expecting him to answer. To come up out of the dirt with his shirt pressed and wild lillies in his hands for her. “Jimbo!”, she screamed but he ain’t never answer. He was a feast for God’s creatures underground, decaying in his skin.

Zibowetto prayed that the sun that blackened him would commit suicide and that he would drown in the ocean of his tears.

But Zibowetto’s mother prayed that God would make her son an arrow instead of a target because too many targets had already been hit that year.