Harvestland

FIFTEEN

It was a hot day in the dead heart of July when Charlee McCool's mother found the unopened pregnancy test in her daughter's bedroom.

She had been putting laundry away and first came across a bulging notebook peeking out from under the Star Wars comforter on Charlee's bed. It was beneath a library book, Drugs and Gangs in America's Inner Cities.

Mother flipped through the notebook idly, pages of non-cohesive notes and crude sketches. But then there were some loose pages on cleaner paper, drawings done professionally in color and in comic book type.

Her daughter's considerable artistic talent aside, Mother studied the frames suspiciously.

On one whole page—a dazzling city skyline at night. The caption read: Bop City. Jazz and violence fill the night like lovers.

On the next page, a storyboard depicted a tall beautiful black woman with an afro. She wore a leather jacket and stood on the roof of a low-rise building, looking at the streets below.

In another, her face was contorted in rage as she gave her all to a punching bag at a grimy boxing facility. Transposed as a parallel to these images, she also beat a corner boy's face in, pounding his face to a bloody pulp in rather graphic detail.

Give me the fucking name! she yelled at him. I know you know the name, motherfucker!

Mother sighed, turned the page.

There the heroine was outfitted in a sleek black jumpsuit, a thin white mask covering only her eyes. Her fighting moves were tighter, cleaner, as she took on two thugs in an alleyway.

Who are you? a bloody thug spat from the ground.

Who am I? she said. I'm the Ghost Orchid.

In the next frame, the heroine danced with and kissed her love interest on a distant street corner outside of a booming jazz club at night. They were fuzzy silhouettes against the city lights. The boxed narration read:

The only love I have time for is mad love, when you love so much it hurts, and it hurts so bad your heart explodes across the sky and rains down fire that burns red, red, red like hot jazz into a city night.

Mother turned the page again. Her eyes grew large.

Several small frames depicted the heroine and her lover in bed, both completely naked, entangled together in a passionate love scene. There were candles. City lights out the window. Her eyes were closed and mouth parted in a sweet moan of ecstasy.

I love you so much, she said.

And he said, Making love to you, lying in your arms, it's the only time I ever truly feel home.

Mother took a second to roll her eyes but then took a closer look at the paper, at the face of the heroine's love interest. He was a handsome half-black half-Hispanic gentleman who in no small part resembled Charlee's own love interest, Noah Faison.

She would talk to her daughter about this later. But as she finished putting the laundry away in the dresser, that was when she found the unopened pregnancy test stuffed under several pairs of balled up socks in an underwear drawer.

Later, Charlee came home from the neighborhood pool with Noah. Towels were draped around their necks and their hair was still wet. When she saw Mother sitting solemnly at the kitchen table with the pregnancy test box, she froze, literally felt an intense rush of cold despite the ninety-plus degree heat. Noah's hand clammed up in hers when he saw the same thing.