Blue Hour

Praise forBlue Hour•“Blue Hour is a poetic and feverish debut, a story that laces together the struggles of marriage and motherhood, art and artist, race and violence in America into a powerful web, much bigger and stronger than its slender spine would suggest. If you loved Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, the work of Rachel Cusk, or Luster by Raven Leilani, this book is for you.”—Ashley Warlick, author of The Arrangement“An exquisite, melancholic portrait of motherhood and marriage for a biracial woman in America. Tiffany Clarke Harrison writes about miscarriage with fleshy, beating rawness, leaving us painfully undone and beautifully seen. Blue Hour has captured the dark question of modern motherhood amid police brutality and racism in America—do we really want to bring kids into this? There is no other book I’d rather read than hers . . . I never want to love or lose again without it.”—Sarah Hosseini, writer, journalist, and professor“Blue Hour is a pulsing and powerful novel about grief, motherhood, storytelling, and self. At once ragged, raw, and transcendent, Harrison’s novel marries the universality of maternal love and loss with the specificity of mothering Black and biracial children in contemporary America. A short, beautiful, intensely present work of art.”—Lydia Kielsing, author of The Golden State“In a world full of demands and distractions, Blue Hour asks us to pause and sit with our grief. Challenging, intimate, and relevant, this novel is a meditation on the boundaries of hope.”—Osa Atoe, author of Shotgun Seamstress For my grandparents Audley and Agnes Webster All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.—JAMES BALDWIN ContentsPart IPart IIAcknowledgments Part I The therapist asks how I feel, and I tell her, dismembered. I do not know where the pieces have been discarded. Even if I did, how would I begin to put them back together?All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…For days in my head, this rhyme.It all started with The Metamorphosis.You were sitting in the back office of your store, Meir, chain-smoking at seven in the morning, waiting for me to take photos for a magazine. The editor had told me little about you except for your name, Asher Fromm, and titles: tie designer, owner. Despite the bell’s jangle, you hadn’t heard me come in. You always say you noticed my hair first. You say it billowed and rolled like a cloud down my back, and then you coat my neck with kisses. I stood in front of the bookshelf at the entrance, intrigued by your attempt at cleverness or culture. A large plant leaf obscured half of the top shelves, and books with torn spines were stacked beneath chairs. It was a men’s clothing boutique, not a bookstore, and you’d written WORDS FOR EVERY MAN on a cut piece of chalkboard that hung from twine on a tack. I picked up The Metamorphosis, opened it, and put the pages to my nose, inhaled.“What are you doing?”“I like to get acquainted with a space before prodding its intimate corners with a lens.” I removed the book from my nose, leafed through the pages. I had yet to look at you. “It’s not the fifties, but a certain amount of modesty and manners still goes a long way.”I put down the book, plucked another from the shelf, and ran my fingers along the spine. Music played. Guitars and drums.“Your store is gorgeous. The classic novels are a nice touch. It’s like a tailored rock star, a hipster, and a member of the Nation of Islam walk into a bar—and read Hemingway.”“God, you’re strange.”I turned, glimpsed your face.“It bodes well for me.”“I’m Jewish, though, not Muslim. So it would be more like ‘a tailored rockstar, a hipster, and a Jew walk into a bar.’”“I’m Black, Haitian, Japanese. So now that we’ve got our census information out of the way, where would you like to start?”“I like you.” You smiled.The feathered scar on your jaw was my favorite.In a few months we would be married. Stand before a judge. Me in black combat boots and a white minidress, and you in a trim burgundy floral print suit. We linked arms and held hands. Repeat after me, the judge said, and we repeated. Recited vows as somewhat strangers, then family. I could hardly bring my tongue to curl around the word family, project it. So why do I consider it now? Why do I consider my parents and sisters? Our baby, dead before birth? Now as the world bears down on Black bodies (another man killed), and I am tired. Now that I’ve had enough.You read aloud to me on the couch, squinting through glasses at the words by the dim stutter of candlelight. The power was out, a storm, and our apartment glowed gold with swaying flames on the shelves, with sprawling plants and piccolo, and on the hearth near the leaning stack of found paintings and frames. The moon was high, clear. The steady sheet of rain had thinned. You read from your favorite book: A Sport and a Pastime. The dropout bathes the French girl. His prick goes into her, and he discovers the world. My legs were draped across your lap and you stroked my shin and knee. I was on my back, the linen of my robe pulled open. Exposed. A patch of dark grew tangled between my legs. I turned and saw myself in the mirror of that leaning stack, my face splattered with freckles, and turned back to you. “I’ll read,” I said, and thumbed through the pages. I responded with raised hips, pauses between words, to your fingers inside me, your mouth.This is pre-miscarriage when we insisted on late nights and liquor and displays of whatever the hell we wanted. Like the first time Meir made a coveted list in a national magazine, and damn if you couldn’t stop touching me; hands