Mercy

Let me tell you something about your father, a Queen named Amber Wavves says, Let me tell you something about your father, in his early years as a Queen, the rumor around was that his main man was a dude that was an AIDS terrorists, if you know what I mean. Mean dude had AIDS and shook it around like it was nothing, fucking Ev-ah-ree-thang, you know what I mean. And he was your old man's old man. You know. He never told your dad, though, sweets, and I'm sorry you gotta find out this way, but your old man is sick and you need to come back here and help him. He's gotta community here but it aint the same as his baby girl he talks about so much.

Miss Amber says, we got you a airplane ticket home, child. Come home and take care of your daddy.

Mercy looked at the only surviving photographs of her as a toddler with her mop of ragamuffin curls and her father, looking like he stepped right out of Ralph Lauren advertisement, windblown hair, straight white teeth, tan skin, even in a black and white picture. Her mother, too, not in the same realm of beauty as her father, in a different style, an air about her more than her actual physical body. What she always interpreted as passion between them, laughing carelessly at their toddler baby girl.
Mercy. Baby Mercy. Toddler Mercy. Teenage Mercy. Adult Mercy.

Her mother got to see up to space between Toddler Mercy and Teenage Mercy. Awkward child Mercy. Her mother always called her Mercy May even though it wasn't her middle name.

Little did her mother know and little did Mercy know that the beautiful man in the photograph with is tan head cocked and his blonde curls accenting his mouth, wide and smiling, is dying of HIV at the moment this picture was taken. No one knew, through decades, he kept quiet even when diagnosed, he kept performing, even after her mother died mysteriously of a brain aneurysm, she had a headache and needed to lie down and was dead. In this picture of Toddler Mercy, this beautiful man was having unprotected sex and sharing needles on the weekends with his other Queens. This beautiful man has not yet told his wife that the second job he has taken on in the City is actually dressing in women's clothing and dancing for money. He has not told her that he was in a competition and won first place and that is where their money for the crib came from. The best part about her is that she never asked any questions her father would say to her eventually, she never asked me anything at all until I was caught.