Friday Black

“She loved saying, as a way to keep me humble, ‘I didn’t have a mother. You’re lucky. You have a mother.’”

Although the story’s events are told from the narrator’s point of view, the reader can also infer the mother’s perspective from her sayings, specifically how her presence in her son’s life radically sets them apart due to her own motherless upbringing. The narrator is resentful over the way their circumstances affect him, which extends to the indifference he perceives from his mother. However, his mother is the reason he is able to enjoy a warm meal in the story. Furthermore, the passage foreshadows the end as the narrator is humbled when he recognizes the work it took to prepare the meal for him.

“I wasn’t optimized at all. I am not optimal or ideal. But I’m also not unoptimal, so I wasn’t going to look like Samantha, which is good. It’s not all good, though, since no optiselect means no chance of being perfect either. I don’t care. I’m true. I’m proud, still.”

Ben outlines the pros and cons of optimization regarding his status and the tension it creates within him. He is initially relieved by his lack of optimization since those who come out unoptimal suffer the worst bullying in his society. Yet even when he dismisses his exclusion from the status quo as a con, he goes on to rely on things other than his own affirmations to cope with that exclusion, most of all his dependency on Good.

“When I have Good, it’s easy to be proud and truthful, and ignore the things that cloud my truth, like Marlene, or being made into an example, or knowing I’ll never be perfect.”

In contrast to the previous quote, Ben describes the allure of Good, which temporarily frees him of the tensions that grind against his self-awareness. Ironically, Ben only manages to see the pros of Good and fails to acknowledge the flaws of his dependency. This underscores how strong the tensions of the previous passage are while also characterizing the mental and emotional issues that plague Ben’s world.

“‘I feel like you think I don’t care,’ I continued. ‘And I do care, but I was afraid that if I cared that way you’d change your mind.’”

In this passage, the narrator of “Lark Street” expresses his fear of vulnerability, which, aside from his excessive desire to control the situation with Jaclyn, is his major character flaw. His reticence to communicate his feelings to Jaclyn is related to this tragic flaw; he assumes that vulnerability will convince Jaclyn to raise children with him. However, his fear of vulnerability also leads to his lonely resolution at the end when Jaclyn decides to take the children with her, knowing that the narrator wouldn’t take responsibility for them.

“The Twelve-tongued God had promised me I would make our lives better. That I could use the power it had granted me to change things. It wouldn’t matter what I did if my father wasn’t there to see what I’d done.”

The narrator expresses a nuanced desire to uplift himself from his living situation. It doesn’t just matter that he can uplift himself using the Twelve-tongued God’s power but that he can also do it within his father’s lifetime. He relies on the validation of uplifting his father as a benchmark for success, which emphasizes his motivation during the course of the story. He wants to obey the orders of the Twelve-tongued God on one hand but must also ensure that his father is getting the care he needs on the other.

“That night I wrote my first story. I saw I was chained to the new power. I had to stay with the story. Work it harder and harder until it was something greater than I could have imagined. From that day forward, I prayed to Twelve-tongue every night and every morning, asking for more tongues. For sharper tongues. When I didn’t write, my brand pulsed and ached. When I wrote badly, it screamed fiery chords. But then, when I made sentences that lived, it quieted and I could feel my ability growing. Still, I craved more tongues, new worlds to live in, and more power to change the one I was in now. I loved it. It was very lonely.”

One detail that this passage presents is the narrator’s attraction to the rewards of a creative life. While he could give up writing after suffering the pain of his branding, he finds himself emotionally drawn to the desire to write more whenever he does it well. His craving for the joys of a creative life is stronger than the repulsion of the pain he suffers to perfect his craft.

“I wanted to ask, When will I be a winner? And though the thought never reached my throat, the Twelve-tongued God turned to me just before disappearing through the double doors, and said, ‘When you win something.’”

After suffering a life of hardship, the narrator internalizes his doubts over whether or not he will ever succeed. His access to the linguistic gifts of the Twelve-tongued God is complicated by his loss in a literary contest, affirming the God’s observation that he isn’t quite ready for greatness yet. Rather than encourage the narrator with certainty over his gifts, the Twelve-tongued God affirms his doubt, saying tautologically that his success will come in its own time.

“[N]othing is more boring than a happy ending, her eyes said.”

In this story about writing, the Twelve-tongued God makes an implicit statement that resonates with Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s poetics. Across the collection, the endings of each story are usually tinged with hints of fear, doubt, or humility, which resonate with this passage. None of the characters should get exactly what they want, the author says, because that isn’t interesting.

“What’s a job without a soul?”

Melanie’s hypothetical question is the moral quandary at the heart of “Zimmer Land.” She initially challenges Isaiah to ponder over how much good he can achieve in his job at the theme park; he believes he can change things even though he is alienated from the narrative-building process all the way to the end. Ironically, Melanie gives into a job at the park for the same reasons as Isaiah, and when met with the same challenge from Isaiah, she echoes his conviction that good can be achieved while working within the system.

“‘I think we’re equating killing and justice for our patrons,’ I say flatly.

‘Well, sometimes it’s the same,’ Heland says. ‘And sometimes it isn’t. That’s the magic of the module.’”

Heland and Isaiah’s dialogue explicates the main flaw of Zimmer Land, which centers its design around extrajudicial killing as a possible form of justice. Heland’s response suggests that patrons are still free to choose peace if they feel it is the right way to go. However, Isaiah points out earlier on in their discussion that nothing in the park frames that decision as one with consequences; from Heland’s perspective, justice is the consequence of killing.

“People say ‘sell your soul’ like it’s easy. But your soul is yours and it’s not for sale. Even if you try, it’ll still be there, waiting for you to remember it.”

This passage resonates across the collection, speaking in particular to The Plight of Retail Workers. Exploitative work conditions reward workers for investing an added commitment to their responsibilities; they encourage the idea that it’s always better to go above and beyond because that will naturally lead to more rewards. But in this passage, Isaiah acknowledges that one cannot give up their most essential aspects for a promised reward. This is what awakens the workers to their exploitation.

“I hear the people, the sizes, the model, the make, and the reason. Even if all they’re doing is foaming at the mouth.”

In “Friday Black,” Adjei-Brenyah employs a metaphor to describe the frenzy of shoppers during Black Friday sales. Comparing them to rabid zombies, he comments on the mindlessness of consumerism and the way shoppers seem to abandon all signs of discernment and reason for sheer, unmitigated want. The narrator can make sense of their cries partly because of his injury—he was bitten in a past Black Friday—but also because he, too, is driven by want. He desires the seasonal joy his family used to celebrate, liberation from hardship, and the affirmation of his mother’s love.

“Outside the store, the Prominent is bloody and broken, so I can tell it’s been a great Black Friday. There are people strung out over benches and feet poking out of trash bins. Christmas music you can’t escape plays from speakers you cannot see. Christmas is God here.”

This passage from “Friday Black” extends the commentary on Black Friday to include The Normalization of Violence. The narrator describes the immediate aftermath of the first horde of shoppers as a desolate wasteland, befitting a dystopia. Bodies litter the surroundings, and oppressive Christmas music reinforces the reason people have come to the mall: to shop, to consume, to want. In this case, Adjei-Brenyah anchors the story in the ways Christmas has become deeply tied to consumerism.

“My third Black Friday, the company wasn’t doing great. There was no commission and no prize. I still outsold everybody.”

This passage represents one of the major turning points in the narrator’s character development. Shortly after Duo tells him to abandon his desire for the parka, the narrator is reminded of how he outperformed his peers in the past despite the absence of a reward. He is reminded that even if he performs his best, his rewards signify nothing.

“I had become a devotee to a religion of my own creation. Its most integral ritual was maintaining a precise calm especially when angry, when hurt, when terrified. People like my father, who yelled freely in English and Twi whenever things were bad, were heretics to be ignored or hated.”

The narrator discusses his attitude toward conflict in this passage, which is integral to understanding his disposition toward the story’s events. The narrator’s reactions are purposefully muted, partly because he has been told throughout his childhood to be patient. When his father suddenly abandons their family, he resorts to calm as a form of differentiation; he quietly fears that expressing his feelings so outwardly will make him more like his father than he wants.

“When I did see my sister, I tried to be fatherly. ‘How was school today?’ I’d ask.

‘You were there,’ she’d reply. She was only a few years younger. She did me the mercy of pretending everything was normal. We were good at that. Acting, ignoring our own disintegrating.”

The narrator exhibits a disposition to stories, which is a character trait that extends across his entire family. A brief moment with his sister shows how the two engage in storytelling as a coping mechanism for their difficult situation. This echoes the narrator’s thought experiment about finding a child at the back of a truck—small fictions that get him through his hurt.

“To make things easier, I played little games in my head.”

The element of play resonates deeply with the story the narrator’s father tells throughout “The Lion & the Spider.” To overcome the Lion, Anansi engages him in an elaborate game that begins even before they decide to race each other to the mountaintop. When the father reaches the end of his story, he reveals that Anansi tricked the Lion into eating stones, underscoring the ways The Transformative Power of Magical Thinking engages modes of play to overcome difficult situations.

“‘I used to hate when they noticed me. I get it,’ says Fuckton while looking at Porter. ‘Then you think, if they’d just leave me alone, it’d get better. But then when they leave you alone, they leave you all the way alone. It’s just as bad. Worse. It’s like you’re nothing. Nobody. I hated that. I waited until I got to college. One more chance. I gave them one more chance to fix it, but still nothing. Not one friend. No girls looked at me. No one even tried. And I—I gave them so many “chances. Order of the Stingray. I’ve touched one before. A real stingray. They’d debarbed it, so it wouldn’t kill everyone. I felt bad for it. But it’s not a real thing. The order isn’t real. We aren’t wizards. I know you think they deserve it. What do you deserve, though? You think you’re already dead. But you’re not.’”

Fuckton delivers an extended monologue to Porter that explains his character on one hand and makes implicit comparisons on the other. Although the reader is given few details about Porter to explain his actions, it is easy to believe that Fuckton can understand Porter’s situation based on the specificity of his experience. Based on the circumstances he finds Porter in, Fuckton reverse engineers a portrait of the other character using his own experience.

“‘Let me do it. Before though, do you still hate me?’

‘I’m an angel now,’ she says as she takes Fuckton’s hand.”

In the lead-up to this passage, Fuckton repeatedly presses Deirdra for validation to prove that their interaction changed him for the better. This passage represents the turning point of Fuckton and Deirdra’s relationship. It calls back to Deirdra’s implication that being an angel made her better than Fuckton, whom she declared to be nothing.

“Florence is currently seventh in the nation in sales. She’s the real deal, but I’m me. I carve ICEKING in the walls of the shipping halls. That way, even when I’m done with the mall, my legend will live forever.”

IceKing’s sales performance is built around an obsessive desire to preserve his legacy. Without any other motivation to drive him in his career or push him to break out of retail, he desires only for others to acknowledge his reputation, even as he disdains his mall job as something he will eventually be “done” with.

“You have to grab for happiness in places like this because there isn’t enough to go around for everybody. Working retail is never gonna be the armed services or the police or anything. It’s a job at least. It could be worse. Everywhere is different. Some places, people eat alcohol-infused chocolate-covered strawberries. Other places, everything tastes like cholera. The idea is that even in nothing jobs like this, you need to think of ways you might really be helping somebody, or you could end up a Lucy.”

In contrast to IceKing, Florence maintains a balancing act between the joy and bleakness of retail work. She downplays the tedium of her role by differentiating it from jobs where things are better or worse, making it seem like retail is unique in its own way. Her motivation is entirely self-driven, knowing that a failure to look for the happy parts of her job could be fatal.

“Down below me that day, I saw two kids near Cone Zone joking with each other and, like, pretending to lean over and fall. They were only one floor above Lucy and her yellow blanket. You’d think the mall would maybe close for a few hours. Let people gather themselves. Maybe light a candle or something. Nope. Buy One Get One stops for no one.”

Florence highlights The Plight of Retail Workers as she recalls Lucy’s death, stressing that the only thing worse than her suicide was the immediate reaction to it. She acknowledges that Lucy’s death was a tragedy befitting the candle tributes communities usually leave at sites of commemoration. However, she seems to be the only one who feels this way, which leads her to worry about her own fate should she choose to do the same thing.

“Nothing he writes will last through the Flash—everything goes back to how it was the day the bomb dropped—but writing in it helps him think.”

Ike’s writing not only foreshadows the end of the story but is a symbolic act of hope that represents his family’s attitude toward the Flash. Ama acknowledges that Ike’s writing will not persist when the Flash restarts the Loop. However, his memory will, and the passage of his memory from one iteration to the next ensures that they will be equipped with greater knowledge as they live through the Flash.