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worshipful happiness? How can I be jealous of him for the dance? But this ache that I know shouldn’t be there slides through every part of me.
    I don’t actually know Enki. I’m not stupid. I’m aware this attachment I feel is the product of emotional investment in the largely stage-managed and manufactured spectacle of the royal election. I know that a thousand wakas are probably crying themselves to sleep tonight, just like me.
    I’m an artist, after all, and I live for spectacle, for the construction of emotional states and the evocation of suppressed feelings. I can appreciate what Enki has done with his election — the way he subverted it while simultaneously triumphing within its rules. I don’t envy Queen Oreste in her efforts to manage him during this year. The summer kings of moon years might not have any political clout, but I think grandes underestimate the power of desire.
    But Enki is also himself. He is the boy who turned a dance before the Queen into a political statement, the boy who came up from the verde to steal our hearts, and is it so silly, so unbelievable that I’d allowed myself to fantasize? To think that he might look at me in the way he looked at Gil tonight, that it might have been my lips he kissed, my cheek he caressed?
    I squeeze my hand into a fist. No. That’s a story a little girl tells herself to fall asleep at night, and I am done with fairy tales. I want art, pure and clean and uncompromising. I want Gil to be happy and Iwant to be happy for him. I can love Enki as the summer king without dreaming of his kisses.
    On the horizon, I see a pale glow, the barest hint of dawn. The waves get higher and choppier. The wind whistles past the trusses. I know the signs; there’s a storm coming.
    Down in the verde, they will be sealing their windows, huddling in spaces away from the waves. Even so, every year a few unlucky people are washed out. Last sun year, there was a big political debate over what the next Queen should do to help the plight of the catinga, but as far as I can tell, Oreste has done nothing but make a brief visit during her first coronation tour.
    Before I know it, I scramble out from under the covers. I’m practically naked, but I’ve stopped shivering.
    It’s almost dawn. Auntie Yaha and Mother snore in the other room. They won’t notice when I leave. They never do. I pull on my black overalls and high-necked jacket. My shoes and gloves are black too, with special grippy bottoms that are technically illegal without a license, though Gil’s mother didn’t say anything when I asked for them.
    Hunting outfits , Gil calls them, and my smile when I find my grafiteiro spray can is perhaps a little fierce, and very hungry.

    You ask me why I want to die, like you have no idea, like you haven’t known all this time exactly what I want to do. It hurts to know that you don’t understand this part of me, though together we’ve made so much more of it than I could have ever dreamed on my own.
    Samba is dance, it is spirit, it is the space between the world and nothing, between the orixás of my grandmothers and the Jesus of my grandfathers. It is a rhythm so fast you can hardly think it. It is a dance so subtle that when your feet move, you had better let yourself follow them. Samba is life.
    In the pop-rattle-pop of the pandeiro and the whoop-whoo of the cuíca and the strum-pause-strum of the guitar, I am open, I am divine, my entrails are on the floor and anyone can read them.
    Why do I want to die?
    Why do you?

    I jump a ride to the verde in four different pods, going all the way up to Gria Plaza with an Auntie’s secretary in a pale gray suit before I find a night janitor finally on her way back home. I make up some story about how I accidentally dropped my flash in the bay. I don’t sound like I’m from the verde, but I make sure I don’t sound like I’m from Tier Eight either, and anyway, she’s too tired to do much but shrug and let me sit across from