Excerpt from Witness by Jamel Brinkley, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"They eat grass? Dogs shit on grass."

"Technically it's hay," Cyan said, pointing a finger upward. "But they can't subsist on hay alone. It doesn't provide all the nutrients." He then offered us an opportunity to feed the animals some lettuce.

"So you can really get thick like that by eating lettuce and hay?" Antonio asked.

Cyan gave a heh-heh laugh, false and uncomprehending but good-natured, and then called toward the back of the store for someone named Reginald. In a moment, this Reginald walked in, except Reginald wasn't Reginald. Reginald was Headass. He stood there, looking even taller and lankier than usual, though a bit more youthful, with a semblance of a healthful glow. He was also wearing an apron, and against his chest he held a clear plastic bin filled with wet, brilliantly green leaves. His pants and kicks were clean—well, clean for Headass, anyway, meaning they weren't filthy—and his matted hair was parted oddly on one side. The part itself, which revealed his pale skin in a broad strip, glistened with some kind of grease. We gaped at the sight of him, he yawned at the sight of us. Then, in a snap, a crooked grin stretched the left side of his face, like the banner of some new country tautened by a sudden wind.

"Y'all hired Headass?"

Cyan pursed his lips and then gave his heh-heh laugh again. "It was always our intention to engage people from the community," he said in his funny voice, with enough brightness to blind us. "Reginald here was the perfect person to help us out."

The sound of that name had the effect of a magic word, activating Headass again. He stepped forward, but instead of distributing the food among the animals in any way that would have made sense, he set the bin down on the floor, grabbed a handful of the greens, and stepped over the tremulous perimeter of a cage, entering it with two easy strides. He lowered himself until he was sitting cross-legged with the cage's three rabbits, who, after a moment of wariness and agitation, reacted surprisingly well to him. Headass slowly lifted one of the rabbits, a portly auburn-colored one with flecks of black, and set it onto his lap. With evident pleasure, he began feeding it the edge of a leaf of lettuce.

"It appears that Reginald and dear Chicory have made a love connection," one of the women said.

Headass was imitating the rabbit now, with rapid, pulsing movements of his nostrils and mouth, as though he were eating too. His fingers slowly stroked the air just above the fur, never touching it. The gesture made you feel the animal's heat. When one of us started laughing, a moment passed before we could all figure out why, but when we did, the laughter became reassuringly infectious. The pellets scattered there in the cage with Headass—scattered in all the cages—weren't made of dirt. He was sitting gleefully in a pile of the rabbits' droppings.

* * *

We left the rescue and walked shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and so on, incandescent with jokes and laughter, five lit bulbs on a string. It may be ridiculous, but seeing Headass, genuinely taking notice of him, really witnessing him rooted there in that playpen of dung, seemed to bind us in a way we hadn't been bound in months, at least since the end of junior year. We walked and without speaking we agreed on which direction to turn on which corner, we came to an immediate consensus about where (the pizza parlor) and what (a pepperoni pie) to eat for lunch, and as we ate we expressed one enthusiastic opinion about the new album everyone was talking about, which had been released without warning at midnight. We quickly agreed on which song was the best, possessed of the most fire, and after lunch when we played it aloud on one of our phones, we stopped walking and claimed a little pocket of Marcus Garvey Boulevard, making it gorgeous as hell with our singing and our shouts and the perfectly synchronized dance steps we devised right there on the spot. Even the two of us boys who had grown increasingly shy about that kind of display, especially in the last few months, were completely into it for a minute, gleefully popping our butts along with the girls until it became suddenly too awkward, and when our little performance was done we all leaned into one another and cackled in a spirit of gratified exhaustion, without a trace of cynicism, irony, or embarrassment.

Excerpted from Witness by Jamel Brinkley. Copyright © 2023 by Jamel Brinkley. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.