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

Behind him, Cyan stood in the doorway of the rescue, leaning within the threshold and chewing loose fistfuls of peanuts. He must have heard us asking one another about the sound Headass was making. "Little-known fact," he called, "but rabbits have the ability to purr, just like our feline friends. It's much cooler though. You know why? Rabbits do it with their teeth."

Headass wasn't doing anything with his teeth, and the noise he was making didn't sound one bit like purring. It was more like a drawn-out, melancholic moan. He was hardly stopping long enough to breathe.

Cyan wiped his hands on the front of his pants and came over to us. Specks of papery brown skin from the peanuts had become stuck in his beard. "This was Reginald's idea, you know. So we let him choose whichever costume he wanted. It's maybe not what we would have gone with but there's definitely something to it."

Maybe Cyan wasn't all bad, for an invader.

"It was cool of y'all to hire a homeless dude."

Cyan seemed taken aback by the comment. He said, "Well, technically … he's a volunteer."

"Wait, you don't pay him?"

He listened to Headass moan and nodded regretfully. "If only we could."

"Do you feed him?"

Cyan balked. "Feed him? Well, there's always lots of leftover romaine, not to mention—let's see—bok choy, watercress, kohlrabi…"

Maybe not.

We watched Headass stop, spin on his heels, and start again in the opposite direction.

"There haven't been as many adoptions as we might have liked," Cyan said to us, changing the subject. The two white women who worked there were the only people inside. "Not a single one so far, in fact. But folks seem curious, that's for sure. They slow down when they pass by. They peek in. Building interest is always step numero uno."

"You can't really expect there to be a lot of rabbit adoptions in the hood," Roni said, with a razor in her voice.

"Why not?" he replied. "History tells us that rabbits appeal to people from all walks of life. Certain rodents too, studies have shown. Besides, this isn't really the hood anymore, is it?"

Cyan was right about that last part, though he spoke as if he had absolutely nothing to do with it. His comment made us stare first at him and then around at the drivers parading by in their eco-friendly cars and the cyclists who actually wore helmets and biking shorts, pumping their nickel-bright knees, assaulting us with their show of law-abiding goodness and safety. But all of that was oppressively dull—we knew it too well—so we didn't comment on it. What was interesting to us were the people and places that were gone. When Cyan went back inside, and as Headass continued his marching and moaning, we found ourselves scrutinizing the rescue itself. What exactly had been there before? Any one of us could have gone in and asked Cyan or the rescue ladies about it, but none of us wanted to. There was nothing appealing about the possibility of acquiring the information from them, from some records they had dug up as part of a business plan. It would have been that merely. Information, data. Looking it up with a phone would have felt similarly cheap. The thing was to remember, to use our minds and their keen branching tails, to recollect via the spark of the scintillating connections we could make on our own. But once the topic was broached and we discussed it among ourselves, no one could conjure up the answer. For a long time, before the opening of the rescue, the space had been empty, with a sign in the clouded window that read COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR RENT.

All of a sudden Headass pivoted and walked briskly toward us, as if all his back and forth had just been a way of winding himself up. He stood directly in front of us and peered down into our faces, fully inhabiting his bestial role. The teeth of his costume pressed pinholes into his worried brow.

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.