Afro-Bougie Blues - Chapter Excerpt

All that with a laid-back "I Got This" attitude that was so different from our pressure cooker environment. In fact, I found myself cooking up excuses to be around him, presumably to help him tweak the database. He knew how to make me laugh at myself. And I loved it. After his contract was over, we started dating.

I remembered the night I had told him I'd been pregnant before. I had orchestrated it as the crucial moment in our relationship that it was. We had not yet had sex, but since the attraction was there, I wanted to tell him early -I didn't want it to be a secret. So, we met for dinner at a seafood restaurant; I picked a place we'd never been to before to symbolize exploring new territory. I told him just before the check came.

"Terrence, there's something I need to tell you, and it could change how you see me as a person, but it's important I think you know how much I like you I hope we'll become very close, but you also need to know how seriously I take birth control I got pregnant when I was seventeen I thought I was in love, and I didn't understand enough about sex I didn't think that one time would do it But it did The only thing I did know was I didn't want to be a teenage mother or waddle through my senior year pregnant "

I stopped there I'd never told another man I'd never wanted to get serious enough with anyone else to trust them with that one piece of information, or rather those three pieces: I'd had sex at age seventeen, gotten pregnant, and aborted the child. It wasn't that I was ashamed or had remorse. I simply knew too many people wouldn't understand where I was coming from back then. For me, the abortion had been a pragmatic decision.

There had been no angst at all, but no one liked to hear that. I was supposed to have anguished about this for days and weeks, teetered on the fence with it, and contemplated keeping the child and raising it myself. I did none of that. Instead, I aborted the child within me and never looked back.

(Continued

) Book Praise

The best short stories should explore ideas as well as emotions centering around an instance where intense change becomes possible or at least, imaginable for the character and this is true in all of Wilson's stories but perhaps no more so than in "Mourning Angela" where every sentence is as full and alive as a sentence can be while managing to stay ordinary and wholly relatable to her readers And it's this kind of attention to detail and richness of texture that lifts her characters from the page into some more lasting place in a reader's mind

With twelve stories for readers to immerse themselves in and characters that feel vulnerable and real, AfroBougie Blues is a must-read for fans of short fiction and is an unreservedly recommended 5-star read!

Reviewed by BookViral