Quintin Collins
The Data Says America Burns
The data slithered through the umbilical cord. It breached
the placenta, foretold floods of misfortune in the amniotic fluid.
Kicking and screaming, the data met light. My mother
swaddled a decimal point latched to her breast, infant body
cupped like a comma curved between digits. When I was a toddler,
the data dismantled an electrical outlet. It was curious how the world worked.
Older data knew already, so it burned Los Angeles for five days
while I said my first sentences. The data started counting
and stopped when I was six. My grandfather smoked cigarettes
until statistics smothered his lungs with tumors. This time, Florida
went up in flames. One summer evening, everything black
but security lights, the data struck a match, lit a cigar,
and handed it to my father. My mother
said it was a gift from friends at my birth. The data
spiraled from the glowing tip like smoke, my father a shadow
in the dark. In school, teachers warned about the data.
Some students already had mouths full of percent signs. Their tongues
clicked like tickers. When I met those kids on the wrong block
on the wrong day, the data kept a knee on my spine. Cincinnati smoldered,
and then America crackled on a jet fuel bonfire.
Wasn’t it always embers? Wasn’t it always Oakland?
The data thought so and slipped a few figures
into my palm when I turned twenty-one: Florida incinerated
again, the flames found new kindling, crawled from Ferguson to Cleveland
to New York to North Charleston to Baltimore to Waller County to Falcon Heights.
One in every, two in every, three in every, four in every—the data
spilled tens and hundreds and thousands and millions into streets.
At twenty-seven, I talked with my wife about counting down from nine,
and a statistic said, “Remember, I rode shotgun when cops stopped you
in Chicago.” In California, a new blaze sparked in Sacramento,
and I tried to tally the tip of each flame.
Quintin Collins has works that have appeared or are forthcoming in Threshold, Glass Mountain, Eclectica, Transition, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Solstice MFA program, Quintin is a managing editor at a digital marketing agency, where he publishes writing craft blogs. If Quintin were to have one extravagance, it would be a personal sommelier to give him wine pairings for books.
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