Like her boyfriend Riley, she is devoted to cosplay. Another is Paris Larkin, who longs for a superpower to "make herself visible" (10). Then, there is a visual artist Kevan, who is hundreds of miles away from the main action in the story, but would later draw images of Black men, like Riley and Brother Man, killed by police (8). Nafissa Thompson-Spiress 'Suicide, Watch' provides a dark but humorous portrait of suicide and community in an age of social media. Another Black man, referred to as Brother Man, "was burly but not violent and rather liked to regard himself as an intellectual in a misleading package" (4). From the opening sentences of the opening story in Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut collection, Heads of the Colored People, we’re in a world of humor, provocation and deep reflection about. One of the characters, a young Black man named Riley wears colored contacts and bleached hair, and, as we're informed by the narrator, "this wasn’t any kind of self-hatred thing” (1). The narrator takes the time to give us brief, in-depth takes on the movements, choices, and thoughts of four characters. In Nafissa Thompson-Spires's story “Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology," we are introduced to four characters whose individual stories intersect on a day that two of them are shot by police.
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