Salsa Nocturna: A Bone Street Rumba Collection Read online

  SALSA NOCTURNA

  All stories are Copyright © 2012/2016 Daniel José Older and are used with permission.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact Crossed Genres.

  Original edition edited by Kay T. Holt.

  Bone Street Rumba Map by Cortney Skinner.

  Lyrics From "The Mothafuckin' Riot" by King Impervious from the album "Red Handed Royalty" produced by Desmond Pocket. Copyright © Brooklyn Boogie Records, 2013. Used with permission.

  Lyrics from "Katarsis" by Juan Santiago performed by Culebra from the album "Como mi ritmo no hay dios." Copyright © Way Down Underground Music Collective. Used with permission.

  "Graveyard Waltz" was previously published in The Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2009.

  "The Collector" was previously published in The ShadowCast Audio Anthology in 2010, and in The Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2010.

  ”Protected Entity" was previously published in Crossed Genres Magazine in 2010.

  "Salsa Nocturna" was previously published in Strange Horizons in 2010.

  "Tenderfoot" was previously published in The Innsmouth Free Press in 2011.

  "Phantom Overload" was previously published in Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm by Crossed Genres Publications in 2011.

  “Victory Music” was previously published in [PANK] in 2015.

  ISBN 978-1-625672-00-1

  For Dora, Marc and Malka

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction to the Original Edition

  Author’s Preface

  Tenderfoot

  Salsa Nocturna

  Date Night

  Skin Like Porcelain Death

  Graveyard Waltz

  Protected Entity

  Magdalena

  The Collector

  Red Feather and Bone

  The Passing

  Tall Walkin' Death

  Victory Music

  Love is a Fucking River

  Forgive Me My Tangents

  Phantom Overload

  About the Author

  Introduction to the Original Edition

  In the hyperbolic world of jacket review copy, and self-congratulatory "blurb speak," we are often told that so-and-so – who once parked cars and saved starving children, who climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with two of said children on his or her back while penning their first novel at the age of ten – is a "writer to watch" and an"up-and-coming superstar" in the world of literature and letters. Most of the time we read these descriptions and blink back a knowing smile, then flip to the author's pages (or the author's photo), wondering if the writer will live up to the advanced hokum and ballyhoo; however, in this case, all the hype is true. Really.

  From the very first workshop at the now dearly missed Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Manhattan, I knew – indeed, we all knew – that Daniel José Older had a magical way of writing the world. Daniel had a distinctive imagination and voice that spoke of wondrous journeys. Somewhere, somehow during his very busy and full life, this writer had parked his butt in a chair, rolled up his sleeves, and done some good work. The music, the wisdom, his compassion, and humor came through in every line of his draft of a short story called "Salsa Nocturna" at that time. It wasn't a perfect, flawless work – what newborn vision is? – but it was a vibrant, living thing that offered that "sense of wonder" readers enjoy and discuss beyond the page. We loved meeting "Gordo" and his family in a reimagined version of the city we all thought we knew. Daniel's music was a startling, strange brew of remixed New York City street songs from Harlem to Brooklyn, and like the best salsa music, it blended ancient Afro-Cuban rhythms and a wicked grasp of how a people's disparate histories can impact present and future lives in surprising ways. Who else could offer us ghostly refugee camps and gentrification in the middle of the 'hood, negrita noir and neocolonialism in the afterlife equipped with bureaucracy and spiritual red tape? Daniel imagined this, troubling the waters, and all while penning a Lovecraftian love song to New York City.

  That evening we left workshop with the magic of Daniel's prose still flowing through our heads. Laughter, mixed in with a little darkness and a lot of light, is what characterized his first work. The idea that people, ordinary people are far more powerful, courageous, and brighter than they think they are is a general theme in all his pieces, and that is the wisdom that has stayed with me. The general consensus of those gathered at that very memorable first workshop session on the second floor of the NAACP building on 96th and Broadway, is that we wanted more, far more of Daniel José Older's stories. His work invited us to enter a unique world that made everyday, ordinary living seem that much more remarkable.

  Much respect to this very talented writer and to all those spirited hearts and minds who supported this debut collection of short stories you're holding in your hands. Making good mojo in any art can be a tricky business, an intricate dance. Daniel José Older has captured the eclectic rhythm of New York City and reimagined it with his own special salsa.

  Sheree Renée Thomas

  Memphis, Tennessee

  2012

  Author of Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, Seattle 2016) and Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems ("Conversation Pieces Series," Vol. 28, Aqueduct Press, Seattle 2011)

  Editor of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (Warner, 2000) – Winner of the 2001 World Fantasy Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Editor of Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (Warner Aspect, 2004) – Winner of the 2005 World Fantasy Award

  Author’s Preface

  It was just past eleven p.m. on December 31, 2008—that dizzy in-between time when we’re not quite here but not yet there—and white kids crowded the trendy streets of Haight-Ashbury. I was in San Francisco with my family but they’d all stayed in for the night and left me to wander my old stomping grounds—I’d spent a few months here after high school, first as a bike messenger, then a waiter at Mel’s Drive-In. I had stories on my mind.

  I’d always been a big reader, but that year I felt like I’d rediscovered literature. I devoured all of Octavia Butler’s works, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and, in one sleepless night that felt like it somehow flew past, Walter Mosley’s short story collection Six Easy Pieces. The literary chemical reaction of all that brilliance plus Steven King’s On Writing and bingewatching Cowboy Bebop set a fire inside me. Up to that point, I’d put most of my creative energy into music, although stories had always lingered at the heart of it. But something was different now. Octavia and Walter and Junot were speaking a language I’d heard all around me on the street but never read on the page, certainly not in the context of stories about aliens, detectives, or supernerds. This was a new mythology; it was permission. I’d always known I could get lost in a book; now I knew I could be found in one too.

  I dipped into a brightly lit headshop for a pack of cigars and a pocket sized rum. Lit a smoke and walked back out into the street, weaving through the crowds. An old homeless guy sparechanged; some twenty-year old rich kids sparechanged. Somewhere not too far away, the darkness of the panhandle and Golden Gate Park churned and beckoned. What mysteries did it hide? What magic? What stories would come from this night?

  I didn’t know what being a writer meant, but I knew I loved writing. I’d always loved writing. I knew that telling stories was as essentia
l to who I was as my own name, that stories sought me out, took shape in the air around me, poured forth when summoned.

  A tall, wasted, and impeccably dressed cat with tightly wrapped locks stretching down his back addressed the festive street: Whaddup douchebags and douchebaguettes? A few passing revelers chuckled, but most ignored him. A blond lady rolled her eyes as if she was being hit on for like the four hundredth time tonight. Why so serious? He yelled into the sky. This is the year, people! The time, she has come! People, get ready! We made quick friends and partyhopped for a few hours. The new year entered with a few drunken yells and random objects thrown into the air. The night slid past with no major event, no fight or crisis, no sudden love affair or break up.

  I came home, moved into a new place on Lexington Ave in Bed-Stuy, set up an office in the basement. I had been working graveyard shifts on the ambulance, coming home, blogging about the various disasters and doldrums of the night before. It was easy: I just wrote what happened; took a handful of minutes and the results flowed smoothly and encapsulated a tiny piece of what it’s like to work at the messy crossroads of life and death. I thought: what if I just made some shit up? Then it’d be fiction, not a blog. And some little dam inside me broke. Just tell the fucking story, became my motto. I stopped overthinking and started writing the book that would one day become Shadowshaper.

  During the next year, as I was amassing the first dozen of what would eventually be some forty rejections letters from agents, I took a class with Sheree Renée Thomas at the now-defunct Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center on the Upper West Side. There, I started writing the stories that would one day become this collection. One of the first ones began like this: “It’s just past eleven p.m. on December thirty-first—that dizzy in-between time when we’re not quite here but not yet there—and hip young white kids crowd the trendy streets of Haight-Ashbury.” Eventually, that went on to become the first chapter of Half-Resurrection Blues, and the Haight became Park Slope and Sunset became Prospect and that mystery hiding in the woods became an entrada, a secret entrance to the Underworld. And the Bone Street Rumba began.

  Sheree midwifed that world into existence, nurtured my writing with love and precision while more rejections piled up and the publishing world started looking like that misty impossible-to-scale cliff in the Princess Bride. I kept writing. Gradually, a few small and midsized publications took my work. When I approached Crossed Genres, who had published two of my stories, about serializing some of the longer ones, they said, “What about a book?” Under the editorial guidance of the excellent Kay Holt, Salsa Nocturna grew from a bunch of stories into a coherent narrative. It was Kay, during a phonecall I will never forget, who pointed out that the book was a damn sausage party, and I got my shit together and wrote Krys and CiCi’s stories, “Magdalena” and “The Passing,” and then the characters took hold, as Kia Summers would later do, and started popping up again and again.

  Besides the two additional stories, “Victory Music” and “Date Night”, and this introduction, this new edition includes some small updates to the original texts. When I first wrote these stories, Carlos was the only inbetweener anyone had ever heard about. He hadn’t met Sasha or the Survivors yet, he hadn’t fallen in love. Except, of course, he had, I just didn’t know it yet. So in the interest of series continuity and making shit work, I’ve made a couple changes here and there.

  The fun part about writing an interconnected collection was watching the arcs and structure emerge on its own. There’s no sense that any one arc needs to see itself to completion over the course of the book, so many disparate threads become their own unusual fabric. It is an ensemble production, the portrait of a community. In Salsa, without realizing it, I created two somewhat related worlds: one centered around Carlos, and one centered around Gordo. As with real-life communities, everyone knows someone who knows someone else who knows that guy, so all paths seem destined to lead into each other at one moment or another. Worlds collide; communities break down and re-form into brand new communities.

  In my head, the sprawling map of the Brooklyn I know and love stretched for miles and miles amidst the complex tangles of power and history. Writing the world of the Bone Street Rumba meant deploying these characters into the world and letting the world do the talking. Narrative is melody, I tell my students, and worldbuilding is harmony. The stacked notes of literature, context-work allows us room to draw on all those messy intersections and imbalances that make places come to life. When I was a kid I loved those cartoon birds-eye-view maps of cities, where different sites of interest (and paying businesses) would stand out and decorative elements like balloons and trolley cars hinted at so many stories lurking beneath the surface.

  We all have personal cartographies of the places we’ve lived; memories crowd the crossroads like ghosts: here’s the corner where we stood in the rain; there’s the club we played that gig and then walked the streets all night. My own maps include the many shootings, stabbings, heart attacks, and drunken disaster calls I worked over the years, plus the many walks I took with friends or alone, and that night on the brink of a brand new year, two time zones away when I roamed the streets of the Haight with a pack of cigars and pocket rum, imagining the world that would one day be the Bone Street Rumba.

  Daniel José Older

  Brooklyn, NY

  August, 2016

  Cantan

  De memorias y tragedias

  Valses y demonologías dispersas

  Cantan para evitar

  El escozor de lo que pudiera haber sido, hubiera podido ser, si sólo

  Y construir un nuevo lenguaje del quizás

  Cañones de posibilidad se abren con cada nota

  Cada molécula un chance

  Una esperanza o sueño apagado

  Lenguas meneándose y dientes rechinando

  Ojos mojados y agudos

  Para detener la duda

  Cantan los Muertos

  Y el mundo se rompe abierto

  Y desangra otro día

  They sing

  Of memories, tragedies,

  Waltzes and scattered demonologies

  They sing to ward off

  The sting of might have been, could have been, if only

  And build a brand new language of maybe

  Canyons of possibility open with each note

  Every molecule a chance,

  A hope or extinguished dream

  Wagging tongues and gnashing teeth,

  Eyes moist and sharp,

  To keep the doubt at bay

  They sing, the Dead

  And the world cracks open

  And bleeds another day

  From the song Katarsis

  by Culebra

  Tenderfoot

  I remember Delton Jennings. Bumped into him pretty regularly on my late night sojourns and the guy was nice enough, if you could get past the rambling and hygiene issues. But this flattened mass of flesh, blood-crusted hair and organs? They put a name tag where they guessed the foot would've been and called it a day.

  The one thing that is impossible not to notice is the smell. It's not the pee-plus-beer-plus-a quarter century of body odor combo that Delton usually rocked. It's something more animal-like. As if he'd been wrestling in a zoo and lost.

  I concentrate hard, watching the air around him for those little shining satellites that tell me what's going on with folks, but nothing comes. He's already been dead at least six hours and rotting in this morgue for three, so whatever memories his corpse carried could easily have fluttered away. But then, slowly, a few flashes return. It's the sound of leaves rustling; something huge moving through the underbrush. Terror courses through me – I assume it was Delton's, 'cause I don't frighten easily. I hear a high pitched shrieking – something not human. Light bursts out of the darkness and the inside of my head turns summersaults. Then everything goes black.

  I'm dizzy when I open my eyes. It's not that I'd been expecting Little Bo Peep, but dealing with this gi
ant screeching monstrosity seems a little out of my pay grade. My creepy, translucent bosses at the Council of the Dead are gonna need to hear about all this, but there's a few more leads to check up on first.

  * * *

  I like to get a strong Puerto Rican coffee after I visit the morgue. It's the perfect palate cleanser for all that creepy sterility. I sip the extra-strong, extra-sweet brew out of a little paper cup as I walk up Nostrand Ave towards Eastern Parkway. I'm sure the ghostly dickheads upstairs have selected my half-dead-half-alive ass to do this job for some nefarious reason. Whatever it may be is fine by me – I have some forgetting to get busy doing, and a creepy job is the perfect distraction.

  The rain keeps starting and stopping like an anxious lover who doesn't know if he should spend the night. The sky has been clouded over all day but the true evening darkness is just beginning to settle in. I finish my coffee and walk into the sloping park that's nestled between the Botanical Gardens and the library.

  Brett Colson crouches like a scruffy gargoyle in his regular perch on a bench halfway up the slope. He's talking to himself, but waves at me genially as I approach.

  "Bad business with Delton," I say.

  It takes Brett some effort to pull away from whatever conversation he was busy with before I showed up. "Bad indeed," he finally manages.

  "You see him before it happened?"

  "Carlos, me and Delton been running these streets together for damn near twenty years. I seen Delton every day."

  "So what's the deal?"

  "I dunno, man." Brett fists up his face in disgust. "D disappeared one night last week, showed up again reeking like he was rolling around with some circus animals. Couldn't get the smell off him."

  The smell came before he got stomped. I have some recalculating to do. "Didn't say where he went?"

  "Didn't remember. But that's not so odd for Delton. Thing is though, he actually got hisself cleaned and everything at the shelter on Fulton and still couldn't get that reek of shit and death offa him. We woulda teased him 'bout it but it was all kinda creepy. Now I'm glad we didn't."