PodCastle

* Author : A. M. Dellamonica
* Narrator : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Originally published in Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson.


Content warning for violence and gore.


Rated R.
Cooking Creole
by A. M. Dellamonica
At seventeen, it was music. Guitar.
Then, at twenty-four: speechmaking. Rabble-rousing, his mother had called it. Binding a group of listeners — big, small, middling — with his voice. Inspiring the local grocery clerk to dump her useless husband. Selling roses in boxes on lonely street-corners. Swaying a strike vote at a fish packing plant on the East Coast.
Stupid, dangerous skill. What had he been thinking?
Reinventing himself again at twenty-seven, he took up gambling. Rake in the green, he figured, and the rest would fall into place. For a time he was about nothing but the ins and outs of cards and billiard cues, the snap of dice in his wrist and the chuckle of roulette balls going around and around.
Now Steep Dover had finally figured out what he wanted to do with his life.
At thirty-five, he looked close to fifty on his bad days, with taut, light-catching strands of white wired through the close-cropped black hair against his scalp. The lines on his forehead and around his eyes were prematurely deep. Instead of wearing the slow erosions of age, he’d been fractured by upheavals: heartbreaks, riot cops. When he faced the mirror in the mornings, he saw himself icing over. Only when he smiled — or so women told him — did he look like the young man he still was.
Tonight, though, he felt childlike: vitally awake, keenly excited, and more than a little scared.
He was picking his way along the side of Vancouver’s Lougheed Highway to a crossing point that looked — except for the whizzing trucks and fast commuter cars — like it should have been out in a country town somewhere. Squeezed between a shopping mall two hundred meters back and a scattering of machine shops up ahead, a barely-paved and rutted lane transected the busy Lougheed. An abandoned gas station occupied the northeastern corner of this crossroads, unconvincing evidence of human occupation in a wilderness that was otherwise nothing but traffic noise and curving hillsides of blackberry brambles. Narrow grooves of trampled grass bracketed the road — a path for anyone on foot who had business there, though what there was to bring an ordinary pedestrian into this no-man’s land, Steep couldn’t say.
The intersection had no traffic light, no sign or marker, not even a pullout lane for the gas station. A pocket of remoteness in the midst of an urban bustle, it sat in the industrial wildlands between the Lougheed and its sister highway, the Trans-Canada, its gas station dark, its blackberries fat and oiled-over with fuel emissions, its pathways abandoned and yet never quite overgrown.
It was just after nine. The mall had closed and the sun was setting; on the road, commuters were headed east to Coquitlam and Port Moody. Higher up, crows were commuting, too — sharp charcoal animations, they glided by the thousands across a palette of darkening blue.
Steep sat on a halved oil drum. It was still warm, heated through the sunny day that was now passing into dark.