South Central Noir

Darryl never kept a gun in his store. He had his dad’s old Glock at home, a memento more than protection, but it wasn’t with him now. The notion of an armed bookseller didn’t sit well with him, felt like an oxymoron, so all he had in his trembling hand was a broom handle as he approached the bathroom door. “Come on. No one’s gonna hurt you!” he said, trying to sound folksy and empathetic. Sometimes desperate people only wanted five dollars, or a sandwich. “You need somethin’ I can get you, brother?” (Sexist to assume it was a man, he knew, but whoever it was would have to be pretty tall to reach those boxes on the top shelf. And strong enough to pull them down.)

Stillness and silence.

Darryl knew that most store owners would call the police, but not on his damn watch. And he wouldn’t call those security guards either. He used the hashtag #abolitionnow on his Twitter, so this was how a world without policing would look like. People would need to deal with their own damn problems instead of expecting somebody to come help them.

“All right, then. One... two...”

He didn’t wait for three. He turned the knob and kicked the door open so hard that he tore a foot-sized hole in the wood, which apparently was hollow inside. Shit.

No one was in the bathroom, which was only as big as a broom closet, with no windows, so its emptiness sat in plain view. One gray-white toilet, water low as usual. A sink with a rust trail in the basin from the faucet left dripping over the years. The mirror with a triangle-sized crack in one corner. An old Devil in a Blue Dress movie poster featuring Denzel. Empty.

“What...” Darryl said aloud to his reflection in the mirror, “...the fuck?”

That was the first time the word came to his mind: I’ve got a damn ghost. His grandfather would have called it a haint or a spook. Whatever the word for it, his experiences in the past couple of days finally made sense.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

And just maybe, he thought, he was.

The Spirituality section gave him clues but no real answers. Yet he’d pieced together enough from ghost stories and horror movies to figure out that any haint going to the trouble of being noticed by human eyes must have a message. But what? And, more importantly, whose message?

He thought first of Mrs. Richardson’s husband, Calvin, who had died of a heart attack behind this very desk back in 2005, but why would he bother coming back after all these years? (All he’d talked about was getting away from the burdens of Sankofa, so it was hard to imagine him returning now.) Same for Calvin Jr., who had never shown much interest in the store before he OD’d on painkillers in 2010. Documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne had spent hours at a time visiting Sankofa before he died after brain surgery in 2007, but wouldn’t he be more likely to haunt a movie theater, his beloved medium? Muhammad Ali had done a signing and called the store “the greatest” years ago, though believing it was Ali’s ghost was plain wishful thinking. Like, damn, Ali could haunt anywhere in the world. Same with so many of the others: Prince had surprised him one day and bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of music biographies, but wouldn’t Prince haunt a recording studio instead? Or, better yet, a keyboard? Could it be E. Lynn Harris, gone so soon in 2009? Or Eric Jerome Dickey, who’d broken his readers’ hearts when he passed away in 2021?

And sister Octavia. Octavia E. Butler had done a book signing for Fledgling only months before she died, on Halloween night, no less. He’d almost sprung for an overflow space but decided to let the customers sit close to each other for the experience. They’d been shoulder to shoulder, beyond standing room only. Some had sat on the floor. Every time Octavia had spoken with her deep, wise timbre, the room had been so silent it might as well be empty. Her books could be grim, yet she’d smiled all through that night. Octavia might be haunting the store, he thought, so he put an asterisk by her name. She just might.

But how many other customers had died since Darryl started working here when he was fifteen, their hair graying, walk slowing, persistent coughs shaking stooping shoulders, breaths wheezing under the weight of cigarettes, heart conditions, and diabetes? Three dozen, easily. And those were just the ones whose names he remembered, whose faces had graced the aisles with laughter and smiles and “What you got for me today?” That wasn’t counting the ones who had just moved away, and that was a kind of death too, so why not?