More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Here, in the rapids, I can see it. A face that matches the sky. Fierce. Pewter. Then, gone.
Bueno, the joke was on me. Because, in a city of almost ten million people, being boricua in a dingy Brooklyn foundry gets you nothing but solitude.
Though the Currents’ call may sound distant at times, you are a Son of Neptune and my beloved starfish.” She touches her forehead to mine. “Keep this shell, that you might never forget it.”
América, la tierra de oportunidad, I thought. A homeland for “Schemers and Dreamers” who dared to change their fates. But if this was what it took for Morgan to change his, then I wasn’t sure I had what it took to change mine.
You only swallow ashes if you know what it’s like to go hungry.
“Sideshow Rule Number One: Real is whatever’s in your head.”
“You’re the only one who passes for normal, but you’re probably the oddest carny in this company.” “Being a carny don’t require being odd on the outside,” she remarked, shaking her skirt out. “It’s a state of mind.” “Yeah, the state of desperation,” Eli snorted.
My whole life, no one had ever looked at me this way. Like they could see past the layers of shirt and skin and rib cage and find the X that marked the spot where I’d buried myself.
“How ’bout ‘Río’?” “Río.” He mimicked my rolled R like a native boricua. “Why that name?” A river can be both devastating and beautiful. I shrugged. “It suits you.”
How do you describe asthma to someone who can’t drown?
“I would invite you in for a demonstration,” he said smoothly, “but I fear you would not enjoy drowning.”
“It is the simple truth of every creature with a soul. You are not your body, Benigno.”
what else can I do in this cage with so costly a gift as Benigno’s song except place it in my heart beside the moon? Would that he had sung for me until the dawn.
In a counterfeit world, he alone was the real deal.
He and his mother had believed humans deserved saving, and humanity had punished them cruelly for it.
I often wonder if the people of Borínquen will always be caught between the master who conquers us and the master we wish we could be for ourselves.”
“A Puerto Rican boy who falls in love with other boys.”
Revealing your truth is like swimming, Benigno. It may not come naturally or easily. But in still waters, it can be learned,”
“Safe,” I repeated, looking down at his conviction with envy. “In my whole dumb life, I’ve never felt as safe anywhere as I feel sitting on a metal grate twenty feet above the ground with you.”
Perhaps the Currents brought us here because they knew we would meet.” My face flushed. “Why do you say that?” He looked pityingly up at me through the iron bars. “Because we are both caged.”
Something in his nature calls to mine with music both familiar and strange. Despite the wisdom of my harmony, despite everything I believed possible, my heart is cultivating a pearl. For a human. And the more I learn about Benigno, the more he teaches me to swim.
“Primitive, eh? There a word for ‘comemierda’ in your language?” He smirked. “If I stare at you long enough, I am sure I can come up with one.” “Ah, shaddup.”
“When water claims a human life, fault the sailor, not the sea.”
“You loved your tía very much.” “Couldn’t be helped,” I admitted. “When your family and ten years of memories get swept away in a hurricane, it’s easy to love the one who thought you were worth saving.”
“Salt water has healing properties. That is why our tears are made of it.
The softest hearts wear the thickest armor. I have seen enough of your heart to know it exists.”
“The moon and the ocean are lovers. Companions in the night,” he murmured. “When the moon is full and the sea is calm, it hangs so large and luminous in the sky; I would go to the surface just to bathe in the silver glow and feel the tides rise to greet it.”
“Would that the moon could know the depth of my gratitude for its comforting light.”
I nearly asked him if he knew. If, when he fixed his blue irises on mine, he could see into my dreams and find himself there.
“You’ll have the moon again one day,” I said. “Te lo prometo.”
Before I left, I put my hand against the glass. A promise to return. He came and placed an argentine palm on the glass against mine. A promise to wait.
“Why’re you lookin’ at me like that?” I ventured through half a smile. “What? I got something stuck to my face?” “It brings me pleasure to look at you.”
“One day, I shall tell you how beautiful you are and why it is so. And on that day, you must believe it.”
But there’s no adage or saying for a man who falls in love with another man, let alone un tritón. A story like that only ends with a broken heart and God’s judgment.
“What if I’m not allowed to have what I want?” I asked. “Not allowed? Or too afeart to go after it?” she said, sizing me up. “You and I know fire, Benny. Don’t waste your damn life trying to smother a spark what wants to be a blaze.”
How would it feel to wake up to the ocean of his eyes? To measure his perfect dimensions against my imperfect ones, breathe in the turquoise sea off his skin, and feel like home had come to find me instead of the other way around?
Shivering, he presses his palm against it in a wordless bid—for what? Forgiveness? Consolation? My very heart? He can have them all.
Ave María, if I had a jitney for every condescending compliment a white man gave me whenever I did something too hard for them to do themselves.
Here lies Benny Caldera, Puerto Rican Fraud.
“Sometimes I think the hurricane hadn’t meant to leave me behind. That everything I am is an accident because I should’ve been swept out to sea.”
“I cannot take your burdens,” he went on. “But if you let me, I can bear them with you for a while.”
“Boy Named Kind,” he said softly, “when was the last time someone showed you kindness?”
Bendito. Río smelled like the ocean. Like a sunlit morning on a pier in San Juan.
He molded himself to my body as if it would somehow keep me from splintering apart, and it was a relief to let him so I didn’t have to.
“I dream of you.” I waited for him to drop me. He didn’t. “What do you dream, Benigno?” My arms tightened around him to curb the shaking in my limbs. “That I’m with you. Under the water. Holding you just like this,” I whispered into his shoulder. “They’re the happiest dreams I’ve ever had.”
“All I know is that he misses the moon. If I could, I’d ride a roller coaster to the sky just to steal it for him.”
“What if nobody taught me how to keep my heart safe”—my eyes drifted to the dark ribbon of his mouth—“from you?” “Your heart in my keeping,” he whispered, “would always be safe.”
But I was one of Río’s seashells in his hands—treasured, precious, apt to shatter if pressed too hard.
“I did not know my heart could bend toward a human’s touch,” he said quietly. “Until you.”
Because no dream, no fantasy or myth, had prepared me for this—for happiness that ran in all directions and watered every love-parched corner inside me until I felt as free and weightless as I had soaring above the earth in the red barquito.
