Skin Folk

by Nalo Hopkinson

  But Silky hadn’t wanted to be swallowed up by that dark wetness.

  She had another dream that night. In it, she had survived the flood from the previous nightmare. She was swimming on the surface, above the drowned lands. Bloated corpses bumped her from time to time. The horror made her skin prickle. She put her face into the water to inspect the damage below her. She could see submerged roads, tiny fish nibbling at dissolving lumps of flesh, a sea anemone already blossoming on a disintegrated carcass that had sunk to the sea bed.

  The sea gave a greenish cast to the rotting flesh of the drowned people. In the rigor of death, a man clutched at a slab of coral the size of a dinner table. The coral glowed reddish gold in the flickering water. The man’s face was turned up towards her. His dying gasps for air had contorted it into a ghastly scream. Watery light glistened off his teeth, turning them to gleaming coins. Silky was terrified. Just then, a freak wave rose and slammed her down into the depths, tossing her against the drowned man. The current rearranged his features. It was Morgan. His eyes opened and he reached a beseeching hand out to his sister. She couldn’t stop herself; she screamed. She expected the brine to flood her lungs, burning them, filling them like sponges, but it entered her body slowly; sweet and sustaining, like a breath of air. In disbelief, she heaved, trying to expel the liquid from her stomach.

  She woke in terror, blowing hard. She was lying in bed, a few strands of her hair crushed between her face and the pillow. Some of it had worked its way into her mouth. The hair tasted brackish as the sea, as though she’d been crying in her sleep.

  Silky lay shivering under the icy sheets, trying to get rid of the image of herself drowned, swollen full of salty water. She was afraid that if she hadn’t woken up, the sea would have changed her, rotting the flesh of her dream hands and feet into corrupt parodies of flukes, while eels snapped at her melting flesh. Her mamadjo mother could live in the sea like a mermaid, but she could not.

  The pears were ripe. Silky climbed the tree with a basket hooked over one shoulder, a long scarf inside it. She wedged the basket into a crook of the tree so that she would have her hands free to pick. Shards of golden sunlight struck her eyes. She looked down. A light breeze was rippling the grass in waves. She was sailing on a green sea.

  When they were children, she and Morgan would climb the julie mango tree in the back of the house and pretend that they were old-time pirates, scaling the mast to spy out ships to plunder. Other little boys in Mona Heights had had cap guns. Morgan had a plastic sword. He used to jab Silky with it, until that time when she punched him and broke his nose. Grandpy had been so mad at her!

  As she reminisced, Silky picked a fat, golden pear, but with a liquid sound it collapsed in her hand, rotted from within. “Ugh! Nasty!” She flicked the soggy mush off her fingers and wiped her hand on her jeans.

  After Mummy and Daddy died, the children’s grandfather came from Spanish Town to take care of them. He was the one who had told them the story about Jackson, a man who had lived just outside Spanish Town in the 1600s. People hadn’t known it at the time, but Jackson had been a carpenter turned pirate. He was a greedy man. He had drugged the crew with doped rum and scuttled their ship at sea while they were still in it. He had drowned his mates so that he could retire rich with their booty.

  “Guilt drove Jackson crazy,” Grandpy told them. “The ghosts of the drowned pirates called from their grave in the sea and asked the river spirit for her help. They said she could have their gold if she gave them revenge.

  “River Mumma loves shiny things. She agreed. She would come to Jackson at night. As he tossed and turned in his bed, he could hear the river whispering in his ear that he was a murderer and a thief. River Mumma told him she would have revenge, and she would have his gold. Jackson was afraid, but he was more greedy than scared. He wasn’t going to let her have the doubloons. He used his carpenter’s skills to make a huge table of heavy Jamaican mahogany, then he nailed every last gold coin onto it. Hid it in his cellar. He stopped bathing, stopped talking to his neighbours, stayed in his house all the time.”

  “Then what happened?” Silky had whispered, holding tight to Morgan’s sleeve for reassurance. He looked just as scared as she.

  “Jackson didn’t even notice the heavy rains that year. It rained so hard that the Rio Cobre river that ran beside his property swelled up big. He was in his cellar admiring his gold when the Rio Cobre broke its banks and gouged a new course for itself, right through his home. The house was demolished.

  “River Mumma sent the water for him,” Grandpy said. “The last thing the neighbours saw was a big golden table rising to the surface of the rushing water. It floated for twelve seconds with Jackson clinging to it. Then it sank. If he had let go, they might have been able to save him, but he refused to leave his treasure.”

  “What happened to the table?” Morgan had asked. He was eleven and already he had a taste for money. Grandpy was looking after his two orphans as best as he could, but things were tight.

  “No one ever fetched the golden table out of the Rio Cobre. They say that at the stroke of noon every day, it rises to the top of the water, and it floats for exactly twelve seconds, then sinks again, dragging anything else in the water down with it.”

  Silky’s basket was full. She tied the scarf around the handle and lowered it to the ground, climbing down after it. She lugged it inside the house. Morgan loved pears. She would make preserves from them, stew them in her precious Demerara sugar to keep them until he returned.

  The Jamaican police had sent her Morgan’s effects. Some clothes, a letter he hadn’t mailed. She had put the letter with the month’s stack of bills on the bookshelf. At least the insurance was covering Morgan’s half of the mortgage payments.

  Morgan used to say to her, “Back home, they tell you that when you come up to Canada, it’s going to be easy, not like in Jamaica; that you’ll be able to reach out your hand and pull money from the trees. Money will just fall into your lap like fruit. I wonder where my money tree is,” he said.

  He had explained his plan to her in his unmailed letter: he had gone back to Jamaica to look for the Golden Table. I think I can really find it, Silky! The Rio Cobre has altered its course twice since the pirate Jackson built his home beside it: once when he drowned with his treasure, and once more when they built the Irrigation Works in the 1800s. The works have drained off so much water onto the plain that you can actually walk on parts of the river bed in the dry season. That’s when I’m going to go looking for the Golden Table. I can dig late at night when nobody will see me. I even know the spot where the old people say it is—it’s a deep sinkhole that doesn’t dry up until the height of the dry season.

  No one looks for the Table, you know. They’re afraid. People out here still tell stories about a plantation owner way, way back who tried to have his slaves pull the Table out of the water when it rose at noon. Six men drowned that day, and twelve yokes of oxen, dragged under when the Table sank to the bottom again.

  Suppose it’s really there! All that gold! It’s almost dry season now. Just a few more weeks, and maybe I’ll be coming home rich. I’ll see you soon.

  If Silky had known what Morgan had been up to, she would have talked him out of it. When they were children, her mother had made it clear that she was to look out for her younger brother.

  “You’re the eldest one, Silky, and a girl to boot, so you have to have more sense. That boy’s so full of mischief, always getting himself in deep water. You have to be ready to pull him out. Your daddy and I won’t always be around, you know.”

  Silky had resented the burden placed on her. She loved Morgan, but at the time, she’d been a child too, just like him. Why did she have to take care of him? Isn’t that what her parents were for?

  After their parents were killed in the car crash, Silky sometimes wondered if her mother had known that they wouldn’t be around to see their children into adulthood. Like Silky, Mummy used to dream things. And if Mummy had known th
at, had she also known how to save Morgan? Did she die before she could tell her daughter what to do?

  Silky had another dream. Morgan was standing beside her on the bank of the Rio Cobre. He put an arm around her shoulders to draw her close, and pointed into the murky water.

  It’s time, he said. Look into the water, Silky. No, bend your head like so. Quickly! Twelve seconds and it gone. See it? Rising towards us through the river water? That big round of pure gold, that tabletop, shimmering like the promise of heaven. Getting bigger, coming closer… four, three, two… gone again. Sunk back into the depths of the river. You can’t take it out, you know? The spirits drag you down. If I jump in, Silky, you will pull me out? I can’t swim.

  She didn’t answer him, just stared down into the roiling water that would melt her flesh and change her if she went into it.

  Morgan had been staying with a cousin in Spanish Town; Leonie and her husband, Brian. In a phone call, Leonie told Silky that Morgan had started going out late at night, returning while it was still dark. Leonie had surprised him coming in at four o’clock one morning. He was laughing softly to himself, and she could smell stale sweat on him, like he’d been doing hard labour. When he saw her, he hid a pouch of some kind behind his back, scowled at her, and went to his room. She had heard the key turn in the lock.

  After that he kept to himself. He took a knapsack with him when he left the house in the evenings. Sometimes they saw him when he brought the knapsack back late at night, bulging with whatever was inside it. He cradled it to his body like a lover. He stayed in his room during the days, but they knew when he was in the house by the reek of sweat that followed him. Morgan had stopped using the shower, muttered that he didn’t want the water to wash him away, then had tried to pass it off as a joke. They had been afraid he was going mad.

  A few days later, a tropical storm hit Jamaica hard. The Rio Cobre swelled its banks again, and by morning, Leonie’s house was flooded knee-deep in water. She and Brian knew they had to leave the house until the storm was over. They had called for Morgan through the bedroom door, but there was no answer. Finally, Brian broke the door down. The room was empty. All they found were his clothes and his knapsack with a few water-logged splinters of wood inside it. The police told Leonie that Morgan had probably used it to carry marijuana. They assumed it was a dope deal gone bad, and they expected to find his body at any time, shot and dumped somewhere.

  In Toronto, fall went by and winter settled in, gelid and sullen. Silky stuffed towels into the house’s old cracks to keep the wind out. She moped, barely able to drag herself through work every day. Her colleagues tiptoed around her, speaking quietly. She overheard her boss whispering to another manager over the coffee machine: “brother,” and “drugs.” She didn’t care. All she could think about was Morgan. Her body felt heavy, earthbound.

  She started taking long, hot baths in the evenings, soaking in the deep old claw-footed tub in the darkened bathroom. The water and the dark soothed her, sank into her bones. It felt as though she could float away on the water like an otter, buoyed up from the sorrow that was weighing her down.

  One evening, face bathed in tears, Silky decided to give her body to the water. She let herself sink completely under the surface of the bath. She held her breath for a long time, feeling at peace, listening to the whispering of the water. Then she inhaled. It burned into her lungs, but she fought her body’s thrashing and stayed under. Strangely, the pain in her chest soon stopped. It seemed like she stayed submerged for a long time, waiting for death, but nothing happened. She sat up in the bathtub, and warm water drained harmlessly from her mouth and nose. She felt a curious contentment. She got out of the bath and went to bed. For the first time since Morgan’s disappearance, sleep felt like a benediction.

  Silky didn’t really notice spring come and go. She had no more dreams of Morgan. She started smiling at work again, even went out for drinks one evening with a couple of the women from the office. She drank only water all night, though, glass after glass, until her friends teased her that she would burst. But she was feeling so dry! It had been hours since her last soak in the tub. She dipped a napkin in her glass and dabbed it on her chest and arms. The first thing she did when she got home was to have a long bath, reveling in the feel of water on her skin.

  She was amazed when she looked out the kitchen window one Sunday afternoon and saw that the pear tree was in full leaf; tender, bright green leaves dancing like tiny fish in the balmy air currents.

  It was late May, nine months since Morgan had disappeared. In that time, Silky had birthed herself again. After her failed attempt at suicide, the odd sense of peace had stayed with her. She still grieved for her brother, but no longer felt as though she would die from the pain. In fact, she felt almost invulnerable, as though she could swim through air, or breathe in water.

  Silky looked at herself in her bedroom mirror that Sunday afternoon, wondering if the change in her was apparent on her face. Over the winter, she’d become as portly as her mother had been. She actually found the plump curves of her new full pear shape pleasing, but she was feeling the effects of nine months of inactivity.

  “It’s spring, Morgan,” Silky said to the air. “Time to get into shape.”

  No time like the present; she grabbed workout gear and a bathing suit and walked over to the YMCA. She tried the weight room, but after a few painful contortions on the Nautilus machines she decided to go to the pool instead. It had been years, but she was sure that she’d remember her mother’s lessons. It was five minutes to midday. The noon public swim was just about to start.

  Silky wrinkled her nose at the smell of chlorine. The space rang with the laughter of children, sleek and plump as seals as they splashed in the water or raced around the pool deck. She went to the three lanes roped off for doing laps. An old woman moved with slow grace through the water, blowing like a walrus when she came to the turns. Feeling a little nervous, Silky eased herself in.

  She did the breaststroke so that she could keep her head out of the water. After a few laps, she settled into the rhythm of lane swimming. She no longer heard the noise of the children playing. She kept swimming, always a few feet behind the old woman, who seemed tireless. As usual, her thoughts turned to her lost brother.

  Silky believed that Morgan had found the Golden Table. She believed that by night, he pried the doubloons out of the rotten wood, and brought them back bit by bit to Leonie’s house. But the money was not his to take. River Mumma had claimed it. Grandpy used to say, “Want all, lose all.” Silky believed that because Morgan stole that treasure, River Mumma had stolen away his wits, made him afraid of the water, and when he still wouldn’t return the gold, she came to get it herself, and took him into the water as punishment, the way she had done with the pirate Jackson before him.

  The summer sun shot rays of light through the windows to the pool deck. The light refracted in the blue water, flickering so that Silky couldn’t see below the surface of the pool. With one hand she shaded her eyes from the glare. It was noon. The time the Golden Table rises up from the bed of the Rio Cobre.

  Ahead of Silky, the old woman stopped, treading water until Silky drew level with her. The woman’s skin was brown, and her eyes were like those of Silky’s mother. The old woman smiled at her. “He always getting into deep water,” she said. “Stubborn, greedy boy. But he’s my son from your mamadjo mother, so I’ll let you pull him out. You have to dive, though. You’re changed enough to do it now. But hurry, daughter’s daughter! Only six seconds left!”

  The glare brightened until Silky could no longer see River Mumma. The light seemed to be coming from beneath her now. She felt her heart slamming in her chest, beating the seconds away. The water was rushing and swirling around her. The river had found her. Looking down into it, Silky saw a great golden disk, glowing as it rose to the surface. She was dimly aware of squeals of alarm all around her, people clambering out of the pool, the lifeguard shouting, “Get out! Everybody out of the water!
”

  She could see Morgan clinging stubbornly to the Golden Table, refusing to relinquish all that gold.

  If she gave herself to the water, would she become a mamadjo like her mother?

  No time for doubt. Silky dove, inhaling as she went. The Rio Cobre waters bubbled cool and sweet as air into her lungs. She was truly her mother’s daughter.

  Morgan was closer now. She could see his upturned face, but couldn’t read his expression. Would she be able to pluck Morgan from the Table, like fruit from a tree? Or would his need suck them both down to drown and rot in the green, greedy depths?

  Breathing in the strength of the river, she swam down with strong strokes to get her brother.

  The title of this story comes from a response a student once wrote on a test, if one can believe any of the endless e-mail spam one gets. I wish I knew who that student was so that I could thank the person. It really is one of the most inspired definitions I’ve ever read. (The student’s complete response is up on the Web at http://www.thefreedmans.net/jokes/bloopers.htm.)

  SOMETHING TO HITCH MEAT TO

  Artho picked up a bone lying in the street. No reason, just one of those irrational things you do when your brain is busy with something else, like whether you remembered to buy avocados or not. The alligator-tail chain of a day care snaked past him, each toddler hanging on dutifully to one of the knots in the rope by which they were being led. One of the young, gum-popping nannies said: