Skin Folk

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Artho sighed and got to work again with his mouse, sticking cocoa-coloured pigment to the man like tar on the Tar Baby. He ignored the feeling of his ears burning. It went away eventually.

  He finished blackening the man up, then opened up the working files Tit for Twat. He imported the new images, new inane text (“When Daddy’s not home, see these blond sisters work each other up!”) The “blond” was bleach, the “sisters” Tania and Raven no relation at all, and they were doing their best straight guy’s lesbian fantasy. As soon as they got out of the studio, they shucked the whole act like corn trash from corn and hugged each other good-bye before going their separate ways. Raven was a CGA student, blissfully married to a quiet, balding guy with a paunch, wore hightop sneakers everywhere, showed around pictures of her kids every chance she got. And Tania, as she walked out the door, would be peeling off her false two-inch nails, muttering that her girlfriends would never let her near them with knives on the tips of her fingers.

  “… good weekend, Artho.”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Bye, Glenn,” he said as Glenn let himself out.

  Artho looked around for the first time in hours. It was well past five. He straightened up, groaning; he could feel each of his vertebrae popping as he uncurled from the computer screen. And he was freezing. Charlie was long gone. He and Tamara were the only ones left.

  “Lost in the land of skin?” she chuckled at him.

  “Yeah. Be done soon now, though.” He set the files to render, moved to the next computer over—Rahim worked at that one, but he was gone too—and called up Tomb Raider. Artho’d gotten pretty good at the game. Masquerading as the impossibly firm-breasted Lara Croft, he hunted in a nightmare landscape of demons. He was just killing a ghoul in a spray of blood and bone when the door to the office whispered open. A tiny face poked round it.

  “Hey, Artho?” Tamara said, waving sweater-covered fingers at him. “Relative of yours? This isn’t exactly the place for a kid, you know.”

  It was the little girl, the one from the food court.

  “What’re you doing here?” Artho blurted out. “Where’s your dad?”

  “Daddy’s always busy making stuff,” came the scratchy response from the tiny face hanging in the doorway. “We do his work for him instead.”

  “Huh?” was all that Artho managed in response.

  “Yeah. Each one of us has different jobs. Mine is that I get to go wherever I want, keep an eye on stuff.” The little girl stalked on spindly legs into the room. Her knees were still ashy, the lenses of her specs still woozily thick. The wormy mass of her long, messy braids seemed to be wriggling out from their ribbons as Artho watched.

  “That’s ridiculous! It’s”—Artho glanced at the clock on his screen—“almost seven-thirty in the evening! You can’t be more than seven years old! Who’re your parents? Why are you alone?”

  “So you don’t know her, then?” asked Tamara. She got up, went and knelt by the child. “What’s your name, little girl?” she asked sweetly.

  “Didn’t come for you. Came for him.” And the child stomped right past an astonished Tamara. “Whatcha doin?” On the screen, Lara Croft waited to be activated by a mouse click. “Oh,” said the little girl. “Do you like that?”

  Artho shrugged. “It’s something to do.”

  She turned to the other screen with its bodies frozen in mid-writhe.

  “Don’t look at those!” Artho said.

  “Just skins sewed together,” she replied, grinning. “Do you like those, then?”

  “Artho, do you know this kid or not?”

  Artho found himself answering the child instead of Tamara: “No, I don’t like them so much. I like people to look more real.”

  “Well, why do you make them look not real, then?”

  From the mouths of babes and sucklings. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” he said ruefully, thinking of how far his paycheque wouldn’t stretch this month.

  “Do you like people making you be not real?”

  Artho thought how he’d been late for work that morning because six taxis in a row had refused to stop for him. Thought of the guy in the corner store inspecting his money. Of Charlie elbowing him in the ribs a few hours ago. He felt a burn of rage beginning. “No, dammit!”

  The ugly child just stood and stared at him from the depths of her ugly glasses.

  “But it’s not like I can do anything about it!” Artho said.

  “Do you wanna?” She was shrugging out of her Spider-Man knapsack.

  He turned so he could scowl at her face straight on. “Shit, girl, what d’you think? Yes!”

  Tamara giggled. Fuck, why was he talking to a kid this way? He started slamming pens and pencils around on the desk.

  “Well, change things, then!” the child squealed. She lunged at Artho and swung her Spider-Man knapsack right at his forehead.

  It was like slo-mo; Artho could see the oddly muscular bulge of her lats powering the swing, almost had time to wonder how a seven-year-old could be that built, then he had barely focused on the red and black image of Spidey coming for him, reaching for him, when bang, the knapsack connected and something exploded inside Artho’s skull.

  Tamara yelled. Artho shouted, tried to reach for the kid through the stars flaring behind his eyes. Jesus, felt like a bag of bones the damned child had in there. “Shit, shit, shit,” Artho moaned, holding his aching head. He dimly saw the child slither out of Tamara’s grasp and run, no, glide out of the room on those skin-and-boneless legs. She had a big butt, too, that child; as she ran, it worked under her little plaid skirt like that of someone three times her size.

  “Artho, you okay? I’m calling security.”

  He paid Tamara no mind. He was dizzy. He put his head down between his knees. It was wet, his forehead was wet where he was holding it. He was bleeding! Damned girl. He took his hand away, raised his head enough to inspect it.

  “Yeah, Muhammed? Can you come up to Tri-Ex Media on 17? We got a little girl loose on this floor. No, don’t know where she came from. Look, she just hit Artho, okay? I think he’s hurt. Yes, a kid did it, she’s little, maybe six, seven. Little black girl, school uniform, thick glasses. Says her parents aren’t with her. Okay. Okay.” She hung up. “He’s coming.”

  There was no blood. At least, the stuff leaking out of him didn’t look like blood. The liquid on his hand seemed to glow one minute and go milky the next, like a smear of syrup. “What is this shit?”

  “Here, let me see.” Tamara crouched down by him like she had by the little girl. Nancy. That’s what her dad had called her. What kind of dad let his young kid roam around loose like that?

  Tamara frowned. “Yeah, you’re cut, but there’s this weird… stuff coming out. Oh. Never mind, it’s stopped now. How d’you feel, Artho?”

  “What the hell was in that knapsack? Where’d she go?”

  “I’ll go see.” Tamara jumped up, left the office.

  Artho’s head was clearing. It didn’t hurt so much now. He touched where the cut was, couldn’t feel one. The goop was still on his fingers, though. He rubbed the fingers together to smear the stuff away. His fingers kind of tingled.

  But really, he felt a lot better now. He chuckled a little, thinking of the comic books he’d read as a kid. He’d been bitten by an overactive spider.

  His computer pinged to tell him that it was done rendering. Shit. Had to get that stuff done tonight, or Charlie’d have his head. He moved back to his terminal to upload Tit for Twat. He reached for the mouse. He clicked on it, and the click felt like it traveled all the way through his arm. No, like it had come from his arm, down through his hand, to the mouse. Weird.

  Tamara came back. “Found a little girl with her dad in the elevator. Could have been her. Looked a little bit like her, I guess. I mean, I can’t tell, you know, they all look… I mean…” She stopped, blushing.

  They all look alike. The superintendent of Artho’s apartment building always mixed him up with Patrice who lived
on the 27th floor, never mind that Patrice was dark café cru to Artho’s caramel, was balding, had arms like thighs, and spoke with a strong French accent. Tamara had always been nice to Artho, though. And she knew what a bonehead she’d just been, he could tell. Right? Right. He swallowed, didn’t say anything. Let Tamara believe he hadn’t guessed what she’d almost said.

  “Anyway,” Tamara continued, “she’s gone now. Muhammed’s gone back to his desk. You feeling any better?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Well.” She stood there, still looking sheepish and uncomfortable. “Um, I’m going home now.”

  “See ya.” He watched her put on her coat. He waved good-bye to her. Then he uploaded the site, ignoring the odd clicking feeling in his mouse arm. God, it made him feel clumsy. He’d have to get that checked out. Probably some kind of overuse thing. He clicked the file closed. Behind it was the autofellatio man. Hadn’t he uploaded that one too? He went to do it, but the hand with the mouse slipped, and he ended up instead selecting the “changing oneself always” symbol he’d put on the man’s arm as a joke. Yeah, better take that off. Just in case Charlie did figure out he’d done it. Didn’t want to get his ass in trouble. He dragged the nkyin kyin symbol off the guy’s arm, and what the fuck, it came all the way off the screen, skidded right across the keyboard, and came to rest on his thigh. Alarmed, he released the mouse. The symbol melted through the cloth into the meat of his leg. “Shit!” It tingled for a second, then faded.

  Ah, fuck. Bloody weird day. He reached for the mouse again. When he clicked on it this time, something subtle changed about the autofellatio man. Artho stared hard at the image on the screen to try to see what was different. Yes, the nkyin kyin was back on the man’s shoulder. And he was a little pudgier. And were those crow’s-feet around his eyes? A hint of a smile around his wide-stretched mouth?

  Whatever. Artho shrugged and uploaded the damned thing, ignoring the weird feeling in his arm every time he clicked the mouse.

  Enough. Time to go home. Artho grabbed his coat, locked up, and left.

  By the time the elevator had made it to the first floor, Artho was feeling really odd. Not sick, really, just faintly unreal, like when he smoked a joint too fast, or took sinus meds. He sighed, hoping he wasn’t going to spend the weekend with the flu. At least it’d give him an excuse to skip going to his mum’s. He put his hand on the door of the building to let himself out. Click. When he took the hand away, the nkyin kyin symbol was on it. He peered at the handle. Had it always been ornate worked brass? In the form of some kind of bug? No, now it looked like… a skeleton? Artho touched the handle again, double-clicked. And the handle was a plain aluminum strip once more.

  Artho’s skin began to prickle. Not with fear, not with fever. With hope. He rushed outside the building, put his palm against its dull brick exterior. Clicked. The walls flushed red, then purple. Fluted columns started to sprout beside the doors, which were quickly changing from sliding glass and steel to intricately joined oak. With big knockers. Artho giggled. Pretty damned tarty. He wondered if that had been the builder’s original dream for the building. He double-clicked. The building reverted to its usual form.

  “You’re getting it.”

  When he turned towards the voice, Artho wasn’t at all surprised to see the little girl. She was crouched down beside the steps, jam-jar glasses winking at him. Her hair knotted and unknotted itself.

  “Can I change everything?” Artho asked.

  “Course not, silly! Changing things isn’t your job. You’re not changing things; that’ll happen anyway. You’re just helping them peel off the fake skins.”

  “How’s that work?”

  “You’ll just have to try it and see.” She stuck her tongue out at him too. It was too pointy, and more lavender than pink. She leapt, stuck to the side of the building, started climbing smoothly up it, with two legs, with four. No wonder her behind had looked so, well, well-endowed. Must have had the other pair of legs hitched up under her skirt. The little girl was far above Artho now. He could just make out white panties with her legs sticking out of four leg holes. She climbed with two arms, with four. Ah. That well-muscled back. Artho smiled. He watched her until she disappeared into the darkness. He’d figured out who, what she was. Appeared as a skeleton sometimes, in a top hat. Watcher at the boundaries, at the crossroads. Sometimes man, sometimes woman. Always trickster. He couldn’t really tell in the dark, but she seemed furrier now, or more bristly, or something. Sometimes spider? He wondered if this was the kind of thing her dad had really meant her to do.

  Ah, well; she was notoriously capricious. She might decide to take her gift away again, so he’d better use it while he could. He set off for the streetcar stop, almost bouncing, dancing along in his excitement, thinking where he’d like to implant the Adinkra symbol next. On Charlie? Maybe Charlie really was the way he appeared to be. Oog. His Aunt Dee? What would Dee be like if she could peel away all that unhappiness?

  How about on Aziman? All these choices. “Good evening,” Artho said to the tired people waiting at the stop. One white woman clutched her purse tighter when she saw him. Hmm. Maybe he should work that nkyin kyin thing on himself; it was in him, after all. He wondered what she would see then.

  In 1995, I was accepted into the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University. Going to Clarion had been a dream since I was a teenager. I begged and borrowed enough money to attend. I had no idea how I was going to repay it. I went to Clarion with no story ideas, no confidence that I had the talent to be a writer. For the first long, expensive week, I wasn’t able to write at all, and I was terrified that the whole six weeks would be like that. Writer-in-residence Joe Haldeman warned that perhaps the worst way to try to break writer’s block was with alcohol. Well, nothing else had worked, so on the Friday evening, desperate, I went on what for me is a mini-bender—probably three beers. Then I slept for a few hours, woke up in the late evening, and wrote the first draft of a story that I imbued with a terror that was alarming even as I was writing it.

  SNAKE

  He never wore any bright colours, nothing remarkable. Wouldn’t want anyone to remember that he’d been hanging around. Faded jeans, scuffed running shoes. He bought cheap white T-shirts three to a pack from the nearby K-Mart. He always paid cash. He had a battered old van, but he walked to work, rarely drove. He saved that for special occasions.

  He’d been drawn to this city by its peacefulness. Lots of open, green space, almost no crime, a good place to raise children. The city’s main source of pride was that it was a bird sanctuary. Anyone who so much as flipped a rock at a pigeon had to pay heavy fines. The sign at the entrance to the city even boasted: “Where the Birds Come Home to Roost.”

  The sounds of the school playground tugged at him every morning: the bright, happy laughter of the children; even their squabbles and scuffles. He enjoyed the small, twittering voices chanting jump rope games, the giddy shrieking as little bodies hurtled down the slide, one last game before the school bell rang and the children took flight like spooked birds. It made him sad to watch the schoolyard quickly empty when they ran inside.

  If he woke early, he could spend a few minutes sitting in the large public park beside the school. He would buy a small cup of coffee, heavily sweetened, and a jelly doughnut (never from the same coffee shop twice in a row). He’d take his breakfast to one of the park benches—always a different one—and sit there, watching the children play. Starlings and sparrows would gather at his feet, cocking their heads at him, hoping for crumbs, but he ate too tidily for that.

  The morning ritual soothed him: the milky smell of the coffee; the jammy, sticky doughnut. Two sips of warm, syrupy coffee to every bite of doughnut. He ate meticulously, being sure never to let the jelly touch his fingers. He’d been taught the virtues of cleanliness, and he practised them scrupulously. He would take small bites of his doughnut, then, with a little gulp, swallow each morsel whole, so that he wouldn’
t have to endure the sodden mass of chewed food in his mouth. When he was finished, he would carefully fold the brown paper bag in half, then again, and once more, firmly creasing each fold between the fingernails of his thumb and forefinger. He always made sure to deposit the wad of paper and the empty coffee cup in the garbage cans with the heavy swinging lids: litter disgusted him. The sight of gulls rooting in open bins for stale french fries sickened him. He hated the quarrelsome, messy birds.

  In his mind, he had names for some of the schoolchildren, the ones who caught his eye. The small but boisterous little girl who loved to climb to the very top of the jungle gym, she looked like a Jenny, his jenny-wren. Some might call her plain, but he noticed the way her pigtails bounced saucily on either side of her head as she played. She often beat the boys at marbles, crowing triumphantly as she claimed all the best taws and aggies. He could watch her for hours. She must have bruised her knee last week; a fall, perhaps. All week, she’d worn a Band-Aid on the knee. It mesmerised him, the contrast between her strong, muscular brown legs and the pale pink of the Band-Aid. She was left-handed, and had a loud, joyful laugh.

  Then there was the thoughtful one. He’d christened her Samantha. She played happily enough with the others, but she liked to be alone, too. He could understand that. Samantha often sat nestled in the tire swing, one leg tucked up beneath her, the other trailing in the dust as she rocked gently back and forth, reading a book. She loved to read. He would squint at the covers from his park bench, but it was hard to make out the titles of the books. Samantha had straight, chin-length blond hair. As she read, she would trail some of her hair into her mouth. He often thought of her lips, sucking like that on her hair. There were other girls; Laura, Michelle, and Deb, or so he imagined their names to be. He never thought of names for the boys.

  He would watch the children romp and argue, play and fight and scream and laugh. They were lively, messy little things. It fascinated him that no one punished them for spitting, for farting, for letting their hair come undone. He would study them until the bell rang, then go to his job in the mail room of the local public library. It was routine, solitary work. It suited him well, he felt, the orderly routine of sorting the mail into its tidy cubbyholes.