Skin Folk

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “Scold; cold scold,” one of them taunted her. They were shuffling along the grass, keeping up with her as she walked. “Where’s your warm one now?”

  Seemed to Delpha she’d had one who kept her warm. But gone now. Left her when Delpha’s brain broke—that’s the story the world was telling now—broke, and they tried to glue it back together with pills. “Old broads,” she muttered at the tree hags. “Old broad beams. High blow shatter you.”

  They gasped, offended, then froze where they were, pretending to be trees again. But she could hear them still windily whispering to each other about her. Their needle tongues rustled. Doc in this new story would say there were no talking trees, just her meds, new stuff they had tried on her that had broken her brain apart. But it was everything that was broken, not just her. Shattered everything seven ways from Sunday, they had. With those damned toys, those screen things that trapped stories under glass. Pieces all the way into the future, the past, the never. And when the blasted things broke, they were all stuck with that story. Delpha glared at the tree ladies, kept walking. They wouldn’t last the heat of the glass wind out, nor the cold neither.

  The breath was burning, burning past Sheeny’s throat. Felt like she’d swallowed glass. Maybe she had. Glass wind roaring down to strip flesh from her bones, it had probably blown dust ahead of it before she’d put her filter on. Glass to catch in her throat and scrape it raw, fill her lungs with glistening sand, harden her heart to stone. Always silicone sand in the air, glistening on the ground, even without the glass wind. Old people died from it, coughed to death, spitting gleaming red sand. Stained glass. So lovely.

  Sheeny had been nine when her family took Kay in. His dad was his last people, the rest blown sky high when the mountain went. Pneumonia took Kay’s father, and so he’d come to them. Eleven years old. And pretty. Skin just beginning to pimple; swollen, perfect lips; and that delightful, husky, breaking voice. Was about three years before Sheeny really took all that in though— how much she enjoyed the sight of Kay, the smell of him when he’d been working all day, helping Jeff build another shelter over someone’s basement. Concrete igloos with long, curved tunnels for entranceways. You had to stoop to get inside, then crawl through five doors for keeping glass out. She took to helping Kay make those tunnels, so she could watch his heart-shaped backside proceeding ahead of her as he smoothed walls with his trowel.

  And soon he’d noticed her noticing. Was in one of those tunnels that she and Kay had first kissed. The touch of his lips and tongue against hers had lodged a sliver of something in her heart. His hand had grazed over her canvas jumpsuit, thick weave to keep glass out. His hand brushed over where her breast hid, under layers, and her nipple jumped to attention. Her heart pounded and pounded, but couldn’t dislodge the sliver. She’d pulled back to look at Kay. Glass in her eye? He looked different, he glowed. She leaned in again, laid the warm flat of her tongue against the hollow of his neck. He groaned. She sighed.

  Sheeny hadn’t meant for Kay to go away and never come back, didn’t Mumsie understand? Sheeny’d wanted a boy who would divine her true nature, and love her passionately forever for it. She’d wanted love to blow her world apart, to fall on her like houses. That’s what she’d thought. But when it had finally happened, everyone, everyone could see. In the hitch of her breath when Kay walked into a room; in the way her eyes filled up with him, her fingers moved by themselves to clutch his. They could all see! And they’d looked at her and Kay differently. Some wanting what they had, hating them for having it. Some hoping that something so fragile could survive weeks huddled in concrete huts, hours sifting water glass through gauze and filters for its moisture, days watching the spidery crops in the watery light and hauling the troughs in at the first sign of a breeze. She had hated being so transparent, hated that everyone could see. Love had snuck into her heart and lightened it, made it clear, easy to see through. Kay wanted to love her warm. She couldn’t stand it, couldn’t let herself melt into another’s contours. She made herself cold to him again to keep separate, to keep eyes off her. She’d learned to look at Kay again with obsidian eyes, like everyone else.

  First love feels like everything. It was too much; Sheeny couldn’t stand to let it overtake her. And Kay couldn’t stand losing it, not when he’d already once lost all he’d loved. It was her gaze gone cold that had put him under glass, sent him stumbling to the river. Jeff gone, then Kay. Mumsie’s blaming eyes found Sheeny’s more nowadays. Now Mumsie never filtered the water one last time for Sheeny anymore before she poured her a drink. Never shook the sandy glass out of Sheeny’s gloves anymore when she left them in the tunnel.

  The pain in her foot made Sheeny retch. Nearly home. The low cement domes were only about a minute away, steel doors battened against the wind. No one out looking for her. No time, when the wind came down. Time to get inside then. Had Mumsie locked the doors already? Sheeny’s right thigh knotted, brought her crashing to one knee. She didn’t feel the splinters slipping into her skin like bamboo slivers under fingernails. She heaved back up to her feet, ran on, her legs wobbling.

  A sovereign for a sovereign remedy… Fuck, it was cold. Fuckcold. Cuckold. No, she’d be faithful. Had no choice, no plane fare, no way to unbreak the glass. But she had enough for two bottles of bitters from the corner store. The guy behind the counter gave her an extra one, then hurried her out. “Gotta close up, lady. Getting my ass outta here. Radio says. You should leave too.”

  The story was hardening to bone, stone, silicone. Delpha clutched her three bottles. They made hard little squeaks as they rubbed against each other. Forty percent cold ethyl times three, and then Delpha wouldn’t care what came. ’Cause it was coming. The nighttime air was crackling with it. Stupid, stupid girl, with her games and her hard gaze.

  Delpha stepped outside the store, squinted at the mountain. Her eyes too glassy to see if the peak’s cheek was bulging bigger. Look, I’m a zit. Pop.

  She fumbled one of her bottles open, tasted the dark, astringent potion inside. Nice. Bent her head back, swallowed. More. All gone. Her belly warming, molten. All around her, loaded cars full of goods and their people, faces stiff with panic. Everyone leaving, end to end, not going fast enough. “Hey!” she yelled into the window of a deep green family van, “I don’t wanna be under glass either! Take me with you!” The woman at the wheel put her head down, gunned the engine. It took them all of six feet before they had to stop behind the ass of the fat rich Cadillac in front of them. Two kids in the van twisted their heads round to look at her. The older boy was holding a playscreen, shak-shak-shaking it to make a new image. Imagine unblown, Delpha thought at him. Imagine unglass. But that screen led to another world, not this one. In this one, the groove of all their tracks was set, was lying on a desert floor, grinding down. She spat at the van, watched the spittle hit pavement, freeze into a lump of pearlized glue chip. She waved the van away, shuffled into the road. Horns blew. “Take me!” she yelled. Horns blatted. She made it to the other curb.

  Delpha swigged back another bottle of bitterness. Her feet were a little shaky now. Cold, so cold. Shivershatterday cold. Tomorrow would be Noneday, ever after. All the girlie’s fault.

  Not so much noise in the streets now. Plenty of folks gone.

  Cold. The doorway to the crazy people place yawned at her, belching warmth. She swayed towards it, but its avid lips snapped together while she was still out of reach. She swung her fist in triumph at the building. “Missed me!” She could see the flagstone fangs sticking out. She flung her nearly empty bottle to shards against the building’s face. Shatter, splatter. The façade snarled at her, but couldn’t reach. With a crackly cackling, she opened the last bottle of warmth in glass, toasted the squatting concrete structure. The building hissed, spat. She drank, kept moving.

  “Jeff, where’d it come from, the glass?” Those days, Jeff had still been around, lungs intact, to answer Sheeny’s questions. They were sitting on little stools just outside the house, reading by the last fe
w rays of daylight. Books on cement construction, on water filters. At her question, Jeff had looked over at her, squinting. He took his spectacles off, polished the lenses on the sleeve of his shirt, put them back on. Wouldn’t help him see any clearer, though. He’d dropped the specs on the ground too many times. Glass dust had ground the lenses to a pearly finish. Eyes were pretty ground down too. Jeff went outside too much.

  “Well, Sheeny-girl,” Jeff had drawled at her. “Your Mumsie has a theory about that.” He’d flicked a look at Mumsie, who just turned the ends of her mouth down and kept knitting by the fading daylight. “Yeah,” he continued. “She says that when the mountain blew and took the city with it, all those skyscrapers with their millions and millions of windows, it must have blown shatterglass high into the air to be picked up by the winds. Yeah. She says that the glass house people have finally thrown the biggest stone they could, and broke the whole kit and kaboodle. Time to come, she says, the glass’ll grind itself back down to sand, and then there’ll be just one big desert.”

  Mumsie knitted faster, mouth pursed like a bumhole, cracking the needles together.

  “Y’know that playscreen you and Kay are always staring in? Used to make them up on that mountain. Big factory. Gone too.”

  Wind keened. Sheeny ran, her ankle jabbing and stabbing.

  As she shuffled and shivered on her way, near asleep, Delpha’s fingers loosened. Crash woke her. Crunch of glass underfoot made her jump alert. She licked clear ice off broken lips, tasted salt slurry of blood starting up again. Her mouth stung. Her stomach and head were woozy with bitters. She looked up the valley. Dark, too dark to see the looming mountain.

  There was a turgid slush and wash sound. The air smelled sodden, rotting. She was down near the docks, at the mouth of the river. How had she come so far?

  The skirling of the dancing winds tore at Sheeny’s back. The sound drove ice picks into her ears. She eyeballed the nearest shelter. Leon’s. She pulled her coat off, tied it around her head. Hands in front of her, she ran for Leon’s. Tripped on rocks, kept going. A sword was jabbing up into her ankle. She barely registered the thud of her hands hitting Leon’s shelter. Whimpering, she fumbled round and round it until she felt the tunnel, patted frantically along it till she was kneeling at its entrance. She pulled on the door. Locked. She pounded on the tunnel walls, yelled. She couldn’t hear herself above the grating howl.

  No one opened. The glass wind hit with a ululating joy, tumbled her off her feet, shrapnelled the skin of her exposed hands into a bloody screaming mess. Somewhere back in the wasteland, the playscreen was scoured and pummelled into pieces. The fragments scattered into glittering dust.

  The glass wind skirled.

  The frigid sky was still cyan, staining fast to black. Glacial black all around her. Delpha staggered past blocky storage, feet tramping now over the thick wooden planks of the jetty. Hollowthump. Clump. Again. She could feel her toes only too well, throbbing and burning.

  No ships more, all gone. The crushed ice water, half frozen, gleamed and washed, gleamed and washed. Delpha was shivering like a kite in the wind now, like a burlap lady in a storm. It was coming, the blow was coming, it would tear her apart. She was shaking with cold and with hatred for the careless child who’d brought them to this. She hoped that in other worlds they’d understood the danger of the playscreens.

  Delpha slowly removed one ratty coat, fingers pushing numbly at the buttons to make them work. The air rushed in, came at her in stabbing shards. She unbuttoned the second coat, the one with the torn lining. She shucked both coats to the ground. She trembled belly-deep. She hoped she knew the way, hoped it wasn’t just her speech that could cross worlds in this new physics the girl had made. “I’m going to get out from under.” She pulled her clothing away until she was banana-peeled, standing juddering on the jetty, wearing only the crusted socks in their sole-thin boots with missing laces. Nothing of this place to weigh her down. Stiff-legged ’cause she could no longer feel how to bend at the knee, she lurched to the end of the jetty. Nutty banana, all she needed was creamy ice to make it complete. Dessert time. Time to lose it all. She tried to grin at the grinding water, her new love. Not a warm one. Her teeth chattered, made her smile a rictus. Muscles shuddershaking into cramps, she couldn’t jump. She just leaned. Fell. The splash of landing in the unspeakable lump-ice water froze the scream in her chest. She sank briefly, then rose to the surface again, a bobbing Delpha-sicle finally come to the yearning, intimate cold.

  With sullen, icy fingers the wind lovingly circled and circled and circled Delpha’s tumid nipples, making them crinkle and jut painfully long and hard. She gasped and panted hot breath. The wind supped it from her mouth and blew it back changed, a cooling fog. Yes, take it all away. Frigid air slid over her breasts, pooled in her navel, lapped lazily at her cunt like winter lakes, making her flow. She was all goose bumps, laved in ice, shivershivering. The viscous wash of the water’s tongue carried her on its slow tide, lick, lick, lick, and she was trembling uncontrollably, chilled through to her core. Her limbs were frost-coated. They would shatter with her shuddering. Come for me, I’ll come for you. She managed to spread her legs, open the heat of her. The sea sucked at the hard knot of her clit with a tonguetip dipped in ice. Orgasm crackled her jangling into fragments. She was half aware of the water surging the length of her body like ice floes to cover her. The last thing she saw was a steely wash of it that loomed above her, then crashed, entered eyes, mouth, all her holes. She screamed, impaled by cold glassy ice.

  In a concussion that could shatter eardrums, the mountain exploded. Molten flame poured out. Delpha never knew.

  Mumsie’s house was next. Wind stripping her, Sheeny ran. Stumbled. Ran. Carommed off the side of her house. Found the tight-locked tunnel door and banged and banged with bleeding hands. Would Mumsie forgive?

  Huddling alone in her stone igloo, Sheeny’s Mumsie Adelphine had dozed off. The hollow banging sound startled her awake. She opened her eyes, looked around. Delpha had made it to the other side, had always been there now. She remembered bearing Sheeny, remembered losing Dodder. And Jeff, and Kay. All the warm ones gone; only that hated bleeding girlchild with so much to learn, the one who had shaken the world and broken it. Adelphine sat up, her hands curling into the position where she’d held a tiny two-year-old head once between her breasts, protecting the child and stilling her sobbing. Teaching her to be strong, hard-hearted; ice to the heat of the hurtful world. Sheeny’d always been a quick girl.

  There was a story once about mirrors and cold. Adelphine had read it, somewhere in another sometime. Glass splinters freeze your heart, but it’s still in you. Still sitting there in your chest, sullen, solid. Letting nothing in or out. Not blood, not anything. You lose heat and colour from being so bloodless, and there you are, no feeling. Solid and pale, merciless as the glass wind itself. Under glass.

  The hollow thumping demanding to be let in was still strong. Mumsie swung her unfamiliar feet to the floor and stood, considering.

  In my anthology Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, I introduced the following story with these words: “Eggs are seeds, perfectly white on the outside. Who knows what complexions their insides might reveal when they crack open to germinate and bear fruit?”

  THE GLASS BOTTLE TRICK

  The air was full of storms, but they refused to break.

  In the wicker rocking chair on the front verandah, Beatrice flexed her bare feet against the wooden slat floor, rocking slowly back and forth. Another sweltering rainy season afternoon. The arid heat felt as though all the oxygen had boiled out of the parched air to hang as looming rainclouds, waiting.

  Oh, but she loved it like this. The hotter the day, the slower she would move, basking. She stretched her arms and legs out to better feel the luxuriant warmth, then guiltily sat up straight again. Samuel would scold if he ever saw her slouching like that. Stuffy Sammy. She smiled fondly, admiring the lacy patterns the sunlight threw on the f
loor as it filtered through the white gingerbread fretwork that trimmed the roof of their house.

  “Anything more today, Mistress Powell? I finish doing the dishes.” Gloria had come out of the house and was standing in front of her, wiping her chapped hands on her apron.

  Beatrice felt the shyness come over her as it always did when she thought of giving the older woman orders. Gloria was older than Beatrice’s mother. “Ah… no, I think that’s everything, Gloria…”

  Gloria quirked an eyebrow, crinkling her face like running a fork through molasses. “Then I go take the rest of the afternoon off. You and Mister Samuel should be alone tonight. Is time you tell him.”

  Beatrice gave an abortive, shamefaced “huh” of a laugh. Gloria had known from the start, she’d had so many babies of her own. She’d been mad to run to Samuel with the news from since. But yesterday, Beatrice had already decided to tell Samuel. Well, almost decided. She felt irritated, like a child whose tricks have been found out. She swallowed the feeling. “I think you right, Gloria,” she said, fighting for some dignity before the older woman. “Maybe… maybe I cook him a special meal, feed him up nice, then tell him.”

  “Well, I say is time and past time you make him know. A pickney is a blessing to a family.”