Falling in Love With Hominids

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Watchfully, they walked down their side street and turned onto the main street in the direction of the old grocery store. They walked up the middle of the empty road. That way, if a sprouted came out of one of the shops or alleyways, they might have time to see it before it attacked.

  The burger place, the gas station, the little shoe repair place on the corner; Millie tried to remember what stores like that had been like before. When they’d had unbroken windows and unempty shelves. When there’d been people shopping in them and adults running them, back when adults used to be just grown-up people suspicious of packs of schoolkids in their stores, not howling, sharp-toothed child-killers with dank, stringy fur and paws instead of hands. Ravenous monsters that grew and grew so quickly that you could watch it happen, if you were stupid enough to stick around. Their teeth, hair and claws lengthened, their bodies getting bigger and heavier minute by minute, until they could no longer eat quickly enough to keep up with the growth, and they weakened and died a few days after they’d sprouted.

  Jolly wasn’t tending to her traps. Millie swallowed. “Okay, so we’ll go check with the warren over on Patel Street. They usually have aspirin and stuff.” She walked in silence, except for the worry voice in her head.

  Citron said, “That tree’s going to have to start over.”

  “What?” Millie realized she’d stopped at the traffic light out of habit, because it had gone to red. She was such an idiot. And so was Citron, for just going along with her. She started walking again. Citron tagged along, always just a little behind.

  “The maple tree,” he puffed. When you never had enough to eat, you got tired quickly. “The one outside our place. It put its leaves out too early, and now the frost has killed them. It’ll have to start over.”

  “Whatever.” Then she felt guilty for being so crabby with him. What could she say to make nice? “Uh, that was a nice line you made in Loup-de-lou last night. The one with eyes and spies in it.”

  Citron smiled at her. “Thanks. It wasn’t quite right, though. Sprouteds have bleedy red eyes, not shiny ones.”

  “But your line wasn’t about sprouteds. It was about the . . . the easthound.” She looked all around and behind her. Nothing.

  “Thing is,” Citron replied, so quietly that Millie almost didn’t hear him, “we’re all the easthound.”

  Instantly, Millie swatted the back of his head. “Shut up!”

  “Ow!”

  “Just shut up! Take that back! It’s not true!”

  “Stop making such a racket, willya?”

  “So stop being such a loser!” She was sweating in her jacket, her skinny knees trembling. So hungry all the time. So scared.

  Citron’s eyes widened. “Millie—!”

  He was looking behind her. She turned, hand fumbling in her jacket pocket for her rocks. The sprouted bowled her over while her hand was still snagged in her pocket. Thick, curling fur and snarling and teeth as long as her pinkie. It grabbed her. Its paws were like catcher’s mitts with claws in them. It howled and briefly let her go. It’s in pain, she thought wonderingly, even as she fought her hand out of her pocket and tried to get out from under the sprouted. All that quick growing. It must hurt them. The sprouted snapped at her face, missed. They were fast and strong when they first sprouted, but clumsy in their ever-changing bodies. The sprouted set its jaws in her chest. Through her coat and sweater, its teeth tore into her skin. Pain. Teeth sliding along her ribs. Millie tried to wrestle the head off her. She got her fingers deep into the fur around its neck. Then an impact jerked the sprouted’s head sideways. Citron and his baseball bat, screaming, “Die, die, die!” as he beat the sprouted. It leapt for him. It was already bigger. Millie rolled to her feet, looking around for anything she could use as a weapon. Citron was keeping the sprouted at bay, just barely, by swinging his bat at it. It advanced on him, howling in pain with every step forward.

  Sai seemed to come out of nowhere. She had the piece of rebar she carried whenever she went out. The three of them raged at the sprouted, screaming and hitting. Millie kicked and kicked. The sprouted screamed back, in pain or fury. Its eyes were all bleedy. It swatted Citron aside, but he got up and came at it again. Finally it wasn’t fighting any more. They kept hitting it until they were sure it was dead. Even after Sai and Citron had stopped, Millie stomped the sprouted. With each stomp she grunted, in thick animal rage at herself for letting it sneak up on her, for leaving the warren without her knife. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a few kids that had crept out from other warrens to see what the racket was about. She didn’t care. She stomped.

  “Millie! Millie!” It was Citron. “It’s dead!”

  Millie gave the bloody lump of hair and bone and flesh one more kick, then stood panting. Just a second to catch her breath, then they could keep looking for Jolly. They couldn’t stay there long. A dead sprouted could draw others. If one sprouted was bad, a feeding frenzy of them was worse.

  Sai was gulping, sobbing. She looked at them with stricken eyes. “I woke up and I called to Max and he didn’t answer, and when I went over and lifted his coat,” Sai burst into gusts of weeping, “there was only part of his head and one arm there. And bones. Not even much blood.” Sai clutched herself and shuddered. “While we were sleeping, a sprouted came in and killed Max and ate most of him, even licked up his blood, and we didn’t wake up! I thought it had eaten all of you! I thought it was coming back for me!”

  Something gleamed white in the broken mess of the sprouted’s corpse. Millie leaned over to see better, fighting not to gag on the smell of blood and worse. She had to crouch closer. There was lots of blood on the thing lying in the curve of the sprouted’s body, but with chilly clarity, Millie recognized it. It was the circular base of Jolly’s musical penguin. Millie looked over at Citron and Sai. “Run,” she told them. The tears coursing down her face felt cool. Because her skin was so hot now.

  “What?” asked Sai. “Why?”

  Millie straightened. Her legs were shaking so much they barely held her up. That small pop she’d felt when she pulled on the sprouted’s neck. “A sprouted didn’t come into our squat. It was already in there.” She opened her hand to show them the thing she’d pulled off the sprouted’s throat in her battle with it; Jolly’s gold necklace. Instinct often led sprouteds to return to where the people they loved were. Jolly had run away to protect the rest of her warren from herself. “Bloody run!” Millie yelled at them. “Go find another squat! Somewhere I won’t look for you! Don’t you get it? I’m her twin!”

  First Citron’s face then Sai’s went blank with shock as they understood what Millie was saying. Citron sobbed, once. It might have been the word, “Bye.” He grabbed Sai’s arm. The two of them stumbled away. The other kids that had come out to gawk had disappeared back to their warrens. Millie turned her back so she couldn’t see what direction Sai and Citron were moving in, but she could hear them, more keenly than she’d ever been able to hear. She could smell them. The easthound could track them. The downy starvation fuzz on Millie’s arm was already coarser. The pain in her handless wrist spiked. She looked at it. It was aching because the hand was starting to grow in again. There were tiny fingers on the end of it now. And she needed to eat so badly.

  When had Jolly sprouted? Probably way more than twenty-eight and three-quarter minutes ago. Citron and Sai’s only chance was that Millie had always done everything later than her twin.

  Still clutching Jolly’s necklace, she began to run, too; in a different direction. Leeks, she told the sprouting Hound, fresh leeks. You like those, right? Not blood and still-warm, still-screaming flesh. You like leeks. The Hound wasn’t fully come into itself yet. It was almost believing her that leeks would satisfy its hunger. And it didn’t understand that she couldn’t swim. You’re thirsty too, right? she told it.

  It was.

  Faster, faster, faster, Millie sped towards the river, where the spring tide was running deep and wide.

  That child’s gone wild.
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  Oh, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam.

  Loup.

  Soul Case

  In Jamaican parlance, “soul case” refers to the human body. Around the world you can find folk tales in which a wizard may remove his soul (the source of his vulnerability and the seat of his power) from his body and place it into another vessel for safe-keeping. Maronnage was the historical practice in the Caribbean of Africans rejecting slavery and retreating into the wilderness to create their own temporary autonomous zones. The term comes from the word “maroon,” which is derived from the Spanish word “cimarron,” which means “escaped animal.” Interesting to have one’s ancestors described as such. This next story contains the first scene that came to me when I began writing my novel Blackheart Man, in which I created a maroon community and gave it the ability to develop unmolested for a couple hundred years before the slave owners tried to reclaim the humans they perceived to be theirs by right. I used literary magic to create the maroon nation of Chynchin, but in 1605, real Africans founded the free society of Palmares in Brazil, a quilombo (maroon nation) which thrived for eighty-nine years before the Portuguese army waged war on it and destroyed it. In my story, Acotiren’s name is an homage to director Carlos Diegues’s film Quilombo, which uses the iconography of Afro-Caribbean spirituality to tell a tale of ancient Palmares.

  Moments after the sun’s bottom lip cleared the horizon, the brigade charged down the hill. Kima stood with the rest of the Garfun, ready to give back blow for blow.

  The pistoleers descended towards the waiting village compong. Their silence unnerved. Only the paddy thump of the camels’ wide feet made any sound. Compong people murmured, stepped back. But Mother Letty gestured to the Garfuns defending them to stand still. So they did. Kima felt her palm slippery on her sharpened hoe.

  The pistoleers advanced upon them in five rows; some tens of impeccably uniformed men and women posting up and down in unison on their camels. Each row but the last comprised seven gangly camels, each camel ridden by a soldier, each soldier kitted out a la zouave, in identical and pristine red-and-navy with clean white shirts. Near on four muskets for each of them, and powder, carried by a small boy running beside each camel. There were only twelve muskets in the compong.

  Now the first rows of camels stepped onto the pitch road that led into the village. The road was easily wide enough for seven camels across. The cool morning sun had not yet made the surface of the pitch sticky. The camels didn’t even break stride. Kima made a noise of dismay. Where was the strong science that the three witches had promised them? Weeks and weeks they’d had the villagers carting reeking black pitch from the deep sink of it that lay in the gully, re-warming it on fires, mixing it with stones and spreading it into this road that led from nowhere to the entrance of the compong, and stopped abruptly there. Had they done nothing but create a smooth paved surface by which the army could enter and destroy them?

  From her position at the head of the Garfuns, the black witch, the Obe Acotiren, showed no doubt. She only pursed her lips and grunted, once. Standing beside her, white Mother Letty and the Taino witch Maridowa did not even that. The three should have been behind the Garfuns, where they could be protected. If the villagers lost their Knowledgeables, they would be at the mercy of the whites’ fish magic. Yet there the three stood and watched. Acotiren even had her baby grandson cotched on her hip. So the Garfuns took their cue from the three women. Like them, they kept their ground, ready but still.

  “Twice five,” whispered Mother Letty. “Twice six.” She was counting the soldiers as they stepped onto the black road. Kima thought it little comfort to know exactly how many soldiers had come to kill them, but she found herself counting silently along with Mother Letty.

  The leading edge of the army was almost upon them, scant yards from the entrance to the compong. Camels covered almost the full length of the road. A few of the Garfuns made ready to charge. “Hold,” said Mother Letty. Her voice cut through the pounding of the camels. They held.

  Maridowa turned her wide, brown face to the Garfuns and grinned. “Just a little more,” she said. She was merry at strange times, the young Taino witch was.

  The soldiers had their muskets at the ready. The barrels gleamed in the sun. The Garfuns’ muskets were dull and scorched. “So many of them,” whispered Kima. She raised her hoe, cocked it ready to strike. Beside her, the white boy Carter whimpered, but clutched his cutlass at the ready, a grim look on his face. He’d said he would rather die than be pressganged onto the ships once more as a sailor. He had fourteen years. If he survived this, the village would let him join the boys to be circumcised; let him become a man.

  Thrice six . . .

  The thrice seventh haughty camel stepped smartly onto the battlefield, a little ahead of its fellows. “That will do it,” pronounced the Obe Acotiren. It wasn’t quite a question.

  The pitch went liquid. It was that quick. Camels began to flounder, then to sink. The villagers gasped, talked excitedly to each other. They had laid the pitch only four fingers deep! How then was it swallowing entire camels and riders?

  The pitch swamp had not a care for what was possible and what not. It sucked the brigade into its greedy gullet like a pig gobbling slops. Camels mawed in dismay, the pitch snapping their narrow ankles as they tried to clamber out. They sank more quickly than their lighter riders. Soldier men and women clawed at each other, stepped on each other’s heads and shoulders to fight free of the melted pitch. To no avail. The last hoarse scream was swallowed by the pitch in scarce the time it took the Obe Acotiren’s fifth grandchild—the fat brown boy just past his toddling age, his older sisters and brothers having long since joined the Garfun fighters—to slip from her arms and go running for his favourite mango tree.

  The black face of the road of tar was smooth and flat again, as though the army had never been.

  One meager row of uniformed soldiers stared back at the Garfuns from the other side of the pitch. Their weapons hung unused from their hands. Then, together, they slapped their camels into a turn, and galloped hard for the foot of the hill.

  All but one, who remained a-camelback at the bank of the river of pitch.

  The pistoleer slid off her beast. She stood on the edge of where her fellows, suffocated, were slowly hardening. She bent her knees slightly, curling her upper body around her belly. Fists held out in front of her, she screamed full throat at the villagers; a raw howl of grief that used all the air in her lungs, and that went on long after she should have had none remaining. She seemed like to spit those very lungs up. Her camel watched her disinterestedly for a while, then began to wander up the hill. It stopped to crop yellow hog plums from a scraggly tree.

  On the hill above, the general sounded the retreat. In vain; most of his army had already dispersed. (Over the next few weeks, many of them would straggle into Garfun compongs—some with their camels—begging asylum. This they would be granted. It was a good land, but mostly harsh scrub. It needed many to tend it.)

  Some few of the Garfuns probed the pitch with their weapons. They did not penetrate. Cautiously, the Garfuns stepped onto the pitch. It was hard once more, and held them easily. They began to dance and laugh, to call for their children and their families to join them. Soon there was a celebration on the flat pitch road. An old matron tried to show Carter the steps of her dance. He did his best to follow her, laughing at his own clumsiness.

  The Obe Acotiren watched the soldier woman, who had collapsed onto her knees now, her scream hiccoughing into sobs. While the army was becoming tar beneath the feet of the villagers, Acotiren had pushed through the crowd and fetched her fearless grandchild from the first branch of the mango tree. He’d fallen out of it thrice before, but every day returned to try again. She hitched him up onto her hip. He clamped his legs at her waist and fisted up a handful of her garment at the shoulder. He brought the fist happily to his mouth.

  Acotiren’s face bore a calm, stern sadness. “Never you mind,” Kima heard her mutter in the dire
ction of the grieving woman. “What we do today going to come back on us, and more besides.” Maridowa glanced at the Obe, but said nothing.

  Then Acotiren produced her obi bag from wherever she had had it hidden on her person, and tossed it onto the pitch. Mother Letty started forward. “Tiren, no!” cried Mother Letty, her face anguished.

  She was too late to intercept the obi bag. It landed on the road. It was a small thing, no bigger than a guinea fowl’s egg. It should have simply bounced and rolled. Instead, it sank instantly, as though it weighed as much in itself as the whole tarred army together.

  Maridowa was dancing on the road, and hadn’t noticed what was happening. It was Kima who saw it all. Acotiren pressed her lips together, then smiled a bright smile at her grandchild. “Come,” she said. “Make I show you how to climb a mango tree.”

  Tranquil, as though she hadn’t just tossed her soul case away to be embalmed forever in tar, she turned her back to go and play with the boy, leaving Mother Letty kneeling there, tears coursing through the lines on her ancient face as she watched her friend go.

  In less than a year Acotiren was frail and bent. There was no more climbing trees for her. Her eyes had grown crystalline with cataracts, her hands tremulous, her body sere and unmuscled. One morning she walked into the bush to die, and never came out again. But by then her daughter’s child, Acotiren’s fifth grandchild, was so sure-footed from skinning up gru-gru bef palms and mamapom trees with his nana that he never, ever fell. Wherever he could plant his feet, he could go. His friends called him Goat.

  Message in a Bottle

  Size matters. The message may be the medium, but children are small.

  “Whatcha doing, Kamla?” I peer down at the chubby-fingered kid who has dug her brown toes into the sand of the beach. I try to look relaxed, indulgent. She’s only a child, about four years old, though that outsize head she’s got looks strangely adult. It bobs around on her neck as her muscles fight for control. The adoption centre had told Babette and Sunil that their new daughter checked out perfectly healthy otherwise.