Falling in Love With Hominids

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Black Anchor says, “Toronto summers, when it would get so hot that squirrels would lie flopped like black skins on the branches, fur side up. So humid that you were sure if you made a fist, you would squeeze water dripping from the air. Your thighs squelched when you walked.” Black Anchor’s having one of her more conversational days. Apparently, she used to be a poet. A homeless poet. She told me there was a lot of that going on.

  I say, “The warm milk smell of my husband’s breath after his morning coffee.”

  “Fucking faggot,” grumbles Jimmy. It’s an old, toothless complaint of his.

  I shrug. “Whatever.”

  “Hey,” says Jimmy, in his gruff, hulking way. I know he’s still talking to me because he won’t quite meet my eyes, and his face does this defensive thing, this I’m a manly man and don’t you forget it thing. He says, “That’s the closest you’ve come to talking about a person you used to . . . you know, love. How come is that? Don’t you miss anyone?”

  His eyes glisten as he says the word “love,” like he’s crying. Jimmy goes on about Barbara like she was a piece of heaven that he lost. I guess she was, come to think of it.

  “Yeah, I miss people,” I say slowly, playing for time. Even when you’re dead, some things cut close to the bone. Sometimes Baby Boo cries, and it makes my arms ache with the memory of feeding Brandon when he was that little, watching his tiny pursed mouth latch onto the nipple of his bottle, seeing his eyes staring big and calm up at me as though I were his whole world. “I miss lots of people.”

  Black leans back in her chair and sighs airlessly. “Well, I miss that girl at the doughnut shop who would slip me an extra couple if I went there during her shift.”

  Jimmy shakes his head. “Doughnuts. Jesus. How did you live like that?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Sugar.”

  I shoot Black a grateful glance for getting Jimmy off the subject. When I walk through the darkened mall at night, I try to remember Semyon’s touch. The warmth of his hand on my cheek. The hard curve of his arm around me, his hand slipped into my back jeans pocket. I try to remember his voice.

  I say to Black and Jimmy, “It’s so unfair that we can’t see or hear the world. That we can’t touch, taste, or smell it.”

  Black replies, “Maybe being a ghost is a disease.”

  “What do mean, a disease?” I ask her. For the umpteenth time I wonder, what kind of name is Black Anchor Ohsweygian, anyway? Jimmy thinks maybe she’s Armenian. He says that Armenians all have names that end in “ian.” Some day I’m going to point out to him that some Armenians have names like “Smith.”

  “Like maybe we’re not dead,” she replies. “Maybe we just caught some kind of virus that messed up all our senses. Maybe we’re all lying in hospital beds somewhere, and some grumpy cunt of a doctor with a busted leg is yelling at his team that they have to find us a cure.”

  “And maybe someone used to watch too much fucking television,” says Jimmy. He vees his index and middle finger, puts them to his lips. For a second I think he’s flipping her deuces, but no, he takes a drag of his imaginary cigarette. Habits. Black glares at him, hacks and spits to one side. Habits. Baby Boo belches a baby belch, then giggles. We don’t know Baby Boo’s real name. I don’t remember how we ended up calling him Baby Boo.

  Kitty must have heard us talking. She wanders over, coos at Baby Boo. He gives her a brief baby grin; the kind that always looks accidental, the baby more surprised than anyone else at what its face has just done. Kitty says, “I can smell stuff. Again, I mean. Like when I was alive.”

  Quickly, I tell her, “You might want to keep that to yourself.” She hasn’t been here very long. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She doesn’t know how dangerous it is. I should warn her outright. I don’t.

  Kitty ignores my lame hint. She says, “I’m serious. It just started to come back a little while ago. Bit by bit.”

  My heart starts pounding so quickly that my body trembles a little with every beat. Even though I know I don’t have a heart, or a body. Even though I know it’s just reflex. Jimmy and Black Anchor look just as avid as I feel. The three of us stare at Kitty, our mouths open. She waggles her fingers at Baby Boo. “I thought I was imagining it at first. You know how you can want something so bad it can make your mouth water?”

  We know. Jimmy swallows.

  Kitty’d only been fifteen. She and a bunch of her friends from school had crowded shrieking and laughing into the women’s washroom on the main floor to try on makeup they’d just bought. In the jostling, Kitty fell. On the way down, she hit her head on the edge of a sink.

  Kitty whispers, “I can smell French fries. And bacon.” She points at Mega Burger, where she’d been standing. “Over there. Someone’s burning bacon on the grill.”

  Black Anchor says fiercely, “What else? Smell something else!” Her voice doesn’t sound human any more. It’s hollow, mechanical, nothing like a sound made by air flowing over vocal chords.

  Kitty looks around her. A slow smile comes to her face. “Somebody just went by wearing perfume. I think it’s Obsession. She smells like my mom used to.”

  Oh, god. She’s really doing it. She’s smelling the scent trails of the living people all around us in this mall. Black Anchor chews daily over the gristle of a long ago memory, but Kitty just this second took a whiff of someone warm and alive as she walked past us. Life haunts us, us ghosts. It hovers just out of reach, taunting.

  Longing is shredding my self-control to tatters. I moan, “Kitty, don’t,” but she starts talking again a split second after I say her name, so she doesn’t hear the warning.

  “Mister Kendall,” she says to Jimmy, “there’s someone sitting right there, in the same chair you are. I don’t know whether it’s a guy or a girl, but they’re chewing gum. You know the kind that comes in a little stick and you unwrap the paper from it and it’s kinda beige with these, like, zigzaggy lines in it? I can smell it as the person’s spit wets it and they chew. I should be grossed out, but it’s too freaking cool. There’s someone right there!” She leans in towards Jimmy. She closes her eyes, and no fucking word of a lie, she inhales. Her chest rises and falls, and with it, I hear the breath entering and leaving her lungs. She opens her eyes and looks at us in wonder. “Peppermint,” she whispers reverently, as though she’s saying the secret name of God.

  That does it. The need slams down on me like a wall of bricks, stronger than thought or compassion. I crowd in on Kitty. I dimly notice Jimmy and Black Anchor doing the same.

  “Can you smell coffee?”

  “Sweat! Can you smell sweat?”

  “Is taste coming back, too? Can you taste anything?”

  “Can you feel? Can you touch?”

  Unable to hold the need in check, unable to do anything but shout it in shuddering, hungry voices, we demand to be fed. Kitty, surrounded, looks from one to the other of us, tries to answer our questions, but they come too hard and fast for her to reply. Our hollow shrieks draw the other ghosts. They come flocking in, clamouring, more and more of them as word goes round. We’re all demanding to know what she can smell, demanding that she describe it in every last detail, clawing our fingers through the essence of her as we try in vain to touch her. Needing, needing, needing. And through the din is the thin sound of Baby Boo crying. He’s only little. He doesn’t know how to feed his hunger.

  When the frenzy passes and we come back to ourselves, there’s nothing left of Kitty but a few grey wisps, like fog, that dissipate even as we watch. The canned music tinkles on about Donner and Blitzen and the gifts that Santa brings to good boys and girls.

  Stay long enough in the mall, and you learn what happens if you begin to get the knack of living again. We’ve used Kitty up. And we are still starving.

  Ashamed, we avoid each other’s eyes. We step away from each other, spread out through the mall. There is plenty of room for all of us. I go into the bookstore and stare at the titles that appear and disappear from the shelves. I miss re
ading. Tearlessly, airlessly, I sob. She was only fifteen. At fifteen, Brandon had been worrying about pimples. Semyon and I were coaching him on how to ask girls out. We’d gotten tips from our women friends. I have just sucked from a child what little remained of her life.

  I feel it coming on, like a migraine aura. There’s a whoosh of dislocation and the world rushes over me. I’m on the clock. My hand slaps down onto the moving rubber handrail. The slight sting of the impact against my palm is terrible and glorious. Sound, delicious sound battered against my ears: the voices of the hundreds and hundreds of people who’d been in the mall on my day. I felt my nipples against the crisp fabric of the white shirt I was wearing under my best grey suit.

  There were people near me on the escalator. Below me, a beautiful brown-skinned man in worn jeans and a tight yellow t-shirt. He was talking on his cell phone, telling someone he’d meet them over by the fountain. Beside me was a woman about my age, maybe Asian mixed with something else. She was plump. Girlfriend, don’t you know that sage-coloured polyester slacks don’t suit anyone, least of all people like us whose waistlines weren’t what they used to be? Lessee, I’d gotten a silk tie geometric pattern in greys and blacks shot through with maroon I thought it went nicely with my suit really shouldn’t have waited so long to shop for it Semyon was pretty ticked at me for going shopping last minute he’s just stressing but we had plenty of time to get to the graduation ceremony just a ten-minute drive and oh look there were Semyon and Brandon now waiting for me at the bottom of the escalator and Brandon’s girlfriend Lara that’s a pretty dress though I wondered whether she wasn’t a little too well dumb for Brandon or maybe too smart but what did I know when I first started dating Semyon my sis thought he was too stuck-up for me but she’d thought the guy before him was too common Mom and Dad were going to meet us at Brandon’s school and Sally and what’s his name again Gerald should remember it by now he’d been my brother-in-law for over two years hoped my dad wouldn’t screw up the directions we’d sent Tati an invitation to the graduation but she hadn’t replied probably wouldn’t show up you utter bitch he’s your grandson Semyon and I had never tried to find out which one of us was his bio dad we liked having Brandon be our mystery child kept us going through his defiant years god I hoped to hell those were over and done with now I mean that time he got mad and decked Semyon it was funny later but not when it happened and look at him nineteen with his whole life before him grinning up at me I was just kvelling with pride and oh shit I should have put the tie on in the store better do that now why’d they wrap it in so much tissue paper there did I get the knot right oh whoops ow my elbow’s probably bruised so stupid falling where everybody can see that cute guy turning to lend a hand to the clumsy old fag who can’t manage a simple escalator oh crap I’m stuck my tie

  The fall by itself probably wouldn’t have killed me. But my snazzy new silk necktie caught in the escalator mechanism. And then the lady beside me was screaming for help and the cute guy was yanking desperately on my rapidly shortening tie as it disappeared into the works of the escalator and then my head was jammed against the steps and some of my hair caught in it too and pain pain pain no air pain and then the dull crack and the last face I saw was not Semyon’s or Brandon’s not even my sister Sally’s or Dad’s or Mom’s or my dearest friend Derek’s, just the panicked desperate face of some good-looking stranger I didn’t know and would never know now because although he’d tried his hardest he hadn’t been able to save my bloody lifemylifemylife.

  Broke my fricking neck. Stupid way to go. Really stupid day to do it on. And for the rest of this existence, I’d regret that I’d done it while my son and my husband looked on, helplessly.

  I’m standing alone on the down escalator. The canned music chirps at me to listen to the sleigh bells ringing. I’m off the clock. I let the escalator carry me down to the main floor. At the bottom, I step off it and walk over to the spot where I last saw my family. For all I know, no time has passed for them. For all I know, they might still be here, watching me ruin Brandon’s graduation day. Maybe I brush past or through them as I walk this way once every day.

  I straighten my tie. It does go well with my suit. I walk past the cell phone store, the bathing suit store, the drug store. I turn down the nearest corridor. It leads to an exit. I stand in front of the glass and steel door. I stare at the blackness on the other side of it. I think about pushing against the crash bar; how solid it would feel under my palm; how the glass door would feel slightly chilly against my shoulder as I shoved it open.

  Emily Breakfast

  Dedicated to Rose, who told me the story of the real Emily Breakfast.

  Cranston woke into a bougainvillea-petalled morning, a rosy-fingered dawn of a morning. Soft, pinkish sunlight was streaming its way down from the bedroom skylight, his husband Sir Maracle was sprawled and snoring gently beside him, and Rose of Sharon was crouched on his chest, eyes closed in bliss, the low, vibrating hum of her purring making sleepy syncopation with Sir Maracle’s snores. Her bliss was doubtless because she’d found an especially helpful ray of sunshine that not only kissed her with its warmth, but bathed her in glowing light which displayed the highlights in her chestnut fur to a most flattering advantage.

  Cranston stretched and sighed, which caused Rose of Sharon to open kiwi-green eyes at him and chirp a single questioning mewl. She wanted her kibble. She always wanted her kibble, and most mornings, either Cranston or Sir Maracle had to stop in the middle of their scurrying about dressing for their j.o.bees to serve Rose of Sharon a big scoopful of kibble into one of her yellow-green bowls (the bowls matched her eyes), and to wash and fill the other with fresh water from the tap in the kitchen.

  But there was to be no scurrying this morning. This was the first morning of the blessed furlough that was the weekend. The j.o.bee could go hang for two days, and there was a bedroom full of morning light, his man sleeping by his side, and Rose of Sharon basking on his chest.

  With one hand, Cranston shovelled Rose of Sharon gently off him. She made a lazily offended mraow and landed thump on all fours on the floor. Cranston swung out of bed, grabbed his dressing gown from the hook on the wall, and threw it on. He shuffled his feet into his slippers. He stepped over a leather blindfold and a wooden paddle that had been tossed onto the floor and tiptoed out of the bedroom. He could put the toys away later. Now, it was time for breakfast. Rose of Sharon wove infinity symbols around his ankles with each step he took. This weekend morning, that felt like endearing affection, not exasperating annoyance. Though he still closed her out of the bathroom while he did his morning ablutions.

  When he got out of there, Rose of Sharon was busily cleaning and preening herself with her rough tongue, stretching out her pinions till each individual feather at their tips separated from the others. When she saw him, she snapped to and got to her feet. She rubbed herself against his ankles, purring, until he bent to scritch the back of her neck. When he dug his fingers into her scruff and scratched, she closed her eyes in purry bliss. He tried twice to stop, but she butted her head against his hand, begging. So he kept at it a little while more.

  But it really was time for breakfast. Cranston straightened up. “Come on, then,” he said. Rose of Sharon chirruped a complaint at him for stopping so soon, but she trotted beside him into the kitchen. He scooped her a scoopful of kibble from the big brown paper sack that lived behind the kitchen door. She stalked in circles, her tail an exclamation sign of impatience, until he put her bowl down and she could fall upon it like a hawk upon a mouse. While Rose of Sharon was delicately wolfing down her kibble, Cranston had a look into the ’fridge. There was bacon, there was butter, and the bread was still fresh. There was spinach in the garden. It needed only eggs to make the meal complete. “Time to visit the sisters,” he told Rose of Sharon. It was time to let them out of the coop and into their run, anyway.

  Cranston let Rose of Sharon out the kitchen door ahead of him, and stepped out into the backyard, along the crazy-paving pa
th that led to the vegetable garden and the chicken coop. He was picturing how he would manage, since of course he’d forgotten to fetch a basket from the kitchen, and of course he wasn’t of a mind to go back and get one. He figured spinach first, almost filling one of the big pockets of his dressing gown. One egg cushioned safely on top of that. The second egg in the other dressing gown pocket. He’d have to walk gently then. Once he’d gone too quickly and had had to wash raw egg and eggshells out of his dressing gown pocket. The third egg he would cradle in one hand, leaving the other free to let himself back into the house.

  He picked a batch of spinach from the garden, shaking the occasional slug off the leaves, led on by the image of crisp-cooked rashers of bacon, six each for him and Sir Maracle, laid out on the big blue oval serving platter. Bed of barely steamed spinach in the middle of the platter, fried eggs arrayed on top, their edges crispy and their yolks over easy. To keep him company, Rose of Sharon tracked in among the beds of spinach, basil, chives and oregano and pointed out more slugs to him. She didn’t eat them. She’d tried that once, gotten herself a mouthful of slime for her trouble, and had never tried it again. The only thing Rose loved more than tracking slugs was getting the back of her neck scritched. “You’ve got to be part hound dog,” he teased her. She gave him a bland stare and switched to chasing butterflies. Problem was, of course, that butterflies flit and flutter, while Rose of Sharon was more the “soar and dive” type of cat. Although she could fly more quickly than they did, the butterflies changed direction on a dime, and she couldn’t do that. She almost never caught one. Or perhaps that was part of the fun. When she did catch one, she’d crush it down to the ground under one paw, lift the paw and shake it delicately, and look in a kind of nonplussed way at the brightly coloured smear she’d created. It was as though her playmate had out of the blue chosen to grab his bat and ball and go home.