Falling in Love With Hominids

by Nalo Hopkinson

  That first noise must have come from the powerful kick. It crashed like the sound of cannon shot. A second bang followed, painfully, stupefyingly loud; then a concussion of air from the direction of the front door as it collapsed inward. Jenny didn’t even have time to react. She sat up straight on her couch, that was all. The elephant was in the living room almost immediately. Jenny went wordlessly still in fright and disbelief. She lived on the fifteenth floor.

  The elephant took a step forward. One of its massive feet slammed casually through the housing of the television, which, unprotesting, broke apart into shards of plastic, tangles of coloured wires and nubbins of shiny metal. So much for the evening news.

  The elephant filled the close living room of Jenny’s tiny apartment. Plaster crumbled from the walls where it had squeezed through her brief hallway. Its haunches knocked three rows of books and a vase down from her bookshelf. The vase shattered when it hit the floor.

  The elephant’s head brushed the ceiling, threatening the light fixture. It crowded the tree trunks of its two legs nearest her up against the couch. Fearing for her toes—well, her feet, really—Jenny yanked her own feet up onto the couch, then stood right up on the seat. It was only the merest advantage of height, but it was something. She couldn’t call for help. The phone was in the bedroom, on the other side of the elephant.

  The animal smelled. Its wrinkly, gray-brown hide gave off a pungent tang of mammalian sweat. Its skin looked ashy, dry. Ludicrously, Jenny found herself thinking of how it might feel to tenderly rub bucketsful of lotion into its cracked surface, to feel the hide plump and soften from her care.

  Elephants were hairier than she’d thought. Black, straight bristles, thick as needles, sprung here and there from the leathery skin.

  The elephant reached out with its trunk and sniffed the potted plant flourishing on its stand by the window—a large big-leaf thyme bush, fat and green from drinking in the sun. Fascinated, Jenny watched the elephant curl its trunk around the base of the bush and pluck it out of its pot. The pot thudded to the carpet, but didn’t break. It rolled over onto its side and vomited dirt. The elephant lifted the plant to its mouth. Jenny closed her eyes and flinched at the rootspray of soil as the animal devoured her houseplant, chewing ruminatively.

  She couldn’t help it; didn’t want to. She reached out a hand—so small, compared!—and touched the elephant. Just one touch, so brief, but it set off an avalanche of juddering flesh. A fingertipped pod of gristle with two holes in it snaked over to her, slammed into her chest and shoved her away; the elephant’s trunk. Jenny felt her back collide with the wall. Nowhere to go. She remained standing, very still.

  A new smell pulled her eyes toward its source. The elephant had raised its tail and was depositing firm brown lumps of manure onto her carpet. She could see spiky threads of straw woven into each globule. The pong of rotted, fermented grass itched inside her nose, made her cough. Outraged, hardly knowing what she did, she leapt forward and slapped the elephant, hard, on its large, round rump. The vast animal trumpeted, and, leading with its shoulder, took two running steps through the rest of her living room. It stuck briefly in the open doorway on the other side. Then more plaster crumbled, and it popped out onto her brief balcony. With an astonishing agility, the pachyderm clambered out over the cement wall of the balcony. “No!” Jenny shouted, jumping down off the couch, but it was no use. Ponderous as a walrus diving from an ice floe, the elephant flung itself over the low wall. Jenny rushed to the door.

  The elephant hovered in the air, and paddled until it was facing her. It looked at her a moment, executed a slow backwards flip with a half turn, then trundled off, wading comfortably through the aether as though it swam in water.

  The last thing she saw of the beast, in the crowding dark of evening, was the oddly graceful bulk of its blimp body, growing smaller, as it floated towards the horizon.

  Jenny’s knees gave way. She felt her bum hit floor. A hot tear rolled down her cheek. She looked around at the mess: the scattered textbooks for the course she was glumly, doggedly failing; the crushed vase in a colour she’d never liked, a grudging gift from an aunt who’d never liked her; the destroyed television with its thousand channels of candied nothing. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of elephant dung, then stood again. She fetched broom and dustpan from the kitchen and started to clean up.

  A month later she passed the web design course, just barely, and sold the textbooks. She felt lighter when she exchanged them for crisp bills of money. At the pharmacy, she used most of the money to buy all the lotion they had, the type for the driest skin. After he’d helped her repair her walls, her father had given her another big-leaf thyme cutting, which, sitting in its jar of water, had quickly sprouted a healthy tangle of roots. She’d told him once about the elephant. He’d raised one articulate brow, then said nothing more.

  Jenny lugged the tubs of skin lotion home, then went to the hardware store. With the remaining money she bought a bag of soil. Back home again, she transferred the cutting into a new pot that her dad had given her. She put it on the balcony, where it could enjoy the two remaining months of summer. The plant grew quickly, and huge.

  She got hired to maintain the question-and-answer page for the local natural history museum. The work was interesting enough, and sometimes people asked about the habits of elephants. Jenny would pore over the curators’ answers before putting them up on the web page. It must have been an Indian elephant; an African one would never have fit through her doorway. For the rest of the summer, every evening when she got home, she would go out onto the balcony, taking a container of the skin lotion with her. She would brush her hands amongst the leaves of the plant, gently bruising them. The pungent smell of the herb would waft its beckoning call out on the evening air, and Jenny would lean against the balcony railing for an hour or so, lotion in hand, hopefully scanning the darkening sky.

  A Young Candy Daughter

  I’m not the only person who’s ever asked the question, “What if God was one of us?” But maybe “us” looks a little different from my side of the sandbox.

  The Salvation Army Santa Claus wasn’t ho-ho-hoing, not any more. He was no longer singing a carol, and he had stopped ringing his bell. He stood on the busy street corner—a thin brown man wearing Saint Nick’s heavy velvet-red-and-whites and sweating himself thinner in the tropical heat—and gaped into the brass pot he had hanging in a frame for people to put their coins in.

  Only two people stood near him. The young woman’s freshness of skin and mischievous smile made it impossible to guess her age. She could have been sixteen, or twenty-six. Her jeans were scandalously tight, and, he noticed as she bent to tie her child’s shoelace, showed off her high bottom nicely. Under different circumstances, the Salvation Army Santa Claus would have been using the cover of his cotton wool mustachios and beard to sneak a better glance. The young woman was not so much beautiful as pretty. The Salvation Army Santa Claus preferred pretty; he generally found it to be friendlier. Hers shone through despite hair severely processed into rigid ringlets. Her stylized makeup job failed to homogenize and blanch her features. Instead of the sparkling gold chain around her neck, silver or platinum would have complemented her black skin better, but no matter. (The chain supported a pendant with the word “foxy” in gold, followed by a star.) If you were to search for a word for what glowed through her as it did, made you want to laugh with her, and dance, you would have come up with “joy.”

  The young woman smiled as she placed her hand on the head of the second person standing at the Salvation Army pot; a little boy? Girl? Difficult to tell. An even younger person. The child wore too-big jeans, rolled up at the ankles, with threadbare knees. Its hair was cane-rowed neatly against its head, in even rows that went from nape to neck. It wore a scowl, a Spider-Man t-shirt, and a gold stud in either ear. But earrings were no indicator of gender these days. The child had one foot on a skateboard, up-ending it at an angle. The child pulled a handful of candy out of the
Salvation Army pot and, with a look of intense concentration, flung it in an arc away from its body. Other children at the street corner broke free of their parents and scrabbled to collect it. So did one woman, her feet bare and black-bottomed, her body burly only because she seemed to be wearing everything she’d ever owned, in dirty and torn layers one atop the other. She clutched two packets of tamarind balls and five peppermints to her bosom with one hand. In the other hand she held a purple lollipop. As she scuttled into a corner to eat the rest of her prize, she tore the lollipop wrapper away with her teeth.

  The Salvation Army Santa Claus stared at the young woman. “It didn’t have any sweeties in there before,” he said.

  In response, she only grinned. Worlds in that grin; miracles. Somewhere, a leader was shot, and the wondrous creation that was a gull swooped down over the waves and caught a fat fish for its young. “La’shawna,” she said to the child—a girl, then— “people want more than sweeties to fill their belly.”

  The tomboy of a girl looked up at her, scratched her nose, and said, “So what I should give them?”

  “I ain’t know,” her mother replied. “Some people eat meat but no provisions. Some people eat provisions but no meat. Some people only want a cold beer and some peace and quiet.”

  The little girl considered. The Salvation Army Santa Claus peered into his brass pot. As far as he could see, it still only held the few coins he had received for singing his carols and ringing his bell. Perhaps the child had put the sweeties in there herself? They were troublemakers, her and her pretty mother. He was going to have to run them off.

  “All right,” the child said. She tossed her chin in greeting to the Salvation Army Santa. “Mister, tell any hungry people to put they hand in your pot. Each one will find what they want.”

  “What?” The Salvation Army Santa scowled at the little girl.

  “You eat lunch yet?” her mother said to him.

  “What that have to do with . . . why?”

  “You hungry?”

  Her smile was infectious. He found himself beaming back at her. “Yes.”

  “Then put your hand in the pot, nuh?”

  Feeling like an idiot, the Salvation Army Santa did as she suggested. His hand closed over something warm and yielding. A delicious smell came from it. His tummy rumbled. He pulled his lunch out of the pot and nearly dropped it in surprise.

  The child laughed. “Mummy, check it,” she said. “All he want is a patty and a cocoa bread!”

  People were starting to gather round. The woman in all her tattered clothing was tiptoeing nearer. “Only the hungry ones will get anything,” the child told the man.

  “Come, darling,” said the young woman. “We have to go. Plenty to do.”

  The girl let the skateboard slap to the floor. “What else we must do now?” she asked.

  “Well, this nice man going to get more customers than he can handle. So now we have to visit every Salvation Army Santa we can find round here and make their pots into cook pots, too.”

  “That’s a lot of work, Mummy.”

  “You started it, girlchild.”

  The little girl made a face and kissed her teeth in mild exasperation. She shook her head, but then she smiled. The smile had something of her mother’s about it.

  The little girl hopped onto the skateboard and rolled away slowly. She stopped a little way away and did skillful, impatient circles, waiting for her mother to catch up.

  Cringing as though she feared violence, the tattered woman snuck her hand into the pot. The thing she brought out was wrapped in banana leaves, tied with string, and steaming. She cackled in amazement, a delight rare and miraculous. Somewhere, children got a snow day. Somewhere else, a political prisoner died only minutes into his “interrogation,” cheating his torturer. A man stepped up to the pot and put his hand inside.

  “Is not this easy, you know,” the Salvation Army Santa said to the young woman.

  She gave him an appraising look.

  “Doing good, I mean,” he explained.

  She sighed. “I know. She still have plenty to learn, and sometimes I don’t know what to tell her. When she help one person, she might be harming someone else.” She gestured at the pot, where four people where elbowing at each other to try and get their hands inside. “Where you think all this food coming from?” she asked. “Is somebody hard labour.” She clapped her hands to get the attention of the people squabbling over the pot of plenty. “Hey!” she yelled. Faces turned to her. “If allyuh fight, that food going to turn to shit in allyuh mouth one time.”

  The wrangling subsided a little. The little girl came whizzing up on her skateboard, dipped her hand into the pot, and brought it back out overflowing with penny sweeties, sweet and sour plums, candy canes and gummy bears; only the red ones. She flashed a triumphant grin at her mother, who said, “La’shawna, you have to have more than that for lunch!” The girl put two gummy bears in her mouth and zoomed away again.

  The young woman sighed. “I have to go with she,” she said. “Yesterday she turned an old man’s walking cane into solid gold. He nearly break he foot when he drop it.” She waved goodbye to the Salvation Army Santa Claus. Tentatively, he waved back. She began to run after her child. She stopped a little way off, cupped her mouth with her hands and yelled back at the Santa Claus, “Yes, the name is Mary. I ain’t have no Joseph. But you nice. I could come back and check you later?”

  He nodded.

  She ran to catch up with La’shawna.

  A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog

  In the fall of 2002, I spent two months as writer-in-residence at Green College, a graduate residence of the University of British Columbia in Canada. Green College is a beautiful residence on a beautiful campus in an extraordinarily beautiful part of Canada. I have so many glorious memories of my time there; among them tall pines, gyring crows, taking a bowl out in the mornings to pick wild blackberries for my breakfast, spying shy seals in the ocean, hosting a short writing series, lavender bushes the size of small Volkswagens, the Hallowe’en dance, talking with the grad students about everything from science fiction to religious philosophy, and the weekly word game nights in the dining hall. Though I don’t remember which game spawned this next story, it is my fantastical paean to the trials of geek dating, and to imaginatively overcoming them.

  Have you seen a little dog anywhere about?

  A raggy dog, a shaggy dog,

  Who’s always looking out

  For some fresh mischief which he thinks

  he really ought to do . . .

  —from “My Dog” by Emily Lewis

  There you are. Right on time. Yes, climb up here where we can see eye to eye. Look, see the nice plant, up on the night table? Come on. Yeah, that’s better. I’m going to get off the bed and move around, but I’ll do it really slowly, okay? Okay.

  You know, I don’t really mind when it’s this hot. The orchids like it. Particularly when I make the ceiling sprinklers come on. It’s pretty easy to do. I light a candle—one of the sootless types—climb up on a chair, and heat a sprinkler up good and hot. Like this. Whoops, here comes the rain. Oh, you like it too, huh? Isn’t that nice?

  Wow, that alarm’s loud. No, don’t go! Come back, please. The noise won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you.

  Thank you.

  When the downpour starts, the orchids and I just sit in the apartment and enjoy it; the warmth, the artificial rain trickling down the backs of our necks. The orchids like it, so long as I let them dry out quickly afterwards; it’s a bit like their natural homes would be. So when I move, I try to find buildings where there are basement apartments with sprinklers. I’ve gotten used to the sound of fire alarms honking.

  It’s best to do the candle trick in the summer, like now. After the fire department has gone and the sprinklers have stopped, it’s easy to dry off in summer’s heat. In winter, it takes longer, and it’s cold. Some day I’ll have my own rooms, empty save for orchids and my bed, and I’ll be able to make
it rain indoors as often as I like, and I won’t have to move to a new apartment after I’ve done it any more. My rooms will be in a big house, where I’ll live with someone who doesn’t think I’m weird for sleeping in the greenhouse with the orchids.

  My name is Tammy Griggs. You can probably see that I’m fat. But maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you. Me, I think it’s pretty cool. Lots of surface for my tattoos. This one, here on my thigh? It’s a Dendrobium findlayanum. I like its pale purple colour. I have a real one, in that hanging pot up there. It looks pretty good right now. In the cooler months, it starts dropping its leaves. Not really a great orchid to have in people’s offices, because when the leaves fall off, they think it’s because you aren’t taking care of it, and sometimes they refuse to pay you. That’s what I do to earn a living; I’m the one who makes those expensive living plant arrangements you see in office buildings. I go in every week and care for them. I have a bunch of clients. I’ve created mini jungles all over this city, with orchids in them.

  This tat here on my belly is the Catasetum integerrimum. Some people think it’s ugly. Looks like clumps of little green men in shrouds. Tiny green deaths, coming for you. They’re cool, though. So dignified. To me they look like monks, some kind of green order of them, going to sing matins in the morning. After their singing, maybe they work in the gardens, tending the flowers and the tomatoes.

  On my bicep is the Blue Drago. They call it blue, but really, it’s pale purple too. This tat underneath it is a picture of my last boyfriend. Sam. He drew it, and he put it on me. He did all these tattoos on me, in fact. Sam was really talented. He smelled good, like guy come and cigarettes. And he would read to me. Newspaper articles, goofy stuff on the backs of cereal boxes, anything. His voice was raspy. Made me feel all melty inside. He draws all the time. He’s going to be a comic artist. He designs his own tats, indie stuff, not the company toons. I wanted him to tattoo me all over. But he’d only done a few when he started saying that the patterns I wanted freaked him out. He said that at night he could smell them on my skin, smell the orchids of ink flowering. Got to where he wouldn’t go anywhere near the real plants. He wanted me to stop working with them, to get a different kind of job. You ever had to choose between two things you love? Sam’s dating some guy named Walid now. I hang out with them sometimes. Walid says if he ever gets a tat, it’ll be a simple one, like a heart or something, with Sam’s name on it, right on his butt. A dead tattoo. When Walid talks about it, Sam just gazes at him, struck dumb with love. I really miss Sam.