Falling in Love With Hominids

by Nalo Hopkinson

  There’s a young black woman sitting on a bench, her hair tight peppercorns against her scalp. Her feet are crossed beneath her. She’s alone, reading a book. She’s pretty, but she looks too much like your sister. Too brown to ever be a golden girl. She looks up as you go by, distracted from her reading by the chattering of the woman beside you. She looks at you. Smiles. Nods a greeting. Burning up with guilt, you make your face stone. You move on.

  In my mother and father, salt meet with sweet. Milk meet with chocolate. No one could touch her while he was alive and ruler of his lands, but the minute him dead, her family and his get together and exile her to that little island to starve to death. Send her away with two sweet-and-sour, milk chocolate pickney; me in her belly and Caliban at her breast. Is nuh that turn her bitter? When you confine the sea, it don’t stagnate? You put milk to stand, and it nuh curdle?

  Chuh. Watch at my brother there, making himself fool-fool. Is time. Time to end this, to take him back down. “Mama,” I whisper. I blow one puff of wind, then another. The puffs tear a balloon out from a little girl’s hand. The balloon have a fish painted on it. I like that. The little girl cry out and run after her toy. Her father dash after her. I puff and blow, make the little metallic balloon skitter just out of the child reach. As she run, she knock over a case of fancy bottled water, the expensive fizzy kind in blue glass bottles, from a display. The bottles explode when them hit the ground, the water escaping with a shout of glee. The little girl just dance out the way of broken glass and spilled water and keep running for her balloon, reaching for it. I make it bob like a bubble in the air. Her daddy jump to one side, away from the glass. He try to snatch the back of her dress, but he too big and slow. Caliban step forward and grasp her balloon by the string. He give it back to her. She look at him, her y’eye-them big. She clutch the balloon to her bosom and smile at her daddy as he sweep her up into him arms. The storekeeper just a-wait outside her shop, to talk to the man about who going to refund her goods.

  “Mother,” I call. “Him is here. I find him.”

  The water from out the bottles start to flow together in a spiral.

  You hear her first in the dancing breeze that’s toying with that little girl’s balloon. You fetch the balloon for the child before you deal with what’s coming. Her father mumbles a suspicious thanks at you. You step away from them. You narrow your eyes, look around. “You’re here, aren’t you?” you say to the air.

  “Who’s here?” asks the woman at your side.

  “My sister,” you tell her. You say “sister” like you’re spitting out spoiled milk.

  “I don’t see anyone,” the woman says.

  “El!” you call out.

  I don’t pay him no mind. I summon up one of them hot, gusty winds. I blow over glasses of water on café tables. I grab popsicles swips! from out the hands and mouths of children. The popsicles fall down and melt, all the bright colours; melt and run like that brother of mine.

  Popsicle juice, café table water, spring water that break free from bottles; them all rolling together now, crashing and splashing and calling to our mother. I sing up the whirling devils. Them twirl sand into everybody eyes. Hats and baseball caps flying off heads, dancing along with me. An umbrella galloping down the road, end over end, with an old lady chasing it. All the trendy Sunday people squealing and running everywhere.

  “Ariel, stop it!” you say.

  So I run up his girlfriend skirt, make it fly high in the air. “Oh!” she cry out, trying to hold the frock down. She wearing a panty with a tear in one leg and a knot in the waistband. That make me laugh out loud. “Mama!” I shout, loud so Brother can hear me this time. “You seeing this? Look him here so!” I blow one rassclaat cluster of rain clouds over the scene, them bellies black and heavy with water. “So me see that you get a new master!” I screech at Brother.

  The street is empty now, but for the three of you. Everyone else has found shelter. Your girl is cowering down beside the trunk of a tree, hugging her skirt about her knees. Her hair has come loose from most of its plaits, is whipping in a tangled mess about her head. She’s shielding her face from blowing sand, but trying to look up at the sky above her, where this attack is coming from. You punch at the air, furious. You know you can’t hurt your sister, but you need to lash out anyway. “Fuck you!” you yell. “You always do this! Why can’t the two of you leave me alone!”

  I chuckle. “Your face favour jackass when him sick. Why you can’t leave white woman alone? You don’t see what them do to you?”

  “You are our mother’s creature,” you hiss at her. “Look at you, trying so hard to be ‘island,’ talking like you just come off the boat.” In your anger, your speech slips into the same rhythms as hers.

  “At least me nah try fe chat like something out of some Englishman book.” I make the wind howl it back at him: “At least me remember is which boat me come off from!” I burst open the clouds overhead and drench the two of them in mother water. She squeals. Good

  “Ariel, Caliban; stop that squabbling, or I’ll bind you both up in a split tree forever.” The voice is a wintry runnel, fast-freezing.

  You both turn. Your sister has manifested, has pushed a trembling bottom lip out. Dread runs cold along your limbs. It’s Sycorax. “Yes, Mother,” you both say, standing sheepishly shoulder to shoulder. “Sorry, Mother.”

  Sycorax is sitting in a sticky puddle of water and melted popsicles, but a queen on her throne could not be more regal. She has wrapped an ocean wave about her like a shawl. Her eyes are open-water blue. Her writhing hair foams white over her shoulders and the marble swells of her vast breasts. Her belly is a mounded salt lick, rising from the weedy tangle of her pubic hair, a marine jungle in and out of which flit tiny blennies. The tsunami of Sycorax’s hips overflows her watery seat. Her myriad split tails are flicking, the way they do when she’s irritated. With one of them, she scratches around her navel. You think you can see the sullen head of a moray eel, lurking in the cave those hydra tails make. You don’t want to think about it. You never have.

  “Ariel,” says Sycorax, “have you been up to your tricks again?”

  “But he,” splutters your sister, “he . . .”

  “He never ceases with his tricks,” your mother pronounces. “Running home to Mama, leaving me with the mess he’s made.” She looks at you, and your watery legs weaken. “Caliban,” she says, “I’m getting too old to play surrogate mother to your spawn. That last school of your offspring all had poisonous stings.”

  “I know, Mother. I’m sorry.”

  “How did that happen?” she asks.

  You risk a glance at the woman you’ve dragged into this, the golden girl. She’s standing now, a look of interest and curiosity on her face. “This is all your fault,” you say to her. “If you had kissed me, told me what you wanted me to be, she and Ariel couldn’t have found us.”

  Your girl looks at you, measuring. “First tell me about the poison babies,” she says. She’s got more iron in her than you’d thought, this one. The last fairy tale princess who’d met your family hadn’t stopped screaming for two days.

  Ariel sniggers. “That was from his last ooman,” she says. “The two of them always quarrelling. For her, Caliban had a poison tongue.”

  “And spat out biting words, no doubt,” Sycorax says. “He became what she saw, and it affected the children they made. Of course she didn’t want them, of course she left; so Grannie gets to do the honours. He has brought me frog children and dog children, baby mack daddies and crack babies. Brings his offspring to me, then runs away again. nd I’m getting tired of it.” Sycorax’s shawl whirls itself up into a waterspout. “And I’m more than tired of his sister’s tale tattling.”

  “But Mama. . . !” Ariel says.

  “‘But Mama’ nothing. I want you to stop pestering your brother.”

  Ariel puffs up till it looks as though she might burst. Her face goes anvil-cloud dark, but she says nothing.

  “And you,”
says Sycorax, pointing at you with a suckered tentacle, “you need to stop bringing me the fallouts from your sorry love life.”

  “I can’t help it, Mama,” you say. “That’s how women see me.”

  Sycorax towers forward, her voice crashing upon your ears. “Do you want to know how I see you?” A cluster of her tentacle tails whips around your shoulders, immobilizes you. That is a moray eel under there, its fanged mouth hanging hungrily open. You are frozen in Sycorax’s gaze, a hapless, irresponsible little boy. You feel the sickening metamorphosis begin. You are changing, shrinking. The last time Sycorax did this to you, it took you forever to become man enough again to escape. You try to twist in her arms, to ook away from her eyes. She pulls you forward, puckering her mouth for the kiss she will give you.

  “Well, yeah, I’m beginning to get a picture here,” says a voice. It’s the golden girl, shivering in her flower-print dress that’s plastered to her skinny body. She steps closer. Her boots squelch. She points at Ariel. “You say he’s colour-struck. You’re his sister, you should know. And yeah, I can see that in him. You’d think I was the sun itself, the way he looks at me.”

  She takes your face in her hands, turns your eyes away from your mother’s. Finally, she kisses you full on the mouth. In her eyes, you become a sunflower, helplessly turning wherever she goes. You stand rooted, waiting for her direction.

  She looks at your terrible mother. “You get to clean up the messes he makes.” And now you’re a baby, soiling your diapers and waiting for Mama to come and fix it. Oh, please, end this.

  She looks down at you, wriggling and helpless on the ground. “And I guess all those other women saw big, black dick.”

  So familiar, the change that wreaks on you. You’re an adult again, heavy-muscled and horny with a thick, swelling erection. You reach for her. She backs away. “But,” she says, “there’s one thing I don’t see.”

  You don’t care. She smells like vanilla and her skin is smooth and cool as ice cream and you want to push your tongue inside. You grab her thin, unresisting arms. She’s shaking, but he looks into your eyes. And hers are empty. You aren’t there. Shocked, you let her go. In a trembling voice, she says, “Who do you think you are?”

  It could be an accusation: Who do you think you are? It might be a question: Who do you think you are? You search her face for the answer. Nothing. You look to your mother, your sib. They both look as shocked as you feel.

  “Look,” says the golden girl, opening her hands wide. Her voice is getting less shaky. “Clearly, this is family business, and I know better than to mess with that.” She gathers her little picky plaits together, squeezes water out of them. “It’s been really . . . interesting, meeting you all.” She looks at you, and her eyes are empty, open, friendly. You don’t know what to make of them. “Um,” she says, “maybe you can give me a call sometime.” She starts walking away. Turns back. “It’s not a brush-off; I mean it. But only call when you can tell me who you really are. Who you think you’re going to become.”

  And she leaves you standing there. In the silence, there’s only a faint sound of whispering water and wind in the trees. You turn to look at your mother and sister. “I,” you say.

  Delicious Monster

  When I discovered that the Latin name of the split-leaved philodendron (Monstera deliciosa) translates into “delicious monster” in English, I knew I would one day use that in a story. Here is the story.

  The tree was still there. Condos and office buildings growing floor by floor all around formed an organics of the city—urban fractals, patterns repeating, random, but inexorable; yet there in the middle of it was the tree, caged in a small empty lot scattered about with unseasonable thistles and rogue lawn grass.

  Looked like that lot was slated for construction too. One of those clapboard condo sales offices had been erected at the other side of it; the kind with a storefront painted to look like a manor house in a magazine. There were stacks of lumber and fat aluminium pipes beside it.

  Cars rushed past Jerry on Spadina, speeding irritably to Friday afternoon freedom. The dusky sky spat the occasional dirty snowflake which tumbled onto the sleeve of Jerry’s jacket and lay there twinkling for a second, six-clawed, until it melted.

  Jerry knelt by the rusting chicken wire that kept the tree in. He peered through one of the fence’s rusty diamonds. He reached to steady himself, to twine the fingers of one hand in the fence, but an angry roar startled him, and he yanked the hand back. He looked up to see what had made the noise, so much louder and closer than the fractious bleating of car horns.

  There it was. Bloody excavation machines, biting and biting at the ravaged ground. The thing lurched away from the fence, bellowing. It brandished a toothed hopper, a maw on a stalk. The tree hunkered there smugly, in the lee of its machine protector. “You just wait,” Jerry said quietly to the tree. “Pretty soon, it’s you the excavator’ll be coming for.”

  Once, as a child visiting the zoo, Jerry’d disobeyed his dad and stuck his hand inside the fencing of the puma cage. There had been no harm in doing so that he could see. The thick wall of clear Lucite that kept the puma penned was a good two feet beyond his reach; the wire fence just an extra precaution in a litigious world. A gaunt great cat had lain panting behind the Lucite, regarding him with a dull, disinterested stare. Its tan coat made it look baked, like biscuits. Glancing to make sure his dad wasn’t looking, Jerry’d waggled his fingers at the puma.

  Later, thinking about what he’d done, he couldn’t say what reaction he’d hoped for, exactly, from the puma. Something. Some acknowledgement that it’d seen him. His dad had barely said a word to him all weekend. Jerry’d knelt and stared hard at the puma. Look. Look over here. He hadn’t seen the other one flying at him until it was a big golden blur in the corner of his eye. A millisecond later it slammed against the Lucite with a heavy thump. Jerry’d thrown himself backward onto his behind. That’s when his dad had turned and asked in a puzzled voice why Jerry was sitting in the dirt. Jerry hadn’t been able to take his eyes off the puma that had charged him. It had looked at him, licked its bruised nose. A fixed, hungry stare. The sunlight had played in its fur, making it glow.

  It’d been a few years since Jerry’d walked this far north on Spadina. The tree’s swollen middle still flowed in rolls like lava down to the ground. He could see the cincture that bit into the tree’s trunk about two-three feet from the ground. Something had been chained there, tight around the tree, years ago, then abandoned. Must have been only a sapling then. It was sturdy enough for climbing now. It had grown, the living tissue of its wood welling and swelling around whatever it was that it now held trapped. Same as he’d done last time he’d passed the tree, Jerry peered closer, trying to see what it held in its folds.

  “Mister, you got any change you can spare? I’m trying to get a coffee.” The guy standing, jittering, with his hands in the pockets of a shredding jeans jacket was young. He’d shaved off all the hair on his head, except for a limp tuft of it at the front, dyed green, that flopped into his eyes.

  “Uh, yeah,” Jerry said, lurching to his feet. “Think I got some here.” He started fumbling in his pockets. Had he put any change in there? He usually did when he was flush, to give to homeless people who asked for it. Sandor always teased him for being a softie when he gave change to beggars. Teased him and then rewarded him with a kiss or a squeeze of his hand.

  “Thanks, man,” said the guy. “Really ’preciate it.”

  Sandor didn’t give money, but he always seemed to have extra smokes in his pocket to give away.

  Something was funny about the way this guy stood. One shoulder was clearly higher than the other. One hip canted up at a sharp angle.

  Damn. Empty pockets. “Hang on.” Flushing with embarrassment at the delay, Jerry took his wallet from his coat.

  While Jerry fumbled, the young man looked politely off to one side. “God, is that ever freaky-looking, eh?” he said.

  He was looking at the defor
med tree.

  “Yeah,” Jerry replied. “Well . . .” There was a twenty. He wasn’t going to give the kid that. He tried to surreptitiously shield the contents of his wallet from view, to riffle through the remaining bills with his other hand.

  There were more snowflakes falling now. The young guy was shivering in his thin jacket. “It’s a monster, that tree,” he told Jerry. He said it with a familiar air. If this was his beat, he’d seen this tree before. “A monster like me, right?”

  “Delicious monster,” Jerry heard himself mutter. The young man had a gnarled beauty about him, like a skinny rock star who cut his own body with razors, or like a bonsai tree.

  “What’d you say, Mister?”

  Shit. “Uh, nothing.” Perversely, the twenty kept jutting up out of the pile of grocery receipts and bus transfers in Jerry’s wallet. He sighed, yanked it out. “I mean, uh, here. Hope you have a delicious dinner.”

  He handed the twenty to the guy, whose face brightened in delight. “Shit, thanks, man!”

  “No problem.”

  The young man pocketed the money, then looked inquisitively at Jerry. “Not a lot of people stop to really look at stuff in the city. Not ratty old growing stuff, anyway.”

  “I’m curious about it, is all.”

  “Flower gardens, maybe. They’ll look at the neat, pretty things.”

  “I mean,” Jerry continued, “what’s that thing stuck inside it?”

  The young guy shrugged, his green hair tumbling onto his beautiful face. He looked at the tree’s bulge, looked up at the sky. “It’ll be during the eclipse,” he said. “That’s when it happens.” Then he lurched away into the darkening day, one hip hitching higher than the other, one foot hitting the ground sooner than the other, arms windmilling awkwardly to propel him forward.

  Delicious monster. That’s what Jerry’s dad had really taken him to the zoo to see; Monstera deliciosa, the massive Swiss cheese plant that flourished in the South American Pavilion. It had been warm in there, and damp. It’d smelt green, a stuffy fetor of growing, living and dying things that clung inside the nose. Jerry’d taken his coat off. The heat had baked into his skin, his hair. It had felt like moisture was condensing on his eyelids. He’d gone heavy, slow. His dad was finally animated. “This stuff comes from my part of the world,” he’d said. “From Guatemala.”