I picked up the golden spoon. “Contact the auction house.”
Salope barely smiled. “I already have. It’s too late. All one hundred and seventeen of ‘The God Under the Tongue’ are already spoken for.”
I slammed the spoon back down onto the table. “Tell them I will pay! Command Rivener to make another! Just one more!”
Salope looked down at the ground. When she returned her gaze to mine, she was serene. “It’s too late, Enlightened. The Academy has decided. Rivener has been transmigrated to Level Sublime. She is beyond your reach.”
“Machine.”
“There is no need for insult, Enlightened.”
“Go away.”
Salope bowed, returned the spoon to my hand, and dissipated into black smoke. I preferred a pale rose mist, but Salope kept stubbornly reverting to black. It had been her father’s favourite colour.
Her father had finally pushed me too far. I’d ordered him to dissolve himself permanently from my aura. I had grieved for two voluptuous years, then sought everywhere for his like. Nothing. Eventually, in desperation, I had his daughter created. Perverse poet’s child; how she could arouse the senses!
I am Amaxon Corazón Junia Principia Delgado the Third, and I bent over my meal and wept luxurious tears into my green banana porridge. It was a perfect decoction, and it now would never satisfy me. Only the poet’s daughter, and her father before her, ever saw me so transported.
The room spoke with Salope’s voice. “Thank you, Enlightened. I consider myself well paid for today’s session. Please recommend my services to your acquaintances.”
I would. Oh, I would.
About the Author
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and also spent her childhood in Trinidad and Guyana before her family moved to Toronto, Canada, when she was sixteen.
Hopkinson’s groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy features diverse characters and the mixing of folklore into her works. Of her writing she says, “I frequently use Afro-Caribbean spirituality, oral history, culture, and language in my stories, but place my characters within the idioms and settings of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. When I was starting out, it was my way of subverting the genre, which speaks so much about the experience of being alienated, but still contains relatively little writing by alienated people themselves.” Hopkinson also helped to found the Carl Brandon Society, which strives to bring people together to discuss the issues of race and ethnicity in science fiction and fantasy.
Hopkinson’s novels include Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos and most recently, Sister Mine. Her early short fiction was published in the collection Skin Folk. She has edited four anthologies, including Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction.
In 1997, Hopkinson won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring. Brown Girl in the Ring was also nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, and received the John W. Campbell and Locus awards for Best First Novel. Her second novel, Midnight Robber, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her collection Skin Folk received the World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Salt Roads received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction. The New Moon’s Arms won the Sunburst Award, making Hopkinson the first author to receive the award twice, and the Prix Aurora Award. She has been awarded ten grants for her work, including an Ontario Art Council Foundation Award.
Hopkinson has faced many obstacles, including suffering from anemia and fibromyalgia. She spent a few years too sick to read or write, and was sometimes homeless. Her view on these dark periods can be humorous: “But every so often I’ll go through an old notebook or find a file I don’t recognize and open it up, and there’s a page or two of writing that I did during that time that I do not remember. At some level I was still writing. The cool part about it is, the writing is pretty good!” (Locus, September 2013)
Hopkinson currently resides in Riverside, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing department at the University of California, Riverside.
Falling in Love With Hominids Page 24