The clouds vomited rain onto the birds. They screamed. A few tumbled out of the air. But the rest kept going. In arrow formation, they dove down, heading straight for me. It was all on me. Despairing, I threw my arms wide and my head back. “Please let this work,” I prayed, though I didn’t know to whom. Dad couldn’t help me, and Uncle wasn’t going to take the risk twice of messing around with life and death.
And in that moment, I knew to whom I should be praying. “Abs, I don’t know whether I’ll ever find my mojo, and I’m not even sure what my mojo will turn out to be. But I know this; as long as I have strength to do so, I can carry you wherever you need to go. And I need you to go with me right now.”
The birds were so close that I could hear the wind whistling through their pinions. The sound was louder than the pounding of my terrified heart, louder than the crash and smash of thunder from multiple lightning bolts. The rain was too far away to touch us, but the buildup of electricity crawled along my skin, erecting the short hairs on my arms and legs.
“Maka, I’m here!” cried Abby’s voice from somewhere behind me. Even through the cacophony, I heard her loud and clear.
I whipped around. “Everyone get out of the way! Now!” I turned back to face the killing flock. I shouted, “Come on, then!” And they were upon me. They struck. They pierced my body, sharp as a million needles, but didn’t come out the other side. It hurt like fuck. With a fierce joy, something seeded in me, became part of me, filled me so full I couldn’t hold it. And still more and more birds came. Their metal parts attracted lightning from the mountainous thunderheads above. Lightning arced towards them, followed them sizzling as they dove into my skin, in through my eyes and mouth. I felt my body shuddering and jerking with the power of it. I could do nothing but take it. I couldn’t inhale, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even fall. The storm surge danced through me, transfixed me in its eye, that pregnant, lowering calm before the raging resumes. My legs wouldn’t hold me. I thudded down onto the ground. I didn’t feel a thing.
Abby screamed and ran, transit-limber, to kneel by my side. “Maka, what’re you doing?”
Consciousness was fading quickly. I tried to explain. “I… it…” But I couldn’t find the words. English wasn’t coming to me.
English wasn’t the first language I’d learned.
“Trying to free him,” I said in sisterspeak. “You… sing the right vibration. Destroy… kudzu.”
“Me? But I can’t sing low enough!” she protested.
Deep breaths, deep breaths. I wasn’t dying, not yet. I was just receiving my haint, that had been trying to get back into me all my life.
My mojo. “I think I can help,” I said hoarsely to Abby. “Bejis, would you guys prop me up, please?”
The kudzu was still twitching, but oh, so faintly! Dad’s mojo hovered just outside it, as close to the other part of itself as possible. The light from the godlike mojo hurt my eyes. “Do it, Abby. Just sing.”
She took my hands and began, a keening note that soared rapidly down towards the bottom of her range. As she did, something unfurled in me like steel-bladed flowers blooming, like shatterglass exploding, like muscles I hadn’t known I had. Somewhere in the flesh world, my head jerked and slammed against a concrete floor. I grunted with the pain of it. I could feel my body reeling me back in, away from Abby.
She stopped. I felt the flow of power dip to zero, as though someone had put a crimp in a fire hose. “What’s wrong?” she asked fearfully.
I was barely there at all, but I managed to respond, “Don’t stop singing.”
She started again right away. It was like landing on soft grass. In this space, her gesture of unquestioning trust in me was more than an abstract. It literally broke my headlong tumble towards my cage of flesh. Now I understood how faith sustained the lives of gods. I couldn’t let her go. I aimed my awareness in her direction, and I reached out. I don’t know how else to describe it. I stretched out and caught the something that was Abby’s pure, beautiful sound. I cradled it safely, and I carried it down, down. She slipped lower than her range and kept going down. Elephant subsonic deep. Leviathan deep. I held on to Abby’s sound even as it was expanding in my arms, even as the place where we were began to resonate with the impossible vibrations of it. I couldn’t hear it any longer, but I could feel it shaking every atom. Abby’s voice descended to somewhere impossible, then lower, and lower, and held. My newfound, unpracticed talent sliced at me with razor-blade roses, but I held fast. My mind was slipping. My new mojo wasn’t enough to hold it. I didn’t have time to lament. Just before I went, I wrapped my arms and legs around my precious sister-burden. I couldn’t let go, I couldn’t. Beji said in my ear, “The kudzu’s just kinda going liquid. You guys are doing it!”
And it was killing me. I gritted my teeth and held on as I ripped Quashee away from Dad’s soul so that he could reclaim his mojo. I thought, I’m sorry, Quashee. This is no way to repay you. And then I couldn’t make sense of the world any longer. Regretfully, I felt myself going. The last thing I remembered was a flash of green bright enough to show through my closed eyelids, and Abby’s gleeful voice exclaiming, “Daddy!” It could have been wishful thinking, though.
Would tell them how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote.
So I guess my mojo is to be some kind of amplifier? To whom was I speaking? Where was I?
“Not really, but it was clever of you to work it that way.”
Well if not that, what is it, then? What’s my gift?
“You still think it’s something you get, don’t you? Something you own?”
Isn’t it?
“Honey bun, no. It’s a service you give to others, not the other way around. Some of your kin still haven’t grasped that. I love them to pieces, but a couple of them can’t tell shit from Shine-ola, even after all this time.” It snickered at its own pun. “You, now; you’re learning how to give.”
And what, exactly, am I giving as I’m learning to do this giving thing? I was trying to be sly.
“Nukka, please.”
Five-cent fine! I crowed.
“No, not for me.”
I briefly wondered again who I was speaking to, but I was too intrigued by the conversation to distract myself by trying to figure it out.
“I’m way too old a dog to fall for your tricks. You’ll fashion your mojo into something way more interesting than if I tell you what I think it is.”
Spoilsport.
“Not usually. I generally don’t interfere once I’ve set the machine in motion. Invalidates the experiment. But you were a highly entertaining result, so I thought I’d stop by and chat a bit. You won’t remember, anyway. Tell you what, I’ll give you a little clue to your mojo. Your kin, the ones you call celestials, they each govern a range of tensions between a particular set of related dualities.”
Say what now?
“Life and death, for example.”
You mean Uncle Jack?
I received an impression of a smile. “You learn quickly. Wilderness and civilization.”
Dad.
“Salt and sweet.”
Granny Ocean.
“Oh, this is a fun game! Joie de vivre and fear.”
Huh? I reflected on that awhile. Uncle Jack again?
“Clever child. Just keep being yourself, and the two poles of your mojo will become clear.”
I’m going to have to think about that.
“You do that.”
But right now, I’m going to nap for a while.
Nothing. Nothing for the longest, most peaceful while, as the planets whirled in their orbits and stars burned out.
It was the tiniest thread of sound. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I was hearing anything. Curious, I strained to hear better. There! Yes, it was a tune. I could make out a note or two. Pity. I’d been doing just fine lying here, resting.
Where was here, anyway? And where was I? As in really; I didn
’t seem to have a body.
Don’t worry about it. Nothing hurts, right? Lie back, rest.
There it was again, like a mosquito in the ear; such a tiny noise, but piercingly difficult to ignore. I cast about for a little while, searching for the source of the sound, sometimes getting a little closer, sometimes a little farther away. A few times I gave up and tried to go back to my rest. But every time, there the bloody tune was again. I needed to find it, if only to turn it off. And then I did find it, and it wasn’t a whiny little stinger of sound. It wafted like the scent of something delicious that your dad’s cooking on the stove, and you can’t quite tell what he’s cooking, but it’s making your tummy rumble, so you follow that tantalizing smell, getting closer with each step:
Mm, mm, mm, mm,
In anyone’s home we are lost.
Lost? Was I lost? Wait; hadn’t someone said something to me recently about being lost? The voice came again:
Mm, mm, mm, mm,
We are lost in anyone’s home.
I knew that song. Maybe I even knew that voice, though I was too far away to be able to tell for sure. I tried, and managed to drift closer. I was getting the knack of it.
Mm, mm, mm, mm,
In anyone’s home we are lost.
Someone had dreamed those words. Had dreamed about little ghost girls, playful with their sticking-out braids and their summer dresses, trying on their mothers’ clothing and tottering around in high heels four times bigger than their own little feet, and laughing for the silliness of it, then going parading through the house, singing:
Mm, mm, mm, mm,
We are lost in anyone’s home.
Closer. Closer. I was moving faster now. Someone had told me about her dream the second she opened her eyes. Couldn’t wait to tell me what she’d dreamed, how cheerful the girls had been, though the song was slow and the words sad, how she’d even remembered the tune and the words. She’d sung it for me, in a child’s voice already showing the promise of the power it would have:
In anyone’s home we are lost,
We are lost in anyone’s home.
Abby! I was rushing now, hurtling towards the sound of my twin’s voice.
I opened my eyes. I was in a hospital bed. Sitting beside it, crooning the dirge lullaby, was—
“Abby.” She gasped and hurried over to touch my hand and kiss me and kiss me. “A minute longer,” she said, “and Uncle was going to have to do his job.”
“His jo—Oh, shit.”
“He said you were seconds from dead, but Dad said you weren’t ready to go yet.”
“Dad?”
She nodded. “Dad wasn’t willing to mess with the natural order of things any more. But I told him that he might have rules to follow about these things, but I don’t. And I sang and I sang and I thought you weren’t hearing me, but you came back!”
I said, “I’m not lost any more. You brought me back.”
“You’ve always been the one carrying me. It was my turn to carry you for a little while. Hey; when we brought you out of transit, you were clutching Quashee’s root crown. It’s the only part of him that was left, but it was exactly what he needed to regrow. Dad mended the hoodoo tree, and he’s back climbing it. At normal speed this time.”
I kissed her hand. I was still so weak, it took all my strength. I laid my head back down on the pillow.
An irreverent voice said, “Out of the way, there, Abs. Gotta say hi to my other niece.”
“Uncle.”
His hug was as enveloping and Shiny as the satin lining a coffin. It was the sweetest welcome. “Decided to come back, did you? And brought a passenger with you?”
“I have mojo, Uncle.”
“I know that now. I’m sorry I gave you the gears.”
I kissed his bony cheek, inhaled the sweetly decomposing scent of his cigar. My life stretched before me, balanced between freedom and responsibility. “When do I get to see Dad?” I asked.
“For there is no friend like a sister,
In calm or stormy weather,
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book received support from the Toronto Arts Council and from the Ontario Arts Council via publishers’ recommendations to the Writers’ Reserve Program. Profound thanks to Bear and Ishai for keeping me and mine fed in the final few weeks before the deadline, when I could do nothing but eat, breathe, and sleep this book. May your own words flow freely. Appreciations for my agent, Don Maass, for my patient editor, Lindsey Rose, and for the team at Grand Central Publishing. And, as ever, deep gratitude to an international community of friends and family who literally sustained me through the past five years as I struggled to return to health and independence. I give thanks for you all, every day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NALO HOPKINSON was born in Jamaica and has lived in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. The daughter of a poet/playwright and a library technician, she has won numerous awards including the John W. Campbell Award, the World Fantasy Award, and Canada’s Sunburst Award for literature of the fantastic. Her award-winning short fiction collection Skin Folk was selected for the 2002 New York Times Summer Reading List and was one of the New York Times Best Books of the Year. Hopkinson is also the author of The New Moon’s Arms, The Salt Roads, Midnight Robber, and Brown Girl in the Ring. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and splits her time between California, USA, and Toronto, Canada.
Also by Nalo Hopkinson:
Brown Girl in the Ring
Midnight Robber
Skin Folk
The Salt Roads
The New Moon’s Arms
Report from Planet Midnight
Edited by Nalo Hopkinson:
Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root
Mojo: Conjure Stories
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy
(with Uppinder Mehan)
Tesseracts Nine (with Geoff Ryman)
For young adults:
The Chaos
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Nalo Hopkinson
Excerpted poetry is from “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, first published in 1862.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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