So Long Been Dreaming

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Jay’s watch had run down to a row of zeroes. Rendezvous time. The mother ship was calling. I stumbled back into the chair at Perez’s workstation. Max put his head in my lap, his chest rumbled, his eyes searched mine. My left hand hovered over ESCAPE – one touch would blast us to the mother ship. Two right hand fingers rested on ENTER – one touch and we were Earthbound. Paralyzed, I flashed on the forest of ancestors holding Jay and me, on hot milk flowing, humming birds flying backwards, Jay inside of me, and miles of roots holding up a mountain. After twice ten thousand years I wanted to do something impossible, something noble. Instead of chasing down infinity, we could contribute our souls to Earth. A blessing on this future, not now or nothing. The voice and the body and the history.

  Axala of Earth.

  ENTER

  Suzette Mayr is the author of two novels, Moon Honey and The Widows, and a poetry chapbook entitled Zebra Talk. The Widows was shortlisted for the 1998 Commonwealth Prize Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean region and was translated into German. Her third novel is being published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2004. She lives and works in Calgary.

  Toot Sweet Matricia

  Suzette Mayr

  The legend goes like this:

  A lazy horny fisherman, classy as a goat and smelling as good, finds what he thinks is a seal skin. This fisherman is not very clever – no one on land would ever marry him.

  These are the rules.

  The selkie sunbathes naked on the rocks; her skin tucked away in what she thinks is a good hiding place. The fisherman hides the seal skin from her, and the selkie is forced to be his wife.

  The selkie makes a wistful but loyal wife and no one in the neighbourhood asks questions. She dutifully suckles her babies, her husband, but her eye is always on the sea, or the lake, or the plastic swimming pool, or the goldfish bowl where Darth Vader, the 75-cent feeder goldfish, blows “I love you” over and over.

  Her two-year-old’s fingerprinted glass of lemonade makes her so homesick she wants to puke. All her children and her children’s children have webbed fingers and toes.

  But the day comes when the selkie decides to give all the clothes in the attic to the Salvation Army, or sweep up the mouse turds in the basement once and for all, or clean out the ancient dirt in the upstairs closet, and then she finds the trunk, or the canvas sack, or the plastic Safeway bag and inside, where her husband’s hidden it, her selkie’s skin. Suddenly she’s gone out to her yoga lesson and strangely enough forgotten her yoga mat.

  The horror is, she never looks back.

  Crueler men burn the skins. These wives are doomed. Prozac, scotch on the rocks, varicose vein strippings, house renovations, feigned and real illnesses can’t stop the mourning, the inner burning. These are the kinds of wives who one day set their houses on fire with themselves inside, or in a matter of hours turn into lesbians, or slash themselves with their husband’s razors just so they feel something.

  I feel something.

  Putting on the skin when it’s not really yours is like putting both arms into a bog and drawing up pieces of corpse. Ring fingers still wearing rings, arms, palms, and hands (these are harder to identify), legs severed at calf and mid-thigh. I have found no heads yet, not yet felt the horror of hair twine around my fingers, the yawn of a mouth, a thick flapping tongue. Body bits perfectly preserved.

  I look in the mirror at the skin around my shoulders, draped over my head. I look like my grandmother.

  Matricia said that with the chemical straightener, my hair felt like the strings on the bow of her violin. The afro roots of my hair winding and colliding from my scalp, the straightened ends down my shoulders, dry and crisp as winter twigs. She fingered and stroked my hair, buried her hands in its coils while I kissed her breasts. I tugged at her nipples with my teeth through the layers of her sweater, her blouse, her bra. Her armpits seaweed-fragrant.

  Her body smells like perfume and sweat. Matricia is a very black woman, much blacker than me, her hair scraped back from her face and into an elaborate coil, and I picture the excruciating smoothness of her inner thighs. I dragged her up piece by piece from the bogs of memory and horror. The smell of her. The smell of her hair and my skin.

  I try to lose myself to the river by filling my pockets with stones from my mother’s rock garden.

  You’ll only rip the seams of the pockets, my sister says. It’ll never work.

  Detergent foam, empty pop cans, floating cigarette butts swirl around my ankles. The denim of my jeans sucks at my thighs.

  Don’t think you’re getting out of washing the dishes! my sister calls.

  I smell tears; they smell the same as water-fear. That horrifying lurch when my head is pulled under and a long fluid gasp fills my lungs. My mother drags my sputtering body through unnaturally bright pool water, and when she lets go I sink and inhale the water like rose petals. For years we did this every Sunday, she teaching me how to swim, me foundering, flailing, my hair afroed from my head in all directions, dry even under water and strung-out from chlorine, my eyes bitter-red and bulging.

  I have watched too many television documentaries about the Titanic. This is why I hate the water. The documentaries never show the body remains; pieces of bodies just outside the picture, inedible chunks of skull, the flat, silver eyes of fish ogling the newly sunk banquet, the flat, silver lips shredding and tearing away at the sad skin under the soaked fabric, the taut necks, the soft flesh of human bellies. The camera focuses instead on a well-preserved shoe. A barnacled chandelier. A brooch filled with hair in the shape of flowers.

  The TV camera never shows the people who live where the Titanic sank. The ones who stare up through the water’s surface with the faces of the drowned, the ones who crunch through bones like sharks.

  I look into a cup of tea and see my eyes flat, silvered with salt-water cataracts. Submersion, immersion, mouth an open, wavering cavity. There is even danger in dish-water. Drowned angry children hissing through the drains sing me to sleep.

  The water licks and licks at my sister’s boots. Every step she takes swirls whirlpools. My body floats face-down in the river, stopped by the branches of trees caught on my clothes. The stones in my pockets don’t hold me down.

  You can stop faking it, my sister says.

  She watches my blue lips sputter awake when the paramedic with prematurely grey hairs in his nose gives me mouth-to-mouth.

  He’s gay, you dummy, she says. He’s gayer than Paree.

  A year later, I marry the paramedic. On our wedding night at the Royal Wayne Hotel, he pushes the skin away and says, Phew! That reeks!

  I get up from the bed and pretend to steal another motel soap. When you have webs between your fingers, you can’t cry.

  And what if you are the kind of woman who slips from world to world, slides through sewers and between the walls, propelled by will alone? This is not just a metaphor for a black woman with a white father, a lesbian who likes a little cock now and then, a vegetarian who craves Alberta beef. This is a question of heredity.

  If you are the kind of woman who slips from world to world, slides through sewers and between the walls, propelled by will alone, the more you travel the in-betweens, the more you play an either/or tourist, the more you realize home was never really home.

  When Matricia reached the shore, pulled her blubbered body up onto the jagged rocks, she peeled off her skin. Not like a banana because you can’t peel banana skin back on. More like the ripping of a membrane, a hymen; a hymen can be unripped. Her skin tears from her body; the grey silver black speckles of her slick skin rip away like so much sausage pelt and there she stands. Her black skin, not black like coal or chocolate or velvet, her black skin, black.

  Matricia pulls on her pants-suit and Italian shoes. Tucks her skin in her bag. My blackness in the middle of the white prairie makes me an easy target. My marriage, job are water-soaked; panic flush, slip of fingers, suck of whirlpool. Vulnerable desire.

  Matricia paints her nails algae green.

&n
bsp; But then there are the other women in my family.

  Never before in the history of this family, says my grandmother, have the women had to fake orgasms.

  My grandmother strokes the scaly patch of skin on her wrist. The scales glitter like seed-pearls, scratch like sand-paper against our faces. She also has scales behind her ears, in the small of her back.

  Eczema, says my mother. She will not believe anything not in the science books.

  Selkie blood, says my grandmother, and she lights another cigarette, her mouth pursed fish-like against the paper tube.

  Of course, my mother won’t believe this either. There’s no ocean where she comes from. She was born in Saskatchewan. Grandmother’s skin is the colour of the teak coffee table.

  The scaly patches prove love, my grandmother says.

  What they never talk about in that selkie story, says my grandmother, is the bed. How important the bed is. If the man’s nonexistent in bed, then why would you stay?

  According to the rules, if my grandmother, being a selkie, ever retrieved the skin, she would leave immediately. But she’s the one who left the water, saw the liquid muscles of her future lover’s forearms, the silver bubbles trapped among the hairs. Watched her fisherman up through the waves and fell in love with the vibrations in his throat, the cracked skin on his fisherman’s hands. And he stared back at her in water, couldn’t believe his eyes.

  Mixed marriages never work, people say, but my grandmother stumbled up into air, her addiction to cigarettes and wearing men’s trousers more a problem than the fact that she enjoyed her fish still gasping. Scales, gut, and open fish mouth pulled down her throat.

  Toot sweet, she says, and smacks her lips.

  She kept her skin like a wedding gown wrapped muslin, stored in cedar to keep away the bugs. Kept the key on a chain around her throat and as far as we could tell, never opened the chest again for as long as she lived.

  I, on the other hand, open her chest again. And again. And again.

  Matricia slides in and around and among the neighbourhoods like a crocodile in a sewer looking for me. Too much time in the world and she looks at her watch.

  Matricia comes for me. She smells exactly like the ocean.

  We were the only two black kids in the junior high school, Matricia and I, and then her father kidnapped her and I was the only one. Or so the legend went.

  The legend goes like this: We are the only two black girls in the school. Matricia wants to be my friend, but this is against the rules. I ignore her. She disappears. Her father stole her, everyone says. My horror mouth open because I didn’t save her. I remember the dandruff flecks in her hair, the green tinge on her fingernails, the seaweed smell of her skin.

  I will eventually be kidnapped by water for good. This is how all women in my family die. When the water finds me, when it inflates my lungs, it will be crammed with the faces of drowned relatives. Women in our family avoid river banks, cliffs, wave pools, backyard fish ponds, sinks too full of water, they move to the centre of islands, high on mountains, buy dishwashers, but water always finds us.

  I am not safe anywhere.

  I kick my rubber boots hard against the polished floor of the museum, the security guards run, their basset-hound jowls and full bellies bouncing, navy-blue security jackets streaming past glass cases, marbles of naked women, paintings of ornate gardens, and they try to grab me by the collar of my shirt, my sleeves and legs, try to pull me from the canvas-painted oily storm. I will hang in the water for hours before they can retrieve my body. My pockets filled with priceless, deformed pearls.

  I die for love. Matricia, body sleek in waves. I die for love.

  Her skin is the same. Her skin is the same as mine. She is my ghost. Digging for treasure, I found mismatched pieces, assembled and resuscitated her. She tastes like licorice. Water beings always have the faint aftertaste of licorice. I have tasted licorice myself on their lips when they come up from between my thighs to kiss me.

  I wanted to steal her skin. Force her to marry me.

  When Matricia left, I got up from my bed and pretended to steal another motel soap.

  They say fish never blink; selkies don’t cry. I wait for the diamonds to come trickling from my eyes. I have not been a maid since I was sixteen and she stole my maidenhead.

  In love with the ocean through my rubber boats.

  Asthma returns with a splash on the cheek. I am allergic to hairy animals. This is how I know she is for real.

  And how girls can say No Thanks from the safety of their mermaids’ tails or selkie skins. Dust sifts through the air. A desire for the parts of other women. Skin brown even in the womb, eyes grey until they ripen into Caribbean brown. An appetite for other women. I pull her up piece by piece from the muck and memory. Assemble her into the ex-lover who gave the clothes to the Salvation Army, swept up the mouse turds, cleaned out the closet, who left with my heart in the trunk. Of her car. She comes to life in the prairies, in the murky river that drowns prize begonias.

  Toot sweet Matricia. I stretch my lips and blow.

  Larissa Lai was born in La Jolla, California, grew up in Newfoundland, and lived and worked in Vancouver. Her first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand (Press Gang, 1995), was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and is working on a PhD at the University of Calgary. Her second novel, Salt Fish Girl (Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002) was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, the Tiptree Award, and the W. O. Mitchell Award. In 2003, TVO’s Imprint named her one the Top Ten Writers to Watch Under 40. Arsenal Pulp Press will release a new edition of When Fox Is A Thousand in 2004.

  Rachel

  Larissa Lai

  When the policeman says I’m cold, my father tells him about the figure skating accident. “She was a beautiful skater. She could execute a perfect quadruple lutz by the time she was thirteen. But the previous skater had really worked over the ice. It was perilously uneven before Rachel ever set foot on it. Or should I say blade.”

  “In short, I fell,” I tell him. I eye the officer nervously. My father doesn’t trust policemen and neither do I.

  “And you hit your head,” the policeman says, evenly. I can’t tell whether or not he is being sarcastic. His speech is steady and uninflected.

  “Yes, officer,” I say. “On the ice. It knocked me out cold.”

  “She was an extraordinarily emotive child before that,” my father says. “Her mother is Chinese, and very circumspect. And I’m a man of science myself. I don’t know where her passion came from. Or where it went. But doctors say this happens sometimes.”

  “I don’t know where it went myself,” I say, somewhat earnestly. “But it’s gone. That’s for sure.”

  I don’t want to take the test, but my father and I had agreed beforehand that I should. That I would. And that I should volunteer before the policeman asked, so there would be no question of coercion. I hadn’t expected to feel nervous. There is nothing to be nervous about. My father is here. I know who I am. There is no question of failing.

  I sit down opposite the policeman at the long table and let him shine his nasty light into my eye. I can feel him scrutinizing me. There is something about him that stirs me in a way I can’t describe. It’s not exactly pleasant.

  “You’re given a calf skin wallet for your birthday,” he says. The test has begun.

  “I’d return it,” I say. Since 2017 it’s been illegal to slaughter any living thing on Earth. “Also, I’d report the person who gave it to me.”

  My childhood memories are extraordinarily vivid. I remember my mother giving me an empty egg box one day when I was playing in the sand. I filled the box with sand and packed it down tight. When I turned it over there were two neat rows of six identical little houses with round tops. I imagined that if I were really small, I could stroll the alleyways between them.

  I remember piano lessons. I was never very good at music, but it was
something my mother valued a great deal, so I made the effort. Recitals made me terribly nervous. When I had to get up to play, I’d be shaking so badly I could barely hit the keys. I played at a tremendous speed with no attention at all to feeling or dynamics. My mother told people I played beautifully at home. I don’t remember that, but that’s how memory works, isn’t it? Selectively.

  I liked to dress up. I remember once making an elaborate Indian Princess costume which I wore for the Halloween dress-up contest at school. I brushed my long black hair straight and darkened my skin with cocoa powder mixed with water. I expected to win, since all the other kids wore costumes that were obviously store-bought. I was devastated when the boy in the Darth Vader mask won. It seemed the teachers placed no value whatsoever on creativity and imagination.

  “You are reading a magazine and you come across a picture of a naked woman. You show it to your husband and he likes it so much he wants to hang it in your bedroom.”

  “Is this testing whether I’m a replicant or a lesbian, sir?” The question annoys me. I am now sure that I don’t like the policeman. Or his test. There is a subtext to it I don’t understand. Is he coming on to me, or does he know something about me that I don’t? I want to look at my father but I don’t dare.

  When the test is over, I am inexplicably angry. At my father or at the policeman, I’m not sure. What I want more than anything is to see my mother, but she died shortly after my skating accident. I remember little about her death. My father says I’ve repressed it because it was so traumatic. He says when I’m older, I can have hypnosis therapy to try and retrieve the memories. Right now all I know is that I miss her. I get up from the long table and leave the room quickly, rudely. I don’t care. I just want to get to the music room where there is a large portrait of my mother over the piano.