Skin Folk (11 page)

“Jeff, where’d it come from, the glass?” Those days, Jeff had still been around, lungs intact, to answer Sheeny’s questions.
They were sitting on little stools just outside the house, reading by the last few rays of daylight. Books on cement construction,
on water filters. At her question, Jeff had looked over at her, squinting. He took his spectacles off, polished the lenses
on the sleeve of his shirt, put them back on. Wouldn’t help him see any clearer, though. He’d dropped the specs on the ground
too many times. Glass dust had ground the lenses to a pearly finish. Eyes were pretty ground down too. Jeff went outside too
much.

“Well, Sheeny-girl,” Jeff had drawled at her. “Your Mumsie has a theory about that.” He’d flicked a look at Mumsie, who just
turned the ends of her mouth down and kept knitting by the fading daylight. “Yeah,” he continued. “She says that when the
mountain blew and took the city with it, all those skyscrapers with their millions and millions of windows, it must have blown
shatterglass high into the air to be picked up by the winds. Yeah. She says that the glass house people have finally thrown
the biggest stone they could, and broke the whole kit and kaboodle. Time to come, she says, the glass’ll grind itself back
down to sand, and then there’ll be just one big desert.”

Mumsie knitted faster, mouth pursed like a bumhole, cracking the needles together.

“Y’know that playscreen you and Kay are always staring in? Used to make them up on that mountain. Big factory. Gone too.”

Wind keened. Sheeny ran, her ankle jabbing and stabbing.

As she shuffled and shivered on her way, near asleep, Delpha’s fingers loosened. Crash woke her. Crunch of glass underfoot
made her jump alert. She licked clear ice off broken lips, tasted salt slurry of blood starting up again. Her mouth stung.
Her stomach and head were woozy with bitters. She looked up the valley. Dark, too dark to see the looming mountain.

There was a turgid slush and wash sound. The air smelled sodden, rotting. She was down near the docks, at the mouth of the
river. How had she come so far?

The skirling of the dancing winds tore at Sheeny’s back. The sound drove ice picks into her ears. She eyeballed the nearest
shelter. Leon’s. She pulled her coat off, tied it around her head. Hands in front of her, she ran for Leon’s. Tripped on rocks,
kept going. A sword was jabbing up into her ankle. She barely registered the thud of her hands hitting Leon’s shelter. Whimpering,
she fumbled round and round it until she felt the tunnel, patted frantically along it till she was kneeling at its entrance.
She pulled on the door. Locked. She pounded on the tunnel walls, yelled. She couldn’t hear herself above the grating howl.

No one opened. The glass wind hit with a ululating joy, tumbled her off her feet, shrapnelled the skin of her exposed hands
into a bloody screaming mess. Somewhere back in the wasteland, the playscreen was scoured and pummelled into pieces. The fragments
scattered into glittering dust.

The glass wind skirled.

The frigid sky was still cyan, staining fast to black. Glacial black all around her. Delpha staggered past blocky storage,
feet tramping now over the thick wooden planks of the jetty. Hollowthump. Clump. Again. She could feel her toes only too well,
throbbing and burning.

No ships more, all gone. The crushed ice water, half frozen, gleamed and washed, gleamed and washed. Delpha was shivering
like a kite in the wind now, like a burlap lady in a storm. It was coming, the blow was coming, it would tear her apart. She
was shaking with cold and with hatred for the careless child who’d brought them to this. She hoped that in other worlds they’d
understood the danger of the playscreens.

Delpha slowly removed one ratty coat, fingers pushing numbly at the buttons to make them work. The air rushed in, came at
her in stabbing shards. She unbuttoned the second coat, the one with the torn lining. She shucked both coats to the ground.
She trembled belly-deep. She hoped she knew the way, hoped it wasn’t just her speech that could cross worlds in this new physics
the girl had made. “I’m going to get out from under.” She pulled her clothing away until she was banana-peeled, standing juddering
on the jetty, wearing only the crusted socks in their sole-thin boots with missing laces. Nothing of this place to weigh her
down. Stiff-legged ’cause she could no longer feel how to bend at the knee, she lurched to the end of the jetty. Nutty banana,
all she needed was creamy ice to make it complete. Dessert time. Time to lose it all. She tried to grin at the grinding water,
her new love. Not a warm one. Her teeth chattered, made her smile a rictus. Muscles shuddershaking into cramps, she couldn’t
jump. She just leaned. Fell. The splash of landing in the unspeakable lump-ice water froze the scream in her chest. She sank
briefly, then rose to the surface again, a bobbing Delpha-sicle finally come to the yearning, intimate cold.

With sullen, icy fingers the wind lovingly circled and circled and circled Delpha’s tumid nipples, making them crinkle and
jut painfully long and hard. She gasped and panted hot breath. The wind supped it from her mouth and blew it back changed,
a cooling fog. Yes, take it all away. Frigid air slid over her breasts, pooled in her navel, lapped lazily at her cunt like
winter lakes, making her flow. She was all goose bumps, laved in ice, shivershivering. The viscous wash of the water’s tongue
carried her on its slow tide, lick, lick, lick, and she was trembling uncontrollably, chilled through to her core. Her limbs
were frost-coated. They would shatter with her shuddering. Come for me, I’ll come for you. She managed to spread her legs,
open the heat of her. The sea sucked at the hard knot of her clit with a tonguetip dipped in ice. Orgasm crackled her jangling
into fragments. She was half aware of the water surging the length of her body like ice floes to cover her. The last thing
she saw was a steely wash of it that loomed above her, then crashed, entered eyes, mouth, all her holes. She screamed, impaled
by cold glassy ice.

In a concussion that could shatter eardrums, the mountain exploded. Molten flame poured out. Delpha never knew.

Mumsie’s house was next. Wind stripping her, Sheeny ran. Stumbled. Ran. Carommed off the side of her house. Found the tight-locked
tunnel door and banged and banged with bleeding hands. Would Mumsie forgive?

Huddling alone in her stone igloo, Sheeny’s Mumsie Adelphine had dozed off. The hollow banging sound startled her awake. She
opened her eyes, looked around. Delpha had made it to the other side, had always been there now. She remembered bearing Sheeny,
remembered losing Dodder. And Jeff, and Kay. All the warm ones gone; only that hated bleeding girlchild with so much to learn,
the one who had shaken the world and broken it. Adelphine sat up, her hands curling into the position where she’d held a tiny
two-year-old head once between her breasts, protecting the child and stilling her sobbing. Teaching her to be strong, hard-hearted;
ice to the heat of the hurtful world. Sheeny’d always been a quick girl.

There was a story once about mirrors and cold. Adelphine had read it, somewhere in another sometime. Glass splinters freeze
your heart, but it’s still in you. Still sitting there in your chest, sullen, solid. Letting nothing in or out. Not blood,
not anything. You lose heat and colour from being so bloodless, and there you are, no feeling. Solid and pale, merciless as
the glass wind itself. Under glass.

The hollow thumping demanding to be let in was still strong. Mumsie swung her unfamiliar feet to the floor and stood, considering.

I
n my anthology
Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction,
I introduced the following story with these words: “Eggs are seeds, perfectly white on the outside. Who knows what complexions
their insides might reveal when they crack open to germinate and bear fruit?”

T
he air was full of storms, but they refused to break.

In the wicker rocking chair on the front verandah, Beatrice flexed her bare feet against the wooden slat floor, rocking slowly
back and forth. Another sweltering rainy season afternoon. The arid heat felt as though all the oxygen had boiled out of the
parched air to hang as looming rainclouds, waiting.

Oh, but she loved it like this. The hotter the day, the slower she would move, basking. She stretched her arms and legs out
to better feel the luxuriant warmth, then guiltily sat up straight again. Samuel would scold if he ever saw her slouching
like that. Stuffy Sammy. She smiled fondly, admiring the lacy patterns the sunlight threw on the floor as it filtered through
the white gingerbread fretwork that trimmed the roof of their house.

“Anything more today, Mistress Powell? I finish doing the dishes.” Gloria had come out of the house and was standing in front
of her, wiping her chapped hands on her apron.

Beatrice felt the shyness come over her as it always did when she thought of giving the older woman orders. Gloria was older
than Beatrice’s mother. “Ah… no, I think that’s everything, Gloria…”