Skin Folk (10 page)

Something had gone crack in the world when the playscreen broke. Something big and silent. Only Delpha knew it had happened.
The world picture had slipped sideways, was grinding distressfully on the ground. It was the damned girl had gone and done
it, blowing her troubles back in all their faces. This is how it started. Delpha whimpered. Time and history would all be
crazed now, like broken windows.

The welder turned her torch off. Their meal gone, the birds flew away.

Old Delpha could hear how the wind would come, screaming. The centre one of the giant triple mountains had bulged, puffed
its cheek out, ready to blow. Delpha wished her eyes were strong enough to see the scientists clambering about it, taking
measurements. Any day now, they said. Whether or not. Some of them would get off the mountain in time, get into planes and
fly away to safety, if this new cracked-crazed world held any such. She’d get on a plane too, if she could afford a ticket.
If she could stop mumbling and shuffling and could remember to keep her hair combed for long enough to pretend normal so that
they’d let her on.

Striped yellow and black and bumbled as bees, a school bus pulled up to the corner. Little children tumbled out, all squeals
and shrieks and gambols and galumphs and Gumbie sneakers and Maximal Morphin’ Mounties lunch boxes going creak-creak as the
kids swung them by their handles. The children were so sweet, it hurt Delpha to watch them.

On the grass verge (brown grass now it was winter, going to become even Fimbul-er, but nothing to be done about that), three
trees that had been wrapped in burlap against the cold shuffled creakily out of the children’s way. Crazed-crazy time. They
moved like old ladies in shapeless coats, shuffling with swollen ankles. The sight made Delpha chuckle a little. The old lady
trees huddled at the side of the road, their spiny green-tongued needles chatterly gossipping to each other from under their
dumpy burlap coats while the soon to be groundglass wind sang around them, dumping shivery ice splinters into their burlap
folds, making them twinkle in the sun like movie stars in the camera’s glare, like ropes of twirled raw gut. Could no one
else hear the grinding?

“Next stop, Saint Mare Wash, Fishwife, and Brain-stem,” yelled the driver. “Hurry home, kids. Your parents are packing.” The
little bus waddled off, lumpy with its weight of rambunctious children. Poor children.

Delpha had never heard of those schools before. Saint Mare Wash she understood. She guessed somebody had to learn how to keep
the old Night Mare clean. Yeah, she was a goddess, but she probably got dirty, galloping through people’s dreams all night,
making them gasp with terror. Old workhorse. She probably got all lathered. So Saint Mare Wash made sense. But Fishwife? Brainstem?
Delpha started walking, trying to figure it out. Was there a way out? Out from under? She thought about fishwives and tongue-lash-ings
and scolds and shrews and tried to keep it all straight in her mind, how she might get out, but it made no sense. It made
her brainstem hurt. A school for fishwives? Cold as a fish, people said. “Shut up!” she screeched at the burlap tree women.

“Scold; cold scold,” one of them taunted her. They were shuffling along the grass, keeping up with her as she walked. “Where’s
your warm one now?”

Seemed to Delpha she’d had one who kept her warm. But gone now. Left her when Delpha’s brain broke—that’s the story the world
was telling now—broke, and they tried to glue it back together with pills. “Old broads,” she muttered at the tree hags. “Old
broad beams. High blow shatter you.”

They gasped, offended, then froze where they were, pretending to be trees again. But she could hear them still windily whispering
to each other about her. Their needle tongues rustled. Doc in this new story would say there were no talking trees, just her
meds, new stuff they had tried on her that had broken her brain apart. But it was everything that was broken, not just her.
Shattered everything seven ways from Sunday, they had. With those damned toys, those screen things that trapped stories under
glass. Pieces all the way into the future, the past, the never. And when the blasted things broke, they were all stuck with
that story. Delpha glared at the tree ladies, kept walking. They wouldn’t last the heat of the glass wind out, nor the cold
neither.

The breath was burning, burning past Sheeny’s throat. Felt like she’d swallowed glass. Maybe she had. Glass wind roaring down
to strip flesh from her bones, it had probably blown dust ahead of it before she’d put her filter on. Glass to catch in her
throat and scrape it raw, fill her lungs with glistening sand, harden her heart to stone. Always silicone sand in the air,
glistening on the ground, even without the glass wind. Old people died from it, coughed to death, spitting gleaming red sand.
Stained glass. So lovely.

Sheeny had been nine when her family took Kay in. His dad was his last people, the rest blown sky high when the mountain went.
Pneumonia took Kay’s father, and so he’d come to them. Eleven years old. And pretty. Skin just beginning to pimple; swollen,
perfect lips; and that delightful, husky, breaking voice. Was about three years before Sheeny really took all that in though—
how much she enjoyed the sight of Kay, the smell of him when he’d been working all day, helping Jeff build another shelter
over someone’s basement. Concrete igloos with long, curved tunnels for entranceways. You had to stoop to get inside, then
crawl through five doors for keeping glass out. She took to helping Kay make those tunnels, so she could watch his heart-shaped
backside proceeding ahead of her as he smoothed walls with his trowel.

And soon he’d noticed her noticing. Was in one of those tunnels that she and Kay had first kissed. The touch of his lips and
tongue against hers had lodged a sliver of something in her heart. His hand had grazed over her canvas jumpsuit, thick weave
to keep glass out. His hand brushed over where her breast hid, under layers, and her nipple jumped to attention. Her heart
pounded and pounded, but couldn’t dislodge the sliver. She’d pulled back to look at Kay. Glass in her eye? He looked different,
he glowed. She leaned in again, laid the warm flat of her tongue against the hollow of his neck. He groaned. She sighed.

Sheeny hadn’t meant for Kay to go away and never come back, didn’t Mumsie understand? Sheeny’d wanted a boy who would divine
her true nature, and love her passionately forever for it. She’d wanted love to blow her world apart, to fall on her like
houses. That’s what she’d thought. But when it had finally happened, everyone, everyone could see. In the hitch of her breath
when Kay walked into a room; in the way her eyes filled up with him, her fingers moved by themselves to clutch his. They could
all see! And they’d looked at her and Kay differently. Some wanting what they had, hating them for having it. Some hoping
that something so fragile could survive weeks huddled in concrete huts, hours sifting water glass through gauze and filters
for its moisture, days watching the spidery crops in the watery light and hauling the troughs in at the first sign of a breeze.
She had hated being so transparent, hated that everyone could see. Love had snuck into her heart and lightened it, made it
clear, easy to see through. Kay wanted to love her warm. She couldn’t stand it, couldn’t let herself melt into another’s contours.
She made herself cold to him again to keep separate, to keep eyes off her. She’d learned to look at Kay again with obsidian
eyes, like everyone else.

First love feels like everything. It was too much; Sheeny couldn’t stand to let it overtake her. And Kay couldn’t stand losing
it, not when he’d already once lost all he’d loved. It was her gaze gone cold that had put him under glass, sent him stumbling
to the river. Jeff gone, then Kay. Mumsie’s blaming eyes found Sheeny’s more nowadays. Now Mumsie never filtered the water
one last time for Sheeny anymore before she poured her a drink. Never shook the sandy glass out of Sheeny’s gloves anymore
when she left them in the tunnel.

The pain in her foot made Sheeny retch. Nearly home. The low cement domes were only about a minute away, steel doors battened
against the wind. No one out looking for her. No time, when the wind came down. Time to get inside then. Had Mumsie locked
the doors already? Sheeny’s right thigh knotted, brought her crashing to one knee. She didn’t feel the splinters slipping
into her skin like bamboo slivers under fingernails. She heaved back up to her feet, ran on, her legs wobbling.

A sovereign for a sovereign remedy… Fuck, it was cold. Fuckcold. Cuckold. No, she’d be faithful. Had no choice, no plane fare,
no way to unbreak the glass. But she had enough for two bottles of bitters from the corner store. The guy behind the counter
gave her an extra one, then hurried her out. “Gotta close up, lady. Getting my ass outta here. Radio says. You should leave
too.”

The story was hardening to bone, stone, silicone. Delpha clutched her three bottles. They made hard little squeaks as they
rubbed against each other. Forty percent cold ethyl times three, and then Delpha wouldn’t care what came. ’Cause it was coming.
The nighttime air was crackling with it. Stupid, stupid girl, with her games and her hard gaze.

Delpha stepped outside the store, squinted at the mountain. Her eyes too glassy to see if the peak’s cheek was bulging bigger.
Look, I’m a zit. Pop.

She fumbled one of her bottles open, tasted the dark, astringent potion inside. Nice. Bent her head back, swallowed. More.
All gone. Her belly warming, molten. All around her, loaded cars full of goods and their people, faces stiff with panic. Everyone
leaving, end to end, not going fast enough. “Hey!” she yelled into the window of a deep green family van, “I don’t wanna be
under glass either! Take me with you!” The woman at the wheel put her head down, gunned the engine. It took them all of six
feet before they had to stop behind the ass of the fat rich Cadillac in front of them. Two kids in the van twisted their heads
round to look at her. The older boy was holding a playscreen, shak-shak-shaking it to make a new image. Imagine unblown, Delpha
thought at him. Imagine unglass. But that screen led to another world, not this one. In this one, the groove of all their
tracks was set, was lying on a desert floor, grinding down. She spat at the van, watched the spittle hit pavement, freeze
into a lump of pearlized glue chip. She waved the van away, shuffled into the road. Horns blew. “Take me!” she yelled. Horns
blatted. She made it to the other curb.

Delpha swigged back another bottle of bitterness. Her feet were a little shaky now. Cold, so cold. Shivershatterday cold.
Tomorrow would be Noneday, ever after. All the girlie’s fault.

Not so much noise in the streets now. Plenty of folks gone.

Cold. The doorway to the crazy people place yawned at her, belching warmth. She swayed towards it, but its avid lips snapped
together while she was still out of reach. She swung her fist in triumph at the building. “Missed me!” She could see the flagstone
fangs sticking out. She flung her nearly empty bottle to shards against the building’s face. Shatter, splatter. The façade
snarled at her, but couldn’t reach. With a crackly cackling, she opened the last bottle of warmth in glass, toasted the squatting
concrete structure. The building hissed, spat. She drank, kept moving.