Skin Folk (6 page)

But really, he felt a lot better now. He chuckled a little, thinking of the comic books he’d read as a kid. He’d been bitten
by an overactive spider.

His computer pinged to tell him that it was done rendering. Shit. Had to get that stuff done tonight, or Charlie’d have his
head. He moved back to his terminal to upload Tit for Twat. He reached for the mouse. He clicked on it, and the click felt
like it traveled all the way through his arm. No, like it had come
from
his arm, down through his hand, to the mouse. Weird.

Tamara came back. “Found a little girl with her dad in the elevator. Could have been her. Looked a little bit like her, I
guess. I mean, I can’t tell, you know, they all look… I mean…” She stopped, blushing.

They all look alike.
The superintendent of Artho’s apartment building always mixed him up with Patrice who lived on the 27th floor, never mind
that Patrice was dark café cru to Artho’s caramel, was balding, had arms like thighs, and spoke with a strong French accent.
Tamara had always been nice to Artho, though. And she knew what a bonehead she’d just been, he could tell. Right? Right. He
swallowed, didn’t say anything. Let Tamara believe he hadn’t guessed what she’d almost said.

“Anyway,” Tamara continued, “she’s gone now. Muhammed’s gone back to his desk. You feeling any better?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Well.” She stood there, still looking sheepish and uncomfortable. “Um, I’m going home now.”

“See ya.” He watched her put on her coat. He waved good-bye to her. Then he uploaded the site, ignoring the odd clicking feeling
in his mouse arm. God, it made him feel clumsy. He’d have to get that checked out. Probably some kind of overuse thing. He
clicked the file closed. Behind it was the autofellatio man. Hadn’t he uploaded that one too? He went to do it, but the hand
with the mouse slipped, and he ended up instead selecting the “changing oneself always” symbol he’d put on the man’s arm as
a joke. Yeah, better take that off. Just in case Charlie did figure out he’d done it. Didn’t want to get his ass in trouble.
He dragged the nkyin kyin symbol off the guy’s arm, and what the fuck, it came all the way
off
the screen, skidded right across the keyboard, and came to rest on his thigh. Alarmed, he released the mouse. The symbol
melted through the cloth into the meat of his leg. “Shit!” It tingled for a second, then faded.

Ah, fuck. Bloody weird day. He reached for the mouse again. When he clicked on it this time, something subtle changed about
the autofellatio man. Artho stared hard at the image on the screen to try to see what was different. Yes, the nkyin kyin was
back on the man’s shoulder. And he was a little pudgier. And were those crow’s-feet around his eyes? A hint of a smile around
his wide-stretched mouth?

Whatever. Artho shrugged and uploaded the damned thing, ignoring the weird feeling in his arm every time he clicked the mouse.

Enough. Time to go home. Artho grabbed his coat, locked up, and left.

By the time the elevator had made it to the first floor, Artho was feeling really odd. Not sick, really, just faintly unreal,
like when he smoked a joint too fast, or took sinus meds. He sighed, hoping he wasn’t going to spend the weekend with the
flu. At least it’d give him an excuse to skip going to his mum’s. He put his hand on the door of the building to let himself
out.
Click.
When he took the hand away, the nkyin kyin symbol was on it. He peered at the handle. Had it always been ornate worked brass?
In the form of some kind of bug? No, now it looked like… a skeleton? Artho touched the handle again, double-clicked. And the
handle was a plain aluminum strip once more.

Artho’s skin began to prickle. Not with fear, not with fever. With hope. He rushed outside the building, put his palm against
its dull brick exterior. Clicked. The walls flushed red, then purple. Fluted columns started to sprout beside the doors, which
were quickly changing from sliding glass and steel to intricately joined oak. With big knockers. Artho giggled. Pretty damned
tarty. He wondered if that had been the builder’s original dream for the building. He double-clicked. The building reverted
to its usual form.

“You’re getting it.”

When he turned towards the voice, Artho wasn’t at all surprised to see the little girl. She was crouched down beside the steps,
jam-jar glasses winking at him. Her hair knotted and unknotted itself.

“Can I change everything?” Artho asked.

“Course not, silly! Changing things isn’t
your
job. You’re not changing things; that’ll happen anyway. You’re just helping them peel off the fake skins.”

“How’s that work?”

“You’ll just have to try it and see.” She stuck her tongue out at him too. It was too pointy, and more lavender than pink.
She leapt, stuck to the side of the building, started climbing smoothly up it, with two legs, with four. No wonder her behind
had looked so, well, well-endowed. Must have had the other pair of legs hitched up under her skirt. The little girl was far
above Artho now. He could just make out white panties with her legs sticking out of four leg holes. She climbed with two arms,
with four. Ah. That well-muscled back. Artho smiled. He watched her until she disappeared into the darkness. He’d figured
out who, what she was. Appeared as a skeleton sometimes, in a top hat. Watcher at the boundaries, at the crossroads. Sometimes
man, sometimes woman. Always trickster. He couldn’t really tell in the dark, but she seemed furrier now, or more bristly,
or something. Sometimes spider? He wondered if this was the kind of thing her dad had really meant her to do.

Ah, well; she was notoriously capricious. She might decide to take her gift away again, so he’d better use it while he could.
He set off for the streetcar stop, almost bouncing, dancing along in his excitement, thinking where he’d like to implant the
Adinkra symbol next. On Charlie? Maybe Charlie really was the way he appeared to be. Oog. His Aunt Dee? What would Dee be
like if she could peel away all that unhappiness?

How about on Aziman? All these choices. “Good evening,” Artho said to the tired people waiting at the stop. One white woman
clutched her purse tighter when she saw him. Hmm. Maybe he should work that nkyin kyin thing on himself; it was in him, after
all. He wondered what she would see then.

I
n 1995, I was accepted into the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University. Going
to Clarion had been a dream since I was a teenager. I begged and borrowed enough money to attend. I had no idea how I was
going to repay it. I went to Clarion with no story ideas, no confidence that I had the talent to be a writer. For the first
long, expensive week, I wasn’t able to write at all, and I was terrified that the whole six weeks would be like that. Writer-in-residence
Joe Haldeman warned that perhaps the worst way to try to break writer’s block was with alcohol. Well, nothing else had worked,
so on the Friday evening, desperate, I went on what for me is a mini-bender—probably three beers. Then I slept for a few hours,
woke up in the late evening, and wrote the first draft of a story that I imbued with a terror that was alarming even as I
was writing it.

H
e never wore any bright colours, nothing remarkable. Wouldn’t want anyone to remember that he’d been hanging around. Faded
jeans, scuffed running shoes. He bought cheap white T-shirts three to a pack from the nearby K-Mart. He always paid cash.
He had a battered old van, but he walked to work, rarely drove. He saved that for special occasions.

He’d been drawn to this city by its peacefulness. Lots of open, green space, almost no crime, a good place to raise children.
The city’s main source of pride was that it was a bird sanctuary. Anyone who so much as flipped a rock at a pigeon had to
pay heavy fines. The sign at the entrance to the city even boasted: “Where the Birds Come Home to Roost.”

The sounds of the school playground tugged at him every morning: the bright, happy laughter of the children; even their squabbles
and scuffles. He enjoyed the small, twittering voices chanting jump rope games, the giddy shrieking as little bodies hurtled
down the slide, one last game before the school bell rang and the children took flight like spooked birds. It made him sad
to watch the schoolyard quickly empty when they ran inside.

If he woke early, he could spend a few minutes sitting in the large public park beside the school. He would buy a small cup
of coffee, heavily sweetened, and a jelly doughnut (never from the same coffee shop twice in a row). He’d take his breakfast
to one of the park benches—always a different one—and sit there, watching the children play. Starlings and sparrows would
gather at his feet, cocking their heads at him, hoping for crumbs, but he ate too tidily for that.

The morning ritual soothed him: the milky smell of the coffee; the jammy, sticky doughnut. Two sips of warm, syrupy coffee
to every bite of doughnut. He ate meticulously, being sure never to let the jelly touch his fingers. He’d been taught the
virtues of cleanliness, and he practised them scrupulously. He would take small bites of his doughnut, then, with a little
gulp, swallow each morsel whole, so that he wouldn’t have to endure the sodden mass of chewed food in his mouth. When he was
finished, he would carefully fold the brown paper bag in half, then again, and once more, firmly creasing each fold between
the fingernails of his thumb and forefinger. He always made sure to deposit the wad of paper and the empty coffee cup in the
garbage cans with the heavy swinging lids: litter disgusted him. The sight of gulls rooting in open bins for stale french
fries sickened him. He hated the quarrelsome, messy birds.

In his mind, he had names for some of the schoolchildren, the ones who caught his eye. The small but boisterous little girl
who loved to climb to the very top of the jungle gym, she looked like a Jenny, his jenny-wren. Some might call her plain,
but he noticed the way her pigtails bounced saucily on either side of her head as she played. She often beat the boys at marbles,
crowing triumphantly as she claimed all the best taws and aggies. He could watch her for hours. She must have bruised her
knee last week; a fall, perhaps. All week, she’d worn a Band-Aid on the knee. It mesmerised him, the contrast between her
strong, muscular brown legs and the pale pink of the Band-Aid. She was left-handed, and had a loud, joyful laugh.

Then there was the thoughtful one. He’d christened her Samantha. She played happily enough with the others, but she liked
to be alone, too. He could understand that. Samantha often sat nestled in the tire swing, one leg tucked up beneath her, the
other trailing in the dust as she rocked gently back and forth, reading a book. She loved to read. He would squint at the
covers from his park bench, but it was hard to make out the titles of the books. Samantha had straight, chin-length blond
hair. As she read, she would trail some of her hair into her mouth. He often thought of her lips, sucking like that on her
hair. There were other girls; Laura, Michelle, and Deb, or so he imagined their names to be. He never thought of names for
the boys.

He would watch the children romp and argue, play and fight and scream and laugh. They were lively, messy little things. It
fascinated him that no one punished them for spitting, for farting, for letting their hair come undone. He would study them
until the bell rang, then go to his job in the mail room of the local public library. It was routine, solitary work. It suited
him well, he felt, the orderly routine of sorting the mail into its tidy cubbyholes.

There was a spry old couple who usually took an early-morning walk in the park, a brisk stride along the paths that wound
through the trees. They brought stale cake in greasy brown paper bags from a pastry shop, and scattered crumbs for the birds
as they walked. Sometimes they sat on a bench near to his, enticing the birds to peck from their open hands. “Look, Thomas,”
he heard the old woman say once, “that pigeon there; that’s old Helga, I’m sure, the one whose broken wing you set? She’s
come along well, hasn’t she?”

He took care never to make eye contact with the couple.

City Central Library was a huge, squat structure, nine floors high. Two stone creatures guarded the steps to the entrance,
a griffin and a sphinx, weathered wings outstretched in what had once been majesty. Now, their stern faces were obscured by
the bird fæces that had been drizzled down their heads by the gulls that roosted there. He didn’t understand why the city
went to such great lengths to protect the filthy creatures.

The mail room of the library was a musty, sprawling storage room in the basement. The heavy white enamelling of the stucco
walls gathered dust; he spent a lot of time scrubbing at the years of dirt that had gone unnoticed by previous employees.
Delivery trucks offloaded directly from the back door, large boxes of books, new library materials, magazine subscriptions.
When he was done sorting the mail he would load it onto wheeled book trucks for each department. He would deliver them upstairs
twice a day to the supervisor of each department: Media/Technology at 9:30
A.M.
and 2:30
P.M.;
Arts/Humanities at 9:45 and 2:45; Languages at 10:00 and 3:00; Children’s at 10:15 and 3:15. He was never late. The supervisors
were friendly, in an offhand way: “Hi, Stryker. Keeping well?”