Skin Folk Read online

“So then little Zukie draws herself up real tall, and she says, ‘No, silly. The purpose of the skeleton is something to hitch meat to.’ Really! I swear, I nearly died laughing, she sounded so serious.”

  The woman eyed him as she walked past, smiled a little, glanced down. She played with her long hair and stage-whispered to her co-worker, “God, Latino men are just so hot, don’t you think?” They giggled and moved on, trailing children.

  The gears of Artho’s brain kicked back into realtime. He was standing at the southwest corner of King and Bay, holding a chicken thighbone. Fleshless and parched, it felt dusty between his fingers. He dropped it and wiped his hand off on his jeans. Latino? What the hell?

  Streetcar coming. Artho got on, elbowing himself some rush hour standing room between an old man with a bound live chicken that lay gasping in his market basket and three loud, hormonal young women, all politics and piercings. Artho reached for a steady strap. Traffic was gridlocked. He stared blankly out the window as the streetcar inched its way past a woman struggling with two huge dogs on leashes. Bergers des Pyrenées, they were; giant, woolly animals bred for rescuing skiers trapped under alpine avalanches. They were so furry that Artho could barely make out their legs. They lumbered along in a smooth, four-on-the-floor gait. The dogs’ handler tugged futiley at their leashes, barely able to keep up. The beasts could probably cover miles in effortless minutes, snowshoeing on their woolly feet. Artho fancied that they would move even faster, smoother, if you changed them to have six legs, or eight. They would glide along like enormous tarantulas. Artho looked at their handler’s legs and had the oddest feeling, like when an old film skips a frame, and for an instant, you can see the hole-punched edges of the film strip, black and chitinous on the screen, and then it jerks back into place, but now you’re looking at a different scene than you were before. It was like that, Artho looking at this woman walking on ordinary woman legs, then reality skipped frames, and he was seeing instead a being whose natural four-legged stance had been twisted and warped so that all it could manage was this ungainly two-legged jerking from foot to foot. Made into something it wasn’t.

  Alarmed, Artho blinked. He made himself relax. Tired. Too many hours at work in front of a computer screen, staring at all that skin. He leaned his head against the streetcar window and dozed, thinking hungrily of the stewed chicken and rice he would have for dinner, with avocado—his dad always called them alligator pears—on the side. He could see the fleshy avocado in his mind’s eye: slit free of its bumpy rind; pegged and sitting on a plate; beads of salt melting on the sweating, creamy skin. He imagined biting into a slice, his teeth meeting in its spineless centre. His mouth watered.

  It wasn’t until he reached his stop that he realized he really had forgotten to buy the damned avocados. He found some tired, wrinkly ones in the corner store near his apartment. The man behind the counter, who served Artho at least twice a week when he came in for cigarettes or munchies, grumbled at the fifty dollar bill that Artho gave him, and made a big show over holding it up to the light to see if it was counterfeit. Artho had seen the same man cheerfully make change from bills that large for old women or guys in suits. He handed Artho a couple of twenties and some coins, scowling. Artho held each twenty up to the light before putting it into his pocket. “Thank you,” he said sweetly to the guy, who glared. Artho took his avocados and went home. When he sliced into them, one of them was hard and black inside. He threw it out.

  “So,” Artho’s brother said, “I’m out with the guys the other night, and…”

  “Huh? What’d you say?” Artho asked. Something was obscuring Aziman’s voice in the phone, making rubbing and clicking sounds over and around his speech. “What’s that noise?” Artho asked the receiver. “Like dice rolling together or something.”

  “One dice, two die. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, so I’m…”

  “What’re you eating? I can’t make out what you’re saying.”

  “Hold on.” Silence. Then Aziman came on again. “This any better?”

  “Yeah. What was that?”

  “This hard candy the kids brought home. Got me hooked on it. These little round white thingies, y’know? I had a mouthful of them.”

  “Did you spit them out?”

  “Well, not round exactly. Kinda egg-shaped, but squarer than that. Is ‘squarer’ a word?”

  “Did you spit them out?” Artho was just being pissy, and he knew it. He could tell that Aziman had gotten rid of the candies somehow. His voice was coming through clearly now.

  “Yeah, Artho. Can I tell my story now?”

  “Where’d you spit them?”

  “What’s up with you today? Down the kitchen sink.”

  And Aziman started in with his story again, but Artho was distracted, thinking on the tiny white candies disappearing into the drain, perhaps washed down with water.

  “… so this man walks up to us, akid really, y’know? Smart-ass yuppie cornfed kid with naturally blond hair and a polo shirt on. Probably an MBA. And he says to me, ‘’s up, man?’ only he says it ‘mon.’ I mean, I guess he’s decided I’m from Jamaica or something, you know?”

  “Yeah,” said Artho. “I know.”

  “He gives me this weird handshake; grabs my thumb and then makes a fist and I’m supposed to touch my fist to his, I think, I dunno if I did it right. But he says, ‘’s up’ again, and I realize I didn’t answer him, so I just say, ‘Uh, nothing much,’ which I guess isn’t the lingo, right? But I dunno what I’m supposed to say; I mean, you and me, we’re freaking north Toronto niggers, right? And this white guy’s got Toronto suburbs written all over him, too. Probably never been any farther than Buffalo. So what’s he trying to pull with that fake ghetto street shit anyway, you know? And he leans in close, kinda chummy like, and whispers, ‘Think you could sell me some shit, man?’ And I’m thinking, Like the kind you’re trying to sell me on right now? I mean, he’s asking me for dope, or something.”

  Artho laughed. “Yeah, happens to me, too. It’s always the same lame-ass question, never changes. I just point out the meanest-looking, blackest motherfucker in the joint and say, ‘Not me, man, but I bet that guy’ll be able to help you out.’”

  “Shit. I’ll try that next time.”

  “Though I guess it isn’t fair, you know, my doing that. It’s like I’m picking on guys just ’cause they’re blacker than me.”

  “Heh. I guess, if you want to look at things that way. You going to Mom’s for Easter?”

  “Is Aunt Dee going to be there?”

  But Aziman’s only reply was a rustling, shucking type of noise. Then, “Shit!”

  “What?”

  “I stuck my hand into the bag for more candy, y’know? Just figured out what these things are.”

  “What?”

  “Skulls. Little sugar skulls, f’chrissake.”

  Dead people bits. That’s what the candy was. It was all in the way you looked at it.

  “No,” said Artho. “It’ll be just like last year. I’m not going to Mom’s for Easter.”

  A few days later it happened again, a weird unfamiliarity when Artho looked at human bodies. He was in the mall food court on his lunch hour. When he went back to work, it would be to spend the rest of the day updating the Tit for Twat site: Horny Vixens in Heat! No Holes Barred!

  The food court was crowded. People in business suits wolfed down Jolly Meals, barked on cell phones. The buzz of conversation was a formless noise, almost soothing.

  Not many empty spaces. Artho had to share a table for two with a thirtyish man in fine beige wool, engrossed in the financial pages of the Globe & Mail newspaper. The man had shaved his head completely. Artho liked it. There was something sensuous about the baldness, like the domed heads of penises. Cute. Artho was thinking of something to say to him, some kind of opener, when the man’s ears caught his gaze. They jutted out from the side of his head like knurls of deformed cartilage. There really was nothing odd about the guy’s ears—that’s just how
ears were—but they still gave Artho a queasy feeling. With one hand, he worried at his own ear. He looked around at other people in the food court. All their ears seemed like twisted carbuncles of flesh sprouting from the sides of their heads, odd excrescenses. Nausea and doubt squirmed like larvae in Artho’s chest. His fingers twitched, the ones that he would use a few minutes from now to point, click, and drag his mouse as he smoothed out the cellulite and firmed up the pecs of the perfect naked models on the screen, making them even more perfect. He closed his eyes to block out the sight of all those ugly ears.

  Someone was singing. A child’s voice, tuneless and repetitive, threaded its whiny way through the rumble of lunchtime chatter:

  “Tain’t no sin,

  Take off your skin,

  And dance around in your bones.

  Tain’t no sin…”

  Artho opened his eyes. Wriggly as only seven-year-olds can be, a little girl slouched beside her father at a table for four, sitting on her spine so she could kick at the centre pole supporting the table welded to its four seats. Her wiry black hair was braided into thousands of dark medusa strands. The brown bumps of her knees were ashy with dry skin. The lumpy edge of a brightly coloured Spider-Man knapsack jutted out from behind her back.

  “Tain’t no sin…” She kicked and kicked at the pole. An old man who’d been forced to share the table with them looked up from his chow mein and gave her a strained nice-little-girl smile.

  “Quit it, Nancy.” Not even glancing at his daughter—was she his daughter?—her father reached out with one hand and stilled the thin, kicking legs. With his other hand he hurriedly stuffed a burger into his mouth. Green relish oozed between his fingers.

  The little girl stopped kicking, but all that energy had to have some outlet. She immediately started swaying her upper body from side to side, jerking her knapsack about so that something thumped around inside it. She bobbed her head in time to her little song. Her braids flowed like cilia. She looked around her. Her gaze connected with Artho’s. “Daddy,” she said loudly to the man beside her, “can you see me?” She wore glasses with jam-jar-thick lenses, which refracted and multiplied her eyes. She didn’t look up at her father.

  And he didn’t look down at her, just kept gnawing on his burger. “Can’t see you at all, little girl,” he mumbled. “I only think I can. You’re nowhere to be seen.”

  She smiled at that. “I’m everywhere, though, Daddy.”

  Must be some kind of weird game they had between the two of them. Then she started singing again. Artho found himself swaying slightly from side to side in time with her song. He looked away. He’d always hated Spider-Man. As a kid, the comic book character had frightened him. His costume made him look like a skeleton, a clattery skin-and-bone man that someone had painted red as blood.

  “… dance around in your bones!” the little girl shouted, glaring at him from the depths of her specs.

  Artho leapt to his feet and dumped the remainder of his lunch in the garbage, fled the girl’s irritating ditty. His table partner still had his nose buried in his paper.

  As Artho walked the last few feet to the elevator of his office building, he suddenly became aware of the movement of his legs: push off with left leg, bending toes for leverage; contract right knee to extend right leg, heel first; shift weight; step onto right foot; bend right knee; repeat on the other side. For a ludicrous moment, he nearly tripped over his own feet. It was like some kind of weird jig. He stumbled into the elevator, smiled I’m-fine-really at a plump young woman in a business suit who was gazing at him curiously. She looked away. Then he did. They stared politely at the opaque white numbers, knobbled as vertebrae, that indicated each floor. The numbers clicked over, lighting up one at a time: 10… 11… 12… Roll the bones, thought Artho.

  “Um… do you know what time it is?” the woman asked him.

  He checked his watch, smiled at her. “Almost ten to one.” The deep rust of the suit made her flawless cinnamon skin glow, hinted at the buxom swell of breast, belly, hip, and thigh. Yum. Artho’s mouse fingers stopped twitching.

  She smiled back nervously. The smile quirked friendly lines at the corners of her mouth. “Thanks. Guess I’m on time after all, then.”

  “Job interview?”

  “Uh-huh. Marketing. Up at Joint Productions.”

  “The design place? Cool. They’ve done some great stuff.”

  She looked even more interested, leaned forward a little. “Oh, you work there?”

  Shit. “Uh, no.”

  “In the building, then?”

  “Yeah. Web design. For, um, Tri-Ex Media.”

  She frowned a little, took a bit of a step back. “Another design place?”

  “Yeah, sort of. We…”

  The elevator stopped and the door slid noiselessly open.

  “Oh, my stop,” she said. “Nice talking to you.”

  “Yeah. Bye.” If she got the job, that’d be the last civil conversation he had with her. The people at Joint acted like Tri-Ex Media was the very source and centre of evil in the universe. She’d probably get bitten by the same bug. Artho got out at 17.

  Cold air prickled his forearms into goose bumps when he opened the door to Tri-Ex Media. The office was air-conditioned year-round to protect the expensive computer equipment. The not-so-pricey staff just wore sweaters. “Close the fucking door!” growled Charlie, his boss. Artho uncurled his spine to stand tall. He stitched a smile across his face and stepped inside, gently pulling the door shut behind him. “Miss me?” he cooed at Charlie.

  People just look really weird, Artho thought. He contemplated the image up on his screen: a buff, tattooed man in a shoulder stand who’d curled himself tight as a fiddlehead fern so as to suck his own cock. Well, actually, he hadn’t quite been able to reach it. His searching tongue was just a few inches away. Probably would have helped if he’d been interested enough in the procedure to have a hard-on. That was where Artho came in. He giggled, began the process of stiffening and elongating the man’s dick. “Virtual fluffer, that’s me,” he said, aiming the comment at the general air.

  Only Glenn looked up, scowling over the top of his terminal and flicking a lank lick of Popsicle pink hair out of his eyes. “Yeah? Just keep it in your pants, Mouse Boy.” He grinned a little to take the sting of the comment out.

  That uncomfortable little grin. Taboo subject at work, sex. Staring all day at pictures of spread, penetrated flesh—flesh more shapely than any of them in the office had: plump, perky breasts, impossibly slim waists; muscled thighs and ever-ready cocks—but talk about any of it?

  “Hey, Artho?” Tamara called quietly from across the room.

  “Yeah?” Today her thick wool sweater had a picture on it of that guy from the Fabulous Four comics, the one who turned into fire? Flame on. Johnny, his name was? Where in hell did Tamara find the stuff she wore?

  Tamara pulled the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands, trapped them against her palm with three fingers on each hand, kept typing with the free forefingers and thumbs. “You doing anything for Easter?”

  Easter again. Long-distance phone call from Vancouver Island from his father. “I long to see you and your brother,” he’d say. But it never happened. And if Artho visited his mother with her stiff, dead, pressed hair and the pale pink lipstick blanching her full brown lips, she’d ask if he was still working at that place and whisper prayers under her breath when he said yes. Aunt Dee would be there too, with her look of fearful hunger and her Doberman’s knack of going for the soft underbelly of all their relatives: Uncle James starting to lose his hair; Cousin Melba have neither chick nor child to look after; and eh-eh, look at old Uncle Cecil, taking up with a twenty-year-old chick in his dotage. Aziman would be sitting in the basement with the basketball game turned up loud. Holidays always made him morose about his own divorce. He’d get steadily drunker on Wincarnis Tonic Wine (sugar code 17) while his boy and girl screamed and romped and fought around him. “No,” Artho told Tamara. �
��Gonna stay home, where it’s quiet.”

  There. The autofellatio man looked like he was sucking his own dick now. It was moderately convincing. It’d do.

  Easter meant that Aziman, after fueling himself with enough of the sugary wine, would flare, shouting insults at the players on the TV, yelling at his kids to quiet down, brown face flushing burgundy with the barely contained heat. Their mother would make him and the children spend the night at her place. “You can drive tomorrow, when you cool down,” she’d say. Artho hoped that one day the fire inside Aziman would come busting out, fry away the polite surface he always presented.

  How did that Johnny guy’s flame really work? Artho wondered. Was he always flame on the inside?

  On his screen, Artho checked out the autofellatio man’s skin and hair; this one was going on the “Banjee Boys” page, whatever a banjee was, and Charlie thought a light brown black man just didn’t fit the image. Good thing the position the man was in now obscured that aquiline nose, those thin lips. Smiling to himself, Artho painted another tattoo on the man’s beefy shoulder; “nkyin kyin,” the West African Adinkra symbol for “always changing oneself.” He bet Charlie’d never recognise it in a million years.

  Charlie came huffing by, glanced at the screen. “Artho, you still working on that fucking thing? Time is money here, y’know. I want Tit for Twat uploaded before you leave tonight. And no whining at me about overtime, either.”

  Artho sighed. “It’ll be done before five.” As if. But so long as it was up and running when Charlie came in on Monday, he’d never notice.

  “Better be. And make that guy blacker. Looks like a dago.” Charlie turned away. Stopped. Turned back and peered at the screen. Guffawed, “Jesus, Arth! He’s darker than you! Well, whaddya know ’bout that? Betcha his dick’s no match for yours, though. Eh? Eh?” Charlie cackled and elbowed Artho in the ribs, then shaking his head and chuckling at his own wit, stumped his way out of the office. He slammed the door behind him. Everyone jumped at the thump. People avoided Artho’s eyes.