Skin Folk Read online

  “You!” The old woman clawed at the front of his shirt, poking sharp fingers at his chest with each word. “What have you done with our Pat? Helga told us she was shouting for help!”

  The pigeon told them? Stryker didn’t answer. Blood slithered wetly from the gash in his arm. He tried to hold the slippery edges of the cut together. He felt his own blood; hot, sticky. Dirty. It was all over his hands. Dirty. He felt weak.

  “Where is she?” screeched the old biddie’s husband, thrusting a beaked nose inches from Stryker’s eyes. Panicked, he wriggled out of their grasp, went running down the path. He’d get ahead of them, pop back into the woods when he was around a bend in the path, out of sight. He could lose them that way. But as he ran, he could see other figures converging on him. He recognized some of the morning exercisers. They waddled and hopped as fast as their aging legs would carry them. It would have been ludicrous if he hadn’t been so dizzy from shock and blood loss. He hurt! He stepped off the path, staggering. He made as quickly as he could for some sheltering trees. He could move very quietly, hide in the tiniest spaces. As he approached the copse, a cloud of birds swooped down on him from their branches, all types of birds. They dug their tiny claws into his already bruised body and pecked at any exposed flesh, twittering, cawing, screeching their rage. He smelt his own coppery blood in the night air. He struck the birds off, crushed and stamped on the tiny bodies like fleas, but more replaced them. As many as he pulped underfoot, there were more. The air boiled with them. The heavy smell of blood and feathers made his head reel. He stung all over from the bite of claws and beaks.

  And the old people were on him now, drawn by the sound. They poked him with their canes, jabbed at him with umbrellas. “Yes! Keep at it, Robin; don’t let the slimy bastard get away!”

  Huge claws tangled in his hair. A massive pair of wings beat about his head, blinding him. The cry was the challenge of a hunting bird. He stumbled, fell, writhed quickly onto his back so he could see his attacker. Screeching, the old woman’s pet landed on his chest, stabbed at his eyes. He tried to bat the great hooked beak away, but the bird struck at his hand. He felt two fingers snap in its talons. He put his hands up to protect his eyes. The bird set its beak in his throat and tore it out. Spreading its wings, it hopped up to its mistress’s shoulder, where it swallowed the gristly lump of flesh.

  Air rattled in Stryker’s ragged throat, whistled out from his neck. He could feel his body arching, his heels drumming on the earth. The old guardians just watched, alert.

  It took a little time for asphyxiation to kill him; long enough for his darkening eyes to see his Samantha, his darling pigeon, being escorted from the van by a clutch of old women, a brood of old hens, straightening her clothing and clucking soothing words at her.

  Boston subway stops have the oddest names: Braintree. And Alewife (which, Bostonians will explain helpfully, is a fish). One day, traveling on the Toronto subway system, I could have sworn that the driver announced Saint Mare Wash as the next stop. The mundane Saint Clair West paled in comparison. In parts of Toronto, they wrap the trees with burlap in winter to protect them. And then, I’ve always liked Hans Christian Andersen’s fiction…

  UNDER GLASS

  Lying on the chilly bank of the splinterswirling river, Sheeny shook the obsidian rectangle of the playscreen in her hands, then swiped her palm over its blankened surface. In response, its opalescent screen swarmed with vague, sluggish forms: something large and blocky, a building, maybe; smaller somethings moving around it; motes fluttering. Did that tiny shape in the foreground look like Kay? No, no; stop it. Create instead a new story in the masses on the screen. Cobble a fake story out of tales that Jeff used to tell, of worlds that used to might could be, places that she’d never seen, could only imagine.

  The shapes were curdling into solid images. A tiny old woman stood inside the picture blossoming on the playscreen:

  The cold morning light was the soft grey of a dove’s breast feathers. Old Delpha, old lady, stood on the wintry street corner, looking at the construction site that had been sprouting there for the past few months like a stop-motion film; of ice crystals, maybe, growing branch by angular branch upon each other like frozen towers.

  Kneeling on the second-floor girders of the skeleton building, a welder flipped her mask down and put her lit torch to a joist. A hissing tongue of blue flame jutted. To the burring sound of the torch scouring the metal—a tongue-lashing, Delpha giggled to herself—a myriad motes of orange light sprang from the join, fountaining red-gold to the ground. A flock of fat pigeons descended eagerly on the sparks, wings pumping the birds whup-whup-whup down. They quarreled and jostled for space, pecked up the glowing embers as fast as they could. Smart pigeons. They knew how to keep their insides warm, anyway. Wouldn’t be them turning to cold glaze when the glass wind hit. They’d be warm, from the inside out.

  The welder didn’t pay any attention to them, nor to the first icy fingers of wind flicking at the collar of her orange flameproof. Delpha wouldn’t bother to warn her, either. Silly woman.

  “There’s a glass wind coming,” Old Delpha muttered to the girl who was watching her from the other place. Interfering little chit. Little voyeur. Delpha felt a teeny twitch of uncertainty from the girl who was sensing a thought she hadn’t birthed; Delpha’s thought. Serve her right.

  Glass wind. Winter flinter. Delpha could feel it in her achy bones. Fracture-streamy glass wind blowing up screeling across the river from the mountains into the city. Screaming like the angry dead through the valley; glass grinding the city’s more glass windows into shivershattersplinters. A breaking wind. It would be here soon, stinging singing cold, rattling the leafless branches of the wind-scoured trees, whipping icy slivers into hair and eyes. The Whetherman had said so this morning on the radio. Indications were, he’d said. But opposing opinions, he’d said. Never know whether. Idiot. Delpha hummed the jingle that was perfect for the Whetherman: “Whether the weather is cold, or whether the weather is hot, we’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.” It’d be cold and hot and cold again. And no, they wouldn’t like it.

  It was all that stupid girl’s fault, playing with her toy.

  Tinkling, twinkling, the river ground coldly by. A swirl of breeze abraded Sheeny’s cheek. Kay’s lips, his cold-chapped lips had brushed across her cheek so. Absently she wiped her hand over the irritated spot on her face, and brought it away blood-streaked. “Shit!” Alarmed, she yanked her concentration from the playscreen. Untended, the picture froze.

  Sheeny looked up the valley. Damn. There was a glass wind coming, like she’d thought her head had said: blowing down the valley out of the deadlands, making the splinter-scoured trees rattle their deceasing branches. She got to her feet, no longer interested in the spring tumble of water chuckling between the river’s banks, roiling with masses of ground glass too fine to see, too deadly to drink unless it’d been sifted and filtered and filtered again. She looked up the valley; across parched, bare, red earth for miles, nothing to relieve the eye but a few almost-expired trees like clutching hands, towards the two mountain shoulders with the deadlands sitting between their collarbones. No head, only that deep, parched, hollowed-out valley. She could just make out the dark haze of the glass wind swirling down. She could hear it now too; a pleasant tinkling sound at this distance, like ornaments on the Christmas trees, Before. So Mumsie said they’d sounded.

  She shouldn’t have been by the riverbank, daydreaming of Kay. But it was the only place to go to avoid the eyes of her neighbours, gone cold with blame at the sight of her. And Mumsie’s accusing eyes. How could Sheeny have known what would happen? She tugged at the filter hanging from weathered elastic at her neck, pulled it up over her nose and mouth. Fat lot of good that would do if she got caught out in the wind. She hugged the playscreen to her chest and started running for home.

  The rhythmic pounding of her feet covered a little the sound of the wind whistling down. She sent her mind wan
dering, to keep it calm…

  She’d read about Christmas trees, seen pictures in Kay’s old picture book, the one possession he’d brought with him when her family took him in. Christmas trees used to have this green… fuzz on them, not just bare, sandpapered branches that only stayed up one day and were used for fuel the next. Christmas trees didn’t have glass ornaments anymore. Mumsie said the soft clinking sound would drive people crazy with fear, thinking they were hearing the glass wind, the crazed, screeching, splinter-whipping gale that would flense flesh from bone in seconds. Sheeny ran faster, ignoring the way her boots pinched where she had outgrown them.

  Never mind the Whetherman. Old Delpha knew what the weather would be: Glass. Winter’s cold first, then a great big bang boom, then glass. Molten hot, running like rivers and beautifully red. Cold again, descending with the dark ash cloud. A keening, cold iridescence that could freeze your eyes solid as marbles. Then all you saw, peering through ashy light, was the last thing before the freezing. If a glass wind got into your eyes, you had only one point of view forever after. If it slid into your heart, then you were really in trouble. There you’d be, your heart hardened to a lump of frigid, frozen meat, just offal from the butcher’s. Shake the picture up all you want, this one won’t change. Unless the girl made it home safely, re-drew her playscreen. Could happen. The picture wasn’t solid yet. Weird, how it had made a world where the girl could hear her, only her. “Run,” Delpha whispered into the otherworld, the one behind the glass.

  Mumsie had a cow’s glass-scoured thigh bone. Thick, like a young tree trunk, and half Sheeny’s height. Mumsie kept it on top of the bookshelf, to remind herself and to scare Sheeny.

  “Was Dodder, that,” she would tell Sheeny, jerking her sharp chin in the direction of the bone. “An old cow of ours, born Before. Me and Jeff, we’d taken the cattle out to the water troughs and she wandered off. Didn’t have the sense to get in when she heard the glass wind coming. We shoved in the house with the cows and all, but Dodder, she was way out, heading for where she remembered the pasture to be, never mind it’s just dirt and rock there now. No time to roust her back. Wind singing through the valley, blowing down fast. Me and you—you were just two, you wouldn’t even remember—and Jeff, we all clambered with the cattle down the basement, hunkered down there in the mouldy hay. The cow farts smelt like fermented grass.”

  Mumsie didn’t tell the story much anymore, because she’d have to say Jeff’s name when she did. Sheeny’d been with her stepdad Jeff when he’d coughed his last. Mumsie’d come home with her buckets of splintery water to find Sheeny cradling his head, weeping. Sheeny’d looked up to see sorrow and blame burning deep behind Mumsie’s eyes. Sheeny never knew whether Mumsie blamed herself for not having been there in Jeff’s last moments, or whether she blamed Sheeny because Sheeny had.

  Sheeny ran, the howler at her back.

  “Just keep going, girl!” Delpha hissed. The child obliged, pounding her bounding way to home and safety. And when she got there, she’d make a new picture with her toy. She didn’t know that the thing altered worlds. No one knew, yet.

  Delpha had to admire the little chit’s strong lungs, not even thinking of tiring yet. She was so young, hadn’t breathed in much glass. Yes, Run. Like that. Be a gingerbread girl, not yet baked solid. Run. Save us all. Run.

  Slamming across bare earth, Sheeny trod on a stone in her too-small boots. It shifted under her foot; she stumbled, crying out as she felt her ankle twist. The playscreen went tumbling. Something cracked inside it. No time to mind that. Sheeny straightened, gritted her teeth against the crunch of pain, and ran on, leaving the playscreen making unhappy grinding noises on the ground. Behind her, the wind sound was louder now, a buzzing like the sky was full of angry bees.

  She shouldn’t have been by the river. It was too far away from home, from safe windowless cement enclosures and steel doors abraded to a smooth shine by the wind. But the river, it called her. Mumsie knew that’s where Sheeny was nowadays, if she couldn’t be found. Mumsie scolded her for it, beat her sometimes, but she couldn’t stay away. She needed to spend time just crouched by the river, away from Mumsie’s silent accusations, staring at the only thing that lived free beneath the sky, never needing shelter. Kay had jumped into that river when he couldn’t face living under glass any longer.

  “That wind hit dead soon,” Mumsie had told her. The Dodder story. “Scraping, scraping against the house, and screaming ’cause it couldn’t get at us. I dunno if Dodder screamed too, when it caught her. Couldn’t hear nothing but that scraping, screeching wind. Could feel you though, sobbing in my arms, clutching at my bodice, and me sobbing right back, but soft, so you wouldn’t feel it. So you’d learn how to be strong.

  “Jeff, he went up the basement steps, checked to make sure the hatch was bolted. Good, thick steel, that door. He’d checked it twice already, and anyway, no wind would have made it all the way through the tunnel upstairs, but that was Jeff. If he could do something, he felt better.”

  Sheeny’s ankle stabbed with each step; sickly jolts of pain that made metallic-tasting saliva squirt in her mouth. She glanced over her shoulder. In the distance, an army of black cones twirled, screeling. The wide, flat land made it hard to tell how close; too close. The sound they made was a granular scraping, like sandpaper grinding away. She sobbed, stumbled on.

  “When it was over,” Mumsie had said, “we went out. Up to the upper level, out through the tunnel. We had to unhook the carpets from the wall. Laid them down, crawled through the tunnel on them. Glass all the way inside the first two doors. The outside one was blasted open. Mound of glass sand as high as my knee in front of it. Left Jeff sweeping up, you trying to help. I went to find Dodder. Was still a bit of breeze. The glass had gone on in front though, so it was safe enough by then.

  “All left of Dodder was great ropes of flesh that the breeze was stirring about on the ground. They glittered with grindglass, so pretty… And the ground soaked in blood, and bones scattered everywhere, scoured smooth and white like they’d been bleaching in the sun for years. And her skull. I remember. Gaping up blind at me from the ground. After that, we slaughtered all the cows, gave the meat out to the whole town. We couldn’t look out for them all the time anymore. Besides, the mouldy hay was making ’em sick, and we couldn’t grow no more.”

  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.