Skin Folk

by Nalo Hopkinson

  What the fuck was it? The thing turned towards her. In its quest for sensation, it hefted its cock in its hand. Inserted a finger into what seemed to be a vagina underneath. Let its hands drop again. Faintly, Issy could make out a mark on its hip, a circular shape. It reminded her of something…

  Logo, it was the logo of the Senstim people who’d invented the wetsuits!

  But this wasn’t a wetsuit, it was like some kind of, fuck, ball lightning. She and Cleve hadn’t discharged their wetsuits. She remembered some of the nonsense words that were in the warning on the wetsuit storage boxes: “Energizing electrostatic charge,” and “Kirlian phenomenon.” Well, they hadn’t paid attention, and now some kind of weird get of both suits was rubbing itself off in their bathroom. Damn, damn, damn Cleve and his toys. Sobbing, shivering, Issy tried to toe at the plug again. Her knee banged against the tub. The suit-ghost twitched towards the noise. It leaned over the water and dabbed at her clutching toes. Pop-crackle sound. The jolt sent her leg flailing like a dying fish. Pleasure crackled along her leg, painfully intense. Her knee throbbed and tingled, ached sweetly. Her thigh muscles shuddered as though they would tear free. The jolt slammed into her crotch and Issy’s body bucked. She could hear her own grunts. She was straddling a live wire. She was coming to death. Her nipples jutted long as thumbs, stung like they’d been dipped in ice. Her head was banging against the wall with each deadly set of contractions. Issy shouted in pain, in glory, in fear. The suit-ghost leapt back. Issy’s butt hit the floor of the tub, hard. Her muscles were twitching spasmodically. She’d bitten the inside of her mouth. She sucked in air like sobs, swallowed tinny blood.

  The suit-ghost was swollen, bloated, jittering. Its inner lightning bolts were going mad. If it touched her again, it might overload completely. If it touched her again, her heart might stop.

  Issy heard the sound of the key turning in the front door.

  “Iss? You home?”

  “No. Cleve.” Issy hissed under her breath. He mustn’t come in. But if she shouted to warn him, the suit-ghost would touch her again.

  Cleve’s footsteps approached the bathroom. “Iss? Listen, did you drain the wet—”

  Like filings to a magnet, the suit-ghost inclined towards the sound of his voice.

  “Don’t come in, Cleve; go get help!”

  Too late. He’d stuck his head in, grinning his open, friendly grin. The suit-ghost rushed him, plastered itself along his body. It got paler, its aura-lightnings mere flickers. Cleve made a choking noise and crashed to the floor, jerking. Issy levered herself out of the bath, but her jelly muscles wouldn’t let her stand. She flopped to the tiles. Cleve’s body was convulsing, horrible noises coming from his mouth. Riding him like a duppy, a malevolent spirit, the stim-ghost grew paler with each thrash of his flailing body. Its colour patterns started to run into each other, to bleach themselves pale. Cleve’s energy was draining it, but it was killing him. Sucking on her whimpers, Issy reached a hand into the stim-ghost’s field. Her heart went off like a machine gun. Her breathing wouldn’t work. The orgasm was unspeakable. Wailing, Issy rolled away from Cleve, taking the ghostthing with her. It swelled at her touch, its colours flared neon-bright, out of control. It flailed off her, floated back towards Cleve’s more cooling energy.

  Heart pounding, too weak to move, Issy muttered desperately to distract it the first thing that came to her mind: “Y…you like, um, chocolate fudge?”

  The ghost turned towards her. Issy cried and kept talking, kept talking. The ghost wavered between Issy’s hot description of bubbling chocolate and Cleve’s cool silence, caught in the middle. Could it even understand words? Wetsuits located pleasurable sensation to augment it. Maybe it was just drawn to the sensuousness of her tone. Issy talked, urgently, carefully releasing the words from her mouth like caresses:

  “So,” she said to the suit-duppy, “I watching this cookie tin twist through the air like a Frisbee, and is like slow motion, ’cause I seeing gobs of chocolate goo spiraling from it as it flies, and they spreading out wider and wider. I swear I hear separate splats as chocolate hits the walls like slung shit and one line of it strafes the fridge door, and a gob somehow slimes the naked bulb hanging low from the kitchen ceiling. I hear it sizzle. The cookie tin lands on the floor, fudge side down, of course. I haven’t cleaned the fucking floor in ages. There’re spots everywhere on that floor that used to be gummy, but now they’re layered in dust and maybe flour and desiccated bodies of cockroaches that got trapped, reaching for sweetness. I know how they feel. I take a step towards the cookie tin, then I start to smell burning chocolate. I look up. I see a curl of black smoke rising from the glob of chocolate on the light bulb.”

  Cleve raised his head. There were tears in his eyes and the front of his jogging pants was damp and milky. “Issy,” he interrupted in a whisper.

  “Shut up, Cleve!”

  “That thing,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “People call it a ganger; doppel—”

  The ganger was suddenly at his side. It leaned a loving head on his chest, like Issy would do. “No!” she yelled. Cleve’s body shook. The ganger frayed and tossed like a sheet in the wind. Cleve shrieked. He groaned like he was coming, but with an edge of terror and pain that Issy couldn’t bear to hear. Pissed, terrified, Issy swiped an arm through its field, then rolled her bucking body on the bathroom tiles, praying that she could absorb the ganger’s energy without it frying her synapses with sweet sensation.

  Through spasms, she barely heard Cleve say to it, “Come to me, not her. Come. Listen, you know that song? ‘I got a weakness for sweetness…’ That’s my Issy.”

  The ganger dragged itself away from Issy. Released, her muscles melted. She was a gooey, warm puddle spreading on the floor. The ganger reached an ectoplasmic hand towards Cleve, fingers stretching long as arms. Cleve gasped and froze.

  Issy croaked, “You think is that it is, Cleve? Weakness?”

  The ganger turned its head her way, ran a long, slow arm down its body to the floor, back up to its crotch. It stroked itself.

  Cleve spoke to it in a voice that cracked whispery on the notes: “Yeah, sweetness. That’s what my Issy wants most of all.” The ganger moved towards him, rubbing its crotch. He continued, “If I’m not there, there’s always sugar, or food, or booze. I’m just one of her chosen stimulants.”

  Outraged tears filled Issy’s mouth, salty as butter, as flesh. She’d show him, she’d rescue him. She countered:

  “The glob of burned sugar on the light? From the ruined fudge? Well, it goes black and starts to bubble.”

  The ganger extruded a tongue the length of an arm from its mouth. The tongue wriggled towards Issy. She rolled back, saying, “The light bulb explodes. I feel some shards land in my hair. I don’t try to brush them away. Is completely dark now; I only had the kitchen light on. I take another step to where I know the cookie tin is on the floor. A third step, and pain crazes my heel. Must have stepped on a piece of light bulb glass. Can’t do nothing about it now. I rise onto the toes of the hurting foot. I think I feel blood running down from heel to instep.”

  The ganger jittered towards her.

  “You were always better than me at drama, Iss,” Cleve said.

  The sadness in his voice tore at her heart. But she said, “What that thing is?”

  Cleve replied softly, “Is kinda beautiful, ain’t?”

  “It going to kill us.”

  “Beautiful. Just a lump of static charge, coated in the Kirlian energy thrown off from the suits.”

  “Why it show up now?”

  “Is what happens when you leave the suits together too long.”

  The ganger drifted back and forth, pulled by one voice, then the other. A longish silence between them freed it to move. It floated closer to Cleve. Issy wouldn’t let it, she wouldn’t. She quavered:

  “I take another step on the good foot, carefully. I bend down, sweep my hands around.”

  The ganger dropped to the floor, ran its long tong
ue over the tiles. A drop of water made it crackle and shrink in slightly on itself.

  “There,” Issy continued. “The cookie tin. I brush around me, getting a few more splinters in my hands. I get down to my knees, curl down as low to the ground as I can. I pry up the cookie tin, won’t have any glass splinters underneath it. A dark sweet wet chocolate smell rising from under there.”

  “Issy, Jesus,” Cleve whispered. He started to bellow the words of the song he’d taunted her with, drawing the ganger. It touched him with a fingertip. A crackling noise. He gasped, jumped, kept singing.

  Issy ignored him. Hissing under his booming voice she snarled at the ganger, “I run a finger through the fudge. I lick it off. Most of it on the ground, not on the tin. I bend over and run my tongue through it, reaching for sweetness. Butter and vanilla and oh, oh, the chocolate. And crunchy, gritty things I don’t think about. Cockroach parts, maybe. I swallow.”

  Cleve interrupted his song to wail, “That’s gross, Iss. Why you had to go and do that?”

  “So Cleve come in, he see me there sitting on the floor surrounded by broken glass and limp chocolate, and you know what he say?” The ganger was reaching for her.

  “Issy, stop talking, you only drawing it to you.”

  “Nothing.” The ganger jerked. “Zip.” The ganger twitched. “Dick.” The ganger spasmed, once. It touched her hair. Issy breathed. That was safe. “The bastard just started cleaning up; not a word for me.” The ganger hugged her. Issy felt her eyes roll back in her head. She thrashed in the energy of its embrace until Cleve yelled:

  “And what you said! Ee? Tell me!”

  The ganger pulled away. Issy lay still, waiting for her breathing to return to normal. Cleve said, “Started carrying on with some shit about how light bulbs are such poor quality nowadays. Sat in the filth and broken glass, pouting and watching me clean up your mess. Talking about anything but what really on your mind. I barely get all the glass out of your heel before you start pulling my pants down.”

  Issy ignored him. She kept talking to the ganger. “Cool, cool Cleve. No ‘What’s up?’; no ‘What the fuck is this crap on the floor?’; no heat, no passion.”

  “What was the point? I did the only thing that will sweet you every time.”

  “Encased us both in fake skin and let it do the fucking for us.”

  The ganger jittered in uncertain circles between the two of them.

  “Issy, what you want from me?”

  The ganger’s head swelled obscenely towards Cleve.

  “Some heat. Some feeling. Like I show you. Like I feel. Like I feel for you.” The ganger’s lower lip stretched, stretched, a filament of it reaching for Issy’s own mouth. The black cavity of its maw was a tunnel, longing to swallow her up. She shuddered and rolled back farther. Her back came up against the bathtub.

  Softly: “What do you feel for me, Issy?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I do. We do. It’s good. But what do you feel for me, Issy?”

  “Don’t ridicule me. You know.”

  “I don’t know shit, Issy! You talk, talk, talk! And it’s all about what racist insult you heard yesterday, and who tried to cheat you at the store, and how high the phone bill is. You talk around stuff, not about it!”

  “Shut up!”

  The ganger flailed like a hook-caught fish between them.

  Quietly, Cleve said, “The only time we seem to reach each other now is through our skins. So I bought something to make our skins feel more, and it’s still not enough.”

  An involuntary sound came from Issy’s mouth, a hooked, wordless query.

  “Cleve, is that why…” She looked at him, at the intense brown eyes in the expressive brown face. When had he started to look so sad all the time? She reached a hand out to him. The ganger grabbed it. Issy saw fireworks behind her eyes. She screamed. She felt Cleve’s hand on her waist, felt the hand clutch painfully as he tried to shove her away to safety with his other hand. Blindly she reached out, tried to bat the ganger away. Her hand met Cleve’s in the middle of the fog that was the ganger. All the pleasure centres in her body exploded.

  A popping sound. A strong, seminal smell of bleach. The ganger was gone. Issy and Cleve sagged to the floor.

  “Rass,” she sighed. Her calves were knots the size of potatoes. And she’d be sitting tenderly for a while.

  “I feel like I’ve been dragged five miles behind a runaway horse,” Cleve told her. “You all right?”

  “Yeah, where’d that thing go, the ganger?”

  “Shit, Issy, I’m so sorry. Should have drained the suits like you said.”

  “Chuh. Don’t dig nothing. I could have done it too.”

  “I think we neutralized it. Touched each other, touched it: We canceled it out. I think.”

  “Touched each other. That simple.” Issy gave a little rueful laugh. “Cleve, I… you’re my honey, you know? You sweet me for days. I won’t forget anymore to tell you,” she said, “and keep telling you.”

  His smile brimmed over with joy. He replied, “You, you’re my live wire. You keep us both juiced up, make my heart sing in my chest.” He hesitated, spoke bashfully, “And my dick leap in my pants when I see you.”

  A warmth flooded Issy at his sweet, hot talk. She felt her eyelashes dampen. She smiled. “See, the dirty words not so hard to say. And the anger not so hard to show.”

  Tailor-sat on the floor, beautiful Buddha-body, he frowned at her. “I ’fraid to use harsh words, Issy, you know that. Look at the size of me, the blackness of me. You know what it is to see people cringe for fear when you shout?”

  She was dropping down with fatigue. She leaned and softly touched his face. “I don’t know what that is like. But I know you. I know you would never hurt me. You must say what on your mind, Cleve. To me, at least.” She closed her eyes, dragged herself exhaustedly into his embrace.

  He said, “You know, I dream of the way you full up my arms.”

  “You’re sticky,” she murmured. “Like candy.” And fell asleep, touching him.

  The ending of the folktale goes that when the old woman gives the peasant girl the gift of jewels that fall out of her mouth every time she speaks, the prince decides to marry the girl because she’s so sweet and beautiful. Of course, the fact that she had just become a walking treasury can’t have hurt her prospects either. I keep mixing that tale up with the one about the goose that laid the golden eggs and that ended up as dinner. That wasn’t a happy ending either.

  PRECIOUS

  I stopped singing in the shower. I kept having to call the plumber to remove flakes of gold and rotted lilies from the clogged drain. On the phone I would say that I was calling for my poor darling cousin, the one struck dumb by a stroke at an early age. As I spoke, I would hold a cup to my chin to catch the pennies that rolled off my tongue. I would give my own address. If the plumber thought it odd that anyone could manage to spill her jewelry box into the bathtub, and more than once, he was too embarrassed to try to speak to the mute lady. I’m not sure what he thought about the lilies. When he was done, I would scribble my thanks onto a scrap of paper and tip him with a gold nugget.

  I used to have the habit of talking to myself when I was alone, until the day I slipped on an opal that had tumbled from my lips, and fractured my elbow in the fall. At the impact, my cry of pain spat a diamond the size of an egg across the room, where it rolled under the couch. I pulled myself to my feet and called an ambulance. My sobs fell as bitter milkweed blossoms. I always hated to let the flowers die. Holding my injured arm close to my body, I clumsily filled a drinking glass with water from the kitchen and stuck the pink clusters into it.

  The pain in my elbow made me whimper. Quartz crystals formed on my tongue with each sound, soft as pudding in the first instance, but gems always hardened before I could spit them out. The facets abraded my gums as they slipped past my teeth. By the time the ambulance arrived, I had collected hundreds of agonized whimpers into a bowl I had fetched from the kitchen
.

  During the jolting ride to the hospital, I bit nearly through my lip with the effort of making no sound. The few grunts that escaped me rolled onto the pillow as silver coins. “Ma’am,” said a paramedic, “you’ve dropped your change. I’ll just put it into your purse for you, okay?”

  The anaesthetic in the emergency room was a greater mercy than the doctors could imagine. I went home as soon as they would allow.

  My father had always told me that a soft answer would turn away wrath. As a young woman, I took his words to heart, tried to lull my stepmother with agreeableness, dull the edge of her taunts with a soft reply. I went cheerfully about my chores, and smiled till my teeth ached when she had me do her daughter Cass’s work too. I pretended that it didn’t burn at my gut to see mother and daughter smirking as I scrubbed. I always tried to be pleasant, and so of course I was pleasant when Cass and I met the old woman in the mall that day. She was thirsty, she said, so I fetched her the drink of water, though she seemed spry enough to run her own errands. Cass told her as much, scorn in her voice as she derided my instant obedience.