Sister Mine

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “Police; what is your emergency?” said a mellifluous man’s voice.

  I babbled out what I’d seen, where the accident had happened.

  The man laughed. “Look underneath the rug,” he said.

  “What? Is this the right number? This is serious!” Oh, hell on legs. I knew that voice. The deep laugh had piped its way upwards into a silly giggle. I crawled to the side of the rug, lay on my stomach, and peered beneath it. There was Uncle Jack, wearing the aspect of that bald black guy in the old 7UP commercials. He was holding the rug aloft, giggling to beat the band, and covering yards at a stride. He grinned up at me.

  “Hey, girl.”

  “Uncle, stop it this minute! You put me down!”

  Instead, he flung the rug on ahead of himself, like a paper airplane. I was heading, at speed, right for a telephone pole. I abandoned ship. But Uncle snatched me around the waist before I could hit the ground. Time and space went pop and next thing I knew, he and I were both back on the rug, which was still flying. While I retched from the swift transit, the rug banked expertly around the telephone pole. Uncle reclined, cocking himself up onto one elbow. Now he was wearing a long black leather coat. Its hem flapped loose behind him in the breeze of the rug’s passing. “That was great! Now I know how Old Scratch felt, playing Flying Canoe.”

  “Will you be serious for once?” I screeched at him. “There may be people dying back there!”

  “Now, why do you want to go and throw cold water on my little joke like that? Besides, thirty-five people had already called Emergency before you even remembered you had a cell phone on you.” He reached a long arm over and chucked me under the chin. “Don’t fret. Nobody in that accident is at their time to cross over yet. Not from that little fender-bender.” The grin got even broader. “Though they won’t thank you for their insurance bills. And that little boy in the blue car, poor thing, he’s escaped this time, but he’s not long for this world. He’s going to choke on a spoonful of peanut butter.”

  I stared at him, openmouthed. He continued, “Eighty-one years, nineteen weeks, and one point two three seconds from now.”

  I swatted at his shoulder. “Big meanie, scaring me like that.” I tailor-sat beside him. I was beginning to calm down. As much as a person who was sitting on a flying carpet with Lord Death by her side could calm down. “By your standards, none of us have long for this world.”

  “Because you don’t. Mayflies, the lot of you.” He turned the smile off like a light. “Even you and Abby.”

  “But people got hurt in that pileup, right? Maybe even badly injured.”

  He shrugged. “Probably.” The manic rictus was back. “Did you see that orange Volvo? Spinning on its head like a B-boy?”

  “Don’t you even care that people are broken and in pain because of your little joke?”

  “Have I ever? Health care was Boysie’s department, not mine.” He rolled over onto his back, hands clasped behind his head. “Hunter’s pinch-hitting for him, but that boy wouldn’t know his own ass if you gave it to him right in his two hands. Boysie’s going to have a hell of a backlog when he reports for duty again.”

  “You’re sure that’s going to happen, then?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Uncle, can I ask you a favour?”

  “Anything. You know that.”

  “Set Mom’s family free.”

  “Oh, but I barely ask them to do anything for me!”

  “Do you? Ask, I mean? Naima has no friends her age. Suze and Roger have to homeschool her, because they know it’s too much to expect a six-year-old to keep quiet about being handmaiden to a demigod. Do you ask them to do all that, or do you just know that they’re too terrified to say no to you?”

  He pouted and looked up at the stars. “You know what the really important thing is?” He fixed me with a gimlet eye. “What the fuck were you playing at, making this thing?”

  “What do you mean? You’re the one making it fly.” Maybe I hadn’t worked any great mojo after all. I swallowed back the bitter taste at the back of my throat. Envy is an organ of the emotional body. Just like your gall bladder, it squirts out bile.

  “No, I’m not. And there’s no way that you should know how to make an abomination like this fly. If Ma found out about this, the shit would really hit the fan.”

  “Wait, let me get this straight; I finally figure out how to exercise a little bit of my birthright, and both the relations I’m closest to call it an abomination?”

  He didn’t rise to the bait. He gazed at me calmly. It’s how he’d kept me and Abby in line when we were kids and he was babysitting us. If we acted up too badly, we’d get the Look. You know how every black mother the world over can put fear in her child’s heart with one look? Well, none of them can hold a candle to Uncle Longleg Jack. The long seconds of his gaze would give me and Abby time enough to think about just how foolish it would be to piss off Lord Death, and we’d stop whatever it was we’d been doing that we shouldn’t have. But I was grown now, and he didn’t scare me. Mostly didn’t. Bravely as I could, I set my jaw and glared right back at him.

  He sat up. “Here’s the thing; you know how I’m like the ultimate firewall, yes?”

  “Say what?”

  “Think about it, baby girl. I guard the transfer point between this world and the next. I make sure nothing gets in that shouldn’t get in, or out that shouldn’t get out.”

  “Oh. Yeah, put it that way…”

  “Well, when you gave this thing the life of your blood,” he said, making a nasty-smell face at the rug, “and whoever else’s blood I can smell on it, and then invested it with your love, you probably inspirited it. You gave the energy of life to a construction that shouldn’t be able to hold it. And every perimeter alarm I ever set or will set started hollering, all the way back to last week. This thing shouldn’t be here. It’s toxic to this world. It’s a virus.”

  Suddenly, I wanted to not be sitting on that rug as fervently as I’ve ever wanted anything. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What should I do?”

  “You?” he replied cheerfully. “Nothing. This is my department, after all. I’ll get rid of it. Just don’t ever do anything like this again, OK, sweetie?”

  I sulked. “All right. Only I don’t even know how I did it the first time.”

  He frowned. “Neither do I. Something weird’s going on.”

  “You don’t think I’m finally growing into Dad’s mojo?”

  He looked doubtful. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  “And shouldn’t we get off this thing now, if it’s dangerous?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. It’s such a sweet ride. Might as well let it take us to where we’re going.”

  “We? Where’re we going?”

  “Oh, I’m coming back with you to your place. Just so happens I have an appointment there.” His toothy smile made me shiver.

  I shuddered, and not just from the cold. “Uncle, is it me you’re coming for?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous; if it were your time, I’d just take you from right here. By your standards, you’re nowhere near…” He trailed off. He blanched right down to his bones, and now there was a chattering skeleton sitting beside me. “Well, it could be soon, at that. Not tonight, though. I don’t think. You know I can’t see these things too clearly when it’s family involved.” His grin was more like a grimace.

  “Oh, stop your kidding around. Your jokes get more macabre the more worried you are.”

  Casually, he pulled a fat cigar out of the brim of his top hat. It hadn’t been there before. And it was already lit. He puffed on it for a second or two, not meeting my gaze. “Sorry,” he muttered around it.

  I tried to wave the cloud of cigar smoke away. “Man, that thing stinks.”

  “It should. It’s made of bonemeal and cinnamon.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Since when? I thought you preferred the ones made of dried blood and graveyard ash.”

  He shrugged. “A change is as good as a feast,
they say.”

  “What’s on your mind, Uncle Jack?”

  He took the cigar from his mouth and tamped it out against the back of one hand, adding the hissing smell of burned bone to the charnel perfume that hovered around him. “You know I can’t interfere.”

  “Yeah, you lot and your celestial Prime Directive, I know. Can’t interfere in what? Never mind, I know this one; you oversee life and death, so you’re not allowed to affect anything that might lead to either one.”

  His smile was wry. “There are two forty-year-old claypickens in a parked car over the next ridge. One man, one woman. They’re both divorced. From each other. They’re indulging in a bit of angry breakup sex. Neither one of them has made out in the back of a car since they were teenagers. They’re mature adults and they know what’s what, so they’re using a rubber, but wait for it…” He held up a bony forefinger, looked up and to the side as though listening for something. “Ah. There it goes. The condom just broke.”

  “And what’s going to be the result this time? Birth, or death?” He was a two-way ferryman, after all. Sometimes it wasn’t so much fun, getting a peek into Uncle’s job.

  “It’ll be birth. Two births, in fact. When she learns that she’s pregnant, she’s going to tell her shrink, who’s going to go out that same evening and knock his girlfriend up. Bim-bam. And now a mile over yonder, a man has just beaten his dentist to death with a frozen fish. Happens more often than you’d think. It’s a kind of ludicrous situation. Almost as ludicrous as if your Dad’s soul was trapped inside a large climbing plant.”

  My mouth had gone dry. “Is it Brie you’re coming for?”

  Uncle gave me his best death’s-head grin. “How ’bout them Jays, huh?”

  “Stop it! You don’t even like baseball!”

  “You know I can’t talk business with you. And anyway, who or what is Brie? Hell of a name.” He stood up, balancing shakily on the flying carpet like on a water bed that hadn’t been filled enough. “Gotta go. Woman with a crossbow just walked into a gas station in Bogotá and boy, is she pissed.”

  He was gone. I sat there seething while the carpet drifted slowly downwards. He was only using the woman with the crossbow as an excuse to get out of the conversation. His quantumate selves could be here, there, and everywhere people were borning and dying, every millisecond of every day, world without end, amen. But off he’d hustled, leaving me alone with the knowledge that tonight, someone in my building was going to breathe their last. You’ve heard people say they have the family from hell? Well, I have the family from heaven. And I honestly didn’t know which type was worse.

  Just like that, Uncle was back. “Whew. That’s done. Let’s bring this hunk o’ junk in for a landing, shall we?” The rug hovered in front of my window. Uncle would have crashed right through it, only I made him stop and help me to pry the window open. We sailed into my unit. The carpet settled with a squelch, and promptly began leaking the rainwater it’d soaked up all over my floor. We got to our feet. Uncle said, “Pity I have to confiscate this thing. You did a really good job on it. Anyway, there isn’t much time. You’ll have to mop that water up later if you want to watch me work. Meet me outside Room 213, there’s a good niece.”

  And I was alone again, with my feeling of dread, even though it wasn’t Brie. Room 213 was where old lady Fleet lived.

  Fleet came around the corner from the direction of the kitchen. She was wearing a balding, pink chenille bathrobe, cradling a small blue bowl in one hand and swinging a spoon about in the other. Conducting with it, actually. And humming breathily along as she did so.

  Uncle literally did a double take when he saw her. “That’s not her,” he said.

  “Sure it is. Hey, Miz Fleet. How goes?”

  She turned towards me, ethereal as the planets in their spheres. She waved at me with her spoon. “Hey, girl. Whoever you are. How’s it hanging?” She walked right through Uncle to get a little closer to me. Unless he chose otherwise, he wouldn’t be real to her until she crossed over. She said, “So who are you, and what day is this?”

  Thrown, I mumbled something like, “Uh, I’m… Makeda… new neighbour… assistant super… today’s Sunday.”

  “So almost another week to the next Soul Chain gig. I wonder if I can wait that long?”

  Uncle mumbled, half to himself, “It is her. Why is it her?”

  “I like listening to Brie play,” Fleet told me, her voice reverent. It was as though she were lit from within. “When he plays, my soul thins out, like oil on water. Sometimes I think I feel myself float. I swear I can vibrate my molecules and pass right through walls.” She gasped and put a hand to her mouth. With her teeth, she worried at the knuckle of her index finger. She pulled the finger out of her mouth with a popping sound. She leaned in close to me. “It doesn’t work so well any more, though. Even though I go to all his shows. Why is that man looming over us?” She waved a hand at where Uncle was standing. She could see him! She averted her face from him, but her eyes kept sliding in his direction. “Tell him to go away!” she hissed at me.

  “Tell her I haven’t come for her yet,” said Uncle gently, his voice cold as crushed ice being shovelled over a corpse. “It’s not quite her time.”

  Fleet turned and looked right at him. “It’s not?” Oh, but she sounded so very weary! “It’ll be soon now though, won’t it?”

  Uncle nodded. “Soon.”

  “I’ll be brave.”

  He nodded again. “I have a feeling you will be.”

  “I don’t want go yet, I don’t think. But I guess I’ve thinned out so much that there’s almost none of me left.”

  “That’s true. And when it’s time, I’ll come and help you pass through one last wall.”

  Fleet nodded. “That’d be nice. Now I have to go and have supper.” Her face broke into a crazed smile. “Oatmeal. It’s good for the blood!” She floated away in a haze of lace and incense. Uncle John, one eyebrow raised, watched her go. When she reached her door, her trembling fingers dropped the keys three times. I called out, “You need a hand there, Miz Fleet?”

  “Do it myself!” she shouted, face to the door. “I’m sorry. I mean, no thank you.” She giggled in hemidemisemiquavers, a concatenation of hyena-mad notes that put Uncle’s manic laugh to shame. She bent to the floor, managed to pick the keys up the third time. With a shaking hand, she jabbed the key once or twice in the general direction of the keyhole until it slid home. As she let herself in, I could hear her muttering, “Do it myself. Do it myself.” She slipped inside and slammed the door behind her.

  “That was weird,” I said shakily.

  Uncle John murmured:

  “She pined and pined away;

  Sought them by night and day,

  Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey;

  Then fell with the first snow,

  While to this day no grass will grow

  Where she lies low.”

  “Say what now?”

  There was a thud from behind Fleet’s door, a soft cry, then nothing. Instinctively I rushed towards the door, scrabbling at my waist for the master key. Uncle stopped me before I got too far. “Uh-uh. I’ve already taken her across the threshold. Nothing you can do now.” He made a wry face. “People will walk with spoons in their mouths. If they trip and fall, it’s not pretty.”

  “But I can’t let her just lie there!”

  “Sure you can. Her body’ll be just fine where it is for a bit.”

  Whenever I managed to half fool myself that Leggy Jack was just my eccentric old uncle, he did or said something that reminded me that he was so much more. He asked, “Do you have any idea who scraped that poor child all hollow, like pulp from a grapefruit?”

  “They told me she was in and out of the psych hospital, that she’d done a lot of crack and was on a crapload of meds. That what you mean?”

  Tasting the air with his tongue, he tracked a few steps in the direction that Fleet had gone. Always creeped me out when he did that. Mad
e him look like he’d been inhabited by a snake. “Drugs aren’t what did this,” he said. “And she was no crazier than you or me. I know that’s not saying much. But it wasn’t anything of the physical world that made a girl of twenty-three look like a woman of ninety-two. She’s been emptied.”

  “That old lady was only twenty-three years old?”

  “Yuppers.”

  This was beyond crazy. And why was he asking me for the answer? “How come you don’t know stuff, huh? Like where Dad is, and what happened to Fleet? You used to tell me and Abby that you knew everything we were getting up to!”

  He was still sniffing around. “It’s what you tell children. It only keeps them in check for so long, though. Then they grow up and figure out that the adults have been lying through their teeth.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes away from Fleet’s door. I couldn’t make myself stop imagining what she looked like, lying there, her soul fled.

  Uncle shrugged. “I don’t want omnipotence. That’s the Big Boss’s burden. He runs with the throttle full open, all the time, no filters. He receives all information, always.”

  “Sounds like autism to the power of infinity.”

  “Something like that.” He inhaled deeply. His lips pulled back in distaste. “You need to get out of this place. Something’s not quite right.”

  “But I like it here! There are cool people, and one really hot one, and besides, the building likes me.”

  He nodded, narrowing his eyes. “The building’s inspirited. A little. I think. And that’s lovely and all, but the hag that was riding that child’s back has tried to sink its claws into you, too. Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure that it’s drained a sip or two more out of you than you probably reckoned on. You need to leave here, Makeda.”