Sister Mine

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Abby twisted round to look at me. “Dolly?”

  “The rug.”

  “Dolly the doily?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Goof.” She turned back to contemplate the highway.

  “Control freak.”

  “Can it really make us invisible?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Abby rolled to a sitting position, her two legs stuck out straight in front of her. She scowled and crossed her arms. “She never sent me a message in a shell.”

  “Who, Mom?”

  She pouted. “Yes. How come you’re so special?”

  “I’m not, and you know it. Maybe that’s why Mom sent me the message. In compensation.”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that.

  We took the corridor of rail lines running along just north of the highway, keeping close to the trees on the northern embankment of the tracks. The track sloped down to a narrow, paved alleyway, shielded by the embankment to the south and the windowless backs of the co-ops and housing projects to the north. And then we were on Sherbourne, just south of where we wanted to be. As we got closer, Dolly deked right to take us through a strip of parkland. I guessed we probably weren’t invisible; she was sure taking a lot of care to not be spotted.

  We startled a raccoon rappelling down a maple tree trunk, and a bunch of worn, shabbily dressed people sitting on and around a park bench, talking and sharing something from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. We were gone from there before they had time to do much more than call out in alarm.

  Abby asked, “How come they could see us?”

  “Maybe Dolly turned off the onboard cloaking device. Maybe you need to be under the influence. Or a raccoon. The real question is, why were they drinking liqueur? Doesn’t that ritual usually involve cheap vodka?”

  “Ritual?”

  “The ritual of ‘If we all share what little money we have, we can afford to buy one bottle of buck five come alive.’ Whatever they’ve got smelled so sweet I think my blood sugar level tripled just from inhaling it.” I ducked to avoid an overhanging branch. We’d be there soon.

  “You could smell it? But we were yards and yards away from them.”

  “I can still smell it. It’s like somebody diluted candy and then added grain alcohol to it.”

  A stinging hail pelted us. Abby cried out. The lumps made a hollow tapping sound where they hit the rug. I yelped in pain as something small and hard hit me on the cheekbone. “Ow! What in sweet blue blazes?”

  That wasn’t hail. The roundish pieces on the rug looked faintly green in the dark, not luminescent as hail would have been.

  Abby pulled one of them out of her hair. “They’re acorns.”

  “That damned squirrel is tailing us!” I yelled out into the darkness, “You almost took my eye out!”

  “Maka, not so loud.”

  “Tree rat!” Squirrels hated to be called that.

  Abby said, “I’ve got acorns in my bra.”

  I got to my knees and started brushing acorns off Dolly. “They didn’t hurt you, did they, sweetie?”

  Abby responded, “No, I’m fine.”

  I decided not to tell her that I hadn’t been talking to her. She lay back and put her hands behind her head. She closed her eyes.

  I sat back down beside her, but I couldn’t get rid of the cloying candy smell of the hooch those people had been drinking.

  Something was tickling the back of my brain. Something to do with acorns and squirrels. “Hey, Abs, when we left the house tonight, what did you say about the squirrel in the oak tree?”

  “Lemme think… I said that squirrels aren’t usually nocturnal.”

  That wasn’t good. “And I was smelling flowers down on the beach when there are no flowers there. And ice cream and dessert where there aren’t any. And acorns don’t ripen till the fall.” I had a bad feeling about this. “Dolly, can you go faster, please?” The rug obligingly sped up. It dodged and swerved through the treetops. The speed of our flight sent a crisp wind rushing through my hair. I wished I could just relax and enjoy the ride. Instead, I tried to keep my eyes peeled into the darkness surrounding us. Because the sweet scent that had been dogging me all day was back, and stronger than the free samples section at a perfume counter. And I wasn’t smelling ice cream, or spring flowers, or ginger pudding. It smelled like grape hard candies.

  Abby had opened one eye to look at me. “What’s wrong?”

  “I think maybe a tree has been trying to talk to me after all.”

  “Trees talk slowly. It can take one an hour to say good morning.”

  “Hear me out. Those unseasonal acorns aren’t coming from oddly nocturnal squirrels. I think the oaks have been trying to get our attention. I think Dad and Quashee are nearby. Maybe they’ve been following us for a while.”

  “Oh, but that’s great!” Abby rolled to a sitting position. “We should land, so they can find us!”

  I shook my head. “I’m not so—”

  A tapered, boneless shape writhed up in front of us. It whipped around the rug, me, Abby, and dragged us, screaming, out of the air. We thumped onto the ground. The rug squawked, then lay still. The massive vine tendril slid loose from around us and pulled away. Too winded to do much else, I followed its movement with my eyes. In the dark, the kudzu bush was difficult to make out clearly. It was an amorphous, ever-shifting mass. A giant hairball, a twelve-foot-tall mare’s nest of writhing vines and roots and restless leaves. Its purple blossoms, usually the size of a fingernail, were swollen as large as cabbages. The grape candy stench from them was so strong, I feared I’d never again be able to smell anything else. I propped myself up on my elbows.

  Abby was curled up beside me, making a noise halfway between a pant and a whimper. I asked her, “You OK, Sis?”

  “Yes. Just had all the air knocked out of me.”

  “If you think the fall left you breathless, have a gander at Quashee.”

  Abby turned her head to look. “Holy gods. And what’s that nasty smell?”

  “Now you notice it. It’s the kudzu flowers.”

  She made an ew face. “It’s like an explosion in an air freshener factory.”

  We both struggled to our feet. Abby winced. “I think I sprained my ankle.”

  Dolly wasn’t making a sound. Was she broken? Quashee’s roots plucked at the ground longingly, but kept pulling away. Even as I watched, blossoms and leaves withered and fell away from the body of the plant, to be replaced by new ones growing in as quickly as the old ones died. Lengths of vine alternately bulged and thinned. That was some crazy combination of flora mojo and auxins that Quashee was calling on to cradle Dad and to remain ambulant. “Dad?” I said. “You in there?”

  A flight of broomstick-thick tendrils shot out from the body of the plant, headed straight for me. I backed up. “Whoa, not so fast.”

  The reaching tendrils stopped a few inches away from my head. Looked to be easily twenty of them. They undulated, waving, like sea anemones feeding.

  Abby put a hand out in the direction of the tendrils. “Dad?”

  “Careful, Sis. I’m not sure that Dad even has a mind to be out of right now.”

  She touched a couple of the tendrils. They jerked a little way away, then wove themselves back towards her fingers. They twined into a fat paw and patted the back of her hand. Abby smiled. “See? He wouldn’t hurt us.”

  “He yanked us out of the treetops onto the ground.”

  “He had to get our attention, right, Dad?”

  Our conversation was punctuated by the soft thumps of dead kudzu blossoms hitting the grassy earth. Poor Quashee was growing, dying, blooming, climbing, creeping, and seeding, all at once. What looked like vigour was more like death throes.

  I reached to touch the tendrils floating in front of me. Lightning-quick, they shot forward and grabbed my head. Abby screamed, “Makeda!”

  I tried to tear the tendrils off me, but they didn’t give. They pulled me
off my feet and yanked. I heard the joints in my neck pop as I crashed headfirst into the springy, wriggly mass of Quashee. I gagged on the concentrated essence of synthetic grape. Lengths of vine whipped around my arms and legs and pulled me spread-eagled. The joints in my shoulders and thighs twanged like elastic bands.

  “Dad!” yelled Abby. “Stop it!” I managed to turn my head enough to see Abby swinging at the kudzu with her cane. “Let Maka go!” She landed some solid blows on the lianas of Quashee that had thickened to the point of being branches. Quashee grabbed her cane and disappeared it amongst its thrashing leaves. Even in the dark, I could see Abby’s glare. What was she, nuts? She couldn’t protect herself against our ravening dad with a mere cut-eye! Whipping the air, Quashee advanced on her. The motion made me dizzy.

  “Abby, go! Get out of here!”

  I choked on a mouthful of leaves that Quashee crammed into my mouth. Abby shouted, “Hold on! I’m coming back!” Then I couldn’t hear anything but the swish and crash of Quashee. I fought, but Quashee was implacably cocooning me in leaves. I tried to yell, “Dad, please!” Another fistful of curled leaves jammed into my open mouth and turned the words into a gargle. More vines curled around my limbs and tugged. A tearing ache blossomed in my joints as Dad tried to pull me apart like a boiled chicken. He was going to get at his mojo if it killed me.

  And maybe it should. I’d carried Abby until she could carry herself. I’d held Dad’s mojo until he needed it back. He was a deity, and I was a lump of mud that had served its function. Time to break open the clay vessel and pick out the meat inside. I stopped fighting. Dad yanked my shoulder out of its socket. I screeched in agony. In horror, I realized that he wasn’t going to make it easy to go gently into that good night.

  At my scream, Quashee stopped moving. Leaves unpeeled from my eyes. Small tendrils snaked towards my gagged throat. Leaves slapped them away. The tendrils wrapped around the leaves and tore them to shreds, then reached again for the plug of leaves in my mouth. Defiantly pushed itself deeper in so that my breath could only come in wheezing sips of scant air. The fucking thing was going to choke me! Desperate to yank it out, I struggled violently against the vines swaddling my arms.

  A thud reverberated through Quashee. The vines released me, the plug of leaves popped out of my mouth, and I fell to the ground. The unspeakable pain of landing made my vision go grey. It seemed like an eternity before I could suck a much-needed breath in through my unstoppered mouth. The breaths were little sobbing moans of distress. My shoulder sang so I could scarcely think of anything else. The slightest movement amped the pain to ear-ringing levels.

  Above me, a whirring flurry of a shadow was beating Quashee away from me. Dolly! It was she who’d thumped into Quashee! Like a sparrow harrying a hawk from its nest, Dolly flew at Quashee, then darted just out of its reach to come at it again and again. Compared to her, Quashee was big, but slow. Slapping at Dolly and missing, Quashee backed away until I was clear of it.

  “Here, come out of that,” said Lars’s voice. He grabbed me under the armpits. Something ground in my shoulder and I screeched.

  “You’re hurting her!” said Abby. She thumped down onto the ground beside me.

  I groaned, “Leave me here. Go help Dolly.”

  “Dolly?” asked Lars.

  Abby pointed. “That thing. She made it.”

  Lars’s eyes widened, and he was off and running. He was holding something thin and flexible. He set about slashing at Quashee. Leaves and chunks of vine began falling. I called out, “Lars, don’t kill him! That’s our dad!”

  “Maka,” said Abby, “Dad tried to kill you.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Before I could say more, a third being joined the fray. A tall, broad-shouldered man with an unmistakeable Shine to him. Uncle Hunter, in cutoff army fatigues and a black sweatshirt. He shoved Lars aside. As Abby and I screamed at him to stop, he lit into Quashee, literally tearing it limb from limb. Lengths of vine dropped to the ground and went still. When he was done, the ground was covered in pieces of Quashee. I had gone cold all over in shock. Just like that, he’d shredded our dad. Abby was gasping over and over, as though she couldn’t get any air.

  Uncle Hunter picked up armloads of the kudzu at a time and flung them into the air, where they vanished.

  There was one piece left, a root-ball with a torn piece of root hanging from it. I don’t know how Abby managed to move that quickly, but she dashed over to it and picked it up just before Hunter could get to it. He straightened up and gave the three of us an unctuous smile. “Well,” he said, “I bet you guys are glad to see me.”

  With a terrifying calm, Abby replied, “You tore your own brother limb from limb.” I began to shake.

  Hunter replied, “And not a moment too soon. Saved my dear niece’s life”—he nodded at me where I was lying on the sidelines—“you’re welcome, and cleaned up the environmental disaster that Boysie had become. Gotta thank you, Abby, for tromping your way through transit like that in your hurry to fetch your”—he sneered at Lars—“instrument. Just like kids, running through the living room and tracking mud on the carpet. Quite disruptive to the rest of the Family. I just had to follow you to see what was up. And I discover that you’re socializing with a made thing. Abby, Abby, Abby. We had such high hopes for you.”

  There. The knot of root that Abby was holding twitched. Hunter hadn’t noticed. Her body was shielding him from the sight. She had, though. She shot me a brief glance and opened her mouth. I sisterspoke at her, the chopped-off cry that meant, “Shut up.” It did sound like a cry of pain. Go figure.

  Hunter said, “You know, Makeda, I could fix that shoulder for you. Part of my new portfolio and all.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “As you wish, short-lived niece o’ mine. I’ll just dispose of the rest of this mess.” He strode over to Abby to get the root from her.

  I said, “Don’t.” I lifted my head, grinding my teeth against the pain in my shoulder. I looked Hunter full in the face and put all the authority I could into my voice. “He’s dead. You’ve done more than enough.”

  He smirked. “That’s no way to talk to your adoptive father, burrito.”

  I twitched at the hated nickname. “It’s the last piece,” I said. “We’ll burn it.”

  A green shoot lengthened from the root-ball and curled around Abby’s wrist. She pulled it into her body and set up a torrential wail of fake sobbing. Especially when her tears were crocodile tears, Abby’s crying was something to hear. Hunter grimaced and put his fingers in his ears. “All right, all right! You two dispose of it.” Abby’s sobs abated a little. “Wow,” Hunter said to me. “All this fuss. I’d think you’d be glad you got to keep your wits about you tonight.” He laughed at his own joke. “Laters, pets.” He flicked out into transit.

  Abby snickered. The waterworks were completely gone. “Oh, my God, could that god be any dumber?”

  “Abby, goddamnit, you let Hunter follow us!”

  “How could I know that?” she barked back. “I was just trying to save your sorry ass.”

  “All right, never mind that. Is it really alive?”

  Triumphantly, Abby held her hand out to show me. The root-ball was cradled in her palm. The single green shoot braceleted her wrist. “Saved Dad and Quashee both.”

  “Yeah, and you’d better get it off you soon, before it tries to make you into a dolma.”

  Abby looked at her wrist in dismay. She picked at the tip of the kudzu shoot. It came up easily. She uncurled some more of it. It writhed between her fingers like an earthworm. “It’s all right,” she said. “I think it only wants to hurt you.”

  “Well, keep it the fuck away from me, then. But take care of it, OK?”

  “Of course I will! He’s my dad, too.”

  Lars said, “Fucking elitist prick piece of shit. Goddamn, I hate those guys.” Without any warning, he grabbed my arm and yanked my shoulder back into place. I was too stunned to even scream, and then the
pain was mostly gone. He said, “We should get the kudzu into some soil. Poor thing’s starving.”

  I nodded. “Maybe put him near his roses, Abs? You know, for company.”

  “Like hell,” Abby replied, contemplating the kudzu. It had put out another tentative shoot. “He’s not going back into open soil. It’s a pot for him.”

  “Couldn’t we plant him by the lake? Mom could visit him then.”

  “Listen to you, talking about introducing an invasive species into a fragile ecosystem! Dad would give you many kinds of hell for that.”

  “I know.” The tip of one of the shoots was investigating Abby’s skin. I shuddered.

  “Maka?” Abby’s voice was soft.

  “Yeah?”

  “The way I see it, we gotta keep Dad trapped in this form so that you can live out your natural life before giving him back his mojo.”

  “How can you say that? It’s Dad!” A tear escaped down my cheek.

  “Who has all of eternity. You only have a few decades.”

  Lars interjected, “If you guys are going to do that, you should probably get it into some soil soon. And give it some water. It’s dehydrated.”

  He was right. It was the time of day that Dad called “ ’fore day morning.” In the predawn light, I could see that Quashee was wilting.

  My eyes were stinging, and I was running hot, then cold. I was just about perished from fatigue and the shock of watching Hunter viciously attack Dad, and we hadn’t even talked to Brie yet. “Just don’t give it enough soil for it to Hulk out on us again.” I didn’t actually agree to Abby’s plan, but I wasn’t fighting her on it, either. Some loyal daughter I was.

  Suddenly my right leg jerked painfully out to the side. I cried out. Abby jumped. “What was that?”

  “Nothing. Leg’s gone to sleep.” At least, I prayed that it was nothing. It’d been years since the last time! But the trembling only got worse. Both legs spasmed. The familiar, dismaying light-headedness took me. A powerful full-body contraction slammed my head back against the ground. Warm urine soaked my thighs as my bladder let go. I had time enough to say, “Abby!” as the world went away. My last thought was, Fuck. Now she’ll never let me out of her sight.