Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany Read Free Book Online

finished at the window. So Sam said:
    â€œYou go on ahead there. I’m not in that big a rush.” He hefted the three shopping bags, two in hisright hand, so that the handle cords moved half an inch across his stinging palms.
    â€œThat’s awful nice of you. They do get restless sometimes, when they have to stand still so long. I appreciate it a lot.” She turned and announced to the shuffling gaggle: “Now you all stay with this nice colored gentleman right here. I’m going to the window there to get you your penny postcards.” She smiled at Sam in turning and stepped toward the bars.
    The girls moved up around him. One, though in another torn coat and with the same kind of rag over her hair—and her expression just as vacant—, was actually pretty, as she looked off to the side. Her face was the darkest. The bones in it were fine. Her figure, beneath her poor coat, seemed fit. For a moment Sam imagined her some displaced tribal princess, stepped from an ancient African sect to be dazzled by the modern day—till she turned: the far part of her face was a scarred cascade from a burn.
    There was not even an eye in it.
    Tides of black and brown made a torrent down her skull. So as not to stare, Sam dropped his eyes—and saw, beneath her torn hem, her ankles and the legs above them were as badly burned as her face. She wore only some sort of slippers, which her heels had slid over the edge of, onto the mat slewed with snot-colored slush. Sam turned a little, lifted his eyes again—and caught a whiff of unwashed sourness. Could that be one of them?
    Really, he thought, the things that could be wreaked on the body!
    Sam’s bags were weighty with Hubert’s and Elsie’s and Corey’s—and his own—gifts. But the floor was too wet to set them down.
    Just then the Ablir girl ran forward to the window beside theirs, shouldering aside the generous-breasted, humus-skinned woman who had just handed in a package as the bars had been, for a moment, unlocked and swung aside.
    The bars clicked closed; the woman said, “Hey, you—!”
    With all her brachydactylic fingers, Ella pointed through.
    Inside, the white clerk brought forward a toy horse, that Ella must have seen. He stuck one plush hoof through the bars and waved it at her. Ella took a breath, grabbed it, and tried to tug it out—but, still smiling, the clerk pulled it from her grip and raised it higher between the bars, beyond her reach, to wave the leg once more.
    Silent, determined, Ella jumped, missed, jumped again. She didn’t jump very high; and the little lift she managed suggested her physical coordination was deeply impaired.
    The woman who’d just handed her package through looked down now, frowned, then began to smile.
    From behind the bars, the clerk said with a notable brogue: “All right, little girl. Now you have to let the other people mail their letters.”
    Biting her broad underlip, Ella Ablir backed from the cage, gazing within.
    A bunch of penny postcards in one hand, not yet put into her pocket book, the woman in the green coat stepped away from the next window over to receive the child’s shoulders with guiding gloves. At the contact, the woman’s worried look relaxed. “All right,” she said. “Let’s all behave. Come on, now—let’s go. I got your penny postcards for you. We’re going to take them back home and draw pictures of what we want for Christmas and send them to Santa Claus at the North Pole. That’s what we’re going to do now.” As she stepped by Sam, she smiled her gratitude for his brief vigil—and explained: “They won’t never get nothing. And they can’t write. But they like to draw the pictures and send them to Santa.” She turned to the girls. “Now all of us. Let’s go!”
    Their cardboard tags at their several levels on threadbare cloth (the tall one’s coat