Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson Read Free Book Online Page A

looked so, well, well-endowed. Must have had the other pair of legs hitched up under her skirt. The little girl was far
     above Artho now. He could just make out white panties with her legs sticking out of four leg holes. She climbed with two arms,
     with four. Ah. That well-muscled back. Artho smiled. He watched her until she disappeared into the darkness. He’d figured
     out who, what she was. Appeared as a skeleton sometimes, in a top hat. Watcher at the boundaries, at the crossroads. Sometimes
     man, sometimes woman. Always trickster. He couldn’t really tell in the dark, but she seemed furrier now, or more bristly,
     or something. Sometimes spider? He wondered if this was the kind of thing her dad had really meant her to do.
    Ah, well; she was notoriously capricious. She might decide to take her gift away again, so he’d better use it while he could.
     He set off for the streetcar stop, almost bouncing, dancing along in his excitement, thinking where he’d like to implant the
     Adinkra symbol next. On Charlie? Maybe Charlie really was the way he appeared to be. Oog. His Aunt Dee? What would Dee be
     like if she could peel away all that unhappiness?
    How about on Aziman? All these choices. “Good evening,” Artho said to the tired people waiting at the stop. One white woman
     clutched her purse tighter when she saw him. Hmm. Maybe he should work that nkyin kyin thing on himself; it was in him, after
     all. He wondered what she would see then.

I
n 1995, I was accepted into the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University. Going
     to Clarion had been a dream since I was a teenager. I begged and borrowed enough money to attend. I had no idea how I was
     going to repay it. I went to Clarion with no story ideas, no confidence that I had the talent to be a writer. For the first
     long, expensive week, I wasn’t able to write at all, and I was terrified that the whole six weeks would be like that. Writer-in-residence
     Joe Haldeman warned that perhaps the worst way to try to break writer’s block was with alcohol. Well, nothing else had worked,
     so on the Friday evening, desperate, I went on what for me is a mini-bender—probably three beers. Then I slept for a few hours,
     woke up in the late evening, and wrote the first draft of a story that I imbued with a terror that was alarming even as I
     was writing it.

SNAKE
    H e never wore any bright colours, nothing remarkable. Wouldn’t want anyone to remember that he’d been hanging around. Faded
     jeans, scuffed running shoes. He bought cheap white T-shirts three to a pack from the nearby K-Mart. He always paid cash.
     He had a battered old van, but he walked to work, rarely drove. He saved that for special occasions.
    He’d been drawn to this city by its peacefulness. Lots of open, green space, almost no crime, a good place to raise children.
     The city’s main source of pride was that it was a bird sanctuary. Anyone who so much as flipped a rock at a pigeon had to
     pay heavy fines. The sign at the entrance to the city even boasted: “Where the Birds Come Home to Roost.”
    The sounds of the school playground tugged at him every morning: the bright, happy laughter of the children; even their squabbles
     and scuffles. He enjoyed the small, twittering voices chanting jump rope games, the giddy shrieking as little bodies hurtled
     down the slide, one last game before the school bell rang and the children took flight like spooked birds. It made him sad
     to watch the schoolyard quickly empty when they ran inside.
    If he woke early, he could spend a few minutes sitting in the large public park beside the school. He would buy a small cup
     of coffee, heavily sweetened, and a jelly doughnut (never from the same coffee shop twice in a row). He’d take his breakfast
     to one of the park benches—always a different one—and sit there, watching the children play. Starlings and sparrows would
     gather at his feet, cocking their