Free Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson

insides warm, anyway. Wouldn’t be
     them turning to cold glaze when the glass wind hit. They’d be warm, from the inside out.
    The welder didn’t pay any attention to them, nor to the first icy fingers of wind flicking at the collar of her orange flameproof.
     Delpha wouldn’t bother to warn her, either. Silly woman.
    “There’s a glass wind coming,” Old Delpha muttered to the girl who was watching her from the other place. Interfering little
     chit. Little voyeur. Delpha felt a teeny twitch of uncertainty from the girl who was sensing a thought she hadn’t birthed;
     Delpha’s thought. Serve her right.
    Glass wind. Winter flinter. Delpha could feel it in her achy bones. Fracture-streamy glass wind blowing up screeling across
     the river from the mountains into the city. Screaming like the angry dead through the valley; glass grinding the city’s more
     glass windows into shivershattersplinters. A breaking wind. It would be here soon, stinging singing cold, rattling the leafless
     branches of the wind-scoured trees, whipping icy slivers into hair and eyes. The Whetherman had said so this morning on the
     radio. Indications were, he’d said. But opposing opinions, he’d said. Never know whether. Idiot. Delpha hummed the jingle
     that was perfect for the Whetherman: “Whether the weather is cold, or whether the weather is hot, we’ll weather the weather,
     whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.” It’d be cold and hot and cold again. And no, they wouldn’t like it.
    It was all that stupid girl’s fault, playing with her toy.

    Tinkling, twinkling, the river ground coldly by. A swirl of breeze abraded Sheeny’s cheek. Kay’s lips, his cold-chapped lips
     had brushed across her cheek so. Absently she wiped her hand over the irritated spot on her face, and brought it away blood-streaked.
     “Shit!” Alarmed, she yanked her concentration from the playscreen. Untended, the picture froze.
    Sheeny looked up the valley. Damn. There
was
a glass wind coming, like she’d thought her head had said: blowing down the valley out of the deadlands, making the splinter-scoured
     trees rattle their deceasing branches. She got to her feet, no longer interested in the spring tumble of water chuckling between
     the river’s banks, roiling with masses of ground glass too fine to see, too deadly to drink unless it’d been sifted and filtered
     and filtered again. She looked up the valley; across parched, bare, red earth for miles, nothing to relieve the eye but a
     few almost-expired trees like clutching hands, towards the two mountain shoulders with the deadlands sitting between their
     collarbones. No head, only that deep, parched, hollowed-out valley. She could just make out the dark haze of the glass wind
     swirling down. She could hear it now too; a pleasant tinkling sound at this distance, like ornaments on the Christmas trees,
     Before. So Mumsie said they’d sounded.
    She shouldn’t have been by the riverbank, daydreaming of Kay. But it was the only place to go to avoid the eyes of her neighbours,
     gone cold with blame at the sight of her. And Mumsie’s accusing eyes. How could Sheeny have known what would happen? She tugged
     at the filter hanging from weathered elastic at her neck, pulled it up over her nose and mouth. Fat lot of good that would
     do if she got caught out in the wind. She hugged the playscreen to her chest and started running for home.
    The rhythmic pounding of her feet covered a little the sound of the wind whistling down. She sent her mind wandering, to keep
     it calm…
    She’d read about Christmas trees, seen pictures in Kay’s old picture book, the one possession he’d brought with him when her
     family took him in. Christmas trees used to have this green… fuzz on them, not just bare, sandpapered branches that only stayed
     up one day and were used for fuel the next. Christmas trees didn’t have glass ornaments anymore. Mumsie said the soft clinking
     sound would drive