Free Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson

seat. Her myriad split tails are flicking, the way they do when she’s irritated. With one of them, she scratches around her navel. You think you can see the sullen head of a moray eel, lurking in the cave those hydra tails make. You don’t want to think about it. You never have.
    “Ariel,” says Sycorax, “have you been up to your tricks again?”
    “But he,” splutters your sister, “he …”
    “He never ceases with his tricks,” your mother pronounces. “Running home to Mama, leaving me with the mess he’s made.” She looks at you, and your watery legs weaken. “Caliban,” she says, “I’m getting too old to play surrogate mother to your spawn. That last school of your offspring all had poisonous stings.”
    “I know, Mother. I’m sorry.”
    “How did that happen?” she asks.
    You risk a glance at the woman you’ve dragged into this, the golden girl. She’s standing now, a look of interest and curiosity on her face. “This is all your fault,” you say to her. “If you had kissed me, told me what you wanted me to be, she and Ariel couldn’t have found us.”
    Your girl looks at you, measuring. “First tell me about the poison babies,” she says. She’s got more iron in her than you’d thought, this one. The last fairy tale princess who’d met your family hadn’t stopped screaming for two days.
    Ariel sniggers. “That was from his last ooman,” she says. “The two of them always quarrelling. For her, Caliban had a poison tongue.”
    “And spat out biting words, no doubt,” Sycorax says. “He became what she saw, and it affected the children they made. Of course she didn’t want them, of course she left; so Grannie gets to do the honours. He has brought me frog children and dog children, baby mack daddies and crack babies. Brings his offspring to me, then runs away again. And I’m getting tired of it.” Sycorax’s shawl whirls itself up into a waterspout. “And I’m more than tired of his sister’s tale tattling.”
    “But Mama … !” Ariel says.
    “‘But Mama’ nothing. I want you to stop pestering your brother.”
    Ariel puffs up till it looks as though she might burst. Her face goes anvil-cloud dark, but she says nothing.
    “And you,” says Sycorax, pointing at you with a suckered tentacle, “you need to stop bringing me the fallouts from your sorry love life.”
    “I can’t help it, Mama,” you say. “That’s how women see me.”
    Sycorax towers forward, her voice crashing upon your ears. “Do you want to know how I see you?” A cluster of her tentacle tails whips around your shoulders, immobilises you. That is a moray eel under there, its fanged mouth hanging hungrily open. You are frozen in Sycorax’s gaze, a hapless, irresponsible little boy. You feel the sickening metamorphosis begin. You are changing, shrinking. The last time Sycorax did this to you, it took you forever to become man enough again to escape. You try to twist in her arms, to look away from her eyes. She pulls you forward, puckering her mouth for the kiss she will give you.
    “Well, yeah, I’m beginning to get a picture here,” says a voice. It’s the golden girl, shivering in her flower print dress that’s plastered to her skinny body. She steps closer. Her boots squelch. She points at Ariel. “You say he’s colour-struck. You’re his sister, you should know. And yeah, I can see that in him. You’d think I was the sun itself, the way he looks at me.”
    She takes your face in her hands, turns your eyes away from your mother’s. Finally, she kisses you full on the mouth. In her eyes, you become a sunflower, helplessly turning wherever she goes. You stand rooted, waiting for her direction.
    She looks at your terrible mother. “You get to clean up the messes he makes.” And now you’re a baby, soiling your diapers and waiting for Mama to come and fix it. Oh, please, end this.
    She looks down at you, wriggling and helpless on the ground. “And I guess all those other women saw