Free Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson Page A

people crazy with fear, thinking they were hearing the glass wind, the crazed, screeching, splinter-whipping
     gale that would flense flesh from bone in seconds. Sheeny ran faster, ignoring the way her boots pinched where she had outgrown
     them.

    Never mind the Whetherman. Old Delpha knew what the weather would be: Glass. Winter’s cold first, then a great big bang boom,
     then glass. Molten hot, running like rivers and beautifully red. Cold again, descending with the dark ash cloud. A keening,
     cold iridescence that could freeze your eyes solid as marbles. Then all you saw, peering through ashy light, was the last
     thing before the freezing. If a glass wind got into your eyes, you had only one point of view forever after. If it slid into
     your heart, then you were really in trouble. There you’d be, your heart hardened to a lump of frigid, frozen meat, just offal
     from the butcher’s. Shake the picture up all you want, this one won’t change. Unless the girl made it home safely, re-drew
     her playscreen. Could happen. The picture wasn’t solid yet. Weird, how it had made a world where the girl could hear her,
     only her. “Run,” Delpha whispered into the otherworld, the one behind the glass.

    Mumsie had a cow’s glass-scoured thigh bone. Thick, like a young tree trunk, and half Sheeny’s height. Mumsie kept it on top
     of the bookshelf, to remind herself and to scare Sheeny.
    “Was Dodder, that,” she would tell Sheeny, jerking her sharp chin in the direction of the bone. “An old cow of ours, born
     Before. Me and Jeff, we’d taken the cattle out to the water troughs and she wandered off. Didn’t have the sense to get in
     when she heard the glass wind coming. We shoved in the house with the cows and all, but Dodder, she was way out, heading for
     where she remembered the pasture to be, never mind it’s just dirt and rock there now. No time to roust her back. Wind singing
     through the valley, blowing down fast. Me and you—you were just two, you wouldn’t even remember—and Jeff, we all clambered
     with the cattle down the basement, hunkered down there in the mouldy hay. The cow farts smelt like fermented grass.”
    Mumsie didn’t tell the story much anymore, because she’d have to say Jeff’s name when she did. Sheeny’d been with her stepdad
     Jeff when he’d coughed his last. Mumsie’d come home with her buckets of splintery water to find Sheeny cradling his head,
     weeping. Sheeny’d looked up to see sorrow and blame burning deep behind Mumsie’s eyes. Sheeny never knew whether Mumsie blamed
     herself for not having been there in Jeff’s last moments, or whether she blamed Sheeny because Sheeny had.
    Sheeny ran, the howler at her back.

    “Just keep going, girl!” Delpha hissed. The child obliged, pounding her bounding way to home and safety. And when she got
     there, she’d make a new picture with her toy. She didn’t know that the thing altered worlds. No one knew, yet.
    Delpha had to admire the little chit’s strong lungs, not even thinking of tiring yet. She was so young, hadn’t breathed in
     much glass. Yes, Run. Like that. Be a gingerbread girl, not yet baked solid. Run. Save us all. Run.

    Slamming across bare earth, Sheeny trod on a stone in her too-small boots. It shifted under her foot; she stumbled, crying
     out as she felt her ankle twist. The playscreen went tumbling. Something cracked inside it. No time to mind that. Sheeny straightened,
     gritted her teeth against the crunch of pain, and ran on, leaving the playscreen making unhappy grinding noises on the ground.
     Behind her, the wind sound was louder now, a buzzing like the sky was full of angry bees.
    She shouldn’t have been by the river. It was too far away from home, from safe windowless cement enclosures and steel doors
     abraded to a smooth shine by the wind. But the river, it called her. Mumsie knew that’s where Sheeny was nowadays, if she
     couldn’t be found. Mumsie scolded her for it, beat her