Free Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson Page B

sometimes, but she couldn’t stay away. She needed to spend time just
     crouched by the river, away from Mumsie’s silent accusations, staring at the only thing that lived free beneath the sky, never
     needing shelter. Kay had jumped into that river when he couldn’t face living under glass any longer.
    “That wind hit dead soon,” Mumsie had told her. The Dodder story. “Scraping, scraping against the house, and screaming ’cause
     it couldn’t get at us. I dunno if Dodder screamed too, when it caught her. Couldn’t hear nothing but that scraping, screeching
     wind. Could feel you though, sobbing in my arms, clutching at my bodice, and me sobbing right back, but soft, so you wouldn’t
     feel it. So you’d learn how to be strong.
    “Jeff, he went up the basement steps, checked to make sure the hatch was bolted. Good, thick steel, that door. He’d checked
     it twice already, and anyway, no wind would have made it all the way through the tunnel upstairs, but that was Jeff. If he
     could do something, he felt better.”
    Sheeny’s ankle stabbed with each step; sickly jolts of pain that made metallic-tasting saliva squirt in her mouth. She glanced
     over her shoulder. In the distance, an army of black cones twirled, screeling. The wide, flat land made it hard to tell how
     close; too close. The sound they made was a granular scraping, like sandpaper grinding away. She sobbed, stumbled on.
    “When it was over,” Mumsie had said, “we went out. Up to the upper level, out through the tunnel. We had to unhook the carpets
     from the wall. Laid them down, crawled through the tunnel on them. Glass all the way inside the first two doors. The outside
     one was blasted open. Mound of glass sand as high as my knee in front of it. Left Jeff sweeping up, you trying to help. I
     went to find Dodder. Was still a bit of breeze. The glass had gone on in front though, so it was safe enough by then.
    “All left of Dodder was great ropes of flesh that the breeze was stirring about on the ground. They glittered with grindglass,
     so pretty… And the ground soaked in blood, and bones scattered everywhere, scoured smooth and white like they’d been bleaching
     in the sun for years. And her skull. I remember. Gaping up blind at me from the ground. After that, we slaughtered all the
     cows, gave the meat out to the whole town. We couldn’t look out for them all the time anymore. Besides, the mouldy hay was
     making ’em sick, and we couldn’t grow no more.”

    Something had gone crack in the world when the playscreen broke. Something big and silent. Only Delpha knew it had happened.
     The world picture had slipped sideways, was grinding distressfully on the ground. It was the damned girl had gone and done
     it, blowing her troubles back in all their faces. This is how it started. Delpha whimpered. Time and history would all be
     crazed now, like broken windows.
    The welder turned her torch off. Their meal gone, the birds flew away.
    Old Delpha could hear how the wind would come, screaming. The centre one of the giant triple mountains had bulged, puffed
     its cheek out, ready to blow. Delpha wished her eyes were strong enough to see the scientists clambering about it, taking
     measurements. Any day now, they said. Whether or not. Some of them would get off the mountain in time, get into planes and
     fly away to safety, if this new cracked-crazed world held any such. She’d get on a plane too, if she could afford a ticket.
     If she could stop mumbling and shuffling and could remember to keep her hair combed for long enough to pretend normal so that
     they’d let her on.
    Striped yellow and black and bumbled as bees, a school bus pulled up to the corner. Little children tumbled out, all squeals
     and shrieks and gambols and galumphs and Gumbie sneakers and Maximal Morphin’ Mounties lunch boxes going creak-creak as the
     kids swung them by their handles. The children were so sweet, it hurt Delpha to watch them.
    On the grass verge