Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson

protect the filthy creatures.
    The mail room of the library was a musty, sprawling storage room in the basement. The heavy white enamelling of the stucco
     walls gathered dust; he spent a lot of time scrubbing at the years of dirt that had gone unnoticed by previous employees.
     Delivery trucks offloaded directly from the back door, large boxes of books, new library materials, magazine subscriptions.
     When he was done sorting the mail he would load it onto wheeled book trucks for each department. He would deliver them upstairs
     twice a day to the supervisor of each department: Media/Technology at 9:30 A.M. and 2:30 P.M.; Arts/Humanities at 9:45 and 2:45; Languages at 10:00 and 3:00; Children’s at 10:15 and 3:15. He was never late. The supervisors
     were friendly, in an offhand way: “Hi, Stryker. Keeping well?”
    “Yes, Miz Grady.”
    “That’s good. Just put the box over here.”
    Mostly they didn’t much notice him. People didn’t. Except sometimes. Mrs. Herbert in Children’s had let him have a poster
     to tape above his desk, a glossy picture of a little freckled girl flying against a backdrop of stars that formed words. He
     liked her mischievous grin and the knowing look in her eyes. “Books let your imagination soar,” read the poster.

    Some mornings he reached the park very early, before any of the parents had brought their children to school. It was quiet
     then, except for the birds. The park was always full of them, even in winter. Raucous starlings disputed the best spots on
     the power lines. Tiny house sparrows squabbled in the branches. There was even the occasional lurking crow.
    In the mornings, as the wind whispered in the leaves of the old oaks, maples, and weather-twisted crabapple trees, people
     would walk their dogs in the park, picking up their pets’ steaming excrement in plastic grocery bags. He approved of the cleanliness
     bylaw, but didn’t see how the dog owners could bring themselves to touch the steaming, foul waste, even through a layer of
     protective plastic.
    The park was a favourite spot for people practising Ta’i Chi, retirees trying to keep their joints limber. He’d become accustomed
     to the slow, crane-like gestures that they performed in unison, arms sketching strange patterns in the air while they bent
     their legs in a series of odd, consecutive movements. He was sure it didn’t do them any good. The movements were too slow
     for any real exertion, and most of the exercisers were so old that they seemed near death anyway. But there they were, every
     morning, a gaggle of undignified eccentrics wearing old cardigans, loose pants, and soft slippers.
    Some of them were loners, he’d noticed. One man always stayed off to one side of the main group, flapping his outstretched
     arms through a mysterious warmup. A bowed old Asian lady with one blind eye went through the movements with a plastic sword
     in one hand, a ridiculous instrument with a feathery yellow tassel hanging from its pommel. If that wasn’t peculiar enough,
     she brought her pet with her, some kind of hunting bird with a wicked beak. It clutched her right shoulder as she swung about,
     bating its wings for balance. The bird
stared
all the time, as though if it looked at everything hard enough, it could make up for her unseeing right eye.

    This afternoon, Stryker left work promptly at 3:45. He wormed his way through the rows of book trucks in the mail room, packed
     high with books to be returned to other branches, and slid out through the basement door. He’d been feeling restless and irritable
     all day—for weeks, in fact, but today was particularly bad. People had been bumping into him all day, as though they didn’t
     see him. Even Mrs. Herbert in Children’s hadn’t greeted him as she normally would. It always happened. Sooner or later, everybody
     would walk all over him, like soil on the ground. Dirty. The tension was building up in him, it was starting to seep from
     his skin like