Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson Page A

ichor, thick and green, a sullen poison that would need to be leached soon.
    Today, he took the quickest route home. Needed to be home. His apartment building was an old, low-rise brownstone, four floors
     of small, stuffy one-bedroom apartments with sealed windows and no balconies. He climbed the stairs to his fourth-floor unit.
     It was the easiest way to avoid striking up conversations in the elevator. He locked and barred his door behind him, removed
     his shoes in the entranceway, carried them immediately to the bathroom sink, where he washed them, inside and out, with soap.
     He dried them and applied a new coat of polish to the leather. Then he placed them just inside the front door, ready to wear
     the next day. He washed his hands three times, fronts and backs, and cleaned under his fingernails, too. There. That was a
     little better.
    By now, the restless, irritable feeling had built to an almost delicious tension. He was leaking it.
    Now. He took a plastic grocery bag from a drawer in the kitchen. Went into the small, orderly bedroom. Neatly made bed. Tiny
     dresser in the corner, no mirrors, no decorations. Reaching under the bed, he pulled out the shoebox. Now. Cross-legged on
     the bed, he opened the box. Took out the photographs. Fanned them out on the bed in front of him. His little pretties, his
     little birds. Plump Angelica, eight and a half, Toronto, September 1990; flighty Pauline, ten years old, Edmonton, December
     1992; pouty Barb, nine years old, Vancouver, July 1994. Now. The images flashed in his mind; smooth, hairless chests, soft
     as down. The sweet bite of rope into flesh. The soft cries. Now. Now. Yes. He unzipped the fly of the cheap jeans. Reached
     in. Freed the Snake. He wrapped the grocery bag around his stiff penis, took it in both hands. Closed his eyes and let the
     pictures in his mind flow as he drained the sticky poison. Now. Now. Yes.

    He was going to have to move on soon, as soon as he’d made a new addition to his collection. He always moved immediately after
     doing that. He hated the inconvenience of it, but he was on edge all the time now. He had to do something about it, as he
     always did. After that, find another town, another cheap apartment, live on his savings for a few months until he’d found
     a job. By now, he had the sequence down pat. Two months’ notice to the building superintendent. One month and a week after
     that, give two weeks’ notice at the library. Be gone a week before the superintendent expects him to. Soon. As soon as he
     found a way to get what he needed. In the meantime, he rented a van under the name of Charles Coral, presenting Coral’s driver’s
     license and smiling pleasantly for the clerk around the cotton wadding in his cheeks. The fake moustache tickled his lip.
     He’d get rid of the false I.D. along with the van, afterwards.
    But it was long weeks before the opportunity came. He had just made his last delivery to the Children’s department one afternoon
     and was pushing his truck back towards the elevator when he heard a girl’s excited voice. She was talking to a librarian at
     the information desk.
    “… you mean, Gabrielle Singer is actually going to be here? At the library?”
    “Yes,” replied the librarian.
    “No way! She’s my favourite writer of all time!”
    “It’s a March Break program. She’s going to be reading from her last book, you know the one?”
    “
Madeleine Feldman, Girl Astronaut?
Oh, that’s the best story! Especially the part where the girl, you know, Madeleine? The part where she saves the moon colony
     from blowing up? Gabrielle Singer is going to read from that?”
    “Next Wednesday, seven o’clock, in the auditorium. It’s free.”
    “Oh, I have to be there!”
    Stryker casually stopped the truck behind one of the shelves of books, picked something at random off the shelves.
The Tale of Henny Penny.
He opened it, pretended to be reading it. Then he turned his head to look towards the