Skin Folk Read Free

During those holidays, Silky felt that she could want no other food, need no other air to breathe.
    She remembered her mother diving from the jetty into the dark water, circling down past the parrot fish and the long-snouted
     garfish, until Silky could barely make her out, her plump body shimmering greenish in the deep water. She seemed to stay under
     forever, and it scared Silky and Morgan, but Daddy would simply smile.
    “Is by the riverside I first met your mother. She was in the water swimming, like some kind of manatee. Mamadjo woman, mermaid
     woman. Happy in the sea, happy in the river!” He laughed. “What a man your daddy must be, eh, to make a fair maid from the
     river consent to come and live on dry land with him?”
    The children wouldn’t be reassured, though, until she burst to the surface again, not even winded.
    Their mother had tried to teach them both to swim, but the sight of her sinking into the black water appalled them. Morgan
     refused to be coaxed in any deeper than the shallows. Silky remembered him shaking his head no, how the sunlight would make
     diamonds of the water flying from his tight peppercorn curls. For herself, she had loved the feeling of body surfing, but
     wouldn’t put her whole head under the water. She’d stick her face in just far enough to be able to see the grunts flit by.
     She never learned to dive beneath the surface the way her mother did. “Just try to go deeper, nuh, sweetheart?” Mummy would
     say, undulating her arms to show her how to stroke through the water. “You and Morgan can both do it; you’re my children.
     I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
    But Silky hadn’t wanted to be swallowed up by that dark wetness.

    She had another dream that night. In it, she had survived the flood from the previous nightmare. She was swimming on the surface,
     above the drowned lands. Bloated corpses bumped her from time to time. The horror made her skin prickle. She put her face
     into the water to inspect the damage below her. She could see submerged roads, tiny fish nibbling at dissolving lumps of flesh,
     a sea anemone already blossoming on a disintegrated carcass that had sunk to the sea bed.
    The sea gave a greenish cast to the rotting flesh of the drowned people. In the rigor of death, a man clutched at a slab of
     coral the size of a dinner table. The coral glowed reddish gold in the flickering water. The man’s face was turned up towards
     her. His dying gasps for air had contorted it into a ghastly scream. Watery light glistened off his teeth, turning them to
     gleaming coins. Silky was terrified. Just then, a freak wave rose and slammed her down into the depths, tossing her against
     the drowned man. The current rearranged his features. It was Morgan. His eyes opened and he reached a beseeching hand out
     to his sister. She couldn’t stop herself; she screamed. She expected the brine to flood her lungs, burning them, filling them
     like sponges, but it entered her body slowly; sweet and sustaining, like a breath of air. In disbelief, she heaved, trying
     to expel the liquid from her stomach.
    She woke in terror, blowing hard. She was lying in bed, a few strands of her hair crushed between her face and the pillow.
     Some of it had worked its way into her mouth. The hair tasted brackish as the sea, as though she’d been crying in her sleep.
    Silky lay shivering under the icy sheets, trying to get rid of the image of herself drowned, swollen full of salty water.
     She was afraid that if she hadn’t woken up, the sea would have changed her, rotting the flesh of her dream hands and feet
     into corrupt parodies of flukes, while eels snapped at her melting flesh. Her mamadjo mother could live in the sea like a
     mermaid, but she could not.

    The pears were ripe. Silky climbed the tree with a basket hooked over one shoulder, a long scarf inside it. She wedged the
     basket into a crook of the tree so that she would have her hands free to pick.