The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson

have been sitting on my ear. And my eyes appeared to be in my elbow. Both of them in one elbow, except I could see just fine.
    There were other people, also seated in rows of seats. If you could call them “people.” A few looked human, except for the bandicoot heads. And the arms made of smoke. And the fact that you could see through their chests and they each had three hearts beating inside. And the jointed metal legs. Okay, they didn’t look like people at all. But way more so than the ones that looked like a cross between a melty, burning wax candle and the color three, or the ones that tasted like yesterday and whistled like empty brains. It smelled weird in there. Lilac-y, if lilacs were to be nightmares soaked in regrets. Where were we headed? What in the world hadjust happened? Had I hit my head back in the bar? Maybe this was a concussion or something. Maybe I was dying. I should have been way more freaked than I was, but my stomach was all twisted up inside with worry about Rich. Had it been a bomb, back there in the bar? Had Rich maybe gotten on someone’s wrong side while he’d been in jail? Maybe somebody’d showed up at the reading to blow him up, or something? But then, what was that thing we’d seen outside the window before I’d gone away? Shooting up into the sky? That hadn’t been in the bar. That hadn’t even been on land. It’d looked as though it were out in the lake.
    The walls of the train thingie were wet and flexing. My perverse brain immediately thought of intestinal smooth muscle, and I felt even more weirded out than I already was. Damn that surprise bio quiz that Mr. Butler had sprung on us today. I didn’t even know what smooth intestinal muscle looked liked for real, though I could draw a diagram of it.
    Something else about me felt wrong. Yeah, I know; understatement. I looked down at my legs. “Oh, God,” I whimpered.
    My seatmate, a purple triangle with an elephant’s trunk, twitched. “Scotch?” it said. “Holy crap, is that you?”
    “Punum?”
    “Am I in a coma?” the triangle replied. She sounded miserable. “Am I dying?”
    “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” I said. “What was that thing coming out of the lake? Did you see that?”
    “Yeah. It exploded. That was freaky.”
    “No, that was just weird,” I replied. “This right here is freaky. Where are we?”
    She was all outlined in gold. Me, I was . . . I stared down at my legs, all eleven of them. Or maybe only nine, since two of them seemed to be Punum’s as well. “Wait; are you holding my hand?”
    “I grabbed your wrist when shit started to go weird. Now, I don’t know what part of you I’m holding. Feels like your ankle. Both ankles.”
    “Let go of me,” I said. “You’re not my type.”
    “I can’t,” wailed the purple triangle. “I’m stuck.”
    “Oh, goody.” My ear stung. I knew that was bad for some reason. Nine legs or eleven, all of my legs looked like half-melted black rubber. They were some busy legs, too. I was sharing two of them with some mouthy punk chick I didn’t like, and two more of them were intertwined with each other, with puffy-looking bulges where they touched. Where had I seen something like that before? Oh, crap. Earthworms. In that video we saw in bio class. Were my legs trying to mate with each other? Probably explained why I’d been feeling this tickling sensation, well, in places I didn’t want to think about right then. Could give Punum the wrong idea.
    “Whatever I’m tripping on,” said Punum, “I don’t like it.”
    I didn’t answer her, though, because right then, one of the puffy places on my mating legs bulged a little more—it felt as though my leg was yawning—and spat out a tiny version of the floppy-legged thing I’d become. “Holy shit!” I said. I managed to catch the baby before it rolled off me onto the floor of the train, or whatever we were in. It immediately wound sticky legs around the place on my wrist where that