The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson Page A

weird patch of skin had appeared the last time.
    Some of the other beings in there with us started clapping; those that had hands, that is.
    Punum the purple triangle looked at the baby; don’t ask me how I could tell she was looking. Not like she had eyes, or anything. She went all jangly around her gold-lined edges. “Jesus. What is that thing?”
    “I think I just gave myself a baby.” The kid kind of had myface, only with a beak. The irises of its eyes were yellow, shading inward to bright green pupils. It stared calmly at me with them. It only had nine floppy little legs. I guess the two mating ones came in when it got its first period, or had its first wet dream, or both, or something. It’d need to be a hermaphrodite to fertilize itself, right? I think maybe. Its legs weren’t as sticky as mine. And not black, either. Kind of a tortoiseshell brown, almost see-through.
    The baby whipped some of its scary legs toward my face. I yelped and ducked my head, but I was too slow. The baby didn’t hurt me, though. It just started tapping on my chin.
    “What’s it doing that for?” asked Punum.
    I felt like I was going to upchuck. I felt like I was supposed to upchuck. “I think it’s hungry,” I said. And I was supposed to feed it my own stomach contents, like birds did. But there was no way I was going to hurl in public, even if this was really a coma, with people—well, things—watching me, much less spit it all into a baby’s mouth. But the feeling was getting stronger, moving upward into my chest. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. It could starve for all I cared, or learn to drink formula. I clamped my mouth tightly shut and held my breath, willing the upchuck feeling to go away. It didn’t work, and I was going to spit up any second. In panic, I reached deep inside myself and pushed . That’s the only way I could describe it.
    We began to fade out. Thank heaven. Anywhere but here. But as we were leaving the dream, I heard, in a really big voice but weak and from far away, “Scotch! Oh, God, you gotta help me! It hurts so bad!”
    Richard! He was here! I didn’t dare open my mouth to answer, for fear of spewing. Instead I tried to, I dunno, unfade us back into the dream. Richard!
    . . . but Punum and I were sprawled on the ground on Lake Shore Boulevard now, outside Bar None with its torn-open front. Punum’s chair was on its side. Its wheels were spinning, as though it’d only just fallen over. Her crutches were lying nearby. We were in a puddle. “You okay?” I asked her.
    Her face was blank with confusion, but she replied, “Yeah. Damn, I get tired of people asking me that. Fix my chair, would you?”
    I did. She pulled herself over to it and clambered into it. “Hey,” I said, “were we in . . . Did we just . . . Was I out just now? How’d we get outside? How come it’s light out?”
    It wasn’t all that light. More like early morning. Kinda dark, and the world was a mess. Buildings with smashed windows. An ambulance careening the wrong way up the street, its siren blaring. People standing outside buildings, clutching injured arms and legs. People crying. Shit lying in the road; desks, a smashed-up refrigerator that looked as though it’d fallen from an upper story. Power lines torn loose and lying on the sidewalk and the road. Way too many people huddled at the nearest streetcar stop, like the streetcar hadn’t shown up in ages. Punum took it all in, then turned to me. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “That was seriously weird. Do you remember anything at all?”
    Someone had stretched yellow police tape in an “ X ” across what used to be the glass front of the bar. We hadn’t been lying in a puddle. The whole street was wet. “You were a purple triangle.”
    “For real? I could have sworn I was a hat stand.”
    “Did you see me?”
    “Yeah. You were a big bowl of licorice Jell-O.”
    “Gross.”
    “And you had a baby.”
    “Well, at least you got that part