Text copyright © 2021 by Nalo Hopkinson

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

eISBN: 9781542032681

Cover illustration by Natasha Cunningham

Cover design by Alex Merto

Published in coordination with Plympton Literary Studio

“My brother is all the time putting soccer on TV when I want to watch tennis. I forgive him.”

—Embroidered square, Malawi group quilt project “The Forgiveness”

BURRI CREATES NEW LINE OF AFRICAN-INSPIRED KNITWEAR

Last week, designer Agnetta Burri introduced Forgetful, her new line of knitwear for the summer season. The bold colors spill in splashes of geometric shapes that cling unabashedly to the wearer’s body, the design characterized by finger-hiding sleeves and long trains on skirts, dresses, and pants alike. In an interview given poolside at her Lake Geneva chalet, the 27-year-old Swiss designer said, “I’m working with ‘The Forgiveness Project.’ I’m sure you’ve heard of it. A group of teenage girls from a village in Mawi, Mali, something exotic-sounding like that. They’re making this huge knitted quilt and working these, like, Arabic proverbs into the weave. I think it’s Arabic. And maybe it’s prayers, not proverbs. Well, I’ve contracted with them to create quilt squares for display in my boutique. It’s like, ‘Forgive and Forget,’ right? They’re writing some new stuff for me.”

Burri, who has a degree in molecular biochemistry, was originally the founder of a tech startup working on delivery methods for sending cancer-fighting agents to targeted parts of the body. She moved on from that project into the world of haute couture. She has used her biochemistry background to develop a proprietary technique for impregnating the fibers of each of her pieces with a story that will temporarily soak into the wearer’s skin. “No, you won’t be able to read it. Nothing will show on the skin or in the fabric. You kind of absorb it, like those topical painkillers. And then the story just gets transported into the body, and over the course of a few days, you’ll be able to recite the whole thing. You become a sort of megaphone for a story the world needs to hear. There are so many people whose stories don’t get told, don’t you think? I just want to do my part. And in a week’s time, the nanites dissolve; you, well, pass them out in your urine. Just these little nanobot stories in a compound with low molecular weight and a high water and lipid solubility. Those penetrate the skin the easiest. It’s pretty safe. I’ve had it tested and certified. Everything’s above board.”

When asked which stories will be woven into the pieces, Burri would not go into detail. “I must protect my sources,” she said coyly. “I’d hate for anyone to take advantage of these innocent young girls.”

Now that it’s been unveiled at Paris Fashion Week, the Forgetful line will go into mass production. Burri says that the mass-produced pieces will not have stories embedded in them. “I mean, that wouldn’t exactly be consensual, right? No, it’s only the custom-made couture pieces from the collection that have them. Those are going to a handful of customers, and they’ve all signed consent forms. The artisans and models of my couture house, too.”

2032

“Interest on foreign aid loan is too high. My country can never pay it off. God says usury is a sin. I forgive you.”

—Attributed to “The Forgiveness Quilt,” author anonymous

A hush had fallen in the gallery. It wasn’t like there were a ton of visitors; it was only a student group exhibition, after all. But this was it for Wenda’s class cohort. After this, the class of 2032 would be able to graduate. There would be no more of Wenda having to wrangle with her committee over whether Black protest art was “overinscribed.” No more security guards mistaking her for an intruder when she was cleaning up the studio after TAing late-night classes. Her classmates would go on to do whatever they did. And Wenda would probably go to jail. But she’d have her fucking degree.

They were all watching her. Her friend Mèdouze caught her eye. He was standing next to his own project, a video installation. Queer trans identity, color theory, found objects; right now, Wenda was so nervy that the details blurred in her mind, even though she’d helped him work on his artist’s statement. Mèdouze made a heart-shaped gesture against his torso and blew her a kiss for encouragement. Wenda smiled shakily back at him.

She’d already prepared the tabletop by wrapping it in clear garbage bags and taping them down. She got on her knees to reach under the display table for the cardboard boxes containing the first part of her performance piece. Her hands were quivering. Part nerves, part exhaustion. Sleep had been hard to come by recently.

One by one, she pulled out the big cardboard boxes. She’d meant to use wooden crates, but she’d run out of money. The guerilla effect of old packing boxes was probably better for this performance, anyway.

Wenda sat back on her heels with the boxes spread out on the floor in front of her. Some of her classmates were frowning, some smiling, some indifferent. Toulema, her committee chair, had her eyes down, taking notes.

Wenda’s bones were lead. Her eyes had turned to sand. Last night was only the most recent of many all-nighters. She blew out tired air, trying not to fret about what Toulema might be writing about her.

She pulled on the crisscrossed flaps of the box closest to her. They popped open with a soft puff, filling her nose with dust mites and the smell of old things. She sneezed. She reached into the box for one of her finds and unwrapped the tissue paper protecting it to reveal a ceramic tobacco jar in the shape of a man’s head. He was middle brown. His expression was lascivious. His lips took up most of the bottom half of the jar. He had gold hoops in his ears. The lid was in the shape of a turban. For the umpteenth time, Wenda wondered: Was this really some nineteenth-century white guy’s muddled notion of Blackness, or just his idea of kitsch?

She put the jar on the table and kept unboxing. The crowd began an uneasy murmur, leaning in closer to see better. Wenda unboxed the various Blackamoors attached to candlesticks, lamp bases, bookends. Serving, always serving. Stick pins in the likeness of little boys with skin literally black, also sporting the ubiquitous turban plus jeweled bell sleeves, puffy pantaloons, and slippers with upcurled toes. Ashtrays, always in pairs, in the shapes of men and women (always one of each), art deco sleek in pantaloons and little vests, sitting with their legs akimbo, wrapped around the bowls meant for collecting cigarette ash. The women always with their nubbin breasts swinging open to the breeze. She’d found any number of brooches, vintage 1940s and 1950s, displaying the same dismissive uncertainty of aim (“Mawi, Mali, something exotic-sounding like that . . .”). The brooches depicted enameled vaguely Afro-Asiatic faces wearing improbable crowns. The Jemima figurines and cookie jars beamed their pleasure at being kitchen slaves. Mèdouze gasped audibly at those.

There was more: ashtrays in the form of constipated Black toddlers sitting in outhouses, straining as they screamed, openmouthed (the open mouths were where the hot cigarette ash went). As ever, Wenda swallowed down the lump of hurt and betrayal that rose in her throat every time she saw this stuff. She could barely stand to touch it. She wished she could apologize to the pieces, contorted as they were into caricatures happy to serve, happy to entertain. No matter. This ended today. She was going to proclaim her truth, like the young African women knitting “The Forgiveness Quilt.” People loved thinking that the quilt was an act of letting go of blame. Fuck that. Wenda knew different. Nah, those girls were naming the injustices they’d suffered for the world to see.

Worst were the reproductions. The same cornucopia of jocular racism, but newer, shinier, produced within Wenda’s lifetime. They sickened her. But the more modern polymers from which they were molded were the easiest to inspirit. Her iwin would penetrate the resin, carrying a plasticizer that would soften the material into pliability.

She creaked to her feet, grimacing at the grinding of her knees. Around the edges of the table, she ceremoniously laid out all the joke ephemera: Valentine’s Day cards, which depicted the “couple” as a cartoonishly uglified Black girl and boy in tattered clothing, the boy offering wilted wildflowers and the girl declaring through lips fat as hams a vaguely salacious delight in some white person’s contemptuous rendition of Black speech; old postcards of little Black boys, their faces twisted in pain as geese snapped off the chubby penises they’d stuck through holes in wooden fence posts to take a leak.

The assortment of horrors was now fully on display. Wenda straightened and arched her back to ease its twinging. She would’ve cringed in shame if anyone but Mèdouze had seen how she’d been spending so much of her free time—and her scant teaching assistant’s salary—trolling antique shops and internet auction sites to buy this crap. It would have looked to the outside eye like internalized racism of the obsessive-compulsive kind. She was calling the performance “Clap Back.” Some aspects of it were as illegal as balls. Sometimes protest art just was; how you gonna change the world if you play within its rule set? She’d fudged the details with her committee; what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Besides, once they witnessed it in action, she hoped the final result would blow them away. If it worked. She only had one chance to get this right. If it flopped, all she’d have was a table piled with ugly shit.

INFLUENCER JODRI LAFITTE THE FIRST TO UTTER WORDS HIDDEN IN FORGETFUL COUTURE LINE

Mr. Jodri Lafitte, internet darling and makeup artist, today was the first to utter a “storylet” absorbed through his skin from a sweatshirt custom-made for him by designer Agnetta Burri’s couture house. Mr. Lafitte recorded the whole event and uploaded it immediately to his image channel.

click to view video

Speaking eerily in the voice of a young woman, Mr. Lafitte intoned:

“A police came to our school and said if girls wear tight dresses, boys will molest us. I forgive him.”

Then he giggled in surprise at the sounds coming from his mouth. Mr. Lafitte said the sensation of nanites being absorbed into the flesh of his forearm “tickled, like bubbles in champagne.”

According to Burri, Mr. Lafitte will experience the compulsion to repeat the words six or seven times a day for a week before the nanites degrade and are flushed out safely in his urine. The sweatshirt is one of only 17 pieces from Burri’s new Forgetful line of clothing to be custom-made for a handful of select buyers. All 17 pieces have a quotation embedded into a patch of their fabric’s weave.

Wenda lifted the final items out of the last of the boxes: apron, mask, surgical gloves, paintbrush, and a tightly sealed jar. She donned the protective clothing, then held the jar up to the light. The clear liquid inside sloshed with the viscosity of slightly soapy water. To look at it, you would think it was water. Wenda’d been stashing it in her fridge. A couple of times, she’d absentmindedly been about to drink from it, till the smell—a combination of heavy fleshiness and ammonia—had alerted her. After that, she’d labeled the jar clearly with “Iwin” and sealed it into a sandwich bag for good measure.

Iwin. That’s what Wenda had dubbed the invisible sprites floating in her custom blend of plasticizers, amino acids, and dissolved glucose. The English word “ghost” didn’t quite do it for her, so she’d gone with her dad’s native Yoruba word. The world had other names for what the iwin were—“micro-this,” “pico that”—but these were hers, obedient to her. So she’d named them, as any doting mama would.

What had eventually worked as a carrier was a strain of Clostridium sporogenes her poor cat, Sable, had picked up. The vet said he’d probably gotten cut or something while roaming around the fenced backyard. The infection had gotten into the bone. He’d looked as though he were rallying, so the vet had let Wenda take him home. But Sable died a few hours later. Wenda buried him in her landlady’s backyard. She figured it was only justice that she enslave the nasty strain, put it to work as payback for Sable. With any luck, the iwin had infiltrated the bacteria, suppressed the natural eucaryote behaviors, and replaced them with the iwin’s own programmed ones.

Thank heaven for that double major. Even so, the coding that had gone into the iwin had been a stone bitch. She’d found a code string on the Dark Web and blended it into one of her own, adding “wake” and “cease” prompts, and a trigger. Tricky, but she’d finally gotten it as close to right as she could tell. Stroke of luck, finding the string that the poster said had “fallen off a truck.” It consisted of instructions for penetrating and altering dense substances—just what she’d needed.

With the paintbrush, Wenda carefully coated each of the horrid memorabilia with the liquid from the jar. People wrinkled their noses at the smell wafting up from the table: life and unlife in combination. As she worked, she quietly whispered over and over, breathing the words into the still-wet coating: “Please make this work. Please make this work.” Maybe speaking her intention would help. It certainly couldn’t hurt. Intention was plenty. It had brought the horrors on the table into existence, after all.

Done. She set her paintbrush down. Now she had to work quickly. Only a couple of minutes before the plasticizer penetrated the pieces.

She took down her heavy dreadlocs, silver-threaded after years of grad school. This part of the work was better done with unfettered hair. She pulled the whistle out of her apron pocket. She’d carved it from a thigh bone of Sable’s, cutting around the infected part. It was clumsily made, full of chipped-out places. Wenda hadn’t known how to carve, so she’d followed an online tutorial on making a whistle out of dried bone. She’d given herself a bunch of accidental nicks. She discovered that rubbing the blood into the bone and then polishing the surface gave the whistle a pleasing brown stain, like antiquing.

Heart thrumming, Wenda blew a breathy tune through the whistle. She’d designed those notes, those particular vibrations played in that order and that timbre, to activate the iwin. This was modern-day hoodoo. Time was, you’d have had to boil a black cat alive, not salvage from an already dead one.

Wenda clutched the whistle and waited. Seconds passed. Wenda bit the inside of her bottom lip nearly raw with the tension of it. Toulema watched judgingly, the inside corners of her eyebrows squeezed together.

There came the faintest pulse, as though someone had patted the skin of the air like the surface of a drum. “Whoa,” murmured one of the onlookers. A few people clapped their hands to their ears.

Wenda’s scalp prickled. Toulema yelped. On the table, the memorabilia were beginning to move. The iwin had molded and jointed them, giving them insectoid, limb-like levers, their edges imperfectly aligned with other elements of the sculptures and drawings. A lamp glided around the tabletop on hairlike appendages scuttling beneath its base.

Wenda dimly knew she was hyperventilating. Her teeth were chattering out a tympanum of terrified exhilaration. In the fugue state brought on by accumulated years of worry and sleep deprivation, her vision doubled. She knew what she was seeing, but her mind’s eye overlaid it with what she’d dreamed of: Turbans being unwound from sweating heads. Clay and enamel knuckles scrubbing relief into crinkled hair that had been trapped under the masking winding cloths for centuries. Black and brown fingers buttoning vests closed to cover nipple-less breasts, previously exposed. The constipated babies, their bellyful bowels loosened, shitting out flaming tobacco embers with explosions of sulfur, then running giggling away from their burning outhouse prisons to play with their friends. Lips relaxing from cooning rictus into genuine, full smiles and raucous laughter. Endless slices of watermelons being drop-kicked into the air to burst apart and rain down sweetness. Water bowls that had strained unreleased arms for hundreds of years being upended over their carriers’ heads, waterfalling cleansing baths. Tattered clothing mending itself into a riot of defiant, contrary stylishness.

Wenda shouted with glee. It had worked. Her shoulders relaxed, more fully than she’d known possible. “No more,” she told her poppets. She raised her voice so the stunned gallery could hear her: “No more being frozen in attitudes of submission, no more fetching and carrying. No more smoking ash tipped through your lips into your screaming baby bellies. Kill those fucking penis-nipping geese and roast them for a party. A fucking party, y’hear? No more pick-a-nigs. You’re retired.”

Her poppets slid down the table legs and followed her as she marched to the gallery’s front door and opened it for them. The New Black streamed through, out into the unsuspecting world. Wenda stayed behind to face her audience.

The attendees glanced uncertainly at each other. Then Mèdouze began clapping. Hesitantly, the rest joined in. Toulema’s brows had ascended into the stratosphere. In the semaphore of Toulema, you never knew whether that was good or bad. But at least she’d put her damning notebook away.

Wenda was too jittery with reaction to know what she felt. It wasn’t over. No one had asked her yet what the iwin-driven poppets were going to do out in the world. For now, she would have a glass of the cheap red wine at the bar, chat with Mèdouze for a bit, then stagger home and collapse into bed.

Rap star Songtesta has announced her intention to reveal her Forgetful phrases at a pop-up private party on her yacht in the very near future. She’s carefully timing when she will first don her Forgetful garment, an elaborately deconstructed ball gown with its seams visible, so that her storylet will be in her bloodstream during the event.

Although none of the mass-produced versions of the Forgetful line contain the surprise storylets, they do have a select number of “The Forgiveness Quilt” sentences screen-printed onto them. Within 24 hours of Mr. Lafitte’s unveiling, department store sales of the clothing skyrocketed 500 percent.

“Auntie gave me gravy with peanuts in it. I nearly died. I forgive her.”

—Malawi group project, “The Forgiveness Quilt”

By the time Wenda dragged herself from sleep the next day, the gallery manager and Toulema had between them left seven messages in her voice mail. She texted them both to tell them she’d be at the gallery in an hour. When she got there, the manager was jigging around just inside the front door, waiting for her. He said, “Can you tell me what’s going on here, Wenda?”

Wenda approached her project table. What she saw made her clap her hands in glee. The table was twice as full of manikins as it had been the day before. Having no further orders programmed into them, they milled around restlessly. But each of the original ones had done its job—raided the city’s antique and thrift stores, found another atrocity similar to itself, and touched it, imbuing it with iwin as well. Then they’d all come back here.

Wenda used her cell phone to videotape documentation showing that there were now more poppets than before. The manager’s questions became more strident. She handed him her cell phone. “Would you record this next bit for me?” she asked. “No sound, though.” Wouldn’t do to have anyone be able to copy the tune.

She stood in front of the table and played the “cease” notes. The manikins went still. Wenda ached to see their unlife taken away from them. Just memorabilia, she reminded herself. Not the real thing. She took her phone back from the manager and thanked him. “They’re deactivated now,” she told him. “Permanently.”

Then she caught a bus to campus. Term wasn’t over yet. She had a discussion to lead that afternoon. Still needed that paycheck, after all.

“Twelve hours working every day in running shoe factory. I have twelve years old. I forgive you.”

—From the Malawi “Forgiveness Quilt,” author anonymous

COUTURIER AGNETTA BURRI ARRESTED

Oh my darlings, how the pricey have fallen! Hold on for the ride; this scandal’s going to be a bumpy one.

Last year, we couldn’t get enough of tech-startup-whiz-kid-turned-designer Agnetta Burri’s Forgetful clothing line. We fell over ourselves in the department stores to pay a good portion of a month’s wages for “destructed” fashion that looked as though it’d been through a trash compactor, then vomited on by a toddler who’d eaten too many Skittles.

But as expensive as the ready-to-wear version of the line was, customized pieces cost a pretty penny more. The 17 wealthy or famous-enough souls who snapped these pieces up received a little something extra woven right into the fabric: invisible micro-robots that sank into the wearer’s skin like shea butter, causing the wearers to randomly recite snappy little phrases from the Malawi “Forgiveness Quilt” project for a week. More about the quilt project later.

After seven days of using their owners as their mouthpieces, the wee robots would deactivate, break down into their component parts, and be flushed harmlessly out of the body. I’m sure you can guess how. Does it all sound just a bit . . . science fiction-y, my dears? Of course it does. The future is here, and we must come to terms with it.

There’s a catch, though—a glitch in the programming. The tiny micro-nanites don’t deactivate or break down before exiting their hosts and being flushed into our sewage systems. In fact, scientists are fearing that some of them may be replicating themselves. The problem was first detected when doctors began reporting on rare but mysterious cases of people developing short-lived urges to quote words of wisdom from “The Forgiveness Quilt” project. (For me, the real horror is imagining how the nanites are getting from our sewers into other people’s bodies. And now I bet you’re imagining it too, aren’t you? Good. I shouldn’t have to bear this burden alone.)

It turns out that La Burri isn’t the hotshot programmer she told us she was. In fact, she didn’t do the work at all. She put a team of coders together, then snatched their work from them before it was finished because she wanted to have the Forgetful clothing line ready in time for the Paris season.

And “The Forgiveness,” my darlings? That heart-warming meme about a group of young African girls using the power of knitting to forgive us all our sins? An utter fabrication, invented by Agnetta Burri to boost her sales! She took a chance on the tried-and-true technique of marrying fashion with light blackface, and as ever, scads of us found it irresistible. Burri didn’t even write the homilies herself! That was uncredited wordsmithing by the artisans who toil in her couture outfit, custom-fitting every dart, pleat, and cunningly shaped French seam.

Overnight, Agnetta Burri has gone from Forbes woman of the year and youngest self-made billionaire to pariah. Forbes has revised its estimate of her net worth to zero, and Fortune magazine just declared her one of the “World’s Most Disappointing Leaders.” Her trial is set for later this year.

In the meantime, my lovelies, if you find yourself mysteriously quoting the words of an overworked sequin setter in a Paris design house, don’t worry. It’ll pass in a week or so. It’s happening to more and more people nowadays. In fact, it’s all the rage.

“Tourists come to see our dolphins. They leave trash that kills the dolphins. Do the dolphins forgive them?”

—From Burri hoax “The Forgiveness Quilt”

Wenda was surprised to see who her visitor was. Usually it was family coming to see her. Even though the charge had only been petty theft, the judge had decided to make an example of her Black ass. A ten-year sentence for making away with a handful of tchotchkes. Whereas this chick had thrown money at her even bigger problem, paid a few million in damages, and had never done a day of jail time. Wenda breathed down the bitter. She knew the way of the world. Had getting herself put in here made even a bit of difference?

She sat at the long table. In a line on either side of her, other inmates were holding conversations with visitors through the plexiglass barrier. There was laughter, tears, shouting: the usual. She picked the phone up and stared at the chicly understated woman sitting across from her. “Ms. Burri,” Wenda said, “what can I do for you?”

To Wenda’s surprise, Agnetta Burri’s eyes were glistening with tears. “How did you do it?” she said. “How did you get them to come back? How did you turn them off?”

Idiot of a woman. Had other people do her work for her, and couldn’t even get that right. Her tech team had quit, had blacklisted her in the industry, and she couldn’t figure out how to undo her own mistake. Wenda replied, “I’ll tell you how. You’ll have to visit my friend for part of it. He graduated in my same year. But I’ll need you to do two things for me.”

“So yeah,” said Mèdouze’s tinny voice over the phone. “Nobody knows who did it, but our whole graduating year had their student loans completely paid off! Undergrad, grad, every discipline, every major! Isn’t that wild?”

“Really?” said Wenda. “Everyone?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Even me too, I guess. I should get my mom to check.” That’d be handy, to get out of prison with no school debt.

Mèdouze said, “You don’t sound surprised.”

“It’s hard to surprise me anymore. Listen, my phone time is almost up.”

“Right. Hey, some woman called. She wants that creepy whistle of yours.”

Huh. Agnetta was really going to try it. “I know who she is. Give it to her. Pretty sure she’ll get it back to you.” The guard was coming her way. “Gotta go, honey. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Three days later, puzzled emptiness was echoing through the “Black Memorabilia” sections of the online auction platforms, at least for a moment; for a few blessed hours, there were no listings for “Cute Little Black Boy Figurines” or “Black Americana.” Vintage shops were reporting thefts, though some people swore they’d watched the collectibles march out of the stores under their own steam. Agnetta Burri was keeping her second promise.

2082

“My parents are making me marry a man five times my age. Someday, I may forgive them.”

—Phrase in the style of “The Forgiveness Quilt” coined by a rogue nanite

In the middle of the night, Xiomara’s phone rang, waking her up.

Why wasn’t Perry in bed beside her?

The phone kept ringing. Scared now, she answered it. Her heart started slamming in her chest. She said, “I’ll be right there, Officer.”

It was nearly 2:30 a.m. by the time she got herself and Perry safely back home. Xiomara put her purse on the living room table. “Come, sit,” she said to Perry. She took him by the hand and led him to the couch, but he just stood there in front of it. His face was drawn. So she said, “Let me tell you a story.” Six years married, and they still played this game with each other.

He gave her a quizzical look; her timing was odd, and she knew it. But he lay on the couch. He had to bend his knees in order to fit. He put his head in her lap. He was trembling. So was she. She took three fibrillating breaths to collect her thoughts and began. “There once was a woman who collected ghosts.” Now, where in the world had that come from? Oh, right. Her grandmother and her precious iwin. Xiomara hadn’t thought about that story in years.

“Was she a sister?” Perry’s voice shook. “The ghost collector?”

“Yes, a sister. Beautifully Black as a moonless night, with one hell of a ’fro. Like Angela Davis in the 1970s big. No, twice as big. A ’fro high as mountains.”

“Old-school woman, then.”

“The oldest. And curves like LA freeways.”

“Yes, Lord.” His body had relaxed a little against her thighs.

Xiomara snapped her fingers to get the house’s attention. She conjured up a drawing pad. The transparent rectangle hung in the air, outlined in green light. She tapped the screen to get the haptics going, selected a clean pencil line of deep, warm brown. A few strokes with her index finger to outline the suggestion of a face, sturdy nose, chewy lips. Lines of experience deepening the face’s beauty. A calm resolve in the eyes. Sure, that could be Nan-Nan as Xiomara remembered her.

“And in that hair,” Xiomara said, “was where she kept the ghosts.”

Perry’s eyes were closed, as though he was drifting off to sleep. After a few seconds, he muttered, “What kinds of ghosts in her hair?”

“What kinds do you want?”

“Happy ones.”

She shook her head. “No Caspers. Not in my story. Think again.”

He considered for a second. He sat up and leaned over her lap so he too could draw on the screen. “Ghosts of the should,” he said. He used his index finger to tap all around the woman’s head. “Ghosts of the will. Hoodoo spirits, their hearts overflowing with centuries of rage. H’ants holding their torn-out eyes in their hands, yet still bearing witness. Duppies and jumbies, and their jamboree is a revolution.” He kept going until Nan-Nan was adorned with a halo of hair. And still he kept tapping at the screen till he was jabbing, stabbing with those fingers and the screen was flashing REDUCE FORCE, REDUCE FORCE.

Xiomara reached out and covered his hand with both of hers. Not that she could do so completely; those big hands were two of the many things she loved about her man. He curled his fingers into his palm and himself into her embrace. He was shaking again. She rocked him as best she could. He tilted his head back, letting her shoulder support it. His eyes were shut. After a time, he gave a shuddery sigh. Opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling. Low, he muttered, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Don’t give them any reason to notice you. None.”

“I didn’t!”

“Did you put the renewal sticker on your license plate, like I told you?”

“Two days ago.”

“Did they think you were someone else?”

He kept staring up into the white nothing of the ceiling above them. “No. They stopped me because they felt like it.” He bit his lips. “They impounded my car. But first they tore the seats apart. Tore them to shreds. Foam and cotton everywhere. I asked them what they were looking for. That’s when they slammed me down over the hood. One of them put his gun right in my face.”

Her stomach leapt up into her throat. “Perry, they could have killed you!”

“Let it go, Xiomara. Yes, they stopped me. Yes, they pulled their guns on me even though I had both hands in the air and they could clearly see I was unarmed. They wrenched my shoulder good; I could hear the joint creaking—”

A single sob burst from Xiomara’s lips.

“—but they didn’t shoot me. I’m not dead. I’m not the statistic this time.”

“This time.”

“Yeah, this time! In this world, in this country, that’s the best I can do!”

“It isn’t good enough!”

They were both breathing hard. Her arms around him had tightened into steel. He winced, trying to shift his shoulder. Xiomara relaxed her grip. Got her breathing under control. “I’m sorry, lover. I’m just glad you’re home.”

He didn’t answer. She tried again: “Can I get you an ice pack for your shoulder?”

He started shivering again. “No ice pack,” he said through chattering teeth. “A couple of ibuprofen would be nice. And some mint tea.”

“That’s it? You sure?”

“Yeah. I’ll take tomorrow off, go to the doctor first thing.”

In the kitchen, Xiomara used the whistling of the kettle to hide the sound of her racking sobs. Then she washed her face and took Perry his tea and the meds.

They went to bed. Eventually, Perry fell asleep, but Xiomara couldn’t. Ghosts of the should, he’d said. Ghosts of the will.

Xiomara sat straight up in bed. She’d just had the most outrageous idea. I mean, who would do something like that? Who would even consider it?

But the notion wouldn’t go away, so consider it she must. It was a terrible idea. She eased herself out of bed and went to the living room. She animated the drawing of the woman she and Perry had done together, giving it three dimensions. It did look a bit like her long-gone Nan-Nan. Xiomara hadn’t spoken with Wenda’s memory bank in years. Wenda’d been a badass. They put her in prison, but she went and found herself the best girlfriend ever in there. And when they were both finally out, they went and found themselves another. Together, the three of them had revived Agnetta Burri’s failed tech startup, the one from before Burri’s ill-fated designer exploits, and turned it into what it’d set out to be in the first place.

Xiomara turned the image on the screen into an icon, linked it to her grandmother’s avatar, and called Wenda up.

The avatar’s eyes brightened in recognition. It smiled at her with Nan-Nan’s mischievous grin. “Hey, Xiomara.”

“Hey, Nan-Nan. It’s good to hear your voice.”

“What’s up, sweetie? You look as though you have something on your mind.”

Xiomara chuckled. Alive or dead, Nan-Nan could always tell. Her memory bank was a far cry from sentient. But it could be uncanny. She remembered that from just after Nan-Nan died. In her grief, Xiomara would talk to Nan-Nan’s avatar for hours every night, until it told her out of the blue that her friends were probably missing her, and she should start hanging out with them again.

Xiomara said, “I just need someone to talk to. Perry’s asleep right now. Nan-Nan, there are still wild micro-nanites out there from that crazy designer lady, right?”

“Yeah. They didn’t all come back to her. At least she managed to switch off their ability to replicate, and that was good enough. The few remaining ones will degrade eventually.”

“I could turn it back on, though. The replication.”

Nan-Nan smiled. “I know you could. You take after your grandma.” Then Nan-Nan’s eyes went wide, a convincing imitation of life. “But you aren’t serious, are you? Why would you want to do that?”

“First I’d have to reprogram them. Make them able to alter gene markers for race.”

She told Nan-Nan her idea. When she was done, the AI busted out laughing, so loud that Xiomara had to turn the sound down so as not to wake Perry. “You want to make everyone Black!”

“Maybe? But, Nan-Nan, here’s what I’m trying to figure out. Whiteness already tries to take everything they want from Blackness. Must they have our skins, too? What evidence would be left of our authentic selves?” As she spoke, Xiomara brought the avatar’s hair to life with ghost after angry, howling ghost. Ghosts that had been enslaved. “And what about everyone else’s identities? There are more than just white and Black people in the world.” She packed more and more ghosts into the image’s hair. Ghosts that had had a dream.

Nan-Nan smiled. Quietly, she said: “Those already paranoid people who are convinced that whiteness is being bred out of existence would really lose their shit.”

Xiomara chuckled. “Yeah.”

“Darling, do you still have the whistle?”

“Yes, Nan-Nan.” It was one of her most prized possessions.

“Well, your name does mean ‘battle ready,’ after all. If you decide to do this, I’ll teach you the two tunes: start code and kill code.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Of course, my lovely. It’s all up to you. Just say the word.”

Xiomara thanked the memory bank and dismissed it. That left only the avatar on the screen. Xiomara stared at it for a long minute. The Nan-Nan that Xiomara knew had had a big ’fro, but she’d seen pics of a younger Nan-Nan, with fat, bouncy dreadlocs down to her hips.

Xiomara began to work on the image again. She cloned the ghosts that made up its hair until the hair separated into sections and lengthened into thick black coils hanging down past its shoulders, each coil a tangled mass, strong and toothy as barbed wire, of striving and fighting and dying and loving and laughing and birthing and singing and worshipping and being uppity or cowed or jubilant or sad and fighting fighting fighting and never giving up. Ghosts that had led their people to freedom.

Ain’t we people, too? she thought. Wouldn’t freeing us be a step toward freeing all humanity? Would dark skin cease to be an axis of violence if everyone had it?

Did she dare? She sat in the dark, trying to decide.

On the screen, ancestor Wenda shakes her head as though to music, the fat, eager coils of her hair slapping across her face as she does. Her iwin flap free, keening scraps of gray that skirl and twirl until they’ve whipped her locks up into a silver cloud cyclone.

The ghost with ghosts in her hair stills. She gives Xiomara a mischievous grin and calmly waits for her decision.

Yet where can we go that they will truly know us?

Into our heads, if we’re lucky,

If we’re lucky, into our lovers’ arms.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2017 David Findlay

Jamaican Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson has been a published author since 1995, with six novels, two collections of short stories, and a chapbook. She has received numerous literary awards, including the World Fantasy Award and the Andre Norton Nebula Award. Between 2018 and 2020, she wrote scripts for the DC Comics series House of Whispers, set in the universe of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. She currently lives in California and is on the faculty of the creative writing department at the University of California, Riverside.