SHORTLISTED
RACHEL CHIN
Skin split open overnight and out spilled this primordial soup. The tremendous rupture of liquid prebiotic memory splattered the bedsheets and window blinds to leave a shredded husk of a body behind. The surface shone with a slick, oil-like sheen. It pulsed, rhythmically, recalling some sort of tide. There was no way of guessing whose gravity this belonged to, not at seven-thirty in the morning.
It was unclear if the soup answered to a higher or an inner power. More dense than wide, total and amorphous, the soup was everything and nothing. It was a marvel that the bedroom served as an adequate container, though it remained possible that its four walls, plastered with sun-faded photos and glow-in-the-dark crescent moons and stars, would only function as yet another unstable vessel. The soup, brimming with unknowable depths and constant volatility, seemed to threaten further collapse. Or, at least, stains.
These things happen.
“Maybe in foreign,” was the irritable response over that morning’s breakfast, a formerly innocuous cornmeal porridge. “When I was growing up, you could never just shed your human shape and dissolve into formless matter. You woulda been beat within an inch of your life.”
The father of what had since become soup then kissed his teeth for emphasis. His distaste was evident. Perhaps in days of yore, disembodiment was something you could thrash out of an organic solution of obscure origin, but not anymore. Perhaps this was the fault of ages, that their society had strayed so far from enforcing order through force and fear, that children believed they could balloon and bubble and burst overnight before fragmenting the very fabric of existence.
Debatable merits of corporal punishment aside, something still needed to be done. There was still that morning’s appointment at the passport office to think about.
Amid the great inconvenience of it all, it was impossible to tell if this event was supposed to be a curse or tragedy or what. There was nothing to make head or tail of. All that remained was a shimmering expanse of organic compounds, the looming dread of Kingston city morning traffic and the fact that they were now running behind if they wanted to beat the long line to get inside. It was already so difficult just to get the time off from work and to organise who could have the car when, to now have to deal with the dramatics of abiogenesis. This was the last thing anyone needed this morning. It was a question of consideration, plain and simple.
The mother of what had since become soup stood in the bedroom doorway, waiting for some acknowledgement of this disrespect. With one arm akimbo and one foot tapping out impatience against the ceramic tile, her eyes narrowed at the scene before her. The door handle could have come off in her grip, the way she was white knuckling it. Of course, the soup could acknowledge some indeterminate gravity and swell with abstruse tides, but she had to stand there and wait for a response.
“So you really have nut’n fi say fi yuself?”
Being soup, of course not.
Throwing both hands to heaven, she turned her back and left the room. Oh, that soup would have two shoulders to shake. Oh, that soup would have a rawse to beat. But no, everything came down to her to decide what to do now, as it always did, as of course she had to do everything in her house herself, as one day she would jus’ drop dead and alla unnu would realise.
And if her husband wanted to keep grousing about how late it was then he could damned well get up and make himself useful instead of sitting on his carrouches fi jus’ complain, complain, complain, and then maybe they could leave the house in a timely fashion, Jesus Christ.
A familiar exhaustion began to prickle against her shoulders. She had never been able to tell if this came from without or within, but if she did not shake it off soon, it would begin to sink its way deep inside her. She could pay it no mind, but she could not really ignore it. She would have to let it slurry into a series of associations in her head. She could not imagine that she would ever have made it so far into her twenties and dissembled thusly. And to have done so under her parents’ roof? She did not understand this, at all. Was living here so impossible that one would have come so completely undone?
In the face of such great unknowns, she had no choice but to keep it together. She had never had that luxury of choice. There was only ever the need to act. There was only ever the need to keep it together. She had no choice but to keep it together.
The tightness in her shoulders triggered her recall. There was one thing she had that could help. Though such cellular retrogression was new, it was not as if the pickney (or what had been such) had never before rendered evolution inchoate. What was now left of the prior form lay strewn along the bedroom walls and floor, fragmented beyond repair, but there was at least another human skin waiting in the downstairs storage closet.
For the past ten years, this spare form lay draped from a clothing hanger, shed as neatly as a snake’s. Ordinarily, these could be pretty tricky to come by. Most people, it turned out, did not ever experience a cataclysmic reckoning with the tenuous bounds of a physiological condition. Even if you were to, for example, rope each limb of a person to four different horses and then set the steeds galloping in different directions, the body would simply rip at the joints and the human at the centre, the being, would simply die. As mediaeval as it sounded, it was many aeons more civilised than soup.
At present, although the preserved human skin in the downstairs storage closet had served for a fourteen-year-old, it wasn’t as though there was an alternative. There remained the single rip down the spine which resembled the fracture in a chrysalis, but this was nothing she couldn’t stitch back together. It would be a tight fit, but the only thing that mattered (in a manner of speaking) was that the face was the same as the last passport photo.
With the skin slung over her shoulder, the mother of what had since become soup ascended the staircase to embark on the task ahead. She would not repeat herself to her husband, resigned as she was to take charge of the situation. In a house full of organic material, she was again alone. It took all her concentration to hold the delicate juvenile skin open as she scooped up as much of the soup as she could through the split in the back. She did not care if she collected every last drop so long as there was enough to regain personhood. As long as there was enough for them all to move on with the day, then they could do just that.
Past the undue labour and the sweat of her brow, which was all that she could process, she had been one to keep her insides within her. She had done so her whole life. She had once even carried the soup inside her, and rendered everything human once before. So why was she here, now, kneeling at times on the hard floor with her bad knee, having to do this all again? Where did things all begin, actually? She did not understand where this was all coming from. Perhaps she was to blame. Perhaps this had been waiting a long time to manifest. Perhaps this was carried in the bloodline like an evil, waiting in the veins, such total and utter collapse.
She did not always have the name for her shoulders’ pain, but she did not ever have to guess how much it weighed.
At last, the balancing act of skin and soup was complete. The mother had to set about stitching the spine together. She held the opening steadfast in her grip. A slight but obvious ripple continued to billow underneath the fourteen-year-old features, which were at pains to hold twenty-something years of growth inside. The limbs were as gangling as ever, the lips just a little too wide for the face, the faint goat-like stink still hormonal and pervasive.
The mouth twisted now into childish contempt. “Why do you still have this?”
It was a good question. “Yuh luddy,” was the only response.
They, as a unit, as a body, as a whole, were also late.
The hour was edging perilously close to eight, and they had to get going. Without further event, the family embarked on the painful wait in traffic. Their peace was uneasy. All they had to do was make it to the passport office without making any mention of what had come to be that morning. The skies were empty save for the ancient sun. The mother cut her eye behind her to hazard a look at the child. Again, a child in all senses of the word, and not just relative to her being a mother.
Already, there was a leak.
“Pickney. Pickney.” They had already fallen back into familiar patterns. Reflexive, easy. Her voice served as warning: “Mi will give you something fi cry ’bout.”
A long line of bodies lay in wait for them when they arrived in the parking lot. This was the part of the queue that snaked its way outside the entrance to grow longer and longer as the day dragged on. They stood underneath a wide white tent, a courtesy and shield against the brutal sunshine. It helped and was comforting that no one they knew was there. The only thing any of them recognised in those waiting strangers was the slight sag to the torso, where they had begun to crumple under life’s demands. A few retained a tight shine in their eyes. That morning did offer the promise of renewed potential (or, passport). A world of possibility lay ahead of them— more lines outside more embassies, more lying supplicants to more foreign governments, more hoping, more waiting, more opportunity to at last become part of another body.
Once the car had come to a stop, out stepped the child first, followed closely behind by the mother: “You have your photos with you?”
“Yes.”
“You have the money?”
“Yes!”
“You have the old passport?”
Of course not. Not even allowing herself the satisfaction of a changed expression, the mother reached into her handbag to procure it. The farewell they shared was choppy and uncertain, like one could not decipher what the other was talking about. Mother and child stopped to stare at each other.
“What are you doing?” The child had the audacity to ask. With chin gestured towards vehicle, “Don’t you have work?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing? Don’t ask me these questions, alright? Not this morning. Who else gwaan stay with you?”
“I don’t need you to stay with me.” Again, the contorted mouth. “I can handle an appointment on my own. I’m an adult.”
For as clear as the day was, the atmosphere was charged by an unseen and distant tempest. Later, it would rain. It would pour.
Whatever silence befell them was by accident. The immensity of all there was to be said, the infinite morass of it, hurtled at incomprehensible velocity through every atom in the air and every fibre in the nervous system. It was as if all had already come to light, already come to be, already come to pass. So then, what else was she supposed to say?
The mother stood there in the parking lot, eyes narrow against the glare. “If you insist,” she said, got back into the car and left.
The pain in her shoulders did not disappear but was by now drowned out by a sinking feeling in her stomach. It was as if it were collapsing in on itself. She wondered if this was how it all began, if she was now on the precipice of devolving herself. Yet, somehow, she doubted it. This was, she could tell, nothing. It was more than nothing. It was empty. Void.
Time would be the only authority from there onwards. It was only a matter of time. Soon, she would get the call — how anyone would find her number she could not quite yet decipher — and she would then have to learn that she was correct in predicting that the child had yet again dematerialised. How else was the pickney going to learn? How hard was it? To know better, to do better, to act better, to be better.
The hours continued to press in on each other, the dread compounding like an encroaching migraine, until at last it simply vanished. It was noon, and she would make a detour to the passport office on her way home for lunch, exactly as planned. Neck craned from the parking lot, she half-expected a number of civil servants to flood out the front doors in distress. Instead, only one reedy pre-pubescent came shambling towards the passenger’s side.
“How did everything go?” she wanted to know.
“It was fine.”
“Just fine?”
“Yes?” Sudden remorse followed behind. “Sorry. I just want to go home.”
Another silence emerged on the ride back. The two bodies went their separate ways once they made it through the entryway. Perhaps this would be the new normal for the household, and perhaps it suited them all just fine to have a child that still resembled one. It was hard to know, and even harder to ask. There were no answers without inquiry. Yet without question, how would they discern whether they had entered into a new era or not? Calling out what had occurred that morning felt the same as calling it down. Better not to discuss it, as with most everything else.
“Mummy,” called out a soft voice from upstairs. “Can you come here and help me with something, please?”
By the time she made it up, the child had already started sliding the fourteen-year-old skin off.
“What are you doing?” the mother demanded, distraught. She attempted to intervene, holding the face steady. A slight, insistent current billowed the human shape in and out of proportion.
“It has to come off. It doesn’t fit anymore.”
“What you mean it don’t fit?” The mother could spot the rupture in real time, widening at the neck. “It never work this morning? What happen to you now?”
Just that morning, when she had hauled the skin into the bedroom, the only thing inside had been a haunting emptiness. They were right back where they had started. No, this was even further beyond. She did not know if she could bear witness to this.
“Mummy, I can’t do it anymore. Please, just let it go. I’m so tired.”
“What you mean? Tell me what is happening to you.”
“I don’t know.” The voice fell further apart. “I don’t know.”
There in that bedroom, standing over the remains of high school belongings and a tattered twentyish body, the refitted adolescence slipped from them both.
Maturation, since forgotten on the floor, had once bloomed into tenderness— a slow-growing, hard-earned affection for a rigid and sharp and awkward teenager. The skin of a young adult had made newfound patience and straight posture from the vestiges of poor form. Everything had seemed so healthy, once. Everything had seemed so whole.
Both then and now, when she looked upon the finest details and features of her child, she recalled how small it had all been in the beginning, held against her cheek, soft as baby’s breath.
The eyes, dark brown and long lashed, were losing focus. “I just can’t do it anymore. You can keep it if you want.”
“It’s not for my sake. What am I going to do with it?”
Everything was leaking out in her arms and would never be the same again.
Rachel Chin is a writer and artist from Kingston, Jamaica. Her work explores movement at every scale, from migration to emotion, examining adaptation as a negotiated relationship to reality. She is a 2024 Céline Bureau resident writer and a 2021 JAFTA-PSF Screenwriting fellow. A trained but lapsed historian, she has her MA in History from McGill University and her BA in History from Columbia University.
