Read Skin Folk for Free Online Page A

bleach, the “sisters” Tania and Raven no relation at all, and they were doing their best straight guy’s
     lesbian fantasy. As soon as they got out of the studio, they shucked the whole act like corn trash from corn and hugged each
     other good-bye before going their separate ways. Raven was a CGA student, blissfully married to a quiet, balding guy with
     a paunch, wore hightop sneakers everywhere, showed around pictures of her kids every chance she got. And Tania, as she walked
     out the door, would be peeling off her false two-inch nails, muttering that her girlfriends would never let her near them
     with knives on the tips of her fingers.
    “… good weekend, Artho.”
    “Huh? Oh, yeah. Bye, Glenn,” he said as Glenn let himself out.
    Artho looked around for the first time in hours. It was well past five. He straightened up, groaning; he could feel each of
     his vertebrae popping as he uncurled from the computer screen. And he was freezing. Charlie was long gone. He and Tamara were
     the only ones left.
    “Lost in the land of skin?” she chuckled at him.
    “Yeah. Be done soon now, though.” He set the files to render, moved to the next computer over—Rahim worked at that one, but
     he was gone too—and called up Tomb Raider. Artho’d gotten pretty good at the game. Masquerading as the impossibly firm-breasted
     Lara Croft, he hunted in a nightmare landscape of demons. He was just killing a ghoul in a spray of blood and bone when the
     door to the office whispered open. A tiny face poked round it.
    “Hey, Artho?” Tamara said, waving sweater-covered fingers at him. “Relative of yours? This isn’t exactly the place for a kid,
     you know.”
    It was the little girl, the one from the food court.
    “What’re you doing here?” Artho blurted out. “Where’s your dad?”
    “Daddy’s always busy making stuff,” came the scratchy response from the tiny face hanging in the doorway. “We do his work
     for him instead.”
    “Huh?” was all that Artho managed in response.
    “Yeah. Each one of us has different jobs. Mine is that I get to go wherever I want, keep an eye on stuff.” The little girl
     stalked on spindly legs into the room. Her knees were still ashy, the lenses of her specs still woozily thick. The wormy mass
     of her long, messy braids seemed to be wriggling out from their ribbons as Artho watched.
    “That’s ridiculous! It’s”—Artho glanced at the clock on his screen—“almost seven-thirty in the evening! You can’t be more
     than seven years old! Who’re your parents? Why are you alone?”
    “So you don’t know her, then?” asked Tamara. She got up, went and knelt by the child. “What’s your name, little girl?” she
     asked sweetly.
    “Didn’t come for you. Came for him.” And the child stomped right past an astonished Tamara. “Whatcha doin?” On the screen,
     Lara Croft waited to be activated by a mouse click. “Oh,” said the little girl. “Do you like that?”
    Artho shrugged. “It’s something to do.”
    She turned to the other screen with its bodies frozen in mid-writhe.
    “Don’t look at those!” Artho said.
    “Just skins sewed together,” she replied, grinning. “Do you like those, then?”
    “Artho, do you know this kid or not?”
    Artho found himself answering the child instead of Tamara: “No, I don’t like them so much. I like people to look more real.”
    “Well, why do you make them look not real, then?”
    From the mouths of babes and sucklings. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” he said ruefully, thinking of how far his
     paycheque wouldn’t stretch this month.
    “Do you like people making you be not real?”
    Artho thought how he’d been late for work that morning because six taxis in a row had refused to stop for him. Thought of
     the guy in the corner store inspecting his money. Of Charlie elbowing him in the ribs a few hours ago. He felt a burn of rage
     beginning. “No, dammit!”
    The ugly child just stood and stared