(S)Kin

by Ibi Zoboi

These braids are to remind you of all the mothers who came before you, like me, your dear mummy. This ritual is so that we sing the song of our skins over and over again like a hymn.

so you do not forget yourself, darling, and how girls like you were born out of flames.

They call us lougarou, but we are only shape-shifting like the waning and waxing moon. Be careful now. Never let anyone see you.

Remember, there are others. But we keep to ourselves. Better divided than united. Always remember that home is wherever you are in the world and in the cosmos.

All the stars, comets, and meteors are kin— the souls of women and girls who were never able to return to their skins.

Our new home with its thick walls and locked doors wants me to stay trapped in my skin— but I am fury and flame. I am a ravenous creature born out of war and all I want to do right now is inhale life so that I can keep on living.

except we are not the sun. We are its daughters. We are meteors and shooting stars who have to learn to live as humans when the old moon wanes and waxes like a temperamental mother.

They have names for us, Marisol. “Newcomers. Refugees. Migrants. Undocumented. Illegal. But they will never call us monsters.”

They call them old stories, fantasy and folklore. I call those stories my life.

The skyscrapers here keep us from flying as high as we can because people seem to want to live in the clouds. They want to kiss the sun too.

They want the power without the magic.

But Mummy always dreamed of the horizon where the sea meets the sun; where the world stretches much farther than our mountains; much wider than our shoreline.

that I would one day be a compass, a lighthouse of a girl guiding her to my namesake.

forever a sole shooting star in the night sky.

And from the sky, it feels as if I have flown out of a cage, but I am no bird.

So as a ball of flame, a flash of light, I aim for the starless sky. I aim for the spiritless souls, emptied of dreams, emptied of knowing that monsters rule the world.

I blame my father and his PhD in anthropology and all those weird masks and knickknacks and old-ass books around the house.

when I dream about my mother, there is always fire.

My biological mother was a Black woman. I was raised by my white father and his white wife. I wear this betrayal on my skin and in my hair.

Oof.

Kate got what she’s always wanted— babies. Kate is my father’s wife. She has always been my father’s wife. And she’s now a mother. Just not my mother.

Kate has been mean to everyone since the babies, since the pregnancy, since the fertility treatments— and maybe, since I came into her life as a baby.

The thing about monsters and spirits, the thing about myths come to life, and folklore that sprouts wings, is that most people will never stop to wonder and look up at the sky to see me.

Here, ambition takes the place of superstition and the immigrants like us have turned their eyes away from the wonders of the unseen world.

Shape-shifters like me have to become the elements— humans and beasts of the earth, birds of prey and gusty wind in the air, rain showers and morning dew on flowers,

I am made of vapor and vengeance. I am both ghost and deadly smoke.

*chills*

When I am vapor I can still see, and smell, and taste, and know, and remember—

But in this moment, I am more hungry than curious. I am more thirsty than vain.

Dad and Kate are both supposed to be happy now that the twins are here, but they’re just, like, over it—

After hunger, after we’ve sipped from the souls of our victims, there is an exhaustion so fierce and a sadness so deep, I can sleep for a week.

My foremothers have only known rivers.

Our stories were never dead. We were always walking (or flying) amongst the living—

Chipping white paint, a single flickering light bulb, and deep melancholy are the only decorations we have.

I want the freedom of living in a world where no one will accuse me of being a monster— I want to live in a place where reality is the only existence I know, and science is the only thing that can make sense out of the senseless, and everyone sees me as only human.

I would have already tasted this American dream and be full of freedom.

The pestle that goes with it is long gone now, lost to the past generations of mothers it belonged to.

“But two skins cannot occupy the same pot.” So instead she makes me use the tub until the night when her fire dims and it will be my turn for my soul to burn bright and fly higher than the moon so that I can kiss the sun.

And with no skin to return to, we would make a meteor or a comet out of our ended lives; we would be a star holding a permanent space in the universe like an ancestor forever bound to a celestial existence.

We do not die, we get absorbed into the cosmos—

Fear is a useless human emotion.

I refuse to live this new life in this new country in my mother’s shadow. I will claim this apartment as my home.

It is easy to shape-shift in a country where you are freer as a monster than you are as a human.”

“I understand you are angry, Mari,” she says. “But you cannot make a home out of the burnt hole I will leave behind.

I understand you are a young lady and . . . I should not keep you here so isolated. I will work for both of us.”

That’s what the beginning of my life is like— one long empty silence; unspoken truths from my father. So I fill up those hollow spaces with my own origin story.

“The stories we tell ourselves can be just as powerful as the truth.”

The thing about stories, the thing about myths is that with each new truth, the gods, goddesses, monsters, and creatures become part of a beautiful exquisite corpse— like me.

I used to take up so much space— Dad never let me doubt that I was his number one.

And they were born. And they filled up the house with their tiny presence. Two of them, at once.

“You know, in Caribbean folklore,” Dad told me one night when I first started getting these rashes, “the soucouyant or the lougarou shed their skin at night and flew around feeding on the souls of babies—”

Since the babies, he’s stopped telling me stories, he’s stopped checking in, and— Now I’m supposed to just hold the baby?