#Beast from beyond entangler skin#
#Beast from beyond entangler free#

This woman is talking but I can hear only buzzing, not words: flies pouring out of her mouth, filling the office. To read more, click to purchase Shades Within Usīelow are the first pages of Tyler Keevil’s story “Voices” from Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders: I think my dad and I lost consciousness at the same time. I was screaming, my hands tightened around the business card. I only just caught a glimpse of his straw hat before he stepped back and disappeared into the night as if whisked away by the frenzied drumbeat. I whipped around and saw his skull-face first, his stretched grin the pearl gates to a graveyard. “How do you know my name?” -he-and then I knew. When you are ready, I will make that road for you. Then, when I looked back down at the business card, I noticed a word scratched very sloppily into the bottom left-handĬorner as if with a long pointed nail: ‘basement.’ My eyes trained on my dad breathing, bloody, at the foot of his car. Has your situation not already gone out of hand? Tell me, what is your wish, child? The man’s voice in my head carried a hint of mockery, each syllable a new round of laughter at my expense. The cops had hopped into their getaway cars and were already half-way down the road.Ĭrying and crying in the street. Yoruba accent.Ī business card dropped unceremoniously next to my feet. The voice echoed in the chambers of my mind. If that one doesn’t help you, maybe I can, sha. was that it? Was this some kind of death premonition? I could hear the talking drums they’d played then too, frantic rhythms rising in the still swamp of air.ĭeath. The rustic spices and petroleum and bodies. It reminded me of the smell of that church in Nigeria where we’d placed my grandmother’s white casket. I’d smelt it before, though I couldn’t quite place it. Maybe that was why the air now felt heavy and damp, hot against my skin, while my insides were cold as a cemetery. The warmth leached out of my body as if someone had sucked it clean from my blood. I forced my hands to do the sign of the cross, then clasped them together, squeezing my eyes shut. The stench of death surrounded us and I should have known. Even when I tore my eyes away from the wet stains on the front of his pants, I could still hear my dad begging: “It’s-it’s my car! I swear! Please!” My hands shook against the glass of the booth. I didn’t dare announce myself and the cops didn’t notice.

#Beast from beyond entangler skin#

It all fell away until only my skin remained, dark umber bright under the street lamps, blazing like a neon sign: “I’m black too! Come kill me!” Canada fell out of me in layers, first the dust, then the flesh, the organs, the heart. They were the police, beating my dad in the middle of the empty street a block away from our rundown apartment on Finch. I reached into my phone to call the police, only to realize that they were the police. Before I knew it, I was hiding, watching and crying. I was walking home from the convenience store at the same time my dad was coming back, probably from the mechanic.

#Beast from beyond entangler free#

As I cowered in the chill of night behind a vacant bus stop booth watching two of Toronto’s finest pull my dad out of the driver’s seat of his own car and work him over, the word vagabond crawled out of my memories and settled into my consciousness, like some fat slob with a can of beer, pay-per-view, and hours of free time to kill. It must have been the sight of my dad’s tooth sailing in the air that made me reconsider. We weren’t rich, but we’d still been able to make a home in Toronto. My Nigerian parents immigrated here in the nineties, having me in Kapuskasing, and spending a few years in that rural haven of lumberjacks before moving southward to Toronto where we were no longer one of two black families in the city. They wander, looking, but never finding, a home to call their own. “Take your strange gods and alien words! We don’t want you!” the mob would say. They go only where they’re wanted, and stay only as long as they can before the mob comes and chases them out. Some people can pick up and go anywhere they want, make a home anywhere, buy out any plot of land in any continent and damn whoever’s bones may be buried deep beneath their newly built six-bedroom flat. See, according to him, people were either tourists or vagabonds. And from what I read, the guy has a pretty interesting view of the world. I’d never read his stuff myself, mind, but I had come across a summary of one of his essays once. You know the type: highly revered, widely read.

Below are the first pages of Sarah Raughley’s story “The Vagabond of Trudeau High” from Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders: