Skin Folk Read Online Free PDF

unfamiliarity when Artho looked at human bodies. He was in the mall food court
     on his lunch hour. When he went back to work, it would be to spend the rest of the day updating the Tit for Twat site:
Horny Vixens in Heat! No Holes Barred!
    The food court was crowded. People in business suits wolfed down Jolly Meals, barked on cell phones. The buzz of conversation
     was a formless noise, almost soothing.
    Not many empty spaces. Artho had to share a table for two with a thirtyish man in fine beige wool, engrossed in the financial
     pages of the
Globe & Mail
newspaper. The man had shaved his head completely. Artho liked it. There was something sensuous about the baldness, like
     the domed heads of penises. Cute. Artho was thinking of something to say to him, some kind of opener, when the man’s ears
     caught his gaze. They jutted out from the side of his head like knurls of deformed cartilage. There really was nothing odd
     about the guy’s ears—that’s just how ears were—but they still gave Artho a queasy feeling. With one hand, he worried at his
     own ear. He looked around at other people in the food court. All their ears seemed like twisted carbuncles of flesh sprouting
     from the sides of their heads, odd excrescenses. Nausea and doubt squirmed like larvae in Artho’s chest. His fingers twitched,
     the ones that he would use a few minutes from now to point, click, and drag his mouse as he smoothed out the cellulite and
     firmed up the pecs of the perfect naked models on the screen, making them even more perfect. He closed his eyes to block out
     the sight of all those ugly ears.
    Someone was singing. A child’s voice, tuneless and repetitive, threaded its whiny way through the rumble of lunchtime chatter:
    “Tain’t no sin,
    Take off your skin,
    And dance around in your bones.
    Tain’t no sin…”
    Artho opened his eyes. Wriggly as only seven-year-olds can be, a little girl slouched beside her father at a table for four,
     sitting on her spine so she could kick at the centre pole supporting the table welded to its four seats. Her wiry black hair
     was braided into thousands of dark medusa strands. The brown bumps of her knees were ashy with dry skin. The lumpy edge of
     a brightly coloured Spider-Man knapsack jutted out from behind her back.
    “Tain’t no sin…” She kicked and kicked at the pole. An old man who’d been forced to share the table with them looked up from
     his chow mein and gave her a strained nice-little-girl smile.
    “Quit it, Nancy.” Not even glancing at his daughter—was she his daughter?—her father reached out with one hand and stilled
     the thin, kicking legs. With his other hand he hurriedly stuffed a burger into his mouth. Green relish oozed between his fingers.
    The little girl stopped kicking, but all that energy had to have some outlet. She immediately started swaying her upper body
     from side to side, jerking her knapsack about so that something thumped around inside it. She bobbed her head in time to her
     little song. Her braids flowed like cilia. She looked around her. Her gaze connected with Artho’s. “Daddy,” she said loudly
     to the man beside her, “can you see me?” She wore glasses with jam-jar-thick lenses, which refracted and multiplied her eyes.
     She didn’t look up at her father.
    And he didn’t look down at her, just kept gnawing on his burger. “Can’t see you at all, little girl,” he mumbled. “I only
     think I can. You’re nowhere to be seen.”
    She smiled at that. “I’m everywhere, though, Daddy.”
    Must be some kind of weird game they had between the two of them. Then she started singing again. Artho found himself swaying
     slightly from side to side in time with her song. He looked away. He’d always hated Spider-Man. As a kid, the comic book character
     had frightened him. His costume made him look like a skeleton, a clattery skin-and-bone man that someone had painted red as
     blood.
    “… dance around in your bones!” the