One of the mothers smiled. “I believe we asked you a question first.”
“This…” Laki said, throwing one edge of the cloth open to reveal a glimpse of the belt. “…is a souvenir. I can’t seem to get it off…and you, can you all leave the unit?”
The women of Mahini shook their heads. “Temporarily, in an emergency, but our cloaks are bonded.”
“We are one,” they sang together.
“What about your children? What happened to them?”
“We refused to accept them. They belong to someone else…”
“…and we belong to the world.”
“We mother those who need it.”
“We mother with our songs.”
“We mother those who have never heard of us.”
“We mother each other.”
Laki’s head bounced around as she looked into the face of each woman as she spoke.
“Where do you…” She began to ask a question, but was interrupted.
“We don’t answer where,” Mahini sang.
“Where is the owner of that belt?” one of the mothers asked.
“Not here. Probably somewhere in the Stretch.”
“You don’t want to join a mother-unit.”
Laki searched their faces. “Is that a question?”
“No, that’s an observation. Look at you. You’re wearing a stranger’s marriage belt, passed out at a wild party, yet restless as a caged animal.”
“How should I be spending my last night, attaching bells to my cloths?” Laki snapped.
The women of Mahini looked at each other and smiled.
“She’ll be head mother,” one of them commented.
“Feisty yet docile enough to follow the rules.”
“Headed off to a mother-unit like a good little girl.”
“You call this mothering?” Laki asked.
“It isn’t all hugs and pheromones,” one said.
Laki thought about the mother hanging from the sling, giving of her body to nurture the babies. Neither hugs nor pheromones could do that. She opened her mouth to give a tart retort, but found that she didn’t have the energy to respond. She was weary—weary of conversation and weary of escape. The weight of tomorrow was pressing down on her, and she had spent too much time thinking about mother-units. Tomorrow belonged to the mother-unit, tonight was hers.
One of the women began to sing the chorus from their song about the nature of mothers. It was a song that Laki had always loved but never understood. She noticed that Mahini’s veil was billowing around the edges. She unwound her cloth from around her neck and rearranged the cloth Mahini had draped over her. She adjusted it so that the edges lined up in front of her body. Running her hand along the ends of the cloth, she fused it into a flowing robe. She pinched under the arms and shaped roomy sleeves. Laki listened to a few of the mothers chattering about her prospects for success in a mother-unit, then she shrugged off the conversation. She moved around to the back of the mother-unit to investigate the billowing veil. She was surprised to see that the veil was billowing because—while their sisters were chatting or singing—two of the mothers were dancing. Laki stood there, momentarily entranced by the women’s faces and the grace of their movements. Then she covered her face with her hands, as if to protect herself, and joined in.
Once Laki began to move, all the women of Mahini started to dance. Movement, it seemed, was connected to singing for them. As they danced, a humming rose up—a humming that turned into chanting. Their intonations started to reach the ears of Laki’s guests, and one by one, they stopped their revelry and turned to watch Laki dancing with Mahini. It was a sight that very few people had ever seen before and that very few people would ever see again. A mother-unit with exposed faces, dancing with abandon in the Velvet Stretch, veil fluttering and undulating like a living thing.
A feeling of flight, of progress after prolonged struggle, blossomed in the chests of all who heard Mahini’s song. Their message was wordless, but forceful: be free, be free, be free. Mahini encircled Laki, causing their melodies and harmonies to cocoon her. The song dislodged her calm composure and sent her pulse racing.
She had been careful to avoid the embrace of Mahini’s veil, but once she was undone by their song, she lost awareness of her surroundings. When their veil brushed against her skin, she felt as if it were her own veil being thrown over her. The sensation wasn’t all encompassing like the memory of Fogo. Instead, Laki felt as if she were in two places at once. She was dancing with Mahini, feeling the delicious expansion of possibility flowing through her limbs; she was in training with her mothers, feeling suffocated by the veil. She arced an arm overhead, and she was in the past, nothing more than a child grabbing at the veil, letting it tickle her tummy as her mothers dressed her for bed. She spun around, and she was imprisoned in a web of her own panic as the veil was being laid over her for the first time.
The veil was nothing like Laki had thought it would be. She had thought the veil would make the world look hazy, shrouded; instead it made everything sharper. When she was inside the veil, the things that required her attention acquired a glint, a shine. She imagined the veil would feel light and weightless, which is how it looked when the mothers were rushing down the hall to deal with something urgent. But instead of floating over her, the veil had pressed against her skin, sticking to every part of her.
The memory of that first moment with the veil washed over her. She shut her eyes tightly and screamed in terror.
“Relax,” the mothers had sung, “it won’t suffocate you.”
But Laki had felt suffocated. She had felt like it was plastered against her, crawling over every inch of her body. She had clawed at her neck, trying to pull it away from her throat.
“It can’t be grabbed,” the mothers had sung. “It can’t be touched with your hands. You can only move it with emotion.”
Laki had yelled louder.
“Laki, my love, the cloak is not your enemy. It can’t kill you.”
“Breathe, Laki.”
Laki had taken deep gulping breaths. But every time she had opened her mouth to speak, the cloak flowed into it and garbled her voice.
Now Laki raised her hands high in the air and shook her head back and forth. The women of Mahini mimicked her actions. She began whirling and dipping, trying to move faster than memory, but she could not outpace her fears. They stayed with her, panting inside her ear.
She felt it again: the cloak probing her eyes, nose, and armpits. She heard her mothers trying to ease her panic.
“It won’t always feel this way,” one mother sang, stroking her back.
“Each cloak is unique, it becomes a part of you,” sang head-mother. “It will take from you and become you.”
“Then when you’re in your unit it will…”
“…meld with the cloaks of the other women.”
“It will be an extension of you.”
“You will grow to rely on it…”
“…and it will know you better.”
As she continued to dance, Laki became more aware of the sounds Mahini was making. Not the sounds of their voices, but the sounds of their breathing—and of their bells. Laki looked at their faces as she swayed with them. Each of them, she thought, had lived through their first day in the veil, and each of them had survived.
Se-se heard Mahini before she saw them. She had located Laki’s pod, counted pods until she reached hers, then entered her pod. She had disconnected her pod from the party and reconnected it to Laki’s. When she had done all that, she stepped into a completely different party. The abandon and frenetic energy were gone, instead everyone was swaying as if eerily entranced. For a second, Se-se thought she had made a mistake. She went over her actions in her mind, but this was no mistake; there was no other party this could be. She walked back to
