Octavia's Brood by Walidah Imarisha

Author:Walidah Imarisha
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2015-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Runway Blackout

Tara Betts

Therianthropes. That’s technically what they called them, but they weren’t just throwbacks to Circe or Skin-walkers. They were the replacements for the supermodel. No more worries about weight complaints, skin discoloration, or scars. In fact sometimes, an entire magazine only required one model for all of the issue’s glossy pages.

Where did it start, you ask? Well, as people started to date more interracially, whatever that means, different genes started popping up. Not just dark-skinned people with green eyes or white-looking people with Afros or albinos with features like elegant African masks and almond-shaped eyes. It wasn’t those surface changes that mattered anymore. It was the genetic traits that no one expected, bigger than illnesses like sickle cell, Tay-Sachs, or Tourette’s. There were the secrets that people had managed to hide from their children and spouses and had started to fade out, but the splicing of gene pools somehow revived these traits—traits of shape shifting.

This generation of therianthropes was playful. They weren’t only changing into birds, cats, or their scarier cousins, lycanthropes, prowling through horror movie history as werewolves. They started appearing in kindergartens across the country at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Their teachers would often discover them changing in the corner into the twins of their playmates or shrinking down to beige rabbits to rapidly twitch their noses at class pets. No one knew what to do except try to make the children feel welcome. Some people just pretended they didn’t see it for fear of being labeled insane. Some parents got to know their children’s high jinks. There was sitting in on classes for friends during their free periods at school and even eavesdropping like a fly on the wall. But there were no angry mobs and burning torches. These tykes weren’t carted off to secret laboratories.

As those children grew up, they had children of their own, but the thing that usually made them stand out was their unusual beauty. Therianthropes radiated with healthy hair, glowing skin, perfect teeth, and shapely, muscled bodies.

It seemed to be little surprise that many of them went on to become models without the trappings of drugs, anorexia, bulimia, aging, weight gain, or attitudes shaped by diva pretenses. They looked at modeling like a regular job, had children, read books, and went grocery shopping like everyone else because they could easily slip into disguise. Now the myth was that it became progressively more difficult for them to return to their original form, whatever it was. However, whatever their original form was, all therianthropes shared one common trait: they all had black ancestry. Because of this, they felt more comfortable in that type of body than any other. Grace Jones, Denzel Washington, Jay-Z, Oprah, Dorothy Dandridge, Eddie Murphy—you name it, as long as some vestiges of the melanin were intact.

I worked for the highest-paid model among the therianthropes who dominated the modeling industry. Her name was Voile.

When Voile came along everything changed, and everything eventually went back to the way of

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