I was named after my great-grandmother Mma Agnes, a matriarch who predicted her death. “I will not die when the rains fall. Who will attend my funeral then?” She had said, “I will die in Harmattan. By then, the earth will be dry and there will be no rain.”
We are similar in many ways.
I summon death with ease. I once stared at my childhood friend for longer than was comfortable and said “YOU! Why are you alive? You should be dead.” Three weeks later, Mary’s body was found dangling from the mango tree in front of her father’s compound. The squeezed handwritten note on her bed suggested that a voice told her to do it. She was ten. Nobody knew what I’d done, but I did – it scared me.
My mother fondly called me Kokomma, for the name I shared with her grandmother. I was born old – I was two before I was one. In my dreams, I saw all my lives, entangled so much that I could not differentiate them. I had an identical twin sister; everyone mistook me for her but never the other way around. It was like, at first glance, they’d assume I was her but quickly dismiss the thought because I didn’t quite measure up.
I was seven when she took me to the stream. Our parents had forbidden us from going there without adult supervision, but we were children; we found rebellion irresistible. Well, she did.
I followed her to the deep end. I didn’t want to, but she called me a sparrow. A frightened, spineless sparrow. I kept walking on the soft sand bed of the stream as the water climbed to my little waist, and then to my chest. I knew something was wrong when I wasn’t walking anymore. I was sinking. My sister was an excellent swimmer. She was watching me drown, smirking. The rage fueled my little body and I grabbed her neck. She was stronger and soon I was underwater. I held on to her hands, and her legs. Then there was nothing.
I would wake up from these dreams crying, my lungs on fire as I struggled to hold in the air that I knew was all around me. My parents only started to worry about me when I started talking in my sleep — no actual words, just the sounds of a drowning person. I would point at nothing, choke on my spit, and forget how to breathe. My mother had to watch me every night to make sure I did not die in my sleep. When it became too much, they took me to the Lord in prayer. Then it became worse; I started to call my father Aniekpeno, a name he had forgotten he had, so he sought help.
I do not have a twin sister. At least not one that survived. My mother was pregnant with twins. In the second trimester, one of the babies wrapped her umbilical cord around the other’s neck, choking her to death. “If I do not have a twin sister, why do I remember her?” I asked my mother, “Why do I remember the stream?”
The psychologist had no answers for me. He gave me pills though; clozapine, fluoxetine, and some vitamins to help my brain heal. The drugs meant I needed other drugs to help me sleep. When I stayed on my meds, they helped; the voices were still there but now I heard them as though they were on the other side of a wall. I wish I could see her face, the face of the person who’d made me will my friend’s death, who had made me do things to make the physical pain block out the emotional.
“Agnes, you need to eat something,” my mother said, during dinner a week before my tenth birthday.”
“Kill her, say it and it will be so.”
I did not want to kill my mother, so these urges were easy to ignore. I told her I’d try to eat and thanked her. As I climbed up the stairs to my room, I spoke to myself, “If you promise to leave my mother alone, I will find someone.”
“Fine.” The voice says “Until then, tell me a story”
My great-grandmother was a renowned storyteller. She would weave an incredible mental tapestry of kings, warriors, lovers, families, and gods. My father told me that once every week, Mma would invite her children and grandchildren to her home and tell them stories. Some weeks, she’d repeat the same stories, but they’d have a different feel to them. She’d focus on a minor character and give them depth. On other weeks, she’d repeat the story exactly as she told it before. Her children summed it up to old age, but I knew it was deliberate. We have that in common. We love stories. We love to hear them and tell them. We love to rehash our work and watch for a reaction. Who missed the changes? Who complained about the repetition? We like to know. The knowledge itself was powerful.
I told the voice about my cousin Ijeoma, who was mean to me in school. “Koko, if she’s mean, why do you call her your friend?” The voice had become gentler in the last three years. I feel like I’m getting better. My doctor thought so too, and he started tapering off my medication. “Who knows,” he’d said during our last session, in a few months you might not need them at all.”
“She’s my cousin na. She’s only mean because her father beats her mother,” I replied. “She told me and made me swear never to tell anyone.”
“I’m not anyone. I’m you”
“So your name is Agnes?” I asked.
The voice paused before replying. “No, my name is Cecilia.” Suddenly I could see her – full-haired, with a face that looked exactly like the pictures of my great-grandmother when she was young.
I never met Mma Agnes, but I have known her my entire life. “I’ve seen her before,” I said when a picture was shown to me. Faded in the way that time and water fade images, the face of the figure in the picture was blurred, but I could see her. I know her. “No sweetie, she died around the time I became pregnant with you.” My mother had said.
I wanted to tell her I could see my great-grandmother’s life in its entirety as if I was watching it on a DVD player, but I did not want to scare my mother and end up in my doctor’s office again.
“Do you want to name Ijeoma’s father? He’s a bad man.”
I agreed.
A month later, he was found dead, his throat slit by an unknown assailant as he returned home. I asked Cece how she did it and she smiled at me, now visible through the wall, “I would explain, but I cannot,” she says. This month, I’m done with my medications finally. I sleep soundly and have a night devoid of dreams.
♦
She was named after her great-grandmother, and for that, I want to erase Agnes the way victors erase history to suit them. She told stories to her family; I will tell stories to the world. She lived in a time cruel to women. I am here now, in a time that is insidious in its cruelty, but I will win. She predicted her death; I predict deaths more accurately than she ever did.
She killed me when I was seven, and for eighty years I have roamed, waiting for the perfect vessel. I watched her live out her fulfilled life; be a matriarch to a whole generation, loved by her daughters and her daughter’s children. It was not until Kokomma was born; A child who killed her twin, that I could return to this plane. They named her Agnes, and by that singular act, I was sealed within her body.
I understood what I needed to do; After trying to break Koko’s mind for many years, I spoke, luring her in, and earning her trust. I made peace and let her mind heal; the drugs helped her maintain control of her body, save when she gave a name.
As our wills aligned over the next few nights after the naming, I took over our body and executed. Finally, she was off her medication; her mind was weakened, and I was free. All of this; hanging Mary, haunting Koko, slitting Papa Ijeoma’s throat. All in a bid to get me here: a family funeral.
They buried Ijeoma’s father in December, and as the harmattan winds whipped around us, I held Koko’s mother’s clammy hands. The woman was crying, even more than the widow, but Ijeoma’s mother was most likely relieved that her husband was dead; She would never be beaten again. As they mourned and sang the hymns, I watched quietly, plotting.
The crowd headed back to the family house when the funeral was over. I slept in a room with Kokomma’s other female cousins. As night fell, I waited till the festivities were concluded and all of Agnes’ progeny were gathered and asleep in the house. Agnes and her husband had built the original house sixty years ago and, with its many rooms, it housed the whole family.
I padded silently to the kitchen and unscrewed all the gas cylinders, letting the gas flow through the house. The explosion would end the entire line in one go, Kokomma with them. Maybe finally I would find rest; I could leave this world knowing I had executed/carried out my revenge.
I stood in the middle of the parlour, waiting till I felt the gas had spread enough to blow the building up. I breathed in deeply, enjoying my last breaths; I was not long for this world.
“Sparrow? Is that you?” The voice was very tiny. A child. I looked for her; Adaobi, Ijeoma’s youngest sister, “You were always fiery, eyen. Dying was never going to stop you from getting back at me?”
“Who are you?” I asked, though I knew exactly who it was. The smile on the child’s face was ancient, knowing; it had no place in a six-year-old’s body. She walked towards me, dressed in a white nightgown with a pattern of pink flowers. Currently, a vessel for my twin’s soul. “What’s the journey you’ve had, little one,” she said. “We’re both halves of a whole. Did you not think I was still tethered to you all this time?.”
“Don’t talk to me like you know me. I don’t know you. You little… freak. You’re not a real person. You’re just an afterbirth.” I backed away from her. I could smell the gas; I could end this, but I found myself enthralled by her words. The child inched closer, though she made no moves to attack me.
“Neither are you. These bodies belong to innocents, eyen eka mmi.”
“You killed me!” I spat out.
She stopped moving, her face filled with sorrow. “I am truly sorry, Cece.” She reached out with the child’s tiny hands, her voice pleading, “I am sorry that you never got to live because of me. I really am…” she struggled to speak, tears forming in her eyes.
I stayed silent, unable to put my cluttered thoughts into words.
My sister, the storyteller, told me of the day I died, and the darkness that filled her world in the time that followed. “I did a terrible thing; I was a child, much like this little one, and I had to live with that guilt throughout my life. I am so sorry, Cece.” She gestured to the house, “The past is a bridge to nowhere, but these children? These bodies? They are the future. They had nothing to do with me and you; do not have them pay for my sin.”
Her words cut through decades of resentment, and with my vengeance within my reach, I instinctively knelt, allowing her to touch my face. “I couldn’t see you, but I could sense you always watching. I tried to live right. Put good in the world for all the beauty I took from it. I tried to atone for you, mama.”
I saw her, not as my anger tainted her, but as she was. Mma Agnes, who never hurt another soul after me, and fought the world’s cruelty with her words. My heart ached, but I knew Agnes was not lying to me. “Somehow,” she said, “we are both here, in this world, but we should not be here. Please come with me.” The little girl closed the space between us, trying to wrap her hands as far as they could go around me.
I let her.
♦
I woke up the next day tired, even though I had been asleep for hours. At some point in the night, I had somehow changed and hugged Adaobi, my little cousin, and we slowly detangled, clearly confused – Ada had not fallen to sleep close to me.
I went to the living room for prayers and all who gathered prayed for Papa Ijeoma’s soul. After prayers, my mother told me to shower and pack my bags so we could go home; apparently, the gas had leaked all night, and the cylinders were empty.
“Thank God nobody lit matches to warm rice and stew oh,” Father said, as he and the other men inspected the village house. I headed to the children’s room, and when I removed my clothes to get in the bath, I felt a note in the pocket of my shorts.
Koko.
There’s so much I’d say to you, but I have to go now. In my anger, I almost did an awful thing. Thankfully, Agnes came through and stopped me. Do not worry about me; I’m okay.
You are my sister, baby girl. Thank you for sharing your body with me. I love you.
It was then I noticed the silence; Cecilia was not here anymore. I could still see the memories, and I still felt like I had lived a few lifetimes, but Cecilia’s voice was gone. That suddenly hollowed-out part of my mind hurt, like a part of me had been excised. I clutched my chest, suddenly aware that the clothes I just removed were the last we’d ever share.
“Cece.”
