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Abiba – Dilman Dila

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Admin
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3

Apeli stood at the window, watching a storm as it tried to drown the city. Under a blue sky, the tall buildings would soar like pillars in the ruins of an ancient palace, but now, they looked vague and shapeless, dark forms in the gray horizon, and she thought there were creatures in the dark clouds that hung low, monsters that she had seen only in her dreams.

“What are you doing?” a voice interrupted. She pirouetted to face her aunt, who wore a fancy kitenge dress with an elaborate head piece as though she were going to a party. “Have you washed dishes?” Aunty sounded like thunder. “Should I get my stick?”

Apeli quietly walked away. Aunty had just quarreled with Uncle. They were struggling with finances but Aunty kept spending a lot of money on fancy kitenge. Apeli knew, though the fight had happened in near silence in the bedroom, for just one look into Aunty’s eyes was like reading a book with all of Aunty’s secrets.

In the kitchen, the sight of dishes in the sink made Apeli very tired. With sixteen children and five adults, each meal felt like a party. Apeli did all the work, the cooking, the cleaning, the washing. She always thought of running away, but she was a scrawny fourteen year old orphan. She did not know anyone in the city. Where could she run to?

Mama died five years ago, too soon, before Apeli could learn everything about being an abiba. The little Mama had taught her enabled Apeli to cope with the confusing and terrifying changes that happened to her body, when the ancestors started to manifest. First came the fart fires. The first time it happened, puffs of smoke burst out of her anus and she had expected to feel heat. Instead, she felt comforted. Then came the gift of stealing memories. It used to leave her dizzy and give her migraines, but now whenever she looked into people’s eyes all she felt was a slight tingle in her brains. Recently, she had strange dreams. Many felt like cryptic messages. Some nights she woke up and thought someone was in the room speaking to her in a strange, ancestral language. Mama would know what the ancestors were saying, but Mama was gone and Apeli had to learn everything through trial and error.

By the time she was done with the dishes, and cleaning the kitchen, and peeling potatoes, the storm had ebbed away and darkness had fallen. A power blackout deepened the night. The storm must have knocked down a few electric poles. Apeli used a tadooba for light. She hated the tiny lamp for it emitted a nauseating paraffin smell. Fortunately, Mama had taught her simple prayers to get rid of inconveniences like bad smell. She cooked the meal on a charcoal stove, served it, and went to bed at eleven o’clock, long after everyone else.

She slept in a rundown Land Rover in the garage. Uncle bought it in the ‘60s when he was a government minister but it had not tasted the road in two decades. The family, unable to buy new cars, had turned the garage into a storeroom. It was so full of junk that the only space Apeli could find for a bed was inside the Land Rover.

Aunty forbade her from sharing a room with other children. “You are evil,” Aunty had said the day Apeli arrived, five years ago. “Your mother’s demons are in you.” Being a fanatic born-again Christian, Aunty had chained her to a cross in a church for seven weeks in a sham exorcism. Apeli nearly starved to death. In the end, she put up a show. She went into spasms when the pastor touched her, saliva foaming in her mouth. Satisfied, the pastor released her. He however advised Aunty to keep her isolated from other children until they were sure the demons would not return. Aunty set her up in the garage. Weeks turned into years and the garage became Apeli’s permanent home.

                                                                             #

She could not find sleep that night. Her muscles ached and her bones felt broken. When she finally drifted off, she had a disturbing dream, of a corpse that had crawled out of a grave and was wandering about in the city. Anyone who saw him would mistake him for a drunk. He wore a long white kanzu which she at first mistook for a flowing dress. He had a neat gray beard and a pungent smell of onions. Was he lost or was he going somewhere?

“Apeli,” the dead man said. “Help me.”

Apeli jerked out of sleep, her heart pumping. Was it a message from the ancestors, or was a corpse wandering in the dark streets? But who was he and why was he asking for her help?

She remembered a man once asked for Mama’s help because his late grandfather was restless, and Mama had gone out to the grandfather’s grave to perform rituals so the dead man could rest in peace. Was it a similar case? But why did this corpse not approach an abiba through one of his relatives? Why did he contact her directly? Was that normal?

Thirst burned her throat. Her lips were dry and salty. Something felt wrong. Why was this dead man asking her for help? Could he not see she was only a little girl who knew nothing?

Please mama come back, Apeli cried in the darkness, wishing she knew how to summon Mama’s spirit, or that of her grandmother. I need help!

Rats infested the garage. Cockroaches too. They scampered about in the darkness. They never came to the Land Rover for Apeli had said a prayer to keep them away, so when she noticed a pungent smell, she at first thought a rat had died. The smell grew stronger, and she realized it was the same as in the dream: a stench of onions. She thought she heard the dead man call her again, but she knew it was her imagination. It had been just a dream.

Had it?

Apeli. Help me.

The voice echoed in her head like the after-sound of a church bell. She pulled the old blanket tighter around her body for suddenly the temperature dropped. The smell become stronger, making her eyes water just as if someone had rubbed onions on her face. The dead man was out there in the streets. But who was he and how did he know her name? Why was he asking for her help? Apeli wanted to cower in the old car, to bury her head under the worn out mattress and hope the nightmare would go away. She could not. This was her destiny. She had to answer this call, even though it came from a zombie.

When Mama helped the restless dead, the ritual had seemed simple, requiring nothing more than a prayer and a sacrifice of chicken blood. She knew that prayer. Maybe she could go out and see what it was all about. Maybe it was a simple matter of rats in his coffin, or weeds growing over his grave. Maybe he was asking for her help because he knew the problem was so simple that even an untrained novice like her could handle it.

She crept out of the Land Rover. Rats scampered away. She dressed up in a sweater and a pair of jeans, and then pulled out Mama’s kobi. She kept it hidden at the bottom of her metal suitcase, which she had brought along hoping to use in boarding school. A good thing Aunty never looked in her box otherwise she would have destroyed the winnower, which had become synonymous with abiba. This one looked like any other made from palm fronds, with a variety of colors interwoven in intricate geometric patterns to give it a rare beauty, but Mama said it was no ordinary kobi. It had been in the family for many generations. The day Apeli was born, the kobi regenerated itself, shading off its worn look, repainting over its faded colors, and that was how Mama had known Apeli was an abiba.  Apeli had slept in its hood as a child, had eaten food winnowed on it, and had drunk herbs prepared on it. Having no siblings, the kobi became her big brother. Now, she hoped it would help her as she took a blind step into the world of magic.

Help me. The dead man’s voice reverbed in her head like a corny radio ad.

She crept into the living room, which was not as dark as the garage for a full moon shone in through the window. She slid the bolts on the back door, carefully, hesitating at every creak, and then she stepped out into the night. The backyard had a neat flower garden, a fruit of her labour, and a nine-foot wall fence covered in creeping plants. She had to go over the wall for the gate had a padlock. She stood in the darkness of an orange tree for a long while, watching the windows, until she was satisfied no one was watching. Then, she placed the kobi on the ground, stepped on it, chanted “abruka” three times, and the kobi soared into the air.

Though not an expert flyer, she had practiced enough in the garage to comfortably steer the winnower over the wall. Fire broiled in her belly, keeping her warm from the chilly night, but it did not come out in farts. That only happened in high-altitude flights. Once over the wall, she shakily brought the winnower to ground level. She stood still for several moments, sniffing, until she knew which direction the smell came from.

She went around the corner and found herself at the top of a hill. It would have been brightly lit with orange street lamps, but this night there was just the moon making the road shine. The city’s skyline loomed in the distance, with the moon low on the horizon behind the tall buildings, a few lights blinked here and there. The storm must have done extensive damage to power lines for the blackout to last this long.

Apeli. Help me.

The voice grew stronger. Apeli hovered from street to street, sniffing, following the scent, until she was two miles away from home, in a suburb so densely crowded it resembled a slum. People were in the streets, staggering home from bars, so she got off the winnower and walked. She passed an open-air night-club, music blasting above the roar of a generator. Revelers danced on the muddy pavement. Prostitutes clustered around dead street lamps, laughing and smoking. People cast her glances, but nobody bothered her. She thanked the ancestors for making her wear trousers instead of a skirt. With her short hair, barely formed breasts and scrawny structure, she could have been a boy.

The oniony smell became so strong that she thought she would puke. It led her to a residential street, with broken down fences and old, crumbling houses. The noises from the night-clubs seemed to come from another world. She stood still for several moments, scanning the darkness, holding the kobi in front of her chest. It had grown as hot as a charcoal stove. The dead man stepped out of the shadow of a tree. His kanzu glowed in the moonlight. He walked with a slight shuffle, as though his legs were too heavy.

You? he said, telepathically. They sent you? He did not stop walking.

Apeli hurried after him, her mouth dry, her tongue felt like a stone. Now that she had found him she said the prayer to ward off his smell. It did not go away, it still clung to him like a bad perfume. Then she understood that a powerful juju had brought him out of the grave. If ordinary citizens were to come upon him they would not notice the smell. His eyes were like black smoke, no whites in them, no reflection of the moon. She had seen a corpse before, the night Mama helped the restless grandpa, but it had had something human about it, even though it had decomposed. This one made her think of a demon. Now, she regretted leaving home.

A cock crowed and a dog barked in response. Aunty always woke up before daylight to avoid traffic. She would find Apeli’s bed empty. Then what? Another torture episode in the quack church? She shook off the thought and walked beside the dead man for a few steps, not knowing what to do or say. Finally, she found her voice.

“Why did you call me?” she asked.

I said a prayer, he replied. If you heard it, it means they sent you and you can’t help me.

Apeli bit her lips, berating herself for her naivety. Mama had once explained how prayers worked. If a human made a general call for help to ancestors, each spirit who heard would receive the prayer as though it were addressed personally to it. Apparently, it worked the same way if ancestors cried out to greater powers for help. Those greater powers had allowed her to receive the prayer as though it were addressed personally to her. But why? Did they not see she was only a scrawny, untrained girl?

The dead man turned off the road onto a driveway leading to a rusty gate. Apeli sensed something behind the gate. Something terribly evil. Without giving it a second thought, she grabbed the dead man’s hand and pulled him off the driveway. She used all her energy for it was like pulling a ten-ton truck. Fire flared inside her belly and she farted flames. It scorched her jeans, leaving her buttocks bare to the wind. She kept pulling the dead man until the force dragging him let go. Apeli won the tag of war, but the sudden lack of resistance sent her sprawling onto the road. The dead man fell on top of her.

“If I heard you, then I can help you,” Apeli said. “I’ll take you back to your grave.”

She rushed to her feet, her elbows bruised and hurting, wondering how she would take the corpse back before dawn. She would have to hide him somewhere, then find chicken blood for the ritual to give him a peaceful rest. For now, she had to get away from this evil house. She grabbed him by the hand to pull him to his feet. However, now that the magic was gone, he could not stand up. He lay on the ground, dead, inanimate. The black smoke went out of his eyes and now Apeli saw human eyes, the moon shining in them. His spirit groaned in agony. She could feel it swirling around, agitated, terrified; something was hurting it.

The rusty gate swung open, revealing a ramshackle bungalow, moonlight gleaming off the iron-sheet roof. A man stepped out of the shadows. The moment their eyes met she stole his memories and knew everything about him, all his life from birth to that moment. A musezi. Mama once told her about these cannibals. They killed people and prevented their bodies from decomposing. After burial, they summoned the corpse out of the grave to their home or shrine, where they either cut up and feasted upon it, or turned it into a slave.

The man pointed a finger at Apeli. Instinctively, Apeli raised the kobi as a shield. A force struck the kobi and the next thing she knew was darkness and silence.

#

When she opened her eyes, the first thing she noticed were skulls lined up on a wall like artwork. Over twenty of them. Each had a necklace of bones, beads, and shells. Daylight streamed in from the ventilators, lighting up the room just enough for her to see junk metal, probably parts of cars, beside heaps of bark cloth and animal skins. Herbs were spread out on mats on the floor. A bad smell came from several clay pots, stacked one on top of the other in three columns of four pots each. A table loomed in the middle. She did not have to wonder at its purpose. Bits of flesh stuck to it. A cloth lay abandoned underneath, a kanzu.

Her kobi lay a few feet from her, partly scorched. She could feel its heat.

She was tied up with cowskin rope dipped in a greenish oil, it seared her flesh. Her belly was hot. Fire raced up her veins and spurt out of her anus frequently, reassuring her that the ancestors were with her. But if the musezi hit her with something more powerful than her protectors could handle… Apeli did not want to think about it. Spirits gave her powers but they also drew power from her, and she was only a scrawny fourteen year old girl with no experience, with no knowledge of how to summon greater powers for help.

Was she?

Her muscles contracted as she suddenly realized that she knew a lot about magic. She had stolen the musezi’s memories, and now she knew everything he knew, everything he had taken forty years to learn. She knew all his weapons, and the anti-dote to each, but she lacked ingredients to make them, and while she had his knowledge, she did not have his instincts, his experience, his reflexes. Would she respond fast enough during an attack?

And she knew what he intended to do to her. It turned her stomach inside out. She had to escape, so she looked into his memories and saw that she needed rat’s blood to undo the ropes. There was no rat nearby. But she could burn the ropes. Her wrists were bound together in front of her knees. All she had to do was wriggle her hands between her legs and place them right underneath her bottom.

As she set about this task, a door opened and a woman walked in. She was a little too tall at six feet three inches, with the heavily muscled arms of a woodcutter. One look into her eyes and Apeli knew all about her. The musezi’s wife. They had four children, who did not live with them for she wanted to protect them from her husband. She had not known what he was until after they had gotten married. Now, twelve years later, though more a slave than a dutiful follower, though bearing the wounds of his violence, she helped him run a shrine in the backyard, where people bought fetishes for malicious purposes.

“Hello fire shitter,” she said.

“What are you going to do with me?” Apeli asked her.

“You should be dead,” the woman said. “Something protected you.”

Apeli followed her eyes to the kobi. It had regained some of its color. It was regenerating.

The woman pulled a stool and sat near Apeli. “My husband wanted to finish you off,” she said. “But I saw what you are and I thought…. How did you know about the corpse?”

“I heard his call,” Apeli answered.

“You heard?” The woman eye’s widened. “You can hear them?”

Apeli did not reply. She perceived the woman’s hesitation, her uncertainty, the conflicting thoughts running through her head. She was excited that they had found a young and untrained abiba. Maybe they could turn her into their slave. But she also thought that it would be wrong to turn such a gifted abiba into an evil doer. She did not want a child to suffer under the hands of her husband.

“You have a great gift,” the woman said. “All my life I’ve never met anyone who can hear prayers of the dead. Those are meant for gods!”

“Maybe the ancestors let me hear it,” Apeli said. “Maybe they are too busy with their own affairs that they thought I should answer for them.”

The woman’s forehead narrowed. “You? To answer for the ancestors?” Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “You can’t even protect yourself from a simple lightning strike. How can….” She trailed off, swallowing hard.

Apeli shrugged. She could see the thoughts running through the woman’s head. Her husband had evil spirits, which had given him a lot of power and he had worked unhindered for so long that she had begun to fear he was invincible, but here was a little girl who had heard prayers meant for the ancestors? What if the ancestors had sent her to put an end to her husband? Apeli perceived her confusion. Her good side was struggling to get out, but she feared that the evil spirits would win.

“Maybe they sent me to save you,” Apeli said.

“What?” the woman said.

“Maybe they were answering your prayers,” Apeli said. “Not that of the dead man.”

The woman’s eyes grew wider as the pain she had endured in twelve years of marriage flashed in her pupils. Her lips trembled as she searched for a response. Before she could find any, the musezi walked in. He seemed smaller in daylight. A necklace, of human teeth and a mummified thumb, dangled on his bare chest. His potbelly spilled over a faded pair of brown trousers. He used a live snake for a belt. The woman jumped to her feet.

“It was a chance encounter,” she told the musezi. “She was walking home after a night of fire shitting when she saw a corpse. She’s just a confused fire shitter. Nothing unusual. She has no teacher and is willing to learn from us and work for us.”

For a few moments Apeli did not grasp what the woman was saying. Then she smiled as it dawned on her that the woman’s good side had won.

“Where’s she from?” the musezi asked.

The woman laughed. “Where do fire shitters come from? Come, let’s make her breakfast and give her a good welcome.”

She tagged at her husband’s arm, leading him away to the kitchen where the dead man lay in little heaps on a table. Reluctantly, giving Apeli a friendly smile, the musezi allowed his wife to drag him out. They locked the door.

Apeli waited several minutes until she heard them laughing in the kitchen, then resumed freeing herself. She shoved her hands under her legs, placed them under her butt. The ancestors immediately understood her plan and a jet of flame shot out of her anus and swept over her wrists like hot water. She yelped in pain, for the cow skin rope tried to maintain its grip, but it could not fight her fire and soon it fell off, leaving a bruise on her skin. The pain made her whimper. She pushed it out of her mind and then shit fire on her ankles too. The rope put up a much stronger resistance, causing her so much agony that she nearly passed out. Still, it was no match for her fire. It burned away, leaving red welts on her skin.

Tears clouded her eyes. Ignoring the pain, she struggled to her feet and picked up the kobi. It had regained much of its color. Only a small portion still had scorch marks.

She could not fight her way out, even though she had an ally in the wife. The man was too strong. She needed something to not only divert his attention, but weaken him. Fire. She examined the fetishes in the room, on the floor, on the shelves, on the walls. She stared long at the skulls, at the necklaces that trapped spirits and enslaved them. The musezi treasured these charms. He had other fetishes in the shrine and in other parts of the house, but did not want his customers to freak out on seeing these, his most potent powers, and so he kept them in this room.

She jumped on the kobi, chanted “abruka” three times, and flew. The kobi wobbled a bit. She rode to the ceiling board, which needed only a jet of flame to catch fire. She raced about the room, torching up things at random. Voices erupted in the flames as fetishes screamed in agony. Spirits trapped in the skulls howled in anticipation of freedom. Within a few minutes, the room was ablaze.

She hid behind the door just before it opened and the musezi ran in, shouting chants in a strange language, his wife close behind him. Flames fell down from the ceiling and leapt all around them. They grabbed fetishes at random, but there were too many, and the spirits fueled the fire into an uncontrollable monster. Apeli slinked out of the door into a dark corridor, clutching the kobi tight.

She ran.

“You fire shitter!” the musezi roared behind her.

She felt the bolt of lightning before he threw it, and she ducked to the floor. A zap of electricity swooshed above her. It struck a door at the other end of the corridor. She looked up to see the man raise his arm again, preparing for another strike. Surely this time he would finish her off. But his wife tackled him from behind and shoved him against the wall. Surprised, for a split second he could not react, and that was enough time for the wife’s fingers to stab his eyes. He screamed in pain, collapsing in a heap onto the ground.

“Run,” she told Apeli.

Apeli ran out of the door just as flashes of lightening erupted inside the corridor. Husband and wife were striking each other. Apeli found herself in a living room. It looked like an ordinary living room. A 32’ flat screen TV sat on an entertainment unit, which was full of books, magazines, CDs and DVDs. Photos on the wall told of the family’s happiness. The sofas looked worn from too much washing. Apeli set it all on fire. She ran to the backyard, where a large grass-thatched hut sat in a banana plantation. She did not hesitate. She set it on fire too.

Flames had eaten up a large part of the bungalow. Fetishes screamed in agony as spirits cheered in freedom. The man stumbled out of the back door, blinded, drenched in blood, screaming in rage, one arm torn off his body. He ran to his burning shrine, but the wife jumped on his back. Or what was left of the wife. The lower half of her body was missing. They fell on the grass and her teeth sunk into his neck. He jabbed at her with the mummified finger on his necklace, and the finger tore off a chunk of her head. She rolled off him and finally lay still. Dead. The man tried to crawl to his shrine but there was a huge hole in his neck. Blood gurgled out, choking him, drowning him.

Apeli did not wait to see more. She dashed out of the gate, onto the street, where a crowd had gathered to watch the fire from a safe distance. Apeli fled down the road, aware that they would forever talk about the little boy who ran away from the fire, clutching a winnower. Some might know that winnowers were a symbol of abiba, but the city had a different culture, and most people would probably not know the significance. They would certainly talk about his pants, the rear end of which was burnt off.

#

She did not stop running until she was a mile away from the street. Smoke rose in the distance. Fire engines and police sirens screamed. Apeli leaned against a wall to regain her breath. She saw a skirt on a clothes line and stole it so she could ditch her burnt jeans. The sun stood in the middle of the sky. Her tummy growled. She felt faint from hunger. She did not want to go back to Aunty’s home. There was nothing for her there. Only work and harassment. One look at her and Aunty would know she had gone out on a juju escapade, and then it would be another spell of torture in the quack church. Apeli had to find a new home.

It came to her that she could use her power of perception to get a job as a housemaid, and so she started scanning through the minds of passers-by.

Three hours later, after scanning several dozen candidates, she came upon a single mother who had AIDS. Her little baby was also infected. Her name was Atim and her daughter Amina. All her maids ran away, afraid of contracting the disease from caring for the child. She was shopping for vegetables, worrying about dashing home to cook lunch for her child before running back to a clothes factory where she worked as an accountant. Her supervisor understood her need to frequently leave the office to tend to her child, but he was losing patience.

“Excuse me madam,” Apeli said. “Do you want a maid? Am a hard working girl –”

“Eh little girl,” Atim said. “Even if I wanted a maid, I wouldn’t hire her off the street.”

“Please,” Apeli said. “Mama had the disease and she died last month. Now Aunty has chased me from home. She thinks I’ll infect her children. I’ve nowhere to go. Help me.”

Atim gave her a long stare, and Apeli knew she had struck the right chords. After a short interview, she was carrying the woman’s shopping bag and escorting her home.

“What’s that thing?” Atim asked, nodding at the kobi.

“This,” Apeli smiled, snuggling it under her armpits. “In my language we call it kobi. It’s a winnower. It belonged to my mother. I keep it to remember her.”

“It’s beautiful,” Atim said, opening the door to her apartment.

Apeli’s smile grew wider as she walked into her new home.

END

Dilman Dila is a writer, filmmaker, and all round storyteller. He is the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, A Killing in the Sun. He has been listed in several prestigious prizes, including the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards (2019), the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition (2014), the Commonwealth Short Story Prize  (2013), and the Short Story Day Africa prize (2013, 2014). His short fiction have featured in several magazines and anthologies, including A World of Horror, AfroSF v3, and the Apex Book of World SF. His films include the masterpiece, What Happened in Room 13 (2007), which has attracted over eight million views on Youtube, and The Felistas Fable (2013), which was nominated for Best First Feature by a Director at the Africa Movie Academy Awards (2014), and which won four major awards at Uganda Film Festival (2014). His second feature film, Her Broken Shadow (2017), a scifi set in a futuristic Africa, has screened in places like Durban International Film Festival and AFI Silver Theater. More of his life and works are online at www.dilmandila.com

Holding on to Water – Shingai Kagunda

By
Admin
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1
Holding unto water omenana issue 13
Art By Sunny Efemena

Now…

The baby is found wailing next to her mother near the top of the hill. She is a pathetic, puny little thing. The wormy cord still connecting her to her mother has to be cut. The mud encroaches on her wrinkly skin so one cannot tell which brown is her and which is the ground. The rain recedes, turning into a light drizzle. The baby is cold. The mother colder… Silent… Dead.

Then…

Of course, Mama and Baba Nakuti had wanted a son. In fact before Nakuti, they conceived a boy. It was their first child. It was the first drought. He died coming out of the womb. When mama Nakuti realized what her husband had done she pulled out her hair behind their house. She did not scream or shout. The rains came back and they stayed. Mama Nakuti’s womb remained empty for ten seasons.

The first time Mama Nakuti felt her womb shift and move for Nakuti, she was hunting hare in the forest for the evening meal. It started to drizzle. She felt a little flutter in her stomach. Something was kicking. Mama Nakuti immediately knew. She shed tears that intermingled with the water falling from the sky. Her husband found her like that: soaking wet and crying.

“We will have another,” She told him.

Mama Nakuti knew she was carrying a boy. The process felt the same as her lost firstborn. The baby kicked and raged within her, fighting wars inside her womb. In the last month before coming to term, Mama Nakuti could not move. The baby was weighing her down. She told her husband, “This one will be a warrior and a rainmaker. This one will specialize in lightning and thunder. This one will make us proud.”

Nakuti was born during the heaviest rains without anything between her legs. She was a heavy baby who did not stop screaming after she started. Mama Nakuti shed tears with her daughter. No one could tell if the mother cried for sadness or joy. She loved Nakuti but she wanted a boy.

Now

The villagers carry the mother on a cloth wrapped around two bamboo sticks. Her eyes are half closed as if she is merely sleepy and not dead. A new mother from the village lifts the wailing baby. She wraps her in several clothes to warm her and ties the last one around her waist. She gives her a wet breast to suckle as she half runs to catch up with the rest of the villagers. There is a wail in the air – the villagers mourning. Every so often a woman falls to the ground. Screaming. It is tradition. Even if the woman is not close to the dead mother.

The baby stops suckling on the new mother’s breast. The baby listens to the mourning. Eyes staring up. Searching. There is something she is missing. The villagers are crying for something she is missing.

Then

The baby remover told Mama Nakuti that her womb was healthy and there was no reason she could not have another child. Mama Nakuti found a new preoccupation. She made love to Baba Nakuti as soon as she recovered from giving birth. She sang songs to her daughter about great warriors and legends as she plaited the fistfuls of hair that stuck together on her head. “You will be a great big sister my Pendo. You are beautiful enough that you will marry well. Maybe you will marry the chief’s son and you will bear your own children. They will have an uncle. One day your little brother will be a powerful rainmaker like his father. I will have borne the chief’s wife and a rainmaker.”

When Nakuti was four, the village of Ollu was in the middle of a second drought. The land was dry and the planted crops withered in a desperate plea for water. When Nakuti was four she saw her mother weep. She found her behind their mud hut on the ground screaming at the sky.  There was blood on her skirt. She had lost the third baby in her stomach.  Nakuti had never seen so much red soiling the earth. The rain came back.

After that day, something dark descended over their home. Baba stayed away. He said the villagers needed him more after the drought but Nakuti had always been able to tell when something was not right. Mama tensed when she asked her about it. “Leave the situation alone Nakuti!”

“But mama…”                                 

“Just leave it!” Her once firm skin looked looser, more fragile.  The medicine man came and gave mama crushed plants. Nakuti was not allowed in the room. She did not see what happened to Mama. She was too small to understand but she remembered after that day mama stopped calling her Pendo. Her mother’s withdrawal was even harder than watching the screaming on the ground.

After that, Mama stopped telling Nakuti about the younger brother she would one day have. Her hugs became crisper and her eyes became distant… 

Now

The villagers walk down the hill, past the biggest baobab tree, to the river. They carry the makeshift cloth between four people. The new mother places the baby in front of her grandmother. The grandmother spits on the ground. “What is that?”

“It is your grandchild, Nyanya.”

The grandmother screams. “No she is not! Where is my child? Bring me my child!”

“Nyanya, she is dead.”

The grandmother walks to her daughter in the cot. She touches her face softly with the back of her hand. “Pendo. Pendo wake up. Wake up my love. Stop sleeping. Who has made you fall into such deep sleep?”

A villager steps forward with apprehension, “Nyanya?”

The grandmother screams. “Do not call me that! I am not your Nyanya! I am not anyone’s grandmother!”

“The baby?”

There is fury in the grandmother’s eyes. “That is no baby! It is a curse! It killed my daughter!” She carries earth to where the baby has been put to lie on the ground. She lets it seep through her fingers onto the baby’s face.

A soft wail lifts into the air. It picks up momentum as the handful of soil enters the baby’s nose and mouth. The new mother steps in front. The child is not hers but her maternal senses cannot be helped.

The grandmother holds her hand up, “Do not! You think I am crazy? You?! All of you killed my daughter!”

The grandmother falls to the ground and heaves. She covers herself in the mud and screams. She rolls and rolls and rolls…

Then

The ancestors of the village called Ollu have always had a special connection to water. Everybody in the village was connected to it but not everybody could use it. Nakuti descended from men and women who could call on the water. Her father was the chief rainmaker.

Baba Nakuti treated his daughter like one who knew her own mind from the time she was little. He reasoned with her, he asked her questions as if he truly wanted to know the answers, he affirmed her growing knowledge, and he taught her to think for herself why she believed what she believed about everything. After he knew there would be no sons Baba Nakuti started training his daughter in the making of rain.

He took her out to the river, taught her to breathe slowly; to feel the air filling her lungs. He showed her to taste the wetness or the dryness of the air: to understand how she must call for more wetness or how to tell the air “enough”.

In the evening she would sit on his lap and he would tell her stories. These would be stories of the ancestors who saw villages far away. Stories of how the pot makers and the rainmakers used to live side by side, trading daughters and gifts. Stories of the seed planters and the light bringers. Baba Nakuti would tickle his daughter and tell her that the she would be the greatest rainmaker of all time.

“You are spoiling her,” his wife said.

“You do not spoil her enough,” he responded. She sucked air through her teeth.

“You fill her mind with ideas of the gift but you do not tell her what it will take from her,” She spit. “You are selfish.”

“When did you become so bitter?” He reached out to touch her. “Why do you not call your child love anymore? I know you hold me responsible for our unborn ones but Nakuti has done you no wrong.”

Mama Nakuti stared at him but did not answer. When she had lost the child after Nakuti, the villagers had talked about her womb. She knew they called her cursed. She called the medicine man. She never asked to go through that pain and humiliation. She told him to close her womb; to make it so that she could not conceive. She would never have the son to take after his father.

Mama Nakuti had the genes of the rainmaker. She had always felt it was not her gift to use, yet she was the one who had sacrificed for this gift. She was the one who had conceived and lost because of the gift. After the medicine man, she was unsexed; not fully woman anymore. There were days she would remember and she would shudder. As much as he loved her, Baba Nakuti could never fully understand and for that she could never fully forgive him.

Holding unto water omenana issue 13
Art By Sunny Efemena

Baba Nakuti saw through her. He was a complicated man. He hated her resentment. He received her silent anger at herself and at him but he was attached to her like he was attached to water. Unlike the other chiefs and elders, he never picked a second wife. Though, he was more than entitled to, seeing as his first one bore him no sons and could bear him none. Baba Nakuti feared and loved his wife. They fought but he never once looked at her as disposable or replaceable. No other woman in Ollu could survive the sacrifices she had endured for her people. He loved her through the silence, and on days when tears would fall from her eyes for no reason, he would whisper in their tongue, “You are enough.”…

Now

Blinding flashes appear. Lightning. Deafening claps of thunder. The sky darkens as the grandmother wails. She has screamed at the sky once before… in another lifetime. An old man limps out of a hut, his cane guiding him. The grandfather. He coughs specks of blood onto his palm. He knows one of his own is gone. The rain tells him. His wife stands and faces him. The grief distorts into rage.

Then

Nakuti was veiled in dusky skin; skin that consumed the men of Ollu. They wanted her.  As she grew, her body filled out. Some men tried to win her but they were all the same. Nakuti entertained their interest and grew bored easily.

When Nakuti met Muyanze the rain was still coming: not as frequent but still present. Muyanze was different. He came into Ollu like the desert wind. He was unfamiliar and axiomatic. His and Nakuti’s love story was not complicated. It was the endless push and pull of lust and love in nature. He was a traveller with a thousand stories on the tip of his tongue. He came into the village as a spare part. He ran errands, and helped men chop down big trees with his muscular arms. His skin was the colour of splintered wood.

“Where are you from?” Nakuti found him swinging at a big tree in the forest. She had been sent to kill soft game to dry and store.

“Here and there. Everywhere and nowhere really.” Sweat glazed his skin, dripping down the sides of his face. She took in the sight of his broad shoulders. She shivered a little. She could not understand what drew her to him. The force of it scared her.

“That answers where you are and where you were but not where you are from,” he stopped swinging his axe and studied her, contemplating his answer.

“What does it matter, if I am here?”

“Baba used to tell me where a person is from will tell you a lot about who they become,” Nakuti moved closer, reaching out to touch his back. “You have scars that carry where you are from on your back.” He flinched as she made contact with his skin. He dropped the axe, turned around and grasped her wrist, making her gasp.  Fear. She called the sky involuntarily. The sun disappeared.

“My scars are my stories.” The clouds gathered together forming shadows of darkness. She felt his breath on her skin. “I tell my history only to those I trust to not use it against me.” It started to rain. He looked up, perturbed. He let go of her and the rain immediately receded. He cocked his head.

“What is your name?”

“Nakuti,” she breathed.  He laughed a deep low laughter.

“Ohh. You are the famous rainmaker’s daughter. No wonder the sky listens to you,” he looked her up and down. “The boys in the village have told me you are trouble.”

“Firstly, I am not merely the rainmaker’s daughter. I am a rainmaker. Secondly, I only reciprocate what I am shown. Your boys in the village may be the ones who are trouble.”

“Well then why don’t you make me some rain, rainmaker?”

“Why don’t you tell me where you are from, story teller?” Nakuti moved back and folded her arms across her chest. He laughed.

“That is a fair response. Okay rainmaker, I will tell you my story if you come to me again tomorrow,” Nakuti shrugged, acting unbothered but she knew she would return.

Muyanze’s eyes were beautiful. They were a lighter shade of brown than his skin and when he told a story, they turned almost green. She kept asking about where he came from. He only mentioned the Bahari people in passing.

“The way you can speak to the water in the air and the sky, the village of Oshena have those who can speak to the water in the ground and the sea,” she had never seen the sea but she felt it in him. Whenever he pulled her into himself and kissed her she tasted it too. She was clear. He was salty. Delicious. But like salt, he left her thirsty. Craving… needing more.

Nakuti figured it out. The pull to him. She was drawn to the water in Muyanze. She was ready to drown in him.

Now

“Is it worth it? She is gone! The only one I had! And she too has been taken from me! Is it worth it? Are these people worth it?” The grandmother screams and thrashes out. She staggers and stumbles. The villagers part from her madness.

“Quiet, woman!” He has never raised his voice at her but on this day he claims his right to his loss. He looks at the cot and releases a quivering breath. There she lies; still. How cruel are the ancestors? His child looks as beautiful as every other day she breathed life. It is supposed to be him, not her. He hears the soft sound and sees the baby on the ground. She is the reason.  He passes the grandmother whose eyes follow him bitterly. He walks to the baby whose whimpers have stilled.

He lifts the child and falls to the ground. He does not have the strength to carry both his and the baby’s weight. He holds the little one close to his chest. Her skin is fading. She must survive. For her mother’s sacrifice she must live.

Then

Muyanze left with the rain. He had become restless. When the sky first turned dry, nobody thought anything of it. The sky was unpredictable. Sometimes it roared. Tumbled threats. On other occasions it burned the sun’s fury. But this time it was different.

“Come with me?” he whispered in the dark. Nakuti thought about it. Everything within her propelled her towards him but she couldn’t.

“My father. He is sick. You know I love you but I cannot leave them,” Muyanze sighed at this.

“He has your mother. Can I not have you?”

“Without him the villagers do not have a rainmaker. I need to be here for them.”

“And who will be here for you Nakuti?” she felt the water sliding down her face.

“You could remain. We could have a family,” Even before he answered she knew it would not happen. Muyanze was not one to stay. He was a wanderer. He collected stories and moved on. She was simply a story he had collected.

“I do not belong here.”

She held his face and brought his forehead down until it touched her own, “Then go storyteller, and bring back sea-salt laced stories for me.”

He left on a night in the year of Nakuti’s twenty second born day. Ollu was in its third draught. Muyanze had not left Nakuti without evidence of his presence. Two weeks after he was gone she found herself with life inside her. Her mother was too preoccupied with her father’s health to notice.

Then the rumours started. Whispers behind village huts as she walked down the road. No one knew for sure who the father was. When Mama Nakuti heard the rumours and it was too obvious to hide she pulled her daughter aside.

“Strip!” They were standing outside her father’s hut.

“Excuse me mama?”

“You heard me. Remove those wraps you are wearing and let me see you,” Nakuti’s hands trembled. Her father coughed in the darkness of his room. Her mother reached out and roughly undid the knot that tied Nakuti’s loose ensemble together. Her breasts fell atop her rounding belly. There was no mistaking it. Her mother looked in disgust.

“We will call the medicine man. He will remove that thing.”

“Mama, no!”

“I am not asking Nakuti. You will not bring dishonour upon this family after everything that has been sacrificed for you. You cannot keep this.” She pointed at the protruding stomach.

“Mama I cannot give it up! This is all I have left of him!”

“Left of who? Is it that foreigner who came to our village? It is him, yes? Ollolo! What have I done to deserve this? If only your father had not been sick I should have known you are still too immature to think for yourself! You are naïve,” she shook Nakuti in anger. “How could you let him exploit you like that? Nakuti!” Nakuti trembled.

“You think it is a coincidence? Your pregnancy and the drought? The sky gods are cruel Nakuti! The ancestors have cursed us who are children of rainmakers. It is all a joke to them. We are pieces on their game boards; players to be used. You have just played right into their hands.” Nakuti moved away from her mother, off balance.

“Mama what are you talking about?”

“Your father filled your head with foolishness and I allowed it. No more. You must grow up on your own. So here it is; the truth. When there is drought, the sky must be appeased. It is not merely the rainmaker’s pleas to the water. There has to be sacrifice. The giving of a life to restore life. This is why the other children of my womb could not live. Your father allowed them to be sacrificed.” Mama Nakuti was crying now. Her voice grew softer.

“My babies. The lives inside me. I lost them. He allowed us to lose them for the village to live,” she reached out and felt Nakuti’s shoulder. It was burning. The sun was seeping into her pores. “Pendo, if you want to do your duty as rainmaker, if you want the village to survive and the drought to end you must sacrifice this unborn one,” Nakuti wrapped herself with her arms and shook her head.

“No. No. No. You are lying,” Mama Nakuti cradled her daughter in her arms and hushed her.

“It is okay my love. It is okay my Pendo. Tomorrow I will call the medicine man and we will put this all behind us. Tomorrow it will be over.”

That night before the medicine man came, Nakuti ran away.

Now

Trying to keep those who have left is like holding on to water. No matter how hard you try to grasp them, they slip through the spaces between your fingers.

The grandmother is guided by her rage. She has lost everything. They are blind. They cannot see it. The sky must have a sacrifice. She must have her daughter back. She looks at the child. The answer is patent.

Then

Nakuti felt the sharp pain slicing the inside of her womb. She lay prostrate on the ground next to the river. It carried the nostalgia of her past. Here was where her father would bring her to call the water. It was drying out. It could no longer be called a river. She chanted and prayed. She spoke to the skies.

“Save the life inside me. You are not as cruel as my mother thinks you. I know you are not. I have felt you inside me. I have called and you have answered. Now I am begging you.” Nakuti’s voice was hoarse. She had been screaming and cajoling the sky. Her throat was parched. She cried to the ancestors. She prayed fervently.

She felt detached from the water in the air. She could not sense it. When her womb clenched into tight fists she screamed. The baby inside was fighting to live. It also wanted to survive. “Take me!” She screamed. Something wet hit her arm. It cooled her burning skin. This was what it had been waiting for. “You want a sacrifice. Take me instead! Take me but leave my child.”

More drops. The rain was coming. She stood up and started walking towards the hill: towards her people. She slid on the mud and fell. She would not make it back to Ollu. She stripped her wraps and felt herself expanding. Her body was shifting and moving, creating space for the creature coming out of her.

“Take me instead.” She whispered, the strength draining from her muscles. She pushed one last time and heard the wail floating into the air. She pulled the child to her. The last thing she felt was the warm water leaving her, sliding between her thighs. It mixed with the fresh water falling from the sky.

She imagined it was salty. She tasted him on her lips. She wanted her child to know him. Whispered words… prayers. This one would always find the water. Her last breath released life.

Shingai Kagunda
Shingai is a Kenyan storyteller, story-writer, and poet who has featured in various art spaces in Nairobi. She graduated with a B.A in English Literature and a minor in International Relations. She works at a bookshop and seeks out stories wherever she can find them. Shingai will be starting her MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University during the fall season of 2019. Her work aims to highlight Afro-centrism, retelling silenced narratives, and femme experiences

Becoming a God – Keletso Mopai

By
Admin
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2
Illustration for Becoming a God in Omenana issue 13

She’d heard the stories; stories of men who morphed rocks into glass with their bare hands, of men who dipped their thumbs into a bowl of ash and turned it into fire, of men who transformed into wild animals, and stories of men who caused disastrous storms in the night. Except, for Mmadjadji, these were tales of her own fore-fathers. These were her ancestors.

As a child, she was most intrigued by the story of her grandfather, the famous Storm God who is said to have created both havoc and peace in her village. She had heard conflicting rumours: some said he was an angry madman, while others said he was the greatest god in her family. So, one early morning, Mmadjadji asked her mother about him.

Mmadjadji’s mother was sieving maize-meal in a container while Mmadjadji poured the sieved maize into a bucket. Her mother was wearing a yellow dress, the one she liked. She liked it so much that she wore it four times a week. Mmadjadji was dressed in a white, dotted dress that she hated. She disliked how it clung to her chest but floated around her hips. She would lift her tiny feet as if running on burning coals, and cry and scream for her mother to rip the dress off her body. Regardless, her mother always forced her to put it on. Years later, whenever Mmadjadji thought of her mother, she always remembered her in that beautiful yellow dress, and she, crying in her ugly white dress.

“What did he do? Why did our people love and hate the Storm God so much?”

Her mother responded simply, “He healed sick people.”

Disappointed, Mmadjadji said, “That’s it? He didn’t do anything else, like trigger rainfall, just as The Rain Queen used to?”

Mmadjadji wished she had lived in the era of The Rain Queen. She idolized her. The thought of a woman powerful enough to compel the clouds to shed tears whenever she felt like it, fascinated her. She had heard that presidents from all over the world would visit her village of Bolobedu in fancy private jets just to plead with The Rain Queen to put them out of their misery. Their crops were dying, they said. People were crumbling with thirst, they claimed. Because of this, the people of Bolobedu worshipped her. And although Mmadjadji loved The Rain Queen, she was also jealous that she was not a part of her family.

Mmadjadji’s mother looked at her, offended. “You think healing people is not a great thing?” she shook her head, “Once, when the Storm God was angry at his children, he caused a storm that lasted a year.”

“Haaa!” a disbelieving Mmadjadji gasped, “Did people die from the storm?”

“No, that’s what was strange about that storm. But, because people wanted to farm and go to work, they begged him with money and fruit baskets, and apologized on behalf of his stubborn children.”

“Mmawe, what else?”

“Mmadjadji…” her mother warned

“Tell me, please.”

“He also cursed sinners and made them sick. Your grandfather detested sinful people. He followed The Book, word by word. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. A man or a woman must not lie with another man or another woman. Thou shalt not commit adultery. One should respect their mother and father, and so on,” She handed Mmadjadji the last load of the mealie-meal to pour into the bucket. “The Storm God was a man with a pure heart, and that’s how he wanted others to be. When one of his neighbours stole another man’s goats and sold them, he made him impotent and thin; so thin, you could spin him around your fingers like a stick,” She chuckled as she said this and Mmadjadji giggled.

“Because of these things, our whole family was afraid of him. Sadly, your grandfather died of old age, not long before you were born. However, like the other gods before him, he sees everything we do, and he speaks to us when we need answers.” She watched Mmadjadji, who looked at her with attentive eyes. She then told her, “Years from now, when you become a woman, you will bear a son, and he will become a god too.”

Mmadjadji quickly looked at the ground, sudden tears in her eye-sockets and she asked her mother, “Does Papa have a good heart like his father? Is Papa like the Storm God?”

Her mother rose to her feet, picked up the filled bucket and said, “Your father is our god now, isn’t he? So, he will be like the great Storm God–even better.”

*

Not long after this Mmadjadji found herself surrounded by almost all the elders in her family. Her mother had called a family meeting.

 “How could she be pregnant so young, are you sure?” Mmadjadji’s aunt had asked her mother. “Isn’t she just twelve years old? Has she even bled yet?”

“She has been menstruating since she was nine,” her mother responded. Mmadjadji hated the way her mother said that. It was as if it was all her fault. Everyone, from her grandmothers to her uncles, kept gawking at Mmadjadji’s stomach with discomfort, as if she was carrying the devil.

 “Abortion is the only solution; there is no hiding this,” one of her uncles bluntly suggested. “Our gods will punish us all if the baby lives, the Storm God has communicated this to me.”

Sitting there with her family, Mmadjadji felt disgusting and unwanted. It was just like that scorching hot afternoon the year before, when her father climbed on top of her, put his big, sweaty hand over her lips, and hissed: “You need to feel like a woman, you are not a boy. You may dress like one, act like one, but you will never be a boy…

 “It will be over soon. Shh, keep quiet.” He further warned her when she struggled.

That day, she’d felt demons grasping her skin and a monster breathing fire all over her body. Everything at that moment, from her father’s hoarse voice, his steaming hot breath, to the two ravens that suddenly flapped their wings and sat on the window panes, numbed her. It was as if her body was no longer hers. She didn’t move until her father, the proclaimed god, was done. When he walked out of her bedroom, Mmadjadji had felt a twinge between her legs; her inner thighs felt as if someone had repeatedly beat her there with a hammer. She touched herself and there it was…blood. Red.

During the meeting, no one in the family asked her who’d tiptoed into her bedroom, dug through her clothes with their long nails, and planted the seed in her belly. No one asked about the numerous times he had touched her. Not a single mouth mentioned her father.

Mmadjadji did not grieve for the baby after her mother purged it from her stomach and dumped it into a toilet pit. After it was removed, she felt a sudden change in her body. She was no longer Mmadjadji, the daughter of some famous gods she never met. She was now someone else. She hated her father. She hated her mother. She hated her entire family. And she loathed the gods with every inch of her flesh. Mmadjadji did not grieve for the baby because it was her own funeral.

What happened to her remained engraved in her mind. The memory ate at her insides like a worm. So, when she turned eighteen, after matriculating high school, Mmadjadji packed her belongings and left Bolobedu.

Years later, she would realise that they did not ask who had impregnated her because they knew.

*

Bontle came into Mmadjadji’s life like the sun ascending in the morning after a cold night.

“May I copy your notes? I can’t see the board,” murmured a girl sitting next to Mmadjadji at the back of the classroom in their second-year Modern Physics lecture. The girl’s dark-green braids were tightly held together in a bun. Her skin was so radiant, it was as if she bathed in turquoise. “I stumbled on my glasses this morning when I was getting out of bed.”

There was a pause as Mmadjadji looked into the girl’s eyes. “How did you get to class then?”

“A friend literally held my hand, walked with me from my residence and dropped me here,” The girl laughed, “So, may I? Please?”

“Sure, go ahead.” She smirked. “Besides, I am used to girls pretending to be blind after noticing how cute I am.”

The girl laughed, a hasty loud laugh that got her a stern look from their lecturer. At the end of that lecture, the girl wrote her phone numbers at the edge of Mmadjadji’s note. It read: My name is Bontle. I know who you are, Mmadjadji, Mother of the sun. I will be waiting for your call.

Soon after graduating from university, they were married and living in Randburg, far away from Bolobedu.

*

Mmadjadji did not talk with her family and neither did they talk to her. However, a newspaper article brought her news about her family. Her father, the most respected living being in her family, had succumbed to colon cancer.

“That man was no god!” she exclaimed and then cursed after reading the paper. What has he done for her village ever since they gave him the title anyway? She asked herself. She had shouted like this once when she was still at varsity after reading an article online. The article said her father had been invited to The Rain Queen’s house, to bless the new Rain Queen of Bolobedu. She felt like standing on a rooftop and announcing to everyone that her father wasn’t the man they thought he was. Gods don’t rape and impregnate their daughters!

She then wondered: were there ever any gods in her family in the first place? The stories about the Storm God and his fore-fathers, were they made up? Was her childhood all a lie?

“You want to go back?” Bontle asked, lying on the bed next to her.

“I don’t know.” She did not know how to stomach her father’s death; kick a leg in the air or wallow in misery.

Mmadjadji and Bontle lay there gazing up at the wooden roof above them in their three-bedroom house. They moved into the house shortly after their small traditional wedding eleven years ago; a gathering of friends and Bontle’s close knit family, now Mmadjadji’s family too. Even though Bontle’s mother is a religious and godly woman, she supported her daughter’s marriage. She had sat in the front row that day with tears in her eyes.

Bontle shifted on the bed, moving closer to Mmadjadji. After a while, she said to her, “Whatever you decide, you know I will support you,” turning her head to face Mmadjadji, she adjusted the glasses on her small nose. Mmadjadji’s eyes remained shut and her lips vibrated in anguish. She spoke softly, and rubbed Mmadjadji’s her shoulder, “Love, I will go with you if you want. I know that after everything he did this must be difficult for you,” when Mmadjadji didn’t say anything, Bontle decided, “You are going home. It is final.”

*

Illustration for Becoming a God in Omenana issue 13
Art by Sunny Efemena

Time had come and gone like a train nobody seemed to want to catch. Life had carried on. Sixteen years since she left home and three weeks after her father’s funeral, Mmadjadji sat in the living room opposite her mother.

She looked around. Everything in the room felt the same. The same smell was in the air. The same walls stared back at her. And the same sofa she had sat on years ago now felt flatter under her. On her right was her bedroom door. She tried to ignore it – old ghosts of her childhood might still be in there. The ceiling still looked the same too, with more holes scattered around. The only thing that looked different was her mother.

She looked at the deep lines on her mother’s forehead. She glared at her black, grey, and brownish hair. Her mother’s skin was worn, resembling that of an elephant. Mmadjadji could not believe this was the same woman she had held such resentment against all these years. Her mother was incredibly old and weak.

Bontle sat on Mmadjadji’s left side, holding her hand. She was dressed in a red Pedi traditional attire. Her eyes looked everywhere except at Mmadjadji’s mother.

Before Mmadjadji opened her mouth, she held Bontle’s right hand tighter, as if to say: don’t leave me with this woman. She then asked, “Where is he buried?”

“Mmadjadji, my beautiful daughter, I am happy you are home.” Her mother said, smiling, not answering her question. Mmadjadji couldn’t tell whether the smile was sincere or bogus.

Mmadjadji’s mother reached for Mmadjadji’s hand, but Mmadjadji refused to move her hand toward her. Her mother eyed Bontle, and then asked, “O’khe stabane?”

“I am. I will always be a lesbian.”

She sighed, “I know. I know, I am your mother. Have you forgotten that I raised you?”

“No, you didn’t raise me. You crushed me every single chance you got because of what I am,”

She shook her head and spoke, “Mmadjadji, you know this is a sin. This is not our tradition. Our family does not—”

 “Please stop. Stop it.” Bontle interrupted “Mosadi, how can you tell her about family when none of your family members and your terrible gods treated her like one? Especially you. You are her mother; the one person she expected to protect her.” Bontle looked into the old woman’s eyes, “I mean, as a woman, how do you sleep at night?”

Mmadjadji tapped Bontle on the back. However, Bontle didn’t yield, “Your daughter was assaulted by her own father, multiple times. Where were you when all of that was happening in this house? Did you know? And if you did, o dirileng? Nothing? Nothing! No, wait… the only thing you did was kill the baby!”

Mmadjadji’s mother raised her finger at Bontle, “This is a family matter, you shouldn’t get –”

“This is my wife. I am the closest family you can get!”

“Bontle, please, I don’t want to fight with her.” Mmadjadji said. Then she looked at her mother and asked again, “Where is he buried?”

All she sees is dirt. Mmadjadji had somehow expected her father to be just sitting there on his grave, grinning and mocking her. Since he was a god, why can’t he rise from the dead and face her? But he is really dead, she thinks to herself.

She feels ridiculous standing there alone. It amazes her how empty she feels. Not a single tear in her eyes. No rage inside her. Nothing. She stares at her father’s grave as if waiting to feel something. Then, she steps onto it, undoes her jeans and squats on the dirt. She takes a piss. The warm fluid flows from her, forming small bubbles on the soil. She looks around the graveyard. Two white-necked ravens fly over her head. She laughs and laughs.

*

Shortly, after the couple return to their house in Randburg, the strange illness begins. First, Bontle finds Mmadjadji lying on their bedroom floor, unmoving, not talking or looking at her – just staring at the wall. Bontle carries her to their bed and covers her with a blanket. Later, Bontle forces food into her mouth because Mmadjadji is not eating her food. That night, she discovers a pile of vomit in a paper bag under their bed.

The following morning, while they are asleep, Mmadjadji howls, “My legs! Bontle, my legs!”

Bontle jumps out of the bed, surprised to hear the sound of Mmadjadji’s voice again, “What? What about them?”

“I can’t move. I can’t feel my legs…”

Bontle calls their doctor first. Next she calls her mother,

“I don’t know, I don’t know how to explain it to you, Mama. She wasn’t eating or talking to me yesterday, and today she wakes up with big, swollen legs. I thought she was just overwhelmed after going back home. But now this happens. I swear, Mama, I think her evil mother has done this to her. The doctor gave her some medications, but I don’t think they’re helping.”

“Thank you. I would really appreciate that.”

Bontle’s mother arrives the following day. She finds her daughter sitting on the kitchen floor, weeping.

“I can’t recognise her. Mama, my wife is gone.”

“Where is she?” her mother asks. With trembling fingers, Bontle points at their bedroom door.

When Bontle’s mother opens the door, she finds a creature with whittling skin, inflated legs, and pimples all over its face. Its head is so big, it’s as if it had stuffed dumplings into its cheeks.

Bontle’s mother doesn’t scream or run. She looks at the creature and calls, “Mmadjadji…” Mmadjadji moves on the bed, not saying a word. “I think we should take you to church. You have been bewitched.”

*

Bontle does what her mother’s priest tells her to do. This is how Bontle was raised. As a child she had gone to church three times a week, and she prayed with her mother every night. As Bontle grew older, however, she stopped attending church. She found that her mother’s church loved her and forgave her sins, but not all of her and not all of her sins.

But now, she and her wife will no longer drink tap water; she will find a stream where two rivers meet, collect the water, mix it with salt and vinegar, and then drink. She will wear a doek on her head every single day. She will not wear any jewellery or makeup. Bontle will sprinkle salt around their house to chase evil spirits away. She will burn stones and then make Mmadjadji inhale the steam from the flames. At midnight, she will gather the burnt stones together on a public road, so that someone else might cross over them and possess the ugly illness instead. Bontle will also fast, she will starve herself to death for Mmadjadji, if need be.

When Mmadjadji doesn’t get better, Bontle begins loudly singing hymns, holding the Holy Bible in her hands and stomping her feet in their house. Maybe this God her mother’s church preaches about every Sunday is somehow hard of hearing, He may hear her if her voice is more audible. Still nothing changes in her wife. It is as if all this time she’s been praying, she was just pouring water over a pile of rocks.

After two months without Mmadjadji getting any better but worse, Bontle decides she must take her back to Bolobedu. Perhaps her mother will undo the curse she laid on her daughter. Otherwise, Bontle might just strangle Mmadjadji’s mother until she confesses.

When they get there, however, she is shocked by what she discovers: Mmadjadji’s mother is lying on a blanket in her living room surrounded by family. She is so thin that a passing wind could cause her to roll on the ground. Her skin is ashy from the waist down and her hair strands can be counted on one hand. Everyone looks up at them and begins to sob.

Mmadjadji’s aunt, a light-skinned woman with big front teeth and dark gums, says to the two of them, “We have been waiting for you. Why did you take so long, my children?”

“La’reng?” Bontle utters.

“The gods… they can’t take this bad blood between Mmadjadji and her mother. They need them to reconcile, else her mother dies.”

“So you people are not the ones bewitching my wife?”

The woman shakes her head in disgust and spits on the floor, “Do you see a witch in this room? Please, don’t insult us. We are not witches here. Your wife has been named by her grandfather, that’s what’s making her sick.” she then looks up at Bontle with sharp eyes and announces, “Mmadjadji has been chosen as the next god!”

Mmadjadji drops to her knees. She can feel her chapped lips stretching when she speaks. “I will not. Not after everything this family has put me through!”

“Please my child,” her uncle says. “You have to. My father… the Storm God will punish us.”

“Is this the same god who you said told you to kill my baby? The same god who says I can’t love another woman?”

When she says this, they all look down. Her uncle murmurs, looking at his wrinkled hands. “Clearly, we were wrong. The Storm God would never choose someone who is evil.”

When Mmadjadji says, “But my father was an evil man…”

Her aunt interrupts, “Your father was not chosen by the gods. We only named him a god after your grandfather died, because he was his firstborn son,”

“We are ashamed about the things your father did to you. All of us here are terribly sorry about the things he did,” another aunt says. “Please, my daughter, heal yourself so that you can heal your mother. Become the god you were destined to be.”

As they sit there begging her, Mmadjadji’s chapped skin starts to heal. Her bulging body slowly returns to its original size. Her pimples ooze pus, and shortly after, her face becomes clear. Everyone in the room, including Bontle, watches in astonishment.

When Mmadjadji has fully healed, she looks at her mother lying there on the floor, dying. She knows she is expected to heal her. She then looks at Bontle, who is beaming with joy, and a hint of pride.

Mmadjadji looks down at her mother again. She slowly kneels beside her and holds her thin hands. Her mother grasps her sturdily, then screams as if giving birth. To everyone’s wonder, bit by bit, Mmadjadji’s mother’s body returns.

Later in the evening, the sky unleashes lightning bolts like bombs, windows screech, threatening to come off from their hinges, trees and mud houses fall to the ground like splintering glass, dogs huddle into corners and howl in the dark, heavy rain pours to the ground as if cleansing the village, and Mmadjadji is now the first woman in her family to become a god.

They will call her The Storm Queen.

The End

Keletso Mopai is a South African storyteller whose work has been published in various journals including The Johannesburg Review of Books, DRUM, Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, Praxis Magazine, African Writer, The Ebedi Review, among others. She was longlisted for the 2017 Writivism Short Story Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 Africa Book Club Competition. ‘Becoming a God’ is part of her debut collection of stories ‘If You Keep Digging,’ which is forthcoming from BlackBird Books by June, 2019. Her stories explore pertinent issues such as racism, homophobia, rape and death

Sin Eater – Chikodili Emelumadu

By
Admin
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8
Illustration for Sin Eater Omenna issue 13

All my life I waited to get into university, but nothing could have prepared me for the experience.

I am the last of seven siblings: three sets of twins – two boys, a boy and a girl, and two girls, then me, the unpaired, skewing the data in favour of more girls than boys. Awkward. All the twins are kind and nice and all, but you can see why I’ve always wanted to get away, live my own life in my own place.

I choose Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, and move into to a hostel, even though my folks live forty minutes away – by bus — in Fegge and don’t want me, their ‘tail child’ to leave their house empty.

Of course, I get a weird roommate.

Her door in the flat stands closed all afternoon. At night, hunger pangs wake me. I click on my rechargeable lantern and make my way down the hallway to the small communal kitchen where I’d dumped my loaf of bread, a bunch of bananas and an old Seaman’s schnapps bottle full of roasted groundnuts.

My flatmate stands naked at the end of the corridor.

“Hi,” she says, rubbing her stomach. “I’m Nchedo. Hope I did not wake you?”

“Okay,” I reply but she doesn’t move. Only my past experience in an all girls’ boarding school makes her nudity sort of normal to me. But not the other thing.

Not the bit where she is covered in blood.

The crimson sheen to her thighs startles me. It glistens, fresh and wet. Her hands are broad swathes of yellowy-brown, mixed in with waves of dripping red.

“You mean this?” she asks, even though I haven’t said anything. “It’s just period blood. I am a heavy bleeder.”

I nod. “Me too… but you know what? No matter how heavy my period gets, I never bleed from my mouth.”

She cocks her head, a micro movement before comprehension. Nchedo wipes her face.

“It’s still there,” I say. She licks a thumb and works it on the corner of her mouth. “I think you need more than a thumb.”

She drops the hand. “You’re not afraid.”

“Of what? All I need to do is wake up and I will be in my bed.”

“You’re not dreaming,” she says. Her stomach gurgles loudly. She winces, clutching at it. “I need to ease myself, before I do it on the floor. Don’t run, you hear?”

I freeze in the act of retreating. The fluorescent lantern in my hand dances jerkily, its beams cutting jagged lines across her body.

“We need to talk, okay?” She’s staring into my eyes, waiting for me to agree.

“I’m not running,” I say. “Take your time.”

**

Nchedo finds me on Nnamdi Azikiwe expressway, trying to flag down a ride.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to run?” She seems only mildly disappointed.

“I’m not running. I just… forgot something at home.”

She shakes her head, amused, as if I am a naughty puppy, takes my hand in her warm, dry one and we are back at the flat, in her room.

“I won’t hurt you, I swear.” Her eyes plead understanding. The curtains are drawn. The single bulb in the ceiling burns low from the half-current that we’ve been supplied this night. There is a human head on the bed in a tangled, viscous mess. It doesn’t look quite real, but the smell, heavy and saturated with metal, says otherwise. I back away. Something gives underneath my slippers. I throw up, long and hard and I have no control over my body, this opening and expelling that takes everything in me. I keep going even when nothing else comes out.

Nchedo sighs. “See, you’re supposed to help me clean this, not add you own.”

**

“Sin eater? Like in ‘Supernatural’ or what?” My voice is muffled behind the headscarf I’ve tied around my nose and my own breath bounces back against my neck. I’m sweating. The meagre electricity gives the room a sickly glow and the brush in my hand is down to its wooden block from the force of my scrubbing.

My flatmate pauses. “That bread-dipping thing? How conveniently neat. Abegi,” she rolls her eyes. Please. “As if there would ever be a male sin eater.”

She tells me. School and freedom pale in comparison.

“It’s my first time. I finally graduated, and this was my first assignment.” She stares at the metal bucket full of sloppy human DNA. “I guess I bit off more than I could swallow.”

Her stomach is flatter underneath the wrapper tied around her chest. I have on a pair of surgical gloves from the packet I stole from my father’s pharmacy. Cutting out three of the fingers on each hand will give you a sleeve over an existing pair. It’s not the first time I’ve had to clean something disgusting. In boarding school, I was a pounder – one of the girls whose job it was to pound the mounds of shit in the toilets with logs so that it could pass through the old, encrusted pipes. It takes a lot to make me vomit.

The room is near spotless when I’m done. Who said boarding school is useless?

“Fine, I’ll help you with your assignments,” I say, even though she doesn’t ask.

“Yay,” she claps. She is gorgeous. Her teeth are whiter than sun-bleached bone and shimmer with their own light. I shudder to think of the mincemeat they made of the guy she’d eaten.

I raise my hand. “Under one condition: No more cleansing in the flat.”

Cleansing. That’s what she calls it when she takes a sin away. The man she ate had beaten his wife for the three years of their marriage. One day, he beat her too hard and she did not get up. We pour out his remains at the foot of a tree, in the bushes where he’d secretly buried his wife.  

“Should we get some suya?” she asks. “I’m a bit hungry.”

I resolve never to eat meat again.

**

Our next mission is a houseboy who is poisoning his madam. A man of about twenty-two, he carries a metal bucket with a lid into the grinding quarters of the market. I watch. Nchedo just stands around attracting okada riders who pull up in their motorcycles and ask where we want to go. She waves them away, worrying at her cuticles with the strong, white nails of the other hand.

The industrial grinders are noisy, shrill. I cover my ears as they work grains, seeds, whatever, into a pulp. The boy comes out, lugging the lidded bucket.

“Maybe his madam is wicked,” I say. “You never know, she could be a witch of a woman.”

“You’re justifying poisoning?” Nchedo snorts. “Anyway, this isn’t the first madam he’s killed,” she says. “It’s his second.”

The boy drops the bucket near the base of the Worker’s Union statue, three men with shovels and pickaxes on a plinth. He slides the lid off with the side of his leg and tips something in, sloshing the bucket to mix it. Nobody in the busy market pays attention to him.

“Rat poison. His Oga is away today. He’s making mai-mai. His madam loves mai-mai. The kids don’t. Really, it’s the children he’s after.”

The boy picks up the lidded bucket. His steps are jaunty.

“The children?”

“Mm. He wants to sell them to traffickers and retire across the border. His madam suspects something is up with him but oga thinks she is being hysterical. She’s just had a baby after all. And she is sick.” She shoves me. “Ngwa, go.”

My skin crawls. I am small. I have almost no breasts. Sometimes, I wonder how far Nchedo’s powers extend. Can she see the future? Did she choose me to be her roomie?

I tap the houseboy. “Excuse, can you tell me where Okwadike stadium is?” The stadium is old, run down and isolated. It’s overgrown and nothing good happens there. Drug deals, quick-action prostitution in cars, rape, a few murders. It is a red flag to a bull.

He looks me up and down and points the way. “That way, then when you come to the junction you corner, turn left, then pass one woman selling recharge, turn right and walk o…in fact, come let me escort you.”

I refuse, thanking him. When I set off, he waits and then he follows.

It’s easy to pretend that I am lost. I haven’t been to the state capital since Children’s Day in primary school, when the stadium bore the name of the then-governor. There’s a new stadium now, bigger and everything. Things change each time there is a new person in power.

I sing, both to cover up my nerves and the fact that he is following me. I’m aware of my jeans, the gap between the waistband and the bottom of my t-shirt. A wrong turn here, another there. I lead him down an alleyway. My voice is small and disappears as we pass behind the lumberyard. A wall. There is no thoroughfare I turn around. He fills up the narrow passage, blocking my exit.

He is bigger than I am, strengthened by hard city living. The alleyway stinks of urine. Someone has wiped their shitty behind on the wall. A used condom lies in the corner, covered in soil and flies.  

“Shift and let me pass!” I say.

The houseboy laughs and hate blooms in my chest like fungi, fertilised by all the times I have felt unsafe. I wonder how Nchedo will do it, but I needn’t have worried. She’s behind him, footfalls muffled on the sawdust from the nearby lumberyard. He doesn’t hear her but when I look behind him, he whirls around, eyes flashing, instantly aware that he has become prey. He relaxes a little when he sees Nchedo, his shoulders coming down from around his ears. She is only a woman.

“Pius, how now?” Nchedo says. He stares at her, surprised she knows his name. I turn away, gazing at the pylons, like so many cobwebs above the city. I don’t see what she does, but there is a twisting and crunching.

“Finished.” Nchedo is out of breath and looks about seven months pregnant. She yawns. “I need to lie down.” Her strappy lycra dress has gone from calf-length to above her knee. When we emerge from the alley, the okada men draw lots as to who will take the pregnant woman, and if they recognise her from before, they don’t say anything.

We end up on the lowest bike and the slowest rider, a portly man with wiry hair growing out of his ears. Nchedo has to pull her dress almost to her hips to get on.

When the houseboy comes out a few hours later, it is in a steady stream of black sludge. We finish all our buckets and jerry cans of water trying to flush him down.

“At least this is better than before, abi?” Her voice is hoarse from throwing up. The houseboy’s remains go down, but the inside of the toilet is stained black no matter the amount of Jik bleach I pour inside it.  

“What about the people he works with? He can’t have planned trafficking those children alone. There must be a network.”

“So, you want me to cleanse all of them? With which stomach? Not my job abeg,” she says. “Let’s hit Diamond Pizza. I want the biggest jollof with coleslaw and a half-chicken.” She grins her usual grin, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

I order a soft serve ice cream and eat it slowly. She’s distracted, staring off into the distance. Her ears twitch as if she can hear something I can’t.

Later that night, she climbs into my bed, waking me with the warmth of her body. A wind blows through the open windows of my room, setting the empty plastic hangers on my rack a-clanking. She curves around my back. Lightning streaks intermittently across the ceiling of my room, but neither thunder nor rain follow.

“What is it?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. She’s already asleep, her breath heating up a spot on my back through my pyjamas.

**

Nchedo mentions her sisters a lot. It is obvious she misses them.

“My sister Makuo used to protect me when there was a storm. I have never liked them. Amadiora, the god of lightning, he can be one kain changeable.”

I shake my head to dislodge this information sharpish. I can accept what Nchedo is, but talk of mythical Igbo gods and goddesses is a step too far.

The sisters then: There is Obegolu who loves to eat mangoes and Akabeze that sets fires because she is always cold and nearly burned down their mother’s house. Stella is the crier of the family, everything brings tears. Beluchukwu, and Hapuluora her twin sister, Mgborie…

“Mgborie? Who still calls their child Mgborie? Your parents did not do well at all!” I’m laughing hard. “And how many sisters do you even have anyway?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “My mother has them when it is time.”

I stop laughing. A thought has occurred to me. “And the boys? Doesn’t your mother have boys?”

Nchedo snorts. “What can boys do, except cause wahala and then die?”

I don’t ask her by whose hand. It is as if I already know. “I have brothers,” I say.

She rolls her eyes. “Hashtag, not all men.”

We mutually decide not to talk about her family again. That is to say, I don’t ask and she doesn’t volunteer.

**

Another assignment.

“How do you know if a person should be cleansed?”

“I just do.”

“But how?”

Illustration for Sin Eater Omenna issue 13

Nchedo sighs. “How do you know when you need the toilet? Or when you’re hungry?” She takes a glug of warm Star beer straight from the bottle.

 I get the point. The girl we are following though, I’m not sure. Her name is Chimere, one of the most popular girls in school, with her light, ‘half-caste’ skin and long, curly hair. Even though she is a fresher like we are, you’ll never find her under the sun, queueing for a bus. Her boyfriend is a fraternity guy, a Buccaneer, one of the fine boys on campus. He picked her right out of secondary school in Enugu, before she’d even finished. The story goes that he worked it for them to be in the same uni. A rotation of vehicles brings Chimere to school every day – when she deigns to attend lectures. She doesn’t need to be in school to pass her classes. Who would mess with a Capone’s chick?

Looks like we will.

“What did she do?”

My flatmate makes a face. There are dark circles under her eyes. “I can show you,” she says. She slides a hand through my sweat-tangled braids and lays it against my scalp. It heats up, and just when I think I am about to scream from the pain, it fades, and I am standing in a new place.

A dim room. There are curtains on the windows, a creamy chiffon underneath heavy burgundy brocade. A sliver of light comes through the middle of the chiffon, where the heavier set of curtains do not quite meet. The air on my skin is cold from the air conditioner. A hotel room, with maroon carpeting overlaid with beige and brown squiggles, cream walls and a double bed. Chimere stands beside me, model-esque in her heels. Her hair smells of chemicals, hair spray or gel or something. She holds a phone pointed at a bed, around which three men…

It’s as if my head is cracking open, the sound is so loud. I’m in the beer parlour again, sitting under an awning. My ears ring and I waggle my jaw to pop them. Nchedo is watching Chimere and her bodyguards picking up cartons of booze from the supermarket next door. Chimere hangs her wrist, as if she is too delicate to do anything. The same hands that held the camera phone. Every pore on my body opens and pours forth sweat.

Nchedo burps, speaks, without taking her eyes off Chimere and her serfs. “It’s how they break them. The video just helps them stay broken. You say ‘No’ to the Buccaneers, and that’s what they do. You say ‘Yes’, same thing.”

I want to scream, shout, cry. The Buccaneers like to call themselves the gentlemen of cults. Whatever. A sword is just a fancy knife. And Chimere’s hand is on the hilt.

**

The party is by invitation only, but that is just a gimmick to make it more appealing. Everybody wants something they can’t have. The bass-heavy music pounds in my chest. It makes me anxious. It’s one thing getting houseboys, but we have entered the lion’s den. I’m just one small person.

“Relax,” Nchedo says. “Drink something. I won’t need you.”

But I can’t. Everyone is drunk. There are drugs going round, openly, everywhere. I’m afraid somebody will roofie me. I don’t want to end up a girl on a bed in a hotel room.

Nchedo moves to the middle of the floor and dances as if she is alone in the place. I retreat further into the crowd. The Buccaneers watch her: campus boys, men who’ve graduated and others like the Capone who should have left school ages ago but haven’t. They’re all too handsome to sweat, so they stand by the walls. They stare from the cordoned-off balcony where the very important alumni point at girls and have them sent up.  

Someone steps on my foot.

“Jesus!”

They don’t say sorry. In the time it takes for me to look up again, Chimere is approaching her man on the balcony, each step like a baby antelope learning to walk. She curls a hand around his biceps, frowns and whispers something in his ear. He doesn’t turn towards her. Nchedo dances, fluid like water and it is she that the Capone watches, biting his lips like he’s a Nollywood leading man or something. His shirt is open and a gold pendant gleams in the forest of chest hair. I can see why he’s the boss man.

Other girls join Nchedo on the floor. Two have blue-black Sudanese complexions and look identical. Many are bronzed and copper-coloured and ochre, all possible hues of black. I can see the similarity in the way they dance as if it’s something they’ve learned together. They are dressed in skin-tight trousers, mini-skirts, batty riders and cut-out dresses; hips working, thighs strong and arms taut. I relax because it means we might not die today. Reinforcements. I’m sure these are Nchedo’s sisters.

Chimere’s Capone gets a look in his eye. He nods at someone and immediately black t-shirts swoop in, smiles, such charming smiles, hands on waists, on bums, giving the girls drinks and leading them off. Nchedo doesn’t look at me when she goes off but somehow, I hear her clearly in my head: Go home.

**

Does it still count as a massacre if there are no bodies? Seven boys are missing. And Chimere. The Black Axes claim responsibility.

**

The bags under Nchedo’s eyes are bigger and she can’t even finish a tuber of yam by herself anymore. At night, she burns with a fever and her breath stinks of abattoirs. I try to take her to the hospital, but she refuses.

“You may muddy a river, but it will flow itself clean again.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” The scarf is back across my nose. It frightens me, seeing her like this.

“I mean,” a pause to cough, “Think about it. You jump into a river and muddy it up. When you leave, it clears itself. It can become vapour, or liquid or a solid, but water doesn’t just disappear.”

“And what does that have to do with the price of garri in the market?”

She laughs.

I snap at her. “If I drink the water, it disappears.” My phone is in my hand. “I’m calling drop to take you to Amaku.” The nearest teaching hospital is ten minutes away by okada but what if she falls off the motorcycle?

“If you drink water it becomes blood and urine and sweat,” Nchedo says. “Water has no beginning and no end. People drive themselves mad looking for the source of this and that, but all water is the same water.” She coughs again. Clears her nose and swallows it, laughing when I make a face.

“It’s in the bible sef. ‘Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’ Water has always been here and so too, Idemili, the Mother of water, you know?

I bring her a glass of water and she takes it, gratefully.

“They are burning her house. Our house. All over this state. You nko, if they burn your mother’s house, won’t it make you sick?”

Burning water? She’s not making sense but I don’t say this aloud.

 “Are you dying?” I don’t want to cry but it doesn’t matter. A blink and I am crying anyway.

“Shut up, you big taata,” she says. “Who told you I’m dying? You’re worse than Stella, I swear.” I watch her as she falls asleep.

                           **

By morning, I am on her bed alone. Her things are scattered all over the flat, but her phone is missing. She’s gone. I spy a note near the shoe rack by the door.

‘I am coming,’ it says. So Nigerian to be coming when one is going.

Despite wishing for space all my life, I am not good at being alone. Time stretches, folds in on itself. The nights are twice as long and I wake constantly, pulled from sleep by the silence.

How did I not notice that Nchedo didn’t give me her mobile number? I have no other friends. My phone does not ring, and the only beeps come from my parents Whatsapping me annoying forwarded messages. It adds to my restlessness and worry.

It is this worry that drives me to evening service a few days later. I go to pray that whatever is happening to Nchedo resolves itself. I pray that she is healthy, and her family is well. I pray for her to come back soon, right after I realise, I cannot even go to find her because she hasn’t told me where her family lives. All this prayer, and I no longer believe in the kind of God in whom I was taught to believe, the kind that lets bad things happen to people like me and does nothing, ‘for His glory’. I like having my own personal avenging angel or demi-goddess or whatever Nchedo is. I pray anyway, because speaking my wishes aloud calms me somewhat.

As I cook dinner for one that night, I turn my small radio on so that it feels as if I am surrounded by lots of people. It’s hard for me to cook for one.

The seven o’clock news comes on and the newsreader announces clashes in communities, people burning shrines and artefacts hundreds of years old. I eat my Indomie and egg, out of the pot, standing over the kitchen sink.

**

When I was a little girl, I knew things happened at night while I slept. My siblings would tell stories to scare me: witches who ate small children, monsters grabbing one from under the bed, shadows that aren’t shaped like their owners. They stopped telling them when they realised how much I loved the fear. It was like a loose tooth to me, salty and painful, and I prodded it with my metaphorical tongue.

In the night, while they slept, I stayed awake and waited for things to happen as my bladder filled up. I wanted to see. But the night is tricky, and her children are cunning. Sleep would take me before long. Over the years, I trained myself not to flutter my eyelids as I lay there, waiting. I let my body go slack, breathing deeply and steadily, watching out of the corners of my eyes.

It’s a smell that wakes me, thick and pungent, masculine. I wake up behind my eyelids as the intruder bends over my face, breathing staleness. This is no Night’s child, playing in the shadows. This is real and present danger.

He seizes me by the throat and pulls me out of bed, dashing me to the floor. From below I can smell the greenery on his skin, as if he’s been living in the bushes while a campus war is being fought.

“Where is your friend, eh?” Capone delivers me a backhand when I am slow to answer, and I smash my face against the wall. I have never felt such pain before.

“I don’t know,” I reply but he kicks me in the stomach. The Indomie is sour when it comes back up, and the pepper I’d added burns through my nostrils. He steps on my back, pushing my face into my vomit as if I am an errant puppy.

“I knew something was up… those girls. Me! You people tried me! Who sent you? Where are my boys?” He’s talking to himself. If he wanted me to respond he would let up on the pressure. My mouth is full of my own vomit. He presses and my teeth cut into the skin behind my lips. “Where is Chimere?” He drags me up by my hair and the braids around my temples snap and break. I cover my head so that I don’t bang it anywhere. My wrists bear the brunt of his beating.

“Please…”

“You are begging? I know you people did something. My dibia does not lie. You see this?” He rips his shirt and the buttons fly. He grabs my hand and rubs his stomach with it. His skin is covered in thick, raised scars. Juju. “This is why you could not get me. No Black Axe, no dirty bagga can get me. If you shout, I will kill you here.”

I hadn’t seen the knife before, but here it is, drawing the eye.

“Open your mouth!” He slips the knife in. “Now talk or I will cut your tongue, I swear to God. If you no wound today, call me bastard! I will kill you and nothing will happen.”

I’m glad Nchedo didn’t tell me where she was going. I look Capone in the eye and see an animal. If I knew anything, I’d have told him. As it is, I don’t. My head is a basket of agony and one of my eyes cannot open. He pushes the knife deeper into my mouth and my throat spasms, cutting itself in the process. Blood. He fumbles with his trousers in the other hand. He is pinning my body with all his weight and I can’t breathe. I can’t swallow with the knife in my throat. I’m choking. I am going to die.

There is a bang, and the pressure across my chest is off. I gulp air, coughing, retching, while chaos reigns around me. My roommate is here, clinging onto Capone’s back and encircling him with her limbs. He reaches around, trying to hit her, but his trousers tangle his legs and they both go down. I want to say her name, but my throat is fire. I slip in my own vomit.

They roll about on the floor and there is a cracking sound, like many dry sticks breaking. Capone screams and brings down the hand holding the knife. It comes up and down again, red, but Nchedo holds on. She is strong. The veins in her neck are thick, pulsing, but Capone is strong too and Nchedo is weakening. His struggles are violent but targeted. Nchedo has not managed to seize that arm. It comes down again and I grab it, but my hands are slippery, so I bite down hard on his wrist. His skin is tough. My teeth hurt but he screams and drops the knife, hitting me away.

It is enough. Nchedo tightens her grip and there are more loud pops. He is still fighting. I crawl back to them and hang onto his ear with my teeth. It is bitter with wax.

Nchedo looks me in the face but her eyes are different, yellow, glowing like the sun. I clasp him from behind, digging my hands into his windpipe, trying to crush. Nchedo throws her head back, grimacing with effort.

 The Capone’s death throes are violent.  Nchedo opens her mouth and her neck elongates, widens. She brings her jaw down on the Capone’s head and there is a sound of breaking coconuts. He stills and she forces him down like a lump of stubborn eba. It looks painful.  I help her, taking off his clothes, flinging the belt away. I rub my roommate’s arms as she swallows, cleansing our campus of sin.

I will never be alone again.

Chikodili Emelumadu is a writer and broadcaster living in Brighton, East Sussex. She was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award in 2014 for her short story ‘Candy Girl’. She’s been published in Apex, One Throne, Eclectica and many other magazines and anthologies, including the collection ‘African Monsters’ for which her story ‘Bush Baby’ was nominated for the Caine Prize for African Literature in 2017. She is currently querying agents for her first novel. She tweets as @chemelumadu.

Call For Submissions: Urban Legends (special issue)

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Omenana Magazine is currently open for fiction, and non-fiction submissions from writers living in Africa or African writers living anywhere in the world for its special edition, The Urban Legend Issue.

As always, we are looking out for imaginative speculative fiction (Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror or Magical Realism) that have compelling characters and settings with strong relation to the African continent based on our Urban Legend theme. The ideal story should challenge normative ideas about gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religious belief.

The Urban Legend Issue will feature imaginative stories drawn from African folklore, myths and legends that have been passed on for generations. The kind of monster stories that served as tales of caution, thrill, and wonder such as Lady Koi Koi, the lady known for the sound of the clatter of her heels, walking about at night in search of something; Gbomogbomo, the mysterious ghost that kidnaps people; Abiku, the child with the ability to reincarnate; or the bush babies of Nairobi. You may interpret the theme as broadly as you like, and you can place the stories in any historic era.

Surprise us!

Submission Guidelines:

  1. All submissions must be sent to urbanlegend.omenana@gmail.com as a single attachment in either doc or docx format. The manuscript should be typed in Times New Roman (Size 12) using double line spacing. (British English spellings).
  2. Include a cover letter in the body of your e-mail providing your contact details, story title, address, email and phone number, a brief publication history, a bio of no more than 100 words and a profile photo.
  3. The maximum word count for fiction submissions is 5000 words. The maximum word count for non-fiction is 3000. Any submission that exceeds the word count will not be read.
  4. All works must be previously unpublished.
  5. Submissions open on October 8, 2018 and closes on October 30, 2018.
  6. Accepted submissions will be paid at a rate of N5,000 per story.

Omenana Speculative Fiction Magazine Issue 12

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Omenana issue 12 cover

Download Issue 12 pdf version here. Read flip version on Issuu 

In this edition:

Editorial: Our Darkest Selves

Essay: Review of Trinity: Red October Issue 1 – Joseph Omotayo

A Bridal Shroud – Mirette Bahgat

In the Garden Watching Nim Noms – Osahon Ize-Iyamu

Memento Mori – Tiah Marie Beautement

Artist Spotlight On: Tamara Reddy

Lee-ah (Sister) – H.J. Golakai

Sunny Efemena illustrated the stories in this edition. PDF version available for download 1st September.

A Bridal Shroud – Mirette Bahgat

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One night, when the air was hot and sticky, and the only sound one could hear was that of the night crickets and the occasional cries of curlews, Kiya sat on the roof of her house. She gazed up at the few scattered stars in the sky, while braiding her dark coarse hair. Her father was on the lower floor preparing dough to bake for the next day. In the silence, Kiya thought she heard something, or someone. A call maybe, a familiar sound. With her hair half-braided, she made her way down the stairs.

“Aba, did you call for me?” She asked her father.
“No.”

But she was sure she had heard something. She went out into the front yard, her bare feet brushing against the damp grass. Despite the warm night breeze, her limbs were shaking. And after a few seconds of silence, she thought that maybe the voice she had heard was that of a fleeting curlew or perhaps the summer wind blowing in from the southern desert.

And then she heard it again—this time louder. “Kiya, here.”

The voice echoed from the river’s direction.

A fog formed above the still waters of the river, and a twirling breeze stirred the scent of Jasmine into Kiya’s nostrils. She shivered like the river’s reeds and thought of running back into the house.

“Come, Kiya. Come closer.”

She took one cautious step forward. Two steps. Five steps. Until her toes met the lukewarm water of the Nile River. “Who are you?”

“I can be anything you want me to be. I can be love; a love more lasting than the love of your father, and more embracing than the flooding river tides,” the void said. “Or I can be fear, if that’s what you want. You know what fear is, don’t you?”

It took her a while to say anything. She was still looking at the empty space above the water, her knees quivering, her face pallid.

“What do you want?” She finally asked.

She didn’t get an answer back. She waited and waited for the voice to say more, and only when the normal sound of the night crickets and the curlews returned, did she go back inside.

– – –

The next day, Kiya and her father rose with the morning star to make fire in the oven, knead the dough prepared from the night before, and bake bread on the fire. The largest loaves they ate with fried eggs and black honey, while the rest they put in straw baskets covered with white cloth. After breakfast, they hit the road to Deir El-Medina grand temple to sell pigeons and bread to the worshippers who streamed from all corners of the land of Kemet to offer sacrifices on the altar there.

There were many shrines in the temple. But one particular shrine attracted thousands of worshippers—the shrine of the god Sobek. Tut was one of his worshippers. Once they reached the temple, he would grab Kiya’s little hand and lead her to the shrine to pay homage to the god.

The dark congested space, with shafts of light coming through the small timber windows; the heavy fragrance of sandalwood and frankincense; the intricately patterned olive green wall tiles and high ceiling—it all nauseated Kiya. In the middle of the shrine, a colossal granite statue of Sobek stood high, with his human body and crocodile face wearing a mischievous smile, a smile that announced dominion and deception.

When Kiya once asked her father about his love for Sobek, his face darkened. “It is fear more than love,” he said. “I, like everybody else, fear the gods—their brutality, their unpredictability, their fury. Who am I to ignore them, to challenge them, or to think that I really have a choice? Freedom is an illusion, my dear, just like love. Fear is the only truth when it comes to worshipping the gods.”

“Why are you afraid of the gods, Aba?” Kiya asked.

“I can’t predict them, my love.” Grief clouded Tut’s eyes as he turned to watch a couple of kids running in the temple’s courtyard. “Thirteen years ago, before you were born, your mother’s womb was closed. For many years, we prayed to Sobek to grant her fertility. We burnt offerings by the altar, and raised prayers night and day, until he finally answered. When I knew that your mother was pregnant, I was ready to do anything for the gods; my heart carried real love for them. I promised Sobek that in return you would be raised to become a priestess at his shrine. But, after a week of delivering you, and for no apparent reason, your mother breathed her last. I wept for her like never before. I wept for her and for my callowness in believing that the gods give freely. The love that consumed my heart for Sobek turned into fear. And it is nothing but fear that has driven me to worship the gods ever since.”

Fear. Love. The two words had possessed Kiya ever since she’d heard the voice at the river the night before. For a twelve-year-old, such words were ghosts with no faces.

– – –

In the first month of the Shemu harvest season, Tut caught The Poor Man’s Disease. It started off as a mild fatigue, then dry coughs, then losing more and more weight until he had to wrap his loincloth twice instead of once, then dry coughs with blood, then fever, then night chills and hallucinations.

At first, Kiya didn’t comprehend what was happening; she had never come this close to death before. For her, death was something she heard about every time her mother’s name was brought up, or whenever someone in the village disappeared and never came back. But this time death was close, so close it visited their house and stayed with them for several months. At first, it was a light guest; its presence went almost unnoticed. But day by day, it made itself more comfortable, until she could smell its thick presence in every corner of the house, until she could see it in Tut’s absent eyes, hear it in his non-stop coughs; until she came to believe death wasn’t going to leave till it claimed Tut’s soul.

Tut died and left Kiya alone. She didn’t weep, neither that day nor in the days after. It was as if a thick rope was tangled around the trail of her tears. Her neighbors prepared everything for the funeral—they embalmed Tut’s body after removing his liver, intestines, stomach, and lungs, putting each in a stone canopic jar. The jars were to be buried with his body, no gold nor precious belongings, only loaves of bread, jugs of black honey, and his wooden lute. By sunset, all the mourners from Deir El-Medina and the neighboring villages boarded boats and crossed to the Western side of the Nile, where prayers were recited and his body was buried.

Through all of it, Kiya watched in shattering silence, the same way she used to watch hoopoes flying in the sky or boats sailing on the river. Hired mourners did all the crying and wailing, while she further withdrew into herself.

“A twelve-year-old girl can’t live alone,” some of the neighbours said during the funeral. Yuf, one of the neighbours, went and asked Tut’s cousin, Ramose, if he would adopt Kiya. But he said he would need some time to think it over.

“Take your time,” Yuf said. “But remember, Kiya’s father left her a house by the Nile, and you’ll be the only custodian once you take her in.”

– – –

For the next four months of the harvest season, Kiya stayed at Yuf’s house. One late night, the tight rope around her tears untangled, and found their way to her eyes—tears of confusion, of missing her father, of not knowing where he was. Those tears turned into angry waves and a flood that gushed out of her body. She wanted to flee from herself. There was no reason for her to exist. No light. No family. No home. Even the Nile with all its vastness seemed limited compared to her despair. Could it contain her? Could it save her from herself even for a fleeting moment?

She took off all her clothes and ran into its waters, swimming for as long and as fast as her limbs could carry her; until her racing heartbeat outran her racing mind; until the impossibility of her survival felt less impossible.

– – –

A silhouette of a man stood watching Kiya from afar as she swam in the river. Her black spontaneous hair and growing breasts ignited a fire deep down his belly. For long minutes, he stood motionless with parted lips, watching her. And then he walked down the road to Yuf’s house.

Yuf and his wife were lounging on the front porch of their house smoking dried lotus, when they saw Ramose approaching.

“Finally, Ramose! I’ve been waiting for your visit,” Yuf said.

“Yes, I’ve been planning this visit for some time now. I had to make some arrangements before I came down here.”

“Ah, does this mean you’ve decided to adopt Kiya? Come, have a smoke.”

Ramose sat next to Yuf. He reached to the tray on the table, and selected the thickest darkest dried lotus petals which had the strongest flavour. He packed his wooden pipe and tucked it between his lips.

“So, you have made up your mind, yes?” Yuf asked.

“Yes,” Ramose said as he frowned. “But I won’t adopt Kiya. I will marry her.”

– – –

The burial Shroud. Art by Sunny Efemena
The burial Shroud. Art by Sunny Efemena

“You can’t let him marry her,” Yuf’s wife said after Ramose left.

“Why not?” Yuf asked.

“He is more than four times her age. Besides, you know his reputation: He buys young girls, marries them for a year or less, and then moves on to the next one.”

“Look, we have nothing to do with this. Ramose is Kiya’s only relative. If he wants to marry her, fine. At least we won’t have to carry her any longer.”

Yuf’s wife stayed awake all night, thinking of how to tell Kiya the news. Does she even know what marriage is? She felt bad for a young girl like her, losing her father, and now losing herself to an old man.

– – –

“Kiya, next week you’ll move in to live with Ramose, your father’s relative,” Yuf’s wife told her the next day. “He wants to marry you.”

Marriage was another word, like death, that was unfamiliar to Kiya’s ears. Unlike death, marriage was supposed to involve happy scenes—people laughing, clapping, dancing, eating; a man and a woman, close together; a new home; children born to life. But, Ramose and she? No. Like the pigeons Kiya used to raise only to see their blood shed to please the gods, she was to become an old man’s sacrifice; fresh blood at his aging altar; soft skin to his dry bones; young sweetness to his bitter mouth.

No! her mind cried out. But her tongue was frozen. The darkness became darker, the pit became deeper, and the mouth that had used speak a few words after Tut’s death became shut tight, like a graveyard.

– – –

 The death that Kiya once feared now seemed tempting compared to marrying Ramose. It was just another sort of sacred union, in a sense, but with death she got to choose what she would unite with. She thought of the Nile. She knew that if she swam south towards the cataracts, the turbulent water rapids would sweep her up and end her life.

– – –

It was past midnight and everyone was sleeping. She slinked out of the house and walked towards the river, her limbs aching from not moving for a week. The fresh breeze met the stale sweat on her body, and she came to notice how dirty and stiff her body was.

She took off her dress, and as she walked towards the steep edge of the riverbank, she heard footsteps behind her.

“You sweet thing, what are you doing here at this late hour of night?” She turned to find Ramose standing right behind her. His presence threw her off, and she skipped to snatch her dress off the ground and put it back on.

She stood for a second staring at him, her mind caught up in questions of what had brought him here and what she should do—run back to Yuf’s house? Or swim forth unto the river?

“Yuf told you we’re getting married soon, didn’t he?” Ramose asked.

She looked at him, his stooped posture, his bald head, his sly looks. Death will at least be more beautiful, she thought.

“I’m not getting married to anyone,” she said.

Ramose laughed, loudly and bitterly. He stepped closer to Kiya until she could feel his warm breath on her face; it carried the stench of beer. “A girl like you should never say no to a man like me, but, you know, I like young girls with strong personalities; they intrigue me.”

He took another step closer to Kiya, who now stood at the edge of the muddy riverbank. He touched her cold cheek with his rough fingers, gazing at her mouth, “I can’t wait to—”   before he could say anything further, Kiya stepped around him in one swift movement, and without thinking, she lunged at his back, throwing him off balance. Ramose staggered before losing his footing and falling down the slope of the riverbank into the deep, cold water.

“Bitch!” he gasped.

Kiya stood on the riverbank watching Ramose as he struggled to keep his head above the water. As she turned around to leave, she heard a loud hiss. She looked back, and right behind Ramose, a scaly body broke the surface of the dark waters, moving swiftly towards him. Ramose looked behind him, and started crying for help. He tried to swim towards the shore, but his uncoordinated movements further submerged him instead. The beast crept towards Ramose, its eyes fixated on him. Kiya stiffened as she watched the emerging creature attack Ramose— its massive jaws clamping down on the old man’s body, its colossal tail churning the water. Ramose screamed and gasped and rose and sank, until he stopped moving all together. His mangled body was soon swallowed by the water, and the smell of fresh blood lingered in the air.

– – –

After doing away with its prey, the beast started swimming towards the shore, its eyes now centred on Kiya. But she didn’t run away, instead she looked the beast straight in the eye, like a convict looking at her saviour.

Kiya’s father once told her that the gods sometimes respond to prayers when you least expect it. She had never seen a god before, yet she knew it was him—Sobek. He was now out of the water, his greyish-green body four times her size, his scaly tail more than two meters long. He wore an ornament of lapis lazuli and gold in his right ear and gold anklets around his front feet. Standing a few centimetres from her, his lunar eyes locked into hers.

“Sobek Ra,” Kiya said softly.

“Kiya,” Sobek Ra said. “You haven’t answered my question yet.”

“What question?”

“If you were to choose, would you choose love or fear?”

“It was you?”

“It was me.”

They sat together, side by side, on the damp earth. Sobek smelled of fresh green algae and stale blood, and the sound of his breath, raucous and deep, infiltrated the night. Hours passed like a thief. Time stopped all at once, as if there was no before and no after. Until the songs of the early-hour bulbuls and the aurora sky alerted them to the nearing morning.

“My father once told me humans never get to choose their destiny,” Kiya said, pulling her slender legs towards her chest. “He said that the gods control us like paper dolls.”

Sobek sighed. “Destiny is a conundrum. Some people choose to love their destiny, and some people fear it. Your father never accepted what fate had in store for him. He thought he could appease the gods with words and bounties to change what is meant to be. He blamed me for his wife’s death, and failed to see death as just another station towards a new life. .”

He turned to face her. “But you, Kiya, you are different. When death called for you, you followed. And so in return, I grant you the freedom to choose. Choose to die in fear, or choose to die in love.”

She pressed her toes in the cool soft soil beneath them. “What difference would it make? Death is death.”

“No, Kiya. Death is a clown with many faces. A fearful death kills both the body and spirit, but a loving death is an altar. You offer your mortal body for your soul to soar.”

Kiya looked out at the clouds. Small scattered clouds merged to form a white river in the sky. Small clouds merged in her mind too. A sudden sound of an approaching cart alerted both of them. Sobek sprang to his feet.

“It is time for me to leave,” he said, lumbering towards the water.

“Wait, I haven’t made my choice yet,” Kiya said.

“Yes, you have,” he looked back at her with a smirk on his face. “Wait for me at the shrine.” Then he swam away.

– – –

It was Akhet— the season of the annual flooding of the Nile. A season long-awaited and celebrated by all inhabitants of the Land of Kemet, for it brought fertility. Farmers prepared their lands to be fertilized by the silt-laden waters before sowing and harvesting the crops that were their only means of paying off the heavy taxes imposed on them by the Pharaoh. Merchants and traders would later buy the crops during the harvest season, and sell them in the big city markets across the region. It was the season of new beginnings, of recreation and rebirth.

During this time of the year, women unable to bear offspring would offer their sacrifices at the shrine of Khepri, the god of recreation and sunrise, to open their wombs. They visited the grand temple daily and walked counter-clockwise around the scarab statue nine times, one round for each month of pregnancy. Husbands and wives who had fallen out of love with each other rubbed their bodies with silt before making love by flowing waters to reignite their affection for each other.

At the shrine of Sobek, sacrifices were offered at the altar and priestesses, priests, and worshippers chanted day and night asking for the god to bless the crops, and the people, and for the waters of the Nile to fill the land and quench its thirst.

Amid the commotion, Kiya sat in a secluded chamber at the bath complex. Her head was shaved, and she wore a long bead-net linen dress. Three priestesses gathered around her—one plaited and waxed a long black wig, and put it on Kiya’s head; another adorned her face with red ochre and black kohl, and painted her nails with henna; and a third rubbed warm jasmine oil over her neck and arms. A high priestess kneelt in one corner of the chamber, burning kapet on top of coal embers and chanting the hymn of the Nile.

Hail to you, O Nile! Who manifests yourself over this land, and comes to give life to Kemet!

Mysterious is your issuing forth from the darkness, on this day whereon it is celebrated!

Watering the orchards created by Re, to cause all the cattle to live,

you give the earth to drink, inexhaustible one!

Path that descends from the sky, loving the bread of Seb and the first fruits of Nepera, You cause the workshops of Ptah to prosper!

Hail to you, O Sobek, Lord of waters. Protector of the justified and repairer of evil.

Healer, he who made the herbage green.

Hunter, he who with swift violence destroys the wicked utterly.

I approach you with humility and an honest heart,

and offer you a glorious bride with no blemish.

A virgin as your heart desires.

Today is your feast day, a wedding of heaven to earth.

Today, your bride will be offered as a living sacrifice on the altar of your Nile.

May the waters rejoice with the bride of the Nile, and flood to nourish our lands.

Kiya sauntered towards the temple gates, surrounded by priests, priestesses, and cheering multitudes. She rode the decorated red chariot pulled by black, heavily-muscled horses heading south towards the Nile cataracts. She was alone, completely alone. A bride with no groom.

<<<<>>>>

Mirette Bahat
Mirette is an Egyptian short story writer and spoken-word artist. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Ake Review, Afreada, Ramingo, and others. In 2009, she was awarded The European Institute of the Mediterranean writing award. She was also awarded the American University Madalyn Lamont literary award in 2016. Her story ‘Exodus’ was shortlisted for Short Story Day Africa contest in 2016. She holds an MA in political science from the American university in Cairo.

In the Garden Watching Nim Noms – Osahon Ize-Iyamu

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                      Day 15

In my rich, luscious garden, there are palm trees. There are orange trees. But most importantly, there are nim noms. Red, purple, blue nim noms. In bloom, ripe, tender, and soft. They grow as curly as my hair, and I love curls, so I love nim noms. And I love them, so I eat them.

I crouch in the soil, as low as I can go, and let my ear brush the mud. I stretch my neck like I am spying on a test and grab each leaf with my teeth, then I chew. No one is looking when I feast, when I devour. I chomp till I feel a tingling within me and I cough up petals. I eat until my neck turns purple and I’m ripe and unfolding into blossoming. I eat till I’m fulfilled, till a velvet petal grows from my palms the next morning and I brush it softly. Then I pluck it out and wash the blood off my fingers because that wasn’t the transformation I needed.

 

When Auntie comes to ask who has destroyed the beautiful, precious nim noms, I shrug. I shake my head and pass around the tissues and cry with everyone for the loss of the nim noms. After Auntie stops crying, she stands firm and calls the exterminator.

He sprays the nim noms with something awful but non-lethal, then wipes his gloves and says that all the pests will go, so there’ll be no more sorrow. Auntie writes a check and he leaves, stomping feet, a smile on his face.

But an exterminator can’t get rid of me. I will never stop eating nim noms, not even the ones coated with a thick layer of pesticide. They taste of something spicy and savory and sweet. Like chicken, cheesecake, and peppers. Maybe the chemicals will give their sweetness an edge and make me more special.

 

The first time I ate a nim nom was after Daddy ignored my attempt at a hug in favour of a phone call, while Sunday got a smile and pat from Daddy later that day as Auntie was shouting at me for not dressing properly or doing anything right. Auntie had once said that all plants are great, but nim noms are special because they’re filled with magic. So I put a nim nom in my mouth, and I swallowed the opportunity to be greater.

 

Day 23

The chandelier is shining bright when my little brother, Sunday, bursts into the living room, sweating. I’m chatting with one of Daddy’s friend’s daughters while Daddy and his friend are drinking whiskey. With his sticky eba hands, Sunday points an accusatory finger at me.

“Ella has been eating the nim noms. Ella is the pest! I thought it was a rabbit, but it was Ella.”

The room bursts into gasps. My face flushes. Sunday! My own brother, trying to destroy me. Exposing me, embarrassing me. I’ve been caught. Now the whole crowd is staring at me, folding their arms, whispering. Gossiping. Me. Eater of nim noms. Destroyer of the beautiful. Murderer. Liar. Disowned daughter.

“It’s simply not true!” I scream, stamping my feet on the floor. “I would never eat a nim nom. I know better. I am better. Only rabbits eat nim noms, and I am not a rabbit. I’m not. So how could I?”

Deny, deny, deny. Lie. Lie. Lie. Straight through my teeth. My teeth that ate the nim noms. They must believe me, for I have eaten and I am now filled with sweetness.

“But I saw you!” Sunday counters.

“Daddy—if I was a nim nom girl, a dirty girl, then you would see me with mud on my dress, looking stained and impure. Ungood. The cleaners would say my clothes looked awful. Have you ever seen me look anything but perfect?”

Murmurs in my favour. Yes, yes, yes. Sunday looks around the room, panicked, and when he tries to talk, his defenses are drowned out. Who would believe the boy with eba-stained hands?

I am hugged by my father, an apology for ever doubting me. He knows me to be true. He knows me to be good. The nim noms have made me good, have made me pure, have made me sweet. Daddy strokes the beads in my hair and promises to take me to the mall on Saturday to buy me something nice. Something pretty—for my hair, or for my skin, or for me to play with.

I shoot a knowing smile at Sunday just to let him know I have him beat. His eyes open wide in horror. Daddy snaps his fingers for Big Nanny to come take Sunday back to his meal, an unfinished bowl of ogbono soup, and I can hear his “nooooos” all the way to the dining table as they drag him away. I let out a small cackle of victory. Little snitch almost ruined me.

The daughter of one of my father’s friends turns back to me and our conversation goes from dolls to snotty siblings who really ought to stay in their place. The girl pulls the hair off one of her dolls, straight out of the scalp, and I like her style. She’s the kind of person who would do something ruthless without a second thought. Like lie through her teeth. Like eat the nim noms in her yard.

She comes close to me and asks me if I really did eat the nim noms. The girl tells me that she swallowed an eraser once, a very precious eraser that once belonged to her grandma. That kind of thing is about as bad as eating nim noms and so I don’t have to hide my secrets from her. The girl tries to touch my hair but my eyes widen and I slap her hand away. I tell her she is a monster, that she should be filled with shame, and watch her eyes well up. I storm out of the parlour, up the stairs and into my bedroom, where I fall into tears of my own, only weeping when I’m sure I’ve locked the door. God help this feeling of worthlessness inside of me. Of being evil. Of being bad.

In the evening, I go to Daddy’s room and tell him I never want to see that girl again. Hypnotized, he deletes his friend’s number from his phone. Pleased my father answered my small request; I smile and go to my room, where I fall to slumber. At midnight, I eat some more nim noms, sweeter than ever now that the rain has washed off the pesticides. I fill myself with goodness, and know that with my eating I am becoming a better person.

 

I don’t know why my sweetness only works on adults and not other children like me. Maybe I need more nim noms. Maybe I need to feast. Maybe children know real goodness, the kind that comes from the heart rather than from nim noms. But what is real, anyway? This is faster. This is better.

 

Day 29

Sunday barges into my room when I am trying on my Junior Girls Singing Club outfit, and I scream my head off. He doesn’t care. He shuts the door.

“I saw you eating nim noms last night,” he says.

Deny, deny, deny. “The exterminator obviously needed to use more chemicals. So many moles must be digging around.”

“I opened my windows and I saw you,” he says. Straight to my face, stepping closer to me. Is he trying to intimidate me? Fool.

“You don’t know what you saw. Big Nanny says you haven’t been eating enough, and you know how you get when you don’t have enough foo—”

“I saw you!” He screams. His flailing arms hit my dresser causing some of my perfumes to fall off. “I saw the beads in your hair and your blue nightgown and your favourite bracelet. I saw you on the floor, putting nim noms in your mouth.”

Who does he think he is? I’m done playing these games. “And so—who’s gonna believe you with your eba-stained hands?”

“I’m going to ask for a camera for my birthday. And then I’ll get you. And they’ll see you’re not even a rabbit. No, you’re just a filthy rat.”

I hate my oversabi little brother, with his snotty little face. I didn’t ask for him, but yet he came. I can’t delete him and I hate him and…

“Get out of my room! Get out! Out! Out! Out!”

He runs out, quick and alert. He has crossed a line. I shut my door. I relax my breath, then I scream again. I am filled with shame and anger and pain. I am filled with hurt. I pluck out the tiny little petals from my skin and I rage.

My secrets are mine to keep. Mine.

 

My mother left us a year ago. In a drunken stupor, breath full of sour wine, sticky and stumbling and raw with emotion. Rain was falling and thunder was screaming and our dinner was rice and stew. My father tried to calm her but she was a mess, crying and angry, then vomiting on the floor. She didn’t leave with footsteps, but puddles.

Mummy and Daddy loved each other, never fought, so why would she leave? I know Daddy still calls her on the phone and they talk, slow and awkward before falling into rhythm. I know Mummy talks to Sunday, but she cuts the call before it can ever reach me. She never asks to speak to me. Maybe it was because I used to cut her hair when she slept or because once I threw out all her sleeping pills or because I would use the wine in her cabinet as blood for my dolls in the dramas I would act. She thinks she knows who I am. She thinks it’s easier to avoid me. She thinks I won’t be good, but I’ll show her, I’ll show them all.

Daddy won’t tell me where Mummy is and I hate him for that. I hate my mother and I’m sure she hates me.

She called me a demon before she left.

In the Garden Watching Nim Noms: Art by Sunny Efemena
In the Garden Watching Nim Noms: Art by Sunny Efemena

Day 37

My Auntie is hosting a planting party, to celebrate things that grow. They are serving drinks and organic juices and everyone wears nice spring clothes. The grass glows greener than ever, not surprising after all the shouting Auntie did to make sure the place was perfect before the visitors arrived. My eyes shine wide at all the freshly-planted nim noms, fresh and all mine. Mine.

Auntie comes in with the grand plant, golden nim nom brought all the way from London. It’s beautiful, stretching out in all directions like a peacock’s feathers, with its tapering, curling leaves that resemble hair. It is ripe and juicy, gorgeously pure. I almost faint at the sight of it. I love it more than anything—more than my brother, or my father. It will be my Christmas dinner. It will make me better for the holidays, best for the New Year.

Before my Auntie can plant it in the soil, my brother stops her.

“Wait! I don’t think you should plant that pretty thing here. I’m not sure all the pests have gone yet, Auntie,” Sunday says.

That. Little. Snitch. He better watch himself. I cast dagger eyes at my brother, but he doesn’t look at me. He gives me no attention. Who does he think he is? If I eat him someday, it would only be right.

I burn. My hands keep clenching and my eyes keep twitching and I try to hold it in, try to be sweet.

“What?” My Auntie shrieks, face paling, hiding her precious plant. Her oh, so delicious plant. Her sun hat wobbles on her head, and the crowd murmurs in confusion. “What have you seen?”

“Big, chewing, rats!” Sunday screams, raising hands to the air, eyes to me.

The crowd gasps.

I explode.

“Lies!” I immediately say, and the crowd turns to me. “I’m always watching the nim—the flowers, and I haven’t seen anything. Sunday just wants attention.”

“I do not!” He yells, and the crowd looks back and forth.

“Maybe if you washed the eba off your hands you could finally tell a lie that sticks.”

“Stop it, both of you!” My father in the midst of the crowd shouts. He glares at us.

I walk up to Daddy and wrap my hands around his waist. “Daddy, see how Sunday is behaving.” I tell him and Sunday looks shamefully at the floor. He knows I have Daddy like thread around a roll, loving me. “Daddy, I’m so sorry,” I say, forcing out tears. “Sunday brings out the worst in me,” I turn to the crowd. “Everybody, I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry. It’s Sunday’s fault.”

If I have Daddy then I can have the crowd, all in the palm of my hand. I can show them my flowers and, even though I hate the petals on my skin, maybe everyone’s adoration will fill me up and I will finally bloom and be full of nectar and full of love; as pretty as a nim nom. I can get them all to love me, to not criticize me, to do my will. That’s how I will be better.

I whisper to Daddy, “I know how we can fix this. Let’s give Sunday up for adoption so he can find someone who loves him. It’ll be you and me—just like old times.”

Daddy stares at me and I smile at him.

“Ella?” He says to me.

“Yes, Daddy?”

“I have never been so disappointed in you.”

“What?”

“Get out.”

“Daddy, what?”

“To your room!”

I burn bright and my stomach rumbles, and I want to eat every nim nom around the room. Every single one, in my mouth, so I can be transformed.

“No,” I say, stamping my foot. “No!”

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” My father bellows. If his voice is thunder, then I can be lightning.

“That’s not fair! It’s all Sunday’s fault; he thinks I’m a rat when he’s nothing. He doesn’t want you to love me! Daddy, don’t let Sunday do this. Please. Don’t let Sunday destroy us.”

I open my fingers up for Daddy’s warmth; I just want to be loved. I just want to be pure. But all I feel are hands dragging me away. The crowd watches me and gasps and my father shakes his head. I hear their murmurs. I hear someone call me spoilt. A brat. A rat.

This can’t be happening. I’ve been destroyed. My father does not love me anymore. I wasn’t enough.

I begin to scream. I cry and tremble. My petals wilt and droop, itchy on my skin.

My brother has ruined me. I must make him disappear.

 

Day 44

Sunday has gotten hold of one of Auntie’s old phones. He called her after the party and mentioned he had seen more “rats” and that he wants to use it to record the rodents eating the nim noms. Auntie came and dropped the phone for Sunday, then took away some of the silver nim noms planted in the garden.

For the next week after the party I stay silent and keep my head down, avoiding Daddy’s gaze. I feel diminished, malnourished, but Sunday has that annoying phone all day long so I can’t feed. Everywhere I go he is watching, video on. If I step outside, he is there. If I get up at night to pee, he is watching. If I excuse myself from the dinner table, he is there. Always with the phone on.

Why doesn’t Sunday want me to be better? Why won’t he allow me to eat the nim-noms so I can be sweet, so I can be pure? So I can be like all the other girls who don’t hate their brothers and fight their mothers, and don’t hate themselves.

I eat to be. So I can transform.

But since the little snitch doesn’t want me to be better—

      Day 53

I enter Sunday’s room with a march and a glare, and he stands up and grabs the phone like we are about to fight. But this is not a battle. I push him down to the floor and he lands with a thud. He sees the roll of tape in my hand and it’s like he knows what I’m about to do, and when I come closer he curls to a ball. He’s still holding that freaking phone and I try to take it out of his grasp but he holds it with all his might. I scream in frustration.

He shrieks and I just want to shut him up. I grab his struggling, squirming legs and push them down, firm, steady, under my control. I wrap them several times with tape till his legs are stable and unmovable. Then, I grab his arms which are flying to my nose and I hold his hands tight, and bind those too. I cover up his little accusatory lips, again, and again, and again, till he has no more words to say. I like his silence.

Then I wrap his disgusting fingers and his crying eyes and his nose till all the rolls of tape are finished. I’m done being sweet. All the nim noms that I have ever eaten roar through my belly. My stomach rumbles with a hunger that’s monstrous and starts to fill with heat.

I crouch down, as low as I can go, and bite his skin, pressing my teeth deeper and deeper, a bit further into his flesh. He doesn’t want me to feed so I will eat him. Sweet or unsweet. I will chew him up; a meal without taste.

I stretch my neck and chew his ears first. No one is looking when I tear out the flesh from his jaw, when I devour. I chomp his little fingers till I feel a tingling in my stomach and a fluttering in my chest. I eat till my neck turns purple and my lips turn red, till I’m fulfilled,. I chew and chew and tear and swallow Sunday whole. Then I belch.

I leave his remains for the rats.

I take his bedroom key and lock the door and head downstairs. I run to the garden, to the nim-noms and I begin to devour every single one. I’m not even subtle. I dig up the roots and suck on their stems. I need to feast till I feel no guilt or sorrow or shame, till I have erased my sins with the taste of sweet. With the taste of pure.

Petals grow on my arms and in my throat. My tears are running down my face into the soil and messing up my dress, messing up my rage, but there’s nothing to feel sorry for. I just need to feed and be good. Good, good, good.

Why am I like this? Why won’t I stop? Why can’t I work and grow and transform to shine? Why can’t I get it right? I just need…

I stop eating when I feel eyes on me, a shadow in the darkness. I look up in horror to see Daddy is watching from the window. He is watching, mouth wide, face twisted. He starts screaming.

Petals bloom on my skin, itchy and bloody. My throat aches with chlorophyll and my stomach swims with vomit. My petals flutter like wings, as though ready to carry me. I am the pest who eats the nim noms. The rat. I am still unsweet, but I am strangely relieved. The hiding is over. I will never be better, never be pure, no matter what I do.

I could try to be better. I could start over and work on my heart, but that’s too hard and right now I have to eat. I can’t help it. I love my nim noms. So I take another nim nom, then I start digging through the soil.

END

Osahon Ize-Iyamu
Osahon Ize-Iyamu lives in Nigeria, where he writes speculative fiction stories. His work has been published in Clarkesworld and The Dark and he is a graduate of the Alpha Writers Workshop. You can find him online @osahon4545

Memento Mori – Tiah Marie Beautement

By
Admin
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14

Death walked in, taking a seat at the table as the kettle came to a boil. The woman silently wheeled herself over to the drain board to fetch another mug. As she moved, the light danced across fingers, each sporting a silver splint.

“How many sugars?” she asked.

Death held up two fingers.

She placed a small tray in her lap before rolling over to the table. Death accepted his mug of rooibos with a nod of thanks.

She pushed her braids from her face, causing the coral beads interwoven into her hair to click. Death fingered one, noting the dark Rhodophyta hue remained. He had worried; it had been too long since his last visit.

“I’m healthy,” she said.

He inhaled her salty scent, rolled it over his tongue, considering it, before replying with a nod.

They sipped their rooibos in leisurely silence. He was in no rush. There were plenty under his command on duty today: from owls, to buck, to ravens, to horses, to his beloved canines.

In fact, he mused, the latter would make an excellent gift. He pulled out a notebook from the rear pocket of his jeans, making a note.

She placed her empty mug on the table and held out a hand. He removed the folded parchment from the inside pocket of his black coat, handing it over. She opened it without comment. This was not always so. The first time they’d done this she’d asked, “Why parchment?”

It was a good question.

Unfortunately, he had no satisfactory answer. This was true of many things in life and in death.

While she read, he made himself busy in the kitchen. It was a pleasure few mortals granted him in their homes. It was their loss, as he was an excellent cook. He’d decided on black bean and butternut chili, which would be served over rice. No cutting required; she didn’t look up for it tonight.

As he dished up the food, she said, “The ramp was damaged in the storm. I’ll need help to reach the water.”

He nodded. He’d spotted the split planks on his arrival. It explained the unusually low number of vials prepared for collection. He pulled out his notebook, making a note to have his birds check on her with more regularity. He looked up to find her watching. He tore out of a piece of paper and handed it to her.

It was blank.

She folded it into an origami ibis then placed it into his hands. He admired it, before tucking it into an inner coat pocket.

They ate in companionable silence as the sun drew closer to the earth. As the bright orb’s underbelly met the horizon, she pushed her bowl away. “I’ll go change.”

Death nodded and collected the dishes for washing up. He had placed the final bowl on the drying rack when she emerged from her bedroom. She’d removed most of the braces and splints, and was wearing a silk robe of blues and greens. A thick grey towel sat folded in her lap, the very one he’d brought her on his last visit. He smiled.

“I think it’s best if you carry me tonight,” she said.

He was relieved that she had come to the conclusion on her own. Wordlessly, he scooped her up and walked out into the dying light. She turned her head, fixing her eyes on the sea. It was a special place, where two great oceans meet. While the area was well known, her cottage and dock were secluded, far from where normal mortals dwelled.

Death picked his way down the ramp with care. Many of the boards were missing or splintered. The floating dock, however, remained sound. He gently set her on the dock’s edge, so her feet could hang in the water. He accepted her towel and robe without comment, then stepped back as she checked the belt around her waist that held numerous tiny vials. As the earth swallowed the sun, her gills appeared. Without farewell, she slipped into the sea.

Death waited another moment before turning back to the cottage. He had a toolbox to fetch.

#

The ocean welcomed her into its depths as the webbing between her fingers and toes slid into place. The sea’s gentle caress soothed her irritable skin while its bulk supported her weight, easing the aches in her joints. How she had missed her watery nights, where she could move with ease and grace. But Death’s time was in high demand and she had not wanted to ask for help. She knew he’d come, eventually. Souls trapped in the sea needed collecting, like any other, and she was one of his best.

As she swam through the deep, many silvery souls drifted by, but she left them alone. They were those of the drowned and their bodies were dead. In time, other soul collectors would catch them, but while they waited they would gently float in a peaceful, slumbering state, unharmed. What she was searching for was far more elusive.

Stories formed by memories that had slipped out through human tears, breath, sweat, and ablutions whispered along the currents she travelled. Thoughts were typically lost at a trickling pace, relieving the mind so that it would not become over-encumbered with new ideas and experiences. There were times, however, when chunks of the past were lost in a gush, either through trauma or an act of mercy. They were of little concern because the soul itself usually remained intact.

But for the people whose entire memories slipped away while their physical being still breathed, leaving them unable to recall the names of loved ones or recognize their faces, this was not so. These souls, torn between body and mind, followed the sense of self into the water and were the hardest for Death to locate. Until these disembodied souls could be caught, the victims’ loved ones could do nothing but helplessly witness their long decline.

As she swam, she shut her eyes, opening her heart to sorrows. This is what her fellow collectors did not understand: dark souls could not be seen or captured. They floated in their watery coffins much like dread sits in a stomach. Her days on land, living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, the chronic condition that caused her body to constantly ache, had taught her this: pain worsened if you fought it. The only way to live with it was to ride its wave with acceptance. This affinity to pain was what called the dark souls out of hiding. She greeted them with open arms, without judgment, soothing their shame as she slipped them into vials and secured them in her belt.

#

            Death finished his task by the darkest hour before the dawn. Yet he remained. Watchful. Patient.

When the sun’s first rays brushed the horizon, her head broke the surface of the sea. Yet she remained out of reach. He knew she was often reluctant to leave, content to swim long after her gills and webbing had retracted. But he was selfishly pleased when she, after spotting him, swam over to the dock. He knew she managed to pull herself onto land, day after day, without assistance. But he found himself unable to bear the thought of watching her face twist in pain as she hauled herself out. Quickly, before she could protest, he’d lifted her up, swaddling her with the thick grey towel.

She stared up at him as he set her gently down in her chair.

He stilled, fearing he’d taken too much liberty.

“Thank you.” She turned her head towards the ramp. “And for that.”

Her words made him bold, and he leaned down, brushing a kiss across her forehead.

She replied with a soft sigh.

Back in the cottage, he took the fresh vials, packing them in his case along with the rest. Done, he went to say good-bye. He found her in bed, nearly asleep. Her eyes fluttered open when he ran a finger down her cheek. As he pulled away, her hand found his.

“Stay.”

She was not the first to ask, but never before had the invitation come from her lips. He was fairly certain she was offering nothing more than her slumbering company. Yet he found himself removing his shoes, shrugging off his coat, and joining her in bed, where he curled himself around her smaller form.

It was warm, comfortable.

A minute later, she was fast asleep.

He waited until the sun had fully risen before kissing her cheek and abandoning the bed. She hardly stirred. He stepped out of the room, leaving the door open a crack, the better to hear her breathe. He wondered if she knew her slumbering breath flowed in time with the waves below, creating a rhythmic melody.

In the kitchen, he brewed her a pot of rooibos. As foil wrapped bricks baked in the oven, he cooked up a bowl of oats, lacing it with raisins and cinnamon. On the other hob he prepared a pot of West African peanut soup. When all was ready, he put the bricks into a cooler box, setting the food on top, and shut the lid. He withdrew a sheet of parchment, the words he wanted already inscribed.

#

            A black Labrador arrived a week later, unannounced. Its trainer looked befuddled and dazed, as if he couldn’t quite understand how he came to be at her cottage. Which was an accurate assessment of the situation. For while records showed money had been received and a discussion of what mobility services would be required, not a single member of the organization could recall interacting with the buyer.

Nonetheless, the trainer handed over the paperwork which detailed the animal’s history and care. As the trainer drove away, a delivery van arrived with dog food and an assortment of pet supplies. Neither driver would recall the location of her cottage by the end of the day.

In the quiet, dog and woman took stock of one another. As she scratched its neck, she her fingers brushed a piece of parchment tucked into the harness. As she read, a raven hopped onto her shoulder. She turned to the bird, whispering, “Please, give him my thanks.”

With a gentle tug to a braid, the raven agreed, then flew away.

Dog and woman worked well together. Each night, before she slipped into the sea, she’d remove his harness. The dog would leap into the water, swimming alongside for a half an hour, before climbing back onto the dock. There he would wait for his mistress, guarding her chair, as she dove into the deep, embracing dark souls whose abandoned bodies longed to die.

Once the dog had his mistress safely back to the cottage, they’d sleep on her bed, side by side. The training manual did not recommend this. Neither woman nor dog cared.

#

            As soon as her head sank under the rough sea, she could hear the terrified cries of fishermen. The other soul collectors were occupied: a hurricane, a jellyfish sting, a tsunami, a suicide. There was never enough of them, but tradition stated that sailors and fishermen should never die alone. Tonight, the dark souls would have to wait.

Battling the turbulent water, she reached the ten terrified humans trapped inside a flooded compartment. She was not permitted to save their lives, but amidst the chaos and panic, she could bring them calm and comfort. Heavy beams blocked their escape. Drawing upon her hypermobility – a trait of being born with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome – she subluxated her joints, flexing and contorting until she partially dislocated them. This caused pain and damage, but she was able to squeeze through a gap between the twisted door and a fallen beams.

Inside, as the boat rocked and debris came loose, she gathered the dying close to her. The boat groaned, seams threatening to split, but she stayed, singing softly to the fishermen. As air evacuated their bodies, a beam fell. The impact completely dislocated her right shoulder. Yet she remained with her charges, welcoming their souls. They turned silver, and peacefully slipped into the awaiting vials, where she corked them, one by one, using her remaining working hand. Finished, she turned her attention to her right arm. But try as she might, she couldn’t force it back into its joint as she often could with other dislocations.

The boat moaned, beams around the gap shifted, narrowing the way out. Pushing panic aside, she grabbed the nearest beam with her left arm, and hauled her torso through what was left of the gap. As she twisted and squeezed through the maze of tiny open spaces, she felt something tear in her left ankle. She continued to kick with her remaining leg, when something struck her right knee, pinning it. Rotating like a contortionist, she  subluxated the joint bending in unnatural ways to free herself. Pain rocketed up her body as, with another pop of a joint, she finally pushed out of the boat. But her body was now battered, with only her left arm in fully functioning condition.

She was swimming too slow. Time was running out. The dock was still a mere pin prick in her sight when the sun began to rise. She gasped as her gills and webbing retracted. Struggling to breathe, she thrashed in the choppy water, her bones growing heavy, her muscles weak.

Turning to float on her back, she released a desperate whistle for help. Her only answer was a raven’s caw.

The sun rose higher, its heat stinging her face. As the waves tossed her spluttering, exhausted body around, trying to force water up her nose and mouth, she thought of Death and wondered why he hadn’t said good-bye. Through bleary eyes, she spotted a raven circling in the sky. There was comfort in knowing she would not die alone, at least.

The sound of the water changed.

Splashing.

There was a cold bump on her cheek. A pant in her ear. A lick over her nose. Blindly, she tossed her good arm over the dog’s neck, grabbing his scruff. It was all she could do to hang on as he dragged her battered body through the choppy sea.

#

Death came as soon as the raven brought word. He walked into her home without a knock. As he strode into her bedroom, he found her asleep. The dog raised his head, acknowledging the visitor, and, satisfied, snuggled back down beside his battered, bruised, and exhausted  mistress.

Death looked her over as best he could without waking her. She and dog had clearly done a decent job sorting out the majority of her injuries once they’d made land. That was her way, to be as independent as possible. Managing her chronic condition was as everyday to her as brushing her teeth. But she’d always struggled to reset her own shoulder.

With nothing to be done until she woke, Death joined the pair in bed, curling his body gently around the woman’s. He listened to her breath’s rise and fall, in perfect harmony with the waves. The dog’s huffy beat added a bluesy feel to the mix.

She was still asleep as the sun stretched past midday. He was antsy, Death needed a distraction, while waiting to reset her shoulder. He decided to cook, but as he rose from the bed, her left hand shot out, grasping his own. He looked down, noting how the silvery splints she wore on each finger sparkled in the daylight. “Stay,” she whispered.

This time he placed the kiss directly on her lips.

#

            Death had never been a healer. Popping her shoulder back into place left him convinced he’d caused her more harm than help. Her cries of pain had sent fear down his spine, despite her assurance afterwards that the worst was now over. As she bathed, he busied himself in the kitchen, wondering how he could persuade her to see a doctor. He knew there probably wasn’t any more a doctor could do, but it would make him feel better.

He looked up at the sound of her chair. She had rolled out of the bedroom, body covered by a fluffy robe. Death noted the extra braces on her wrist and ankles. She parked next to the table, and with the assistance of dog, eased herself into a dining chair. Her robe slipped, flashing a knee brace and long strips of brightly colored athletic tape.

He reached into his jacket for parchment.

“Don’t,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

He wasn’t sure he agreed, but he could tell by the look on her face she was in no mood to argue. He set down mugs of chai and plates of mandazi instead.

“Thank you,” she said.

He joined her at the table. Out of lowered eyes, he watched her attempt to cut the puffed triangles. One went skidding off her plate, straight into the dog’s grateful mouth. A blow of frustration escaped her. He sensed an offer to assist would not be appreciated. Instead, he set down his cutlery and picked up the food with his fingertips. He made a subtle show of dunking the breakfast treat into the rich caramel sauce, before bringing it to his mouth.

She smiled, proceeding to follow his lead. When she’d finished her meal, she carefully cleaned her hands on a serviette and dabbed her face. As she folded the cloth, she said, “I have a favor to ask.”

He wished he could shout, “Anything!” But he was not made to behave as such. Instead, he merely nodded, as his heart warmed.

“It would help to have a larger bathtub, one that would allow me to float during the day when, well, when I’m sore and have had enough.”

He pulled out his notebook, making a note.

“Thank you.”

She stood. He pushed back his chair, preparing to aid, but she held up a splinted hand. He remained sitting, watching her careful steps. The dog ghosted beside her, his harness handle available should she need support. When she reached Death, she gave him a smile, cupping his face with one hand.

He dropped his arms to his sides. She slid onto his lap, resting her head against his chest. As he embraced her, she said, “Do you think, perhaps, you could consider this your home? Use it as a base, between your travels?”

He did not inform her that he already did. Instead, he kissed the top of her head. When she did not look up, he placed a finger under her chin. As she raised her face, he pressed his forehead against hers.

She reached to her waist, untying the fastening. As her robe fell open, she whispered, “Take me to bed.”

End

Tiah Marie Beautement
Tiah Marie Beautement is the author of two novels, including the award nominated This Day (2014, Modjaji) and numerous short stories. She is the managing editor of the The Single Story Foundation’s journal, teaches writing to all ages, and freelances for a variety of publications. In her spare time she has been spotted riding horses and as pillion on motorcycles on the South African Garden Route.

Artist Spotlight On: Tamara Reddy

By
Admin
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0

Tell us a little bit about your background.

I am a self-taught alternative visual artist currently based in Johannesburg, South Africa.  I have been drawing since I was a child. I studied Psychology and Media Studies at the University of Witswaterstrand from 2005-2010. It was only in my final year, when I was deep in socio-critical theory, that I realised a truth about reality and our fear-based society that resonated within me. This led me to start illustrating the emotions and thoughts in my reality.

I saw similar styles and emotions in the gig posters used to promote bands. I thought to myself: “Okay there is a way I can share and display the messages of my art; people make beats about this stuff!” I was also really inspired by Nan Goldin’s photography, so I played around with a camera for a while. But found it too intimating to take pictures of people; I was not as comfortable with photography as I was with sketching.

One day, I was messing around with an image on my PC, combining my sketches with the photo. The outcome was dark, surreal, and romantic; a lifeform that showed itself to me. I fell in love.

What inspired you to be an artist when you were growing up and why?

I grew up in Lenasia South, in Johannesburg. It was during the early 2000s (I was a teenager then), and growing up in this area was boring and really lonely for me. I was also the introverted, weird, and angry kid who believed in magik and that Alanis Morissette was my angel. There was no alternative, no grunge visual culture such as music, graffiti, and posters on the street poles. All I had were the Simunye Grooves CDs and MTV.

I was continuously pressured to fit into the Typical Indian Girl mould, which was: study, dress pretty, have lots of money, and get married. I wanted to escape. I had met a soul-friend in my final year of high school. She was the only girl who got my weirdness and loved it. And in that love I found power. Her love for music opened the door to my love for poetry, alternative music, trip-hop, and punk culture. I started making indie comics and playlists for her.

Collecting music led me to live music, club culture, and album and graphic Art. I finally found a place where I belonged. I finally understood the beauty that lies in darkness. This inspired me to create my craft, to shine light into dark places, to address the social oppressions that women have to endure daily. And to help young women believe in themselves enough that they break their silences.

What is the most challenging aspect of being an artist, particularly as a woman, in your country?

I feel female artists are very segregated, disrespected and stereotyped in South Africa. Firstly, it is really difficult to find female visual artists, unless they are made popular by the media. And the only time a female artist is celebrated by the media is during Women’s History month, or in theme-based parties, or as a sex symbol – and that is if they know how to market themselves. There is a noticeable amount of gender inequality.

If you looked at a visual art exhibition, for example, it will be highly dominated by male artists and maybe one female artist. I feel that there is no encouragement for women to come out more and share and collaborate in their craft so that we don’t have to see the same artists all the time.

I think women artists have to work a bit smarter and harder, because we are breaking the brand of the masculinity-centric society that we live in. I feel that all artistic voices should be recognised equally. It should not matter if we are women or men, self-taught or college-educated. What should be recognised is our passion for pushing the human potential.

Are you involved in any other projects outside your regular job? If so, can you tell us which ones you’re currently most excited about?

Yeah, I am currently involved is a Visual Art and Contemporary Dance collaboration with choreographer and contemporary dancer Thamsanqa (Thami) Majela. I really enjoy Thami’s work. This project in particular, because it speaks to something we both experience and are aware of: the extremes that one experiences in depressed masculinity and feminity.

This performance will be shown in South Africa at the My Body, My Space festival in Mpumalanga. I am also creating a photo-manipulation portrait series where I work with children and women in townships and villages sharing the stories unique to their identity as human beings.

What strategies do you use to carve out time for sketching?

My strategies are rooted in reducing the anxiety that comes about because of working alone and having to discipline myself. Before I start any work, I first make sure I am mentally healthy to do so. I work out and meditate, ensure I have coffee, and always play a movie or an album in the background to eliminate PC noises and the voices who make noise in my head.

Once I am in the zone, I am complete. However, it is critical to step outside and see daylight when the struggle does eventually present itself. Sometimes that’s done in the form of scratching my dog’s belly, sometimes it’s done in the form of YouTube videos. After sketching is done, I always makes sure I clean my work space. I reward myself by being in nature. For me, it is very important to balance my eyesight with man-made light and natural light.

Are there any TV shows, movies or web series you would sneak out to watch right now?

Definitely. The TV series OZ. I always find myself going back to OZ. I think the more I develop in myself, the more I listen to it. It blows my mind all the time. That and the movie Gattaca.

Who are the most exciting artists on the South African scene right now?

I would say Vusi Beauchamp, Ayanda Mabulu, Zanele Muholi and Naomi Van Niekerk. 

What was the most discouraging time in your career and how did you overcome it?

Shoo! I think the most discouraged I have been was when my artwork was selected for The Burning Question, an exhibition about climate change danger featured at the 2017 MTN Bush Fire fesitival. My family did not support my passion for making art at all and made it difficult for me to be at the exhibition. It broke my heart because here I was trying to do something that would make a huge impact on people. Instead, I was being judged and belittled, told to “get a real job”. Naturally, I feel into a depression and it really hurt. Even when I was eventually able to go to the festival, I was still depressed and disappointed – and stayed that way for about two months thereafter.

In the course of those two months I still created art, but I was now starting to fear sharing my work and exhibiting because I was afraid I would be hurt like that again. My art then became a container that turned my anger into something like a bubblegum milkshake. It was the only space I found in my loneliness that understood me. I eventually found myself again and I accepted that that which makes me feel happy is much more important that making others happy. I accepted myself and that I can’t change for anyone. The truth is in staying true to myself.

Looking back, is there anything in your career that you would do differently? Any major decisions you regret?

I don’t regret anything because everything has been a lesson to learn in becoming a better artist. There are definitely things I would have done differently. One thing I learnt is never do anything out of desperation because it makes you do things you don’t want to do – giving away your value for way lower than what it is worth.

What is it you would most want to be remembered for when you’re gone?

Reminding people of the light inside them.

Tamara Reddy
Tamara Reddy is a self-taught Alternative Visual Artist currently based in Johannesburg, South
Africa. She is founder of Tred in Mental, a graphic art free space which encourages the freedom
to create visual poetry through graphic art, fantasy, humour and the appreciation for the Human
Race.
Tamara’s artwork shares a visual culture, of the state of being, through Graphic Posters. Her
artwork questions the way we are socially conditioned to belong as people; to seek truth. All
design work is created as an alternative form of visual education for children and young adults
in raising awareness to the strengths and weaknesses of our current social conditions. Human
development can go through extreme measures to have purpose in this world. Eco Terrorism,
Women abuse, racism, corrective rape, child abuse, thought disorders, suicide, anger and
loneliness are a few of these extremities. Tamara’s visual identity is dedicated to shining a light
in a dark place. It is important to find and create beauty because of how ‘real’ life can get. Her
artwork aims to connect to great hearts and innovative minds in pushing the human race
forward through the freedom of Expression. Tamara’s gift is to share a world of magick through
the use of colour and imagination.
Her portfolio includes design work for print, posters, album art, comics and illustration; and video
art.

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