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Prévoyance | Tariro Ndoro

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  1. Dead body

I joined the force at the age of nineteen and rose to the rank of sergeant by twenty-two and now at twenty-five, I’m being pulled from active inspector duty to become a detective inspector. Don’t get me wrong, the bump in pay is great and the benefits are super but for a government job in the police force? A little too super. I had hoped to be transferred to something prestigious like Major Crimes or even Vice. Now, I know the stereotype everyone has about a Vice cop or about Gangs and Guns. Most of the work is slog but when you bust a crime ring or liberate trafficked kids—instant yellow cross and fast track to top brass.

            I’m being sent over to Special Crimes. That’s code for: woo woo and cold cases and you’ll probably never see the coveted magenta cross or even a yellow cross or blue cross. Just piles and piles of corpses that died thirty years ago and a backlog worse than the city’s budget. The Assistant Commissioner also told me that half our cases are classified so I shouldn’t discuss them with my romantic partner. If he wasn’t brass, I would have laughed in his face. Let’s face it, the last time I had a lover, Jim Bob was still president, and we hadn’t heard of the plague yet. I simply assented and saluted.

            As I drive down the autobahn at two am, I think of my last lover. Kojo. He was Ghanaian with a healthy appetite for food and even healthier recipes. Kojo and I had a good thing going but then I was transferred to the 82nd precinct where murders are a dime a dozen and during our dinnertime sharing hours, I should have noticed the mounting horror on Kojo’s face after I recounted crime scenes. When K. finally left, I missed the delele recipe more than I missed him, which is pretty sad if you think about it.

            What I’ll miss most about the 82nd, is my partner, Mumamba. Lighthearted, and fun but good at his job. He could analyse the worst blood splatter then still interview eight-year-old kids like they were his very own nephews. That kind of bedside manner is an asset on the job. Anyone can interview a lucid 40-year-old, but kids and geriatrics, that’s how you separate the long service detectives from the naturals. Unlike Mr. Sapeurs sitting beside me in a bright maroon suit and fedora. Who dresses that way anymore? Mr. Sapeurs, that’s who.

Ten minutes ago, he lit up a genuine tobacco cigarette and started smoking without a simple by the by. I, of course tried to send a hint by coughing a few times but then I realized he didn’t give a shit, and I switched tactics and automatically rolled down his window from my driving console. That’s what I get, isn’t it? My perfect partner catches a stray bullet in a gunfight, and I get an immediate promotion for surviving, the fine print being that I move to Special Crimes and my new partner lives in his own barren headspace. Believe me I tried my hand at small talk with him but that was a quick fail.

            When I park my car five houses down from the location (the paps already got the scoop so there’s no closer spot) Mr. Sapeurs just walks out the car, slams the door without a ‘thank you’ and heads toward the scene. Rude much?

The crime scene itself doesn’t look far from the ordinary. There’s yellow tape and uniforms guard it. Simple. I show one constable my brand new Det Insp badge, and he lets me through. My eyes immediately survey the scene—there’s signs of struggle: an overturned chair, the smell of death, blood smeared on a wall and in the centre of a room, a body half covered with cloth. That’s unorthodox. Not sure if a witness covered the vic or one of the uniforms thought he was helping. I can say goodbye to the thought that the crime scene is pristine which means we’ll never catch the killer.

  I expect the uniform to brief me, but instead he heads over to my flamboyant partner and speaks in whispered tones. Do I take that as a sign of sexism or ageism? Either way, I keep my distance, observing. Once I made the mistake of asserting myself, guns blazing, and that held me back a year, so now I play the long game.

I’d thought the promotion would come with the usual perks—higher pay, less work, more underlings, more glory but, ladies and gentlemen, promotions are just lies to keep us shackled to the man. It seems I’m a glorified bodyguard to some wunderkind consultant who listens to no one and dresses like a circus owner.

            It’s not just the clothes, he’s also gaunt and severe, and when he finally removes his Ray Bans, I look into his eyes and they are whited over like cataracts, except the centers are still black. There’s something living yet dead about his aura. He removes his hat and lays it on a table then removes his gloves and puts those in his coat pockets. I smell grass and–

            “Regulations say we can’t be high on the job. Besides, you’ll get ash on the body,” I tell him.

            If he heard me at all he doesn’t respond, he simply crouches next to the body and holds the vic’s dead hand. What the fuck?

            “Hey, you can’t just do that. Now we have to eliminate your DNA from the suspect list. Do you have any idea how pissed the CSU will be and how much paperwork we’ll have to file?”

            Mr. Sapeurs doesn’t respond to me. He just stands to his full height and walks very slowly towards me. His expression is so tense, I believe he might slap me or something, but I stand my ground. He takes my gloved hand in his ungloved ones, and I am instantly transported to other places: my fourth birthday when my father went out to get me a birthday cake and returned home in a body bag, my sixteenth birthday when I sat alone on a sterile table having a fetus pulled out of me because how would I explain to my mother that I’d betrayed all her hard work and visions for my future by falling pregnant? The very last image that floats into my head is my partner’s death, the fact that the bullet came from my chamber and there was nothing stray about it. A big lump of pain sits on my chest, and I can’t breathe.

            “How?” I ask, between heavy breaths and the sweat on my brow.

            From far off I register a uniform walking in and announcing that the CSU team has arrived. Mr. Sapeurs grunts in assent as I’m currently unable to form a single coherent thought, then turns back to me and says, “Things are done differently in Special Crime.” Ya think?

  1. The Prophet

The boy’s clothes smelt the way clothes do when they’ve been freshly washed and pressed. The boy himself felt stiff and uncomfortable following his Maman as she walked farther than he had ever gone. All he knew from birth was the slum and now she had washed him, ordered a haircut, allowed him to wear his Sunday shoes and Sunday best. What was happening? Even Maman was wearing her expensive dress and wrapper.

            “Keep up, Celestino,” she said at intervals but that was it.

            As they continued to walk, the streets got cleaner, and the houses were bigger until they reached a fenced home with a black gate. Maman knocked and some boy Celestino’s age opened the gate. When Celestino and his maman entered first the yard and then the house, it was like he’d stepped into another world: the house was big and made of brick and completely painted over with no graffiti, there was freshly washed laundry hanging on a washing line and a healthy mango tree in the corner of the yard. Even the dog sitting near a kennel seemed peaceful and well-fed, perhaps more well fed than Celestino himself. How on earth would it growl at thieves if it wasn’t hungry? How grand it seemed then, although he realised later that it was just a house, and that it was his slum, and not the suburb, that was the anomaly of colonialist social engineering.

They crossed the threshold into the house and the same kid who opened the gate led them from one room to another until they finally reached a room with large, soft sofas in it.

“Maman, brother, take a seat, the bishop will be with you shortly,” the boy intoned.

There was no television. Celestino remembered that. He’d always watched football from the window of some bar back at home and assumed any rich person, any truly rich person would first buy a TV before buying something silly like a sofa or a dog or God forbid! a washing line.

            “Maman Clotilde, is this the boy then?” the bishop said by way of greeting.

            Maman fell to her knees and started crying, with gasps here and there about not knowing what else to do. From her bag, she produced her money purse and pushed all her money towards the prophet. She couldn’t have fished it out of her brassiere like she did on most market days, this was after all a man of God. She had to show some decorum. He patted her head soothingly, the way an unconcerned uncle might pet a sobbing toddler.

            “Here now, trials are given to test our faith. Do you have faith, Maman Clotilde?” he asked, but his eyes were on Celestino, steadfast and unwavering.

            Celestino looked down. It was not seemly to challenge a grown-up with one’s eyes.

            “God willing, God willing, I have faith, monsieur.”

            “Now, now, take a seat. Yves! Get some water for Mama Clotilde!”

            Yves must be nine then, thought Celestino. It was easy to tell how old a boy or girl was by their name. Or at least that is what his maman said when she guessed everyone’s age: those born before Mobutu had French names, those born during Mobutu had Lingala or Swahili names and those born during Kabila had Catholic names. Going by Maman’s history-driven mathematics, Yves, therefore, was ostensibly nine years old. Celestino was still young enough to assume his own maman was completely infallible in her thinking.

            By the time the boy named Yves walked in with a tray balanced in his hand, Maman and the prophet were discussing important matters, grown up matters that made them hush their voices and that seemed to upset Maman, although she had stopped crying. Celestino suspected they were talking about his dreams. At some point he caught fragments of the conversation that sounded like the prophet questioning his mother.

“Are you sure the boy has never taken a gris-gris before, never been given a fetish to fight well? Some of these healers get the recipe wrong or invoke the wrong spirit then we have a boy going mad or falling dead in the middle of the street.” The prophet’s derision of healers was clear.

Instead of soothing Maman, this had the opposite effect. Fat tears tracked down her face as she begged, “Please, Bishop he is just a boy, and I am a good Christian woman. I pray for him every morning and every night. I have never been to a healer in my life!”

“And his father? His family? It is easy to inherit a curse from one’s grandfather, up to the fourth generation. Even the Bible tells us this.”

Now this line of questioning must have been uncomfortable for Maman. Celestino had asked her several times where his father was when he was still snot nosed and little, she told him that his father was a travelling soldier putting everyone in Kinshasa in line and in order. When the neighbour women asked, she told them he’d moved to Brazzaville to try his luck at something but never wrote home. Of late when Celestino asked after this soldier father of his, this brave captain general, Maman just kissed her teeth and berated Celestino.

“Papa this, papa that but tell me have you finished washing your clothes and taken money to Papa Guy as I asked? No, you just want to know where Papa is but is Papa the one who cooks foufou for you at night or rubs salt in your palms when you scream at night? Children these days. I swear to God who is in heaven!”

And that would be that. Celestino would rush off to clean the house and Maman would continue pottering around the kitchen. A woman in a kitchen always had much to do. If it was not cooking it was cleaning and if there was no cleaning, she would sit by a candle and sew his old clothes back to respectability.

“Prophet,” Maman’s head dipped in embarrassment, “I was set upon by robbers on my way home from an errand. I know nothing of them… and I do not speak of it.” This  last part Maman said with more force and authority than Celestino was accustomed to, “I came to Lubumbashi to spare my family the shame. As the eldest daughter they had different hopes for me, you see.”

Celestino was not sure what this meant. The older boys in the slum sometimes spoke lewdly of women and girls but when Celestino and his agemates were around, they switched the topic to football or teasing. The prophet nodded his head gravely.

“Discernment… yes, this may require prayer and fasting. The Bible speaks of this. Our Lord and Saviour also blessed his servant Joseph with dreams and his servant Daniel with wisdom. If anyone can figure it out, it is Bishop Prophet Mukenge, with God’s help of course.”

Maman crossed herself each time the prophet mentioned the Bible or the Lord and Saviour.

“The boy will have to remain here for a while. He will fast with me and pray with me and before you even miss his mischief, we would have figured out this mess.”

Celestino began to make sense of everything: all the visits and odd neighbours seemed to be about his dreams these days. The dreams and apparitions consumed all of Maman’s energy until she’d became a dry husk of the vibrant person she used to be. The wad of cash Maman had taken from her purse sat on a coffee table between Maman and the prophet, untouched. Celestino did not know why he noticed this at the time, but he did, his memory imbuing it in his synapses forever. Now the prophet turned to Celestino.

            “Is it true that you dream, boy? Boy!”

            Several minutes of awkward tension ensued before Celestino realised that it was he that the Bishop referred to for he’d trained himself to not listen too intently when adults were talking.

            “Yes, sir, I dream.”

            The prophet stood and walked up to Celestino. A waft of some strong scent tickled Celestino’s nose.  This is what money should smell like, Celestino thought. No one in the slum had quite that fragrance. At his full height, the prophet was impressive in his tailored safari suit and why not? Politicians often came to the slum wearing such suits and donating food when they wanted votes and even his own mother sewed the same type of outfit albeit with cheaper materials. Safari suits were all the rage in the country. Hadn’t Mobutu Sese Seko come to save the children of Congo from having to wear stiff three-piece suits in the heat of the equatorial summer, amongst other things?

Taking Celestino’s  head in his hands, the prophet took time to examine him. If Celestino touched a single girl that way she would have howled murder, and her brothers would have beat him until he was a whimpering dog. The prophet pushed back Celestino’s eyelids and examined his eyes. He prodded his fingers into Celestino’s ears, making his heart beat faster, yet he did not know why he was afraid.

            “Show me your tongue, boy,” the prophet said. Celestino stuck out his tongue.

            “It is worse than I thought,” said the prophet.

  1. Woo woo

On the ride back to the 81st precinct, I am quieter than Mr. Sapeurs. The last few days have been a hell hole and whatever woo woo mind games he played on me earlier are 100% not cool. He just sits there cool as a cucumber smoking Madisons and not saying a single word to me. Fine.

            “Please don’t tell anyone what you saw. At least not yet. I… I need to figure that out.”

            “Okay,” he replies.

            “I’m serious.” 

            “So am I. I don’t snitch on partners. I’ve pinged you a location. You should drive us there.”

            What does this man see me as? A professional chauffeur? Well, if all he needed was a driver, he should have hired one and not had me transferred from the 23rd precinct. I mean what type of fifty-year-old can’t drive?

            “One that is epileptic, or at least one that has seizures,” Mr. Sapeurs answers.

            Did he just read my thoughts?

            “I told you; things work differently at Specials.”

            For the rest of the drive, I don’t engage with him, just follow the GPS to whatever location he’s pinged into my handheld. I drive off the autobahn and bob and weave through a maze of avenues until I hit Freedom Square, formerly known as Nkrumah Square, then Mandela Square then Marley Square. The council since figured that since the Pan Afrikan Space Station is host to an entire Afrikan diaspora, there’s no use naming the square after any specific hero, but freedom was an abstract ideal that everyone could get behind. Besides, they also realised that every other day, the entire space station downs tools to celebrate some regional holiday or the other (including Caribbean and Afro-American) and that just killed productivity. Now Freedom Square is full of different national flags and food trucks bearing various cuisines.

            “Park there,” he says, and I obey, too sleep-deprived to ask him to mind his tone. He steps out of the car, and I follow, annoyed at the muggy heat. Of all the temperatures, the Architects could have chosen for this square, someone with a nostalgia for New Orleans, of all places, they set our thermostat to hot and humid. My mother told me that the city fathers found it imperative to add different climates to the construct that is the space station, while everyone else says experimental plants in the test biospheres could only survive in different climates and so varied weather is the price we pay for having fauna on the station.

Mr. Saupeurs heads toward one particular food truck. I assume this is a confidential informant. Mumamba had those everywhere—drug pushers, sex workers, street urchins and even housewives. As I said earlier, he had  a good bedside manner. I stand in the 4am cold behind a ten deep queue waiting to see the old lady selling foufou and lamb stew from a green food truck.

            “Bonjour, Maman Eveline. You look beautiful as ever and green is the best colour on you, best colour!” He hands her a wad of cash without making an order and she falls into a narrative about the inclement weather and her clever son Georges who has passed his primary examinations. She beams with the glow of a proud mother before handing two take out boxes to Mr. Sapeur who thanks her profusely. He carries the food to an empty table and places the uppermost box in front of me before opening his own box to reveal… foufou and lamb!

            I sit down and open my own takeaway box to find foufou and chicken then shake the serviettes Maman Eveline handed us and all that’s there is some packets of salt and pepper. What the—.

            “I’m not Mumamba,” my new partner says, gauging my disappointment.

            “So, what, we’re just here to eat?” I ask.

            He chuckles, which sounds more like the rumble of a dying carburetor. “Eat your food, the shift is just starting.”

            “I struggle to eat sadza when I’m not at home. There’s nowhere to wash one’s hands and even when there is, I need to wash my hands into a white basin with soap and hot water and see the dirt on my hands wash down the drain otherwise how do I know my hands are clean?”

            He hands me a recycled spoon. Ostensibly from Maman Eveline. The PASS is really gung-ho about sustainability. “My name is Celestino Mukenge. I was born in Zaire—”

            “You were born in the DRC,” I correct.

            “I was born in Zaire, and don’t interrupt me. I’ve worked Special Crimes for a long time and if you want to survive this department, you need to forget everything they taught you at the academy and follow my lead. You’ll need to practice a nonchalant expression. You’ll see and hear things that will shock you. The trick is to convince everyone around you that you’re not shocked. You’ll also need to carry three different firearms—”

            “I already have–”

            “Two Glock 20s in your shoulder holster and a safety at your ankle. I know that. Don’t interrupt me. You need three distinct types of firearm. The perps we’re hunting won’t be dented by those Glocks.”

            “I’ll have you know that saber rounds in a 20 can penetrate the titanium limbs on a mech.”

            “If you say so,” he says, looking into my soul. What else could be out there? “I have a feeling you look down on Specials and would rather move to Major Crimes or Vice. If you do decent work here, I can recommend you for a transfer but only after three months. Until then, you’re stuck with me.”

            Chided, I nod  and get to eating my food. I really was hungry and by the time we finish eating, the coroner and CSU will have a preliminary report. The building caretaker gave a flimsy statement: no one noticed anything until he went to collect rent and the vic didn’t respond to the knock on her door. The door itself was ajar and the caretaker noticed a strange smell, so he let himself in and discovered that smell was death. I’m no coroner but I’d say that vic was deceased twelve hours to a day before her body was discovered. After a while, one gets a sixth sense for these things. Sad that such a thing could happen on a planet that holds ubuntu to be one of its central tenets.

            “Let’s move,” Mr. Celestino says, stretching his frame to its full height. I follow him to the alleyway which is now devoid of any human life. This is  where I parked my car  and only the sound of rats scurrying about breaks the eerie silence. How the fuck did those follow us from earth? Celestino and I walk silently side by side, our footfall beating a staccato into the tarmac until he stops to tie his shoelaces. My mind is already constructing a list of tenants we should interview, fingerprints to look for…of course if our Jane Doe died hours before her body was discovered prints may be a dud but people tend to drop the strangest things at a crime scene and… just like the night Mumamba died, my body hijacks itself and my right arm automatically grabs a Glock from my shoulder holster and my feet pivot round in double quick speed to shoot at my new partner.

            One minute I’m shooting off, next minute I’m standing in the middle of an alleyway hyperventilating. Most importantly, the partner I just shot isn’t in a heap on the floor. He has a revolver in his hand and he’s walking straight toward me, cool as a cucumber.

            “I shot you! I’m sorry. I was just walking, and I don’t know, I—” what can I say, this will be the second partner I’ve shot in three weeks and now I think it’s time for me to retire and sign myself up for sectioning.

            Celestino opens his suit coat and reveals a vest that clearly has an entry point in it, then undoes the button on his vest to show a maroon shirt with a blooming of crimson on it. He opens the shirt buttons and there is no wound at all but hanging from a chain is a small bottle full of bullets. He taps this bottle with his revolver.

            “These nine bullets should have killed me many times. The gold one came from your mother’s firearm.” I look at his chest and true to God there are many wounds on it.

            “I still shot you,” I say.

            “I wasn’t tying my shoelaces. I was giving you a head start. To test a theory. If I shoot you in the back what will happen?” He unfurls my left hand and I’m holding a bullet. There’s a lot of blood there too and a little pain but the bones and sinews are already healing.

“You caught the bullet, and you fought back, just like what happened at the factory. You did not murder Mumamba, but you’ll have to figure out why he was trying to kill you, and your grieving will end when you accept what your subconscious is trying to tell you. Your partner was dirty and if you weren’t prévoyant, it would have been you and not him who died in that factory. You were not sent here as a punishment but for your own protection. Your mother needs evidence to convince the rest of the brass that you are not a liability to the force.”

            “You could have killed me!” I retort, “If your test had failed, I would have died.

            “The test was for you,” Celestino says, before swaggering off to my squad car.

  1. The Prophet’s Son

Bishop Prophet Mukenge was not a married man, but Celestino was soon to find out that did not hinder his life in any way for on every day of the week there came a Maman Pauline or Eveline or Claudette who was appreciative of the bishop’s prayers and was anxious to feed the man of God. Celestino soon realised that his daily food transmogrified from simple foufou and maniocs to everyday rice and everyday spaghetti and shrimp, for the ladies of First Baptist Church were not just anxious to see that the man of God was fed but also anxious to prove their gratitude by fashioning their favourite dishes for him.

            Celestino soon learned that the sharp boy who’d opened the gate for him and his maman was not a houseboy or the prophet’s son but a distant relative whose parents had died early in his life and after being passed from one relative to another, The Lord had shown the bishop in a dream that such a vagabond existence would only serve to make the boy shiftless; he had to plant his roots somewhere and that somewhere would be the bishop’s own home. On top of that, the bishop realised that while Caleb had Joshua and Paul had Timothy, he himself had no torch bearer and whatever he achieved on this earth would be worth nothing if he had no one to pass his gifts to. Celestino learnt all this during the week as he helped the boy, Yves clean the house.

            “The cleaning is not so bad you’ll see. Those same women who like to give Papa food, sometimes come, and do his laundry, but you and I are not men of God so we must do our own. The husbands at First Baptist are anxious to see Papa married so that their wives don’t cook or clean for Papa, but Papa himself told me that a prophet must be equally yoked. That means the prophet’s wife must have the same anointing as our good Papa.”

            Celestino was a quiet boy, not dull but observant and hadn’t his mother taught him, “You see this here is a volatile country—one day it is the country of the Belgians, next day it is the country of Patrice Lumumba, next it is the country of Joseph Kasa-Vubu, after that it is the country of Mobutu. Next thing, we’ll hear that Laurent Kabila has taken it for himself. Listen to me, Celestino and listen to me well, sometimes it is good to be a Swahili and sometimes it is good to be a Lingala, but I have only one belief: if you want to live long, your ears must be louder than your mouth.”

So Celstino listened to what Yves said and what the Bishop Prophet said and every morning at 6am kneeled for morning prayers and at midday and at six pm and at midnight and when they were fasting, which was often, Yves pulled a grumbling Celestino from bed at 3am. He  observed that these born agains prayed more than Muslims. A few years ago, everyone had been Catholique and now from nowhere the Holy Ghost had spread across the country and everyone was born again. But Celestino didn’t mind the praying and the fasting so much; in the first place his maman was not rich so he’d skipped meals before and in the second place, kneeling and praying beat being tied to a tree and having the ‘evil eye whipped out of him’ as some travelling medicine man had done before Maman had heard of Prophet Bishop Mukenge.

His mother left him at the Prophet’s home for just a few weeks when he was ten years old but by the time he was fifteen, Celestino was still at the home of Bishop Mukenge, fasting and praying for the stubborn spirit that sometimes gave him nightmares and sometimes gave him seizures and more importantly, gave him nightmares that came true. Each morning at eight am after early morning prayers and while the prophet ate the porridge Celestino and Yves took turns preparing, the prophet asked Celestino what he saw in his dreams and wrote it in a notebook.

“I was in a river and Papa Guy was drowning,” Celestino would say.

“Mmmm, mmm,” the prophet would say.

At the First Baptist Church, the different ladies would squeeze his cheeks affectionately and comment on how fat he’d grown and how gaunt he’d been originally. Sometimes he saw his own mother in the crowd and sometimes he did not. In any case, he had to attend to his duties, catching those who fell during altar call, helping when a choir member was absent, straightening the chairs after services.

One day, word reached him that his maman was unwell. This was on Good Friday, the busiest time of the year. He asked the good Prophet Bishop for permission to go see her. The Bishop rubbed his chin, “Of course you can go, I will work alone and Yves will have so much to do but if your mother is more important than the entire flock of the First Baptist Church then, of course, you must hurry.”

            Celestino weighed his options. It would be unkind to let Yves, his older brother, do all the work yet a premonition hit him of a needle piercing his maman’s heart. Should he ignore or obey the prophet? In the end, he resolved to stay and help, after all he could go back to the slum after the service but the special service that Saturday dragged on and on. Ladies kept falling and the choir kept singing and singing and as often as Celestino looked at his watch; he knew only that time was not on his side. By and by he began to forget the premonition altogether. He only remembered days later when the whole business was over, then he woke up in a great sweat and hurriedly slapped on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and ran out of the gate and into the Lubumbashi morning. He navigated the maze of homes in the slum, hoping he would reach his mother in time. By the time Celestino knocked on the familiar blue door that looked more threadbare than when he’d last seen it, an unfamiliar face greeted him.

            “Ah! You must be Celestino. The landlord said you might come one day,” the man said to him. Let me take you to your mother. A vile emotion rose like a vice and gripped Celestino’s heart. The world seemed like a distant place and Celestino was not surprised when the man dragged him in the direction of the cemetery.

  1. Investigation 101

Back at HQ, my fellow prévoyant and I descend to the lowest floor of the precinct basement, below CSU and below the morgue even. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I called it the sunken place with a proverbial swinging light that flickers on and off until someone steadies it. One desk is overflowing with case files and old evidence and the other desk is clinically bare.

            “Your old partner left in a hurry?” I quip.

            “He died on the job.” Nothing more nothing less.

            “It looks like CSU has released the vic’s effects to us already.” That’s the fastest time I’ve ever seen in PASS-PD history.

            “I told you this department is different from every other department,” he says, motioning me round to his side of the table where the orange dashiki our victim wore is now overflowing from a cardboard box. He takes it and hands it to me. “Take this. Sniff it, taste it. Tell me what you know of this woman.”

Art by Sunny Efemena

            I look at him askance. I mean I could sniff it for drugs or a murder weapon but tasting? Come on.

            “Close your eyes,” he says further, “drown the sounds of the whispers upstairs.”

            The man looks really expectant and strange things have happened lately, so I do as he says, I close my eyes and let my nose descend into her clothes. Instantly, a tightness lodges itself in my chest and I can’t breathe, someone is pulling me from behind yanking my dreadlocks and then my throat. If only I can get to my desk, pull out my knife, but he is taller stronger, larger. I claw at everything around me then it all becomes a blur. I fall to my knees choking and that’s when I hear the voices:

            “Help me!”

            “Tell Mulalo I loved her.”

            “Noooo!”

            Celestino shakes me. “What did you see?”

            I struggle for a breath then sit cross-legged on the floor. “The perp was a man, big guy. He had a strong scent, like lemongrass. His arms were…real thick. Like he lifted weights or something. There was something in the desk drawer worth protecting. She knew someone would come for it, but it happened too fast.”

            “Good job. Now you must listen to me. The work we do here… you close your ears and open your memory, comprehend?”

            I nod my head. I bet he’s about to tell me that I drifted out because I listened to the voices upstairs. The dead bodies in the morgue, all of them dead with a cry on their tongue but that cry coming all too late. Celestino takes a different object from the box and breathes heavily before crouching before me.

            “The victim’s effects may be hard to read but sometimes the perps are harder to pin down. The easiest are the dumb thugs, they have no dangerous thoughts, but the first time I read a rape kit, I had seizures for weeks. It is important to read the intent on the item but to not be subsumed by it. Comprehend?”

            I nod again. This time, he doesn’t hand the talisman to me immediately but assesses my face and waits for me to be at some kind of equilibrium before handing the perp’s pendant to me. On the outside, I try to look cool calm and collected but what does that help if the man can read minds of bodies dead or alive. The thing is, I’m freaking out; that weird shoot out in the back alley of Freedom Square was not the first time I realized I was prévoyant. It was sometime earlier. I may have been four or five. My grandfather had just died and so my aunt and uncle supervised me for the entire day. Mother was distraught and couldn’t see to me.

            “Sekuru says he can’t breathe,” I said to my Maiguru Danai just after I finished eating frozen yoghurt sometime between the burial and the drive home, “Sekuru can’t breathe.”

            While my Maiguru had been interested in this strange utterance, my Babamukuru had quickly silenced me. He’s traditional and they don’t speak of the dead unless you want to invite bad spirits. Thing is, now that I’m old enough to read family records, I know my Sekuru drowned so my odd words weren’t so far from the mark. Sometimes I’d feel the scorch of heat or the bite of cold on a mild day. The weather on the space station is regulated so there’s no reasonable explanation for that.

When my mother bought secondhand furniture from auctions or vintage clothes from the thrift store, I had unbearable nightmares. By the time I was ten years old my mother had disavowed her Green Oath, gotten rid of all the secondhand shit in our house and all its baggage, and somewhere between weekly visits a kindly old lady who must have been a n’anga or an elderly therapist had come to visit me. The nightmares abated and the voices stopped whispering, but I know something Celestino knows that my mother knows too–the night Mumamba died, something was reborn in me.  Now I know why the Zoloft I got from the precinct psychologist didn’t work. It wasn’t grief that caused my nightmares. Whatever psionic frequency my five-year-old self used to commune with the past has been reignited.

            I know I don’t have to take the pendant at all. I could literally just unclip my badge from my belt, place my service weapons on the ground and walk on home to my spartan apartment but my mother is a cop and her mother before her was a cop and so on and so forth, generations and generations of women who chose to wear the uniform so they could protect other women and now someone’s daughter, sister, mother has been murdered in her own home. I take offense at that, and it is this offense and this dreadlocked victim who could have been my classmate at school or a fellow recruit at the academy that motivates me to grasp the amulet. I may not have much faith in my own washed-up career, with hushed whispers about killing my partner in a shootout and low odds of having half the career my mom did, but this vic deserves justice.

  1. Set a thief

His mother’s grave was probably the saddest in the cemetery. All that was there was a mound of fresh turned and packed earth and a wooden cross with the name ‘Clotilde’ carved clumsily into it. The new tenant of his childhood home handed him a shoebox.

            “Once her things were sold off to pay for the burial and her doctor’s fee, Papa Jean kept this for you.” Papa Jean was their landlord.

            “Merci,” is all the boy said, because reckoning that there had been medical debts at all and that she’d been behind on rent did not sit well with him. Didn’t Prophet Bishop Mukenge give out free food and accoutrements to his parishioners?  Celestino lapped all of it up like a well-fed dog and here was his own mother dead alone in a pauper’s cemetery. He knew how such things were handled. Some kind man would offer to pay a group of ne’er do wells to dig a grave and a carpenter would be commissioned to fashion a cheap coffin from someone’s unwanted wardrobe or dinner table. The service itself would be brief, after the body was buried, someone would say a short prayer and a neighbour woman of the kindly variety might place a few flowers on the mound but that was all.

At the end of the day, when the men retired to their lagers and spirits, whispers could be heard about shameful neglectful family members and what great evil the world was coming to. Celestino would have written to his family in Kinshasa about this great travesty but the only word on his mother’s cross was Clotilde, there was no surname. Was he to conclude then that in his entire life nobody had ever pried it from her lips? Celestino looked into the shoebox. There were a few pictures of him and his maman in their Sunday best, from before his nightmares and seizures. After that there had been no money for luxuries, just appointments with pastors and medicine men all across Lubumbashi, but never a cure. There was a necklace or two and a hairbrush and that is all that remained of Clotilde of Lubumbashi who had no family and no surname.

            Celestino did not cry then as he stood at her final resting place but something like hate lodged itself into his heart and he knew he could not return to the home of the Bishop Prophet who had delayed him from visiting his mother’s death bed. When he walked from that grave site, it was not in the direction of the First Baptist Church or the prophet’s home but in the direction of the bus station and of Kinshasa and anything that would remove him from the ugly feeling that followed him all the way from his mother’s graveyard until the day he would die.

  1. Special crimes

What makes a victim special? Or a crime? Or a crime scene? Is it the manner of death, the victims themselves or the perpetrator. A forgotten talisman is the only part of the perpetrator that I have to go on. Was it really forgotten in haste or confidence or is this the calling card of a new serial killer. If I touch this necklace, will I go batshit crazy or see clarity and nail the bastard? There’s only one way to find out.

            Reaching out to take the pendant from Celestino should feel like some monumental task but its oddly underwhelming. The string itself feels like nothing and I quirk the side of my lip up to quip about something but that’s when I touch the round metal disc with strange glyphs embedded on it.

  1. Celestino

He ran to Kinshasa, not because of his maternal links there but because it was the capital city and as any country goes the advice is to always go to the capital if you want to see real money. The bus ride may have been ill-advised, with so much fighting in the country who was to say they wouldn’t be waylaid by robbers or worse? But Celestino had suffered a great loss and people who suffer great loss seem to lose their sense of self-preservation for unknown intervals of time.

By the time he landed in Kinshasa, everything was bright and bold and too loud. Not that the city was different from Lubumbashi, but he’d become accustomed to Prophet Bishop Mukenge’s home which was in a well-to-do suburb and therefore quiet. The kinds of visions that often frightened him were often drowned out by Yves’ incessant chattering or prayers, which Celestino did not always believe in but now found comfort in in some grounding, ritualistic way, so that the other street urchins that resided with him in a back alley began to mock him.              

            “Muslim!” they called him, because he prayed five times a day and when some intrepid gambler discovered that he was a good hand at every card game known to man, he dragged Celestino into gambling halls and casinos and bet at long odds.

            “Look here, boy. Take this money and play a game. Yield the first few hands and then win at the end, when you get the money, pay me three quarters and you can keep the rest.”

This was a heavenly proposition to someone who was homeless but by and by that became old and besides, none of the hosts would let him play anymore—the house was supposed to win but he made them lose each damn time. And so on to telling fortunes and crossing over to Congo Brazzaville and when that situation got hairy, he moved to Kenya and on to Tanzania where the owner of some cruise ship experience hired him as a resident novelty act. First there was Joe telling jokes to warm the crowd up and then there was Cele, the magician telling people their fortunes and sometimes their pasts and this was quite the sensation until the internet hit and tarot readers on Tik Tok became a dime a dozen, he sold online readings for $300 a session and life was good and meaningless until the day he came across a dead body on the white sands of Zanzibar. Morbid curiosity led him to look into its eyes. He had seen in a movie once that if you diffract the pupils of a corpse, you can find an image of its last sight. Celestino thought that was all hogwash, but he looked, nonetheless.

  1. Prévoyance

“To answer your question, there are different things that make a crime scene special, but what do you remember about this one?”

            I’m simply flummoxed. What do I remember? It was raining when we arrived on scene, the uniforms had secured the area and the victim’s body was covered from the waist down.

            “You can get all that from photographs and witness statements. What did you notice? Forget the police training.”

            “There were signs of struggle but… no forced entry.”

            “Oui.”

            A thought is forming in my head as I process something, like a memory that wants to be glanced at but is too shy to come to the fore, “The victim and the perpetrator… they had similar energy. She didn’t want to die but… she opened the door herself. He… he didn’t want to hurt her, but he did so anyway.”

            I feel my forehead creasing. That doesn’t even make sense. I keep clutching the talisman, hoping something else will be revealed. This is the only artefact the perp left at the crime scene, unless I touch the victim’s dreadlocks, but then I‘d read too much.

            Mr. Sapeurs sighs heavily and heavily sits in what must be the most uncomfortable chair in the world. He removes his shades and those cataracts swirl like a storm brewing.

            “Before all this modern technology, people used to do studies whenever there was a pandemic. Take bloods sputums, all that. There was an outbreak of Ebola once, when I was still in Lubumbashi. Some of those scientists took blood samples. They were supposed to be making a cure or something, a vaccine. Some… superstitious people believed they wanted to steal our blood to commit witchcraft and I thought that was silly… but that was East Congo and some of these scientists conducted research with no ethics.

            “There were rumours about guerillas in the jungle who could take bullets and not die, street urchins who could tell fortunes… Someone must have caught wind and used Ebola as an excuse to round us up. He was drawing my blood when I saw the world turn to dust.”

            “What did they do to you?” I ask, transfixed.

            “Nothing, at the time, but later in Tanzania, some men tried to hunt me down, but I always felt them approach first. I changed my identity several times and when the Pan Afrikan Space Station was finally built, I thought I could escape them on earth by coming here but they’d already done something worse.”

            “What could be worse than hunting people down for their biology?”

            “When gene sequencing and splicing finally became viable, they used our DNA to reverse engineer prevoyants in test tubes. They got the formula wrong and created something that could be more dangerous.”

            “They don’t see, do they? Whoever killed that woman, they plant ideas!”

            “We call it compelling.”

I don’t ask about the bullet wounds on his chest or the intricacies of reverse engineering someone’s biology—nowadays rich folk splice the weirdest genes into their DNA. It started out as cancer research and trials to cure genetic illnesses but now we have transgenic folk putting wombat DNA into themselves so they can be more curmudgeonly. There are more important questions.

            “When last did you have a partner, Celestino?”

            “Three years ago.”

            “So, you’ve brought me on because a) this isn’t the first compelled victim you’ve found and you’re under resourced or b) you’re losing your woo woo.” I refuse to call it magic.

            “C. all of the above, but it’s not quite that I’ve lost my sight, I can’t see myself and they made compellers out of my blood. And yes… this is officially the first murder victim of this kind but, other researchers have been found dead in their apartments, apparent suicides but when I read them, there was no pain relief in their last breath.”

            There is a question that still tickles the back of my mind. If Celestino’s genetics are so valuable to some shadow syndicate, then why are there eight bullets in a vial around his neck? Who would be trying to kill him.

            “Ah, not my hunters, la petit! There are those who hired me to investigate on their cheating partners and let’s just say the spouses did not enjoy being followed.”

            There is almost a chuckle accompanying that, but what’s stranger is that his lips have not moved. Huh. I must be doing it too.

  1. Awake

It was urchins that found him behind a dumpster in downtown Uhuru. If he had been cognisant, he would have found it ironic but even then, he was bewildered, wondering if he was dead, if this was the heaven Prophet Bishop often spoke of. It did not smell heavenly as he did not suppose God had much use for scurrying rats and vermin—several rodents had investigated his personage already  and he was too tired, too hungry, too paralysed to push them away.

            “Bogey man, what do you think he is?”

            “Ayi, I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out either….”

            “Hey, what are you boys doing there?”

            “Nothing, officer, we just found him. We didn’t even search his pockets or nothing. He looked dead then he opened his eyes.”

            Celestino raised his head a fraction and saw what looked to be a cop, but he couldn’t recognise her uniform. Not Zairean, not Tanzanian, not Rwandan, and even the air was strange, heavier…

            “Sir, I’ll need you to open your eyes for me? Good. Good. Blink twice if you hear me. Sir, how many fingers am I holding up? Four? Good. Sir, who is the President of the PASS?”

            “Laurent Kabila.”

            At that her eyebrows knotted into something tough and complex, and she spoke not into her radio but into her wrist, “Control, this is Eleven-Delta-November. I have a concussed man on Sankara Street possible 315. Request immediate ambulance and CSU.”

            “No hospital. No hospital,” he tried to croak but figured she didn’t hear him.

            She lay a hand on his forehead and then on his chest. “Control, be advised. This may be a partial cryo-mergence case. Come prepared.”

            She looked young, but by then everyone was young in his eyes. Eyes that had seen his own mother’s grave and Laurent Kabila march on Kinshasa and the mad scuffle after his death. Eyes that had seen what was East Congo turn into an irreparable warzone. And now it cost just as much for a shuttle to space as it did to travel to Brussels or America. Now he remembered. He’d been a stowaway on one of those rockets and perhaps if he wasn’t touched by the gods, the journey may have killed him but now he was frozen over at the back of an alley in some planet he didn’t recognise. Another suitcase, another world.

  1. Evidence

“It was your great grandmother who found me in a back alley that night, cold and alone. She worked with me here in Special Cases for a long time after that, then your grandmother, then your mother…”

            “Decided she didn’t believe in superstition and walked away from a calling she didn’t choose.”

            “She wanted to break the glass ceiling, to run a precinct. Instead, she runs a city. She thought you’d follow in her footsteps, then your partner died, and you started dreaming again…”

            “What does this have to do with anything?”

            “You should have died in that warehouse, the fact that you didn’t puts a target on your back. If we find the compeller, we may make you safe, then you’re free to go back to top brass track.”

By now, the erstwhile empty table is full of photographs from different crime scenes and a dusty but empty box sits on the chair, all the files now strewn on one surface or another. If I’m in danger, then what if my mom’s in danger, too? I need to catch these killers.

            “What kind of resources do these people have?”

            “They operate in the shadows, so I can’t give you a figure just that they can pay to make their own mutantes in the lab.”

            “No pressure.”

            We go through the rigmarole of reading through case files until the lines blur across my eyes.

            “Maybe we should hit the streets, talk to witnesses, this isn’t adding any value to our investigation.”

            “In Specials we read objects, that’s all.”

            “But these are exceptional circumstances. Someone is hunting me down, probably you as well! They’re targeting scientists. Who knows what horrors they could be manufacturing in a test tube somewhere? Maybe we could read surfaces just as well, find her lab. Maybe pieces of what’s in that notebook exists across the other work files.

By the time we return to Anna Maria’s house, the cleaning crew have been here and apart from a hellish stain on her bedroom floor and the faint smell of copper in the air, one wouldn’t guess a woman was dead and alone for a day before she was found. Could that mean her body was harder to read? I duck under the “DO NOT ENTER TAPE” and sit on her bed, my palms flat on her comforter then move to her desk where I realise she must have done most of her thinking. Yes, she was investigating Mutation A419 and came across a file of Celestino. I open the drawer she so badly tried to protect on the day she died and glyphs and numerals spin around my head. How big is this?

            I move to her cupboard and inhale the scent of her clothes, remembering the day she bought her graduation dress and how she wanted to discover something that mattered. I get a whiff of a dress thrown to the back of her cupboard, worn for one terrible date, and never looked at again. I pick up her pencils, curious about what I’ll find there and involuntarily, I begin to write a list of names and equations, allowing the knowledge to flow through me. What could this possibly be?

When I come to, Celestino is reading the list while noisily munching on an apple. How long have I been out for?

            “It’s quarter past three,” he says out loud.

            Wow! “Say, did you practice reading minds, or are you just more gifted than I am?”

            “I wouldn’t call it a gift,” is his only answer. Bugger! Can the man not just learn to answer a question straight?

            They say homicide is the worst beat because people tend to die outside the circadian rhythm, and I totally agree because it is only the stiffness in my shoulder and the gravel in my eyes that reminds me, I’ve been up for more than 32 hours. I stand to stretch and then I feel it—the hair on the nape of my neck rises and I feel the odd sensation of déjà vu, like I am falling off a ledge and my heart hammers faster than usual. By the time the door bursts open and a gunman with a Kalashnikov sprays lead across the room, Celestino has already positioned himself in front of me, his body absorbing every bullet that may have killed me a second ago.

            As if my body has its own mind, I unholster my own Sig Sauer and fire one shot towards the gunman’s head before I even process the thought. His semi fires several last bullets as his shocked eyes register death. I hear five shell casings land on the floor and kick the semi-automatic away from him. In the distance I hear sirens. That racket ought to have diverted all uniformed units in this direction. Out of habit I check the man’s pulse, and he is gone as I suspected. What I did not expect was the vacancy in his expression. He was compelled.

            What I also do not expect is the torrent of flashbacks that assail me the minute my fingers make contact with his neck—I see the shadowy eyes of a glassy eyed man his intent keen on the asset he lost. Some clerical type who, to this day has not yet died. A prophet or bishop something. I cannot make it out at once but the whirring fan in the background and the sound of classical Papa Wemba tell me our quarry has been hiding in plain sight all along.

            I let out a screech of shock, thrashing and screaming when a hand lands on my shoulder.

            “Who is the compeller?” Mr. Sapeurs asks. How the hell is he not dead?

            “It’s a man not known to me. He’s not their leader but he’s pretty higher up. Some bishop or prophet who considers you his ‘asset.’ He was sitting in a broad room with a fan and music in the background. He is not far from Eveline’s food truck. If we go now, we might catch him.”

            “No. I’ll radio your mother. If I go, he’ll see me a mile away.”

            “What is it that you have that is so valuable to him?” I ask once he’s pinged the cavalry the killer’s location and I’ve put pressure on all his gaping wounds.

            “I can truly see, and he cannot. That is always tough for a man who considers himself gifted.”

            “Hmmm.”

  1. Ice

On the slab of cold ice, Celestino’s prone body turns blue before my eyes, the blood turning to solid, and a rudimentary tag fastened to his big right toe.

            “He is not dead,” Mother says, reassuringly.

            I turn to her.

            “He signed your release forms and we’ve taken care of the unauthorised elective mutants…mostly. You have your pick of departments now—Vice, Special Victims, Major Crimes, Homicide. The brass has agreed to seal your file from Mumamba’s death. You can put that behind you and in no time, you’ll be a commissioner.

            I look into my mother’s eyes, care worn but earnest. She’s carved a fine career for herself on the force but maybe I should pick my own path.

            “If he’s not dead, why’s he frozen.”

            “In the first place, if he’s near dead none of the compellers can find him. That’s how he escaped Earth. Secondly, he’s told me he has unfinished business on the Mother Planet, as he calls it but a desperate fear of flying. He’d like to travel in the cargo hold.”

            “Oh.”

            “Oh, indeed. Would you like a minute with him?”

            “Yes. Yes, I would. I’ve also picked my path. Thank you for sealing Mumamba’s death record. I’d like his children to grow up believing the best of him, but I won’t be going to Vice or Major Crimes. My place is here, with the magic.”

            I do not know what my mother’s full reaction to this is for I am not facing her when I say it but cradling the head of someone who took twenty bullets for me. By the time I hear Mother’s boots tread heavily toward the door, I have already laid my palm on Celestino’s head and allowed my consciousness to travel back into his time. What I see is an Earth that is broken, yet still has greenery. What I see is green valleys and forests and the staccato sound of furloughed soldiers and guerillas burning off steam by firing bullets into a ndombolo fueled night. It is not a perfect image, but it is familiar. It is Lubumbashi and it is beautiful.

Tariro Ndoro is an award-winning genre b(l)ending author of fiction, poetry and forms in between. Her short fiction has appeared in Fireside FictionHotel AfricaNew Contrast and SAND, among others. When she is not reading or writing, Tariro immerses herself in legal dramas and police procedurals…clearly.

How the End Begins | Gabrielle Emem Harry

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PART I: FOREST

Ayanti knew from the first time she saw a white owl drop out of the sky and into her newly sprouted waterleaf patch, wings wet with morning dew and lifeblood, that her grandmother was a witch. She didn’t need the gossiping girls at the stream to tell her. It was a comforting thing, having someone with power watching over her. It was better than having no one. Before Ekaeka found her, she’d had no one.

Ayanti had woken up one morning to find Ekaeka standing over her, bald-headed with a mole above her upper lip and an indigo wrapper around her waist. Human, and foreign to the forest. The ground shook at the intrusion.      

Coconuts crashed against each other and palm nuts clattered to the ground. The forest was Ayanti’s home, the monkeys her companions and enemies. Snails slithering up her arms and snakes curling around her ankles were the only affection she had ever known.

And so, when the old woman straightened Ayanti’s left arm and touched the black birthmark in the crook of her elbow, rubbing it as if it was a stain that could be wiped away, Ayanti did not pull away. A warm touch is an impossible thing to refuse, even from a rough hand.

When the woman nodded grimly and said “Take.” giving her a piece of roasted wateryam to eat.

Ayanti took it.

When the woman said, “I am your mother’s mother.” Ayanti knew it to be true because how can an elder lie to a child?

When Ekaeka said, “From today, your name is Ayanti.” Ayanti swallowed the name with the wateryam and felt it settle, solid, in her stomach.

When Ekaeka pulled Ayanti’s hand and started walking until they reached a path, Ayanti held onto her hand and walked by her, because you do not refuse a meal or a hand, or a name given to you freely when all you have had before are scales and slime against your skin and sharp stones digging into your feet.

#

Ayanti knew from the first time she bled that her grandmother did not love her. She had slept those five nights, blood running down the unfamiliar path of her skinny mosquito-bitten legs after it had soaked through the one thin rag Ekaeka had given her to place between her thighs, waiting.

She had slept each night, expecting to wake up elsewhere. She’d hoped she’d peel her eyelids back and the skin of the world she knew would be peeled back as well, letting her fall into the place Ekaeka went on those nights when grey owls slept, and white owls flew.

Ayanti forgot more each day about her time in the forest, but in the silence her grandmother left her to wallow in, memories pinched her, the smell of rotting mangoes, the sweet oily taste of hardened coconut…a place she would go sometimes, and how she’d felt when she was there, a lightness, like flying on white wings.

Ete Eyo had a mango tree that rained rotting fruit every year because he wouldn’t let anyone pluck from it since it had killed his son with the help of heavy rain and childish impatience, and Eka Iye sold coconut in the market along with every type of oil and every type of fish and every type of anything that anyone could ever want, but what Ayanti wanted was that old place and that feeling. Back in the forest, she would go to that place, not by herself, not by her power or by any power she could remember. There was so much she could not remember.

Ekaeka had taught her the sharp, simple trade language the people of Ikot Arak and other river towns spoke, but the words never quite lay flat on her tongue. She spoke it like she was treading a stony path, like the path to the stream where the girls mocked her, calling her a witch like her grandmother.

Not many villagers would allow her to work their land. No one wanted a witch’s spawn digging in the earth that fed them. Who knew what she would reap from them? Who knew what she would bury?

The plot of land Ayanti worked on most often belonged to Nse, a childless widow who wore her hair unplaited and matted, with patches rusted by the sun. Nse was mad, but not in a wandering way. She would sit and watch Ayanti work, sometimes standing up suddenly to join her in weeding, then sitting down again just as abruptly.

Ayanti liked working on Nse’s farm because on good days, she got more than the usual meals and tubers. She got stories.

After their work was done for the day, as the daylight bled out and died, Ayanti would sit under the moon, listening.

Nse told every story like it had happened to her. She wrung her face and clutched her smooth, unscarred chest, describing the feeling of a spear piercing through skin and sinew and spirit. She stroked her flat unstretched stomach and detailed the small joys that motherhood sequestered within the deep constant fear of loss. She spoke of loves she could never have known and wars she could never have fought, lives she could never have taken, or lived.

A younger Ayanti had believed the first of Nse’s stories and had stumbled over her still-new words to tell them to the girls at the stream. They had laughed at her and told her that Nse had grown up in the village, married there and lost her mind, along with her husband.

“Little witch, so you cannot tell a lie from the truth? Has your grandmother sacrificed your senses to her coven?” laughed Iye, who had recently started rubbing her whole body with coconut oil twice a day even though she wouldn’t be entering the fattening room for many seasons to come.

Ayanti, with her sudden appearance and slow measured words and beseeching eyes, made the back of Iye’s neck itch, and Iye was the type of girl to scratch an itch until it bled, the type of girl who would take a broomstick and burst a boil in her own armpit to squeeze the pus out of it to punish it for daring to swell in the first place. Her parents were rich. Her father had many wives, and so did her mother. Her mother’s wives tilled her land and sold her foodstuff in the market and cooked food for all of Iye’s younger siblings, so Iye didn’t have to.

This left Iye with a lot of time to do as she pleased, making coconut oil for her mother’s wives to sell, and thinking beyond marriage and market, beyond Ikot Arak. One of the things Iye thought about was Ayanti. She wondered where the strange girl had come from and why she reminded her of the feeling that enshrouded her when she went deep into the forest to collect coconuts. A feeling that she was venturing further than the forest close to the village; Possibility, that brew of hazard and hope. The prospect that she could go elsewhere.

#

Ayanti bled alone in that quiet hut, hoping to be transported and transformed in her sleep. Hoping that Ekaeka would take her hand again in a way that was more and less real than the first time ,but she slept undisturbed and woke uninitiated.

Burning her bloody rag with no witness but the rising sun and the dew on the waterleaf and afang and atama she had painstakingly nurtured for her grandmother’s soups, Ayanti began to accept for the first time that she was truly unloved. She had no friends amongst the village girls. Only Iye spoke to her, to insult her. As for Nse, the stories she told were more for herself than for Ayanti.

She could have perhaps accepted Ekaeka’s rejection, if that was all it was. But it was dangerous to be an unloved relative of a witch. Witches used family as fuel, serving them to their coven sisters and consuming their flesh and spirit. Ayanti could live without love, but she would not die on her grandmother’s terms.

She inhaled the scent of her burning blood, and it smelled like severance to her. She went into the hut and tied a deep blue wrapper under her armpits instead of at her waist, since she was a woman now. She left all her other wrappers behind. She would not need them anymore. She passed Ekaeka sitting on her bench under the shade of the bent coconut tree, chewing her morning bitter kola. She did not ask if she had risen well, and did not get a word of reproach. Ayanti’s heart heaved at the dismissal, and she realised she should have known long ago that there was no love here for her. Most elders would never let a child pass without greeting them, but Ekaeka did not even care enough to rebuke her. She had allowed Ayanti to grow untamed, like wild sugarcane. And now Ayanti would allow herself to be chewed up and spit out.

Ayanti took slow steps, but her grandmother did not call her back.

She continued steadily to her destination, contemplating the last hours of a familiar hollow life, the way one assesses a calabash about to be broken in offering.

When Ayanti arrived at Ndia River, she stood for a while staring at the clear water. She walked into the river, feeling smooth stones under her feet, and lay in the water. She thought once more of her grandmother’s face, the mole above her lip and her eyes, always averted.

And then she inhaled, water flowing into her and burning all her thoughts away to darkness.

#

Akai, what is this?

Ndia, leave me to rest.

Something of yours is in my hand.

I am sleeping, Ndia. Let me sleep.

Don’t you want it? Did you throw it away?

You can have it. Just leave me alone!

I can?

Keep it until I wake.

When will you wake?

Soon.

#

PART II: RIVER

Ayanti woke up on the riverbank, clutching wet sand, gasping and vomiting river water. She sat up, confused and saw a woman standing firmly on the water, wearing a bright white wrapper tied under her arms.

“Sister,” the woman said, “come.”

Ayanti scrambled up and walked ankle-deep into the river, heart crashing into her ribs, because she had never been called “sister”.

The woman held a periwinkle shell in her hand, and she gave it to Ayanti.

“Take, suck it and swallow.”

And Ayanti took it, sucked, and swallowed the periwinkle. It was raw, but sweet.

The woman smiled. “Keep that shell. Do not lose it.”

Ayanti nodded.

“My name is Iso. I am your sister now. All of us are. Come, let me show you to the rest.”

Iso stretched out her hand, and Ayanti took it. Because you do not refuse an outstretched hand and a smile and sweetness.

Iso dragged Ayanti down into the water, and the river swallowed her scream.

#

Everyone seemed to have forgotten the little witch.

Everyone except Iye.

Iye did not realise that she watched the path each day for Ayanti’s approach until Ayanti stopped coming to the stream. After she disappeared, it dawned on Iye that she had never had any reason to come to the stream at all, since her younger siblings and her mother’s wives fetched enough water for each day.

Iye had all the ingredients for happiness. Her family was well-off, her father’s ancestors were generous and her mother’s gods were merciful. Her younger siblings respected her, and the young men admired her. When she left the fattening room, she would have her pick of them. As the first daughter, she would inherit her mother’s wealth and wives, and she could marry more for labour or love if she wanted.

She could have put all these things together and made a sweet, satisfying life for herself, but she had feet made to wander.

And she wondered about Ayanti. She wondered through seven dry seasons and seven rainy ones. She wondered when her father listed names of suitable suitors and while her mother taught her the difference between good and bad copper, moldy and well-dried fish, loyal and troublesome customers. She wondered if Ayanti had finally gone elsewhere.

She wondered each season she refused to enter the fattening room until her mother finally agreed to let her leave the village to buy goods in Kuwo with one of her trusted wives.

Iye had never been to the city. She had never even left Ikot Arak. She had only seen twenty-four dry seasons and twenty-three rainy ones when she left for Kuwo. Her father and her siblings cried as they held her, but her mother only sighed, tallying the loss of a firstborn daughter. Maybe her father’s fathers or her mother’s gods had told them even then that they would never see her again.

#

The River Ndia has seven legs carrying her through seven lands. From Nka to Isino to Dianku to Ubok Akan to Ikot Arak to Ikot Mbut to Amana, people knew not to take from Ndia, not to drink from her or dirty her or enter her, unless they wanted to become hers.

Across these lands, elders told the young, “If you leave the River alone, the River will leave you alone.”

This was a lie, of course, because Ndia’s legs were long, but her throat was longer. She was insatiable. She craved beauty and pride and sorrow and sweetness and dissatisfaction, the very spirit of humanity, distilled by ephemerality.

That was why she loved her daughters, and blessed them. Like any good child, they fed their mother.

The first time Iso took her to the bottom of Ndia, Ayanti found two sisters there, one bald with yellow skin, a body straight from the fattening room, sharpening her teeth with what looked like a grinding stone.

The other one’s hair reached her shoulders, left to lock into ropes, like Nse the recluse’s hair, but smaller and smoother. She was dark and slender and tearing at her hair.

“Mmedi, I told you not to worry. Iso has brought our offering for this market week,” the bald one said with amusement. “She’s saved us. Once again.”

Mmedi’s hands left her hair and she turned and flung herself at Iso, bubbles floating from her mouth as she spoke.

“Iso! You who will never let me be ashamed! Misfortune will be far from you! I have only you in this world,” she said, placing her hand over her chest and eyeing the bald woman pointedly as she said the last part.

The bald one hissed and set the stone down. “Iso, you’ve come?” she welcomed, licking her sharpened teeth.

Art by Sunny Efemena

“Ndiyo, I’ve come,” she replied, “And this is not an offering. She’s our new sister,” she said, gesturing at Ayanti.

“Hm,” Mmedi said, face falling again.

“We don’t need a new sister,” Mmedi sulked. “Can’t we just use her as an offering?”

“No,” Iso snapped. “Mother specifically wanted this one.”

“She’s been very…forceful lately,” Ndiyo observed lazily.

“Yes,” Mmedi agreed. “It’s like there’s something in the water.”

“And in the air, too,” Iso said quietly, “But we’ll be fine as long as we don’t disobey her. Ayanti, have you heard?”

Ayanti only nodded, still afraid to open her mouth underwater.

Ndiyo looked at Ayanti, and smiled a sharp, sad smile.

And so, for seven dry seasons and seven wet ones, Ayanti discovered the cost of a mother’s love.

PART III: MARKET

Iye watched as the white-clothed priestess held the skinned cow head, red and white and dripping blood from its blackened horns. The woman would carry it round the perimeter of the market to soothe the gods of trade as they grew restless at the Turning of the season.

A cow sacrifice would usually only be done as the dry season began, but the Ikanto priestesses sent a crier through Kuwo to announce that the gods were uneasy for reasons known only to them and needed to be quelled.

Iye had heard the seasonal traders who brought hot yellow pepper from Amana and smoked stingray from Ikot Mbut hiss and say that the Ikanto chief priestess was tired of eating fish in her soup and must be craving beef.

The Kuwo traders disagreed. They had seen five market fires in three moons and lost a healthy market chief, not even greying yet, to a sudden sickness. The first could have been blamed on carelessness or market rivalries, and the second on jealousy armed with witchcraft, but both of them together in such a short time? The gods had to be displeased.

The traders took a collection and bought a fat white cow as an offering, hoping it would be enough.

It wasn’t. This was the sixth white cow to be skinned in five moons, and the twelfth market fire of the wet season had started on the same day that the mourning house of the third out of the five head traders of Kuwo had opened.

Iye did not know these market gods by name or face or feeling, so she was not afraid of them. She knew them only by allegations, and she was not sure who or what was responsible for the fires and the deaths; Ananta, her mother’s wife and Iye’s guardian, did not particularly care as long as the fires stayed out of the foodstuff section and the smoked foods row where they sold fish. So far, they had burnt only the textile, pottery and jewellery sections.

Iye, however, was wondering.

She did not pay homage to her mother’s gods or her father’s ancestors, but she knew they watched over her. Her mother had always told her that children were godmakers. Her mother’s gods had once been foremothers, before history had polished and perfected them, reducing them to shining cores of virtue, bestowing them the power to shape the lives of their children, even as their children shaped their afterlives. Her father’s ancestors would also become gods in time, if their children found the right balance of remembrance and forgetfulness.

The gods in Kuwo were older, and the wells of their power ran deeper. They did not draw from their own blood and belief, but from need and necessity. The essences of life: trade, food, birth and death, were their domains. They were distant. They did not cradle their worshippers like the lineage gods did. They demanded sacrifice. The more costly the better.

Ananta found them fearful and unworthy of worship, but Iye was intrigued. These gods, who would demand six skinned cows and counting, and kill and destroy if they did not get their way, seemed petty to her, and childish. It is a known thing that children spit pure truth like chaff, if you know what questions to ask. And Iye had questions.

#

There was an Ikanto priestess in each quarter of the market. In seasons past, their shrines were mostly ignored, acknowledged as one of the many market sights, and bored priestesses could be found chewing alligator pepper seeds and pretending not to listen to gossip wafting from nearby stalls, halfheartedly scrubbing off the market mud or palm oil from a meal staining their white wrappers.

These days, the Ikanto shrines were blocked by lines of traders, hawking their pleas and petitions to the god of trade and journeys. As Iye moved forward on the line, she saw that the wrapper of the priestess was an intimidating white from armpit to ankles. The woman looked many seasons older than her but many seasons younger than her mother, but Iye thought it was possible that her bald head made her look younger.

Iye finally reached the front of the shrine and handed the large smoked catfish she had brought as an offering to the young attendant before turning to the priestess.

“What do you have to trade?” the priestess asked perfunctorily.

“I have nothing of worth to Ikanto.” Iye recited the words she had learned from another trader.

The priestess nodded, “Give a gift then, and take Ikanto’s blessing.”

The attendant showed the fish to the priestess and she waved it away.

“How do you want Ikanto to bless you?” the priestess asked, sounding weary of the question.

“I have… a question that I want answered.”

“Ikanto will not tell your fate or future.”

“No… I know that. That’s not what I want to know. Ikanto is the god of journeys. I want to go on a journey, and I need directions.”

“You can hire a guide or pay one to sell you a song that will lead you anywhere you want in the city. Next.” the priestess said, irritated now.

“The place I want to go is not in Kuwo. It’s not anywhere I know or know of. It’s… somewhere else. Another kind of place completely.” Iye was leaning forward now, insistent. This woman convened with gods. She knew that life went beyond. Beyond solid things like smoked fish and cloth and the coconut oil and camwood powder of the fattening room, beyond bodies. Not all that can be felt can be touched. Iye knew this. She just needed directions to the place beyond.

The priestess sighed and shook her head, seeing that Iye would not be satisfied with simple haunting warnings and hollow reassurances, then she stood up and pushed aside the thick indigo cloth hanging from a rope as a demarcation between them and the inner sanctum of the shrine and stepped in.

Iye waited impatiently as the sun started to set, drenching the market in reddish light, like palm oil melting on hot yam.

The priestess emerged from the sanctum, eyes red and breath strained, bathed in the light of day’s death.

She stood still and pointed at Iye, still struggling for breath.

“Ikanto will guide you on your journey.”

Iye smiled and started to ask how, when the woman continued, “But you must remember one thing.”

“What?” Iye asked eagerly.

The priestess sighed and dragged a hand across her eyes. “All the gods are restless and they won’t tell us why. I have a message for you. On your journey, you will see a landsnake in the river. You must leave it in the river. If you take it out of the river, it will swallow us all.”

“Alright.” Iye agreed. The poor woman must be exhausted, she thought. She wasn’t even making sense anymore.

“Good. You will go to River Ndia…”

#

The closest of Ndia’s legs to Kuwo was in Amana. Iye told Ananta she was going to try and buy fresh fish straight from the fishermen there and have them preserved by the local smokers instead of buying from the traders who brought already-smoked fish to Kuwo. Ananta was delighted at Iye’s interest in the business and gave her permission to go alone.

Iye stood in the midst of the mangroves, watching the water. She already felt it, the thinness of the air around the river. It felt like if she reached out and scratched at it, she could tear a hole in it and crawl out of it into another life.

As she walked closer to the river, the smell of blood hit her nose. She startled forward, her largest toe dipping into the river and disturbing it.

“Ah, an easy catch.”

Iye turned around and saw a figure sitting on the riverbed behind her, staring at its nails.

“Who are you?”

“Your end,” the girl said.

Cold fear ran through Iye’s veins and poured into her mouth, where it turned hot and angry.

“You must be mad! This is just the beginning of my journey.”

The girl looked up and her amused smirk fell away, revealing recognition and then a wide-eyed childish fear which was quickly washed away.

“Iye?”

“Ayanti? Is that you? The witch?”

“I’m not a witch!”

“I see. After all, you did appear from nowhere in front of a forbidden river and threaten to kill me. How could I accuse you so unjustly?” Iye spat.

“That’s not… I’m not a witch. I’m a daughter of the river.”

“How long have I been your target? Since we were young? I knew it! You were always staring at me like you wanted something,” Iye said with a strange satisfaction.

“That’s a lie! I never even looked you in the eye! I was scared of you!”

“Why would you be scared of me? I was scared of you! Who is the witch? Me or you?”

“I told you! I was not, I’m not and will never be a witch! I’m a—”

“Eh, you’re a daughter of the river. I heard you the first time. There’s no need to shout.”

“Yes. I am,” Ayanti said, her annoyance turning to fear, “And you have disturbed the river, so you now belong to her. I have to take you as an offering to my mother.”

“Offering? I don’t understand. Offering how?” Iye asked, beginning to worry.

“She’ll trap your spirit in the water and feed on it.”

“Feed on it? There’s no more fish in the river or what?”

“Look. I feel for you, but you have met your end.”

“You don’t sound like you feel for me.”

Ayanti started to walk toward Iye.

“Listen, Ayanti. I told you my journey was just beginning. Do you know where I’m going?” Iye said, standing still as Ayanti approached.

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t escape Ndia. It doesn’t matter where you go.”

“She can’t follow me there. It’s not a place like this. It’s lighter. Things are lighter there. Bodies are not a burden there.”

“How do you know this place?”

“I felt it. I stood at the doors, though I did not know them to be doors. When I was a child, in Ikot Arak.”

“In the village?” Ayanti asked, her voice breaking.

“Yes! In the forest.”

“I… I felt it too. I thought only witches could go there.”

“No, there are other ways, known only to gods. And to me.”

“How do you—”

The river began to ripple, and the mangroves shook in consternation.

“My sisters are coming. They will take you to her, no matter what you and I say.”

“So, let’s go quickly!”

“I thought you said the door was in Ikot Arak?”

“No, friend,” Iye smiled, “It’s everywhere. You just have to know who to ask for entry.”

Iye took Ayanti’s hand and began to whisper with a soft assurance, and Ayanti held on to Iye’s hand, because no one had ever called her friend.

Iye went silent, and they both looked up.

“We’re… still here,” Iye said, crestfallen. “I was wrong.”

“No,” Ayanti said, pointing down to the ground, awestruck, “Our feet aren’t touching the ground.”

Iye looked down and let out a laugh. She held on to Ayanti’s hand and they began to rise, swimming through the air. It felt, to Ayanti, like coming home.

Ayanti joined Iye, and her laughter floated through the sky and echoed into the earth, shaking stone and rousing the resting land, along with all its loathing. This is how the end begins, with joy waking rage.

END

Gabrielle Emem Harry is a Nigerian speculative fiction writer. She won the 2024 Nommo Short Story Award, was shortlisted for the 2024 Writivism Short Story Prize, selected as a 2024 Voodoonauts Fellow and a 2023 LLEAA Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Logic(s), The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction Volume 3, Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Fiction, the Flametree Press African Short Ghost Stories Anthology, Omenana, Apparition, Isele and more. Her favourite stories are the ones that feel like dreams.

The Night Market | Chinelo Onwualu

0

“You’ve got a real talent for this, you know,” said Oduwe, the head gardener at the Temple of Osun, as Drake worked to weed the yam seedlings. She emerged from the recesses of the tomato bed across from him, combing through the vines on their trellises, and picking off dead leaves for compost. “Don’t think I haven’t heard you out here talking to them.”

Drake was unsure how to reply. He’d only been a gardener’s assistant for a few months and he wasn’t known for being talkative. He flushed at the thought that the old woman had been listening to his crooning.

“That’s good; you should talk to plants,” Oduwe said. “They can hear you, you know.”

She shuffled over and pointed out a patch of grass Drake had missed. “They’re talking back, too. Trick you’ve got to learn now is to listen.” She patted his shoulder and moved up the sloping path to the next level of the terraced six storey greenhouse.

He squatted and uprooted the stringy plants. It was best to pull weeds by hand as Martian soil was too fragile for hoes. Crumbling the powdery red earth from their roots, he stuffed the weeds into the compost pouch at his waist. Straightening, he surveyed the neat formation of bamboo stakes that stretched to the greenhouse’s glazing several metres away. Each had a delicate green vine twined around it like a lover. He stroked the smooth, heart-shaped leaf of the one closest to him. His fingernails had taken on an ochre tint that refused to wash off, but he didn’t mind. He liked the contrast.

On earth he’d grown up a soldier, taken from his parents as a baby and trained by the warrior priests of the Amethyst Order. When he was 10, Drake had tried to grow an orange seed in his rations locker. His commander found it and forced him to smash the pot in front of the other boys and grind the delicate green shoot under his heel. A soldier has only one love, his commander had told him, his duty.

The great gong boomed across the complex, signalling the first prayer of the day. In his first few days its low thooms would set his teeth on edge; they sounded too much like explosions. Now, he appreciated its soothing quality, so different from the shrill bells of his childhood. He was on the first floor terrace with a clear view of the doors that led to the Acolyte’s quarters and as the gong boomed again, he waited. Within a few minutes, the Acolytes streamed into the greenhouse.

They had to pass this way every day, crossing over the bridge that spanned the fish pond, to get to the temple. Dressed in simple white wrappers, they moved in a single file. Those who trained to be the priests and priestesses of Osun had to be without physical fault or blemish, and the goddess demanded only the most beautiful. So each Acolyte was luminous jewel, possessing a fearful symmetry that bordered on perfection. Yet none of them compared to his Bella.

Where the other Acolytes were shades of copper, bronze and gold, her skin was a radiant ebony, hinting at blue under the greenhouse lights. The white cloth wrapped around her hands and arms seemed whiter by contrast. Bald as an egg and just as delicate, she moved with a smooth grace that made her seem as if she was gliding. The temple had taken her in as soon as they saw her, while Drake had struggled for months before landing his current position.

She must have felt his stare because she raised her head towards him. Her expression was the picture of dignified solemnity, but her eyes, gold as the heart of a flame, were alive with good humour. She winked at him and Drake could not help but smile in return.

“Stay away from those ones,” Oduwe spoke from behind him. Drake spun round, his garden fork poised to stab. The old gardener eyed the tool impassively. Cursing his soldier’s instincts, Drake slipped the tool back into his utility belt and forced himself to relax. “They aren’t for the likes of you or I.”

“It’s not like that,” he said. He and Bella were not related, but they were bound together by more than blood. He wasn’t about to try and explain that to his boss, though.

The old woman gave him a sceptical look “All they have is their beauty and their Goddess,” she said. “Mess that up for them and they’ll never forgive you.”

It was Drake’s turn to look sceptical. The last thing he or Bella were searching for here was religion. Their faith had been burned out of both of them a long time ago.

#

Night was a quiet time in the temple complex. On earth, the dark would have been full of the sounds of nature: owls hooting, wild dogs barking, crickets chirping and the occasional whomp whomp of tree frogs. Here, there was little to hear beyond the sonorous chanting of the Night Singers.

Drake lay on his pallet in the gardener’s spare room tracing the filigree cracks in the regolith walls with his fingers. His furnishings were spare, as fit for a semi-skilled labourer: a single mattress, a small side table, a prayer mat, and a hook on the wall where he hung his one change of clothes. He clenched and unclenched his hands, revelling in the sweet ache that only came after a hard day of honest labour.

The room was warm, but he kept his window shut. The bio-dome which made the Holy City of New Thebes habitable was also supposed to keep the temperature constant, to compensate for the planet’s extreme changes in temperature. After a century though, it could no longer keep up with its massive population, and the nights were often far warmer than necessary.

A soft knock at the window startled him. Rising, he drew his hunting knife out from under his pillow and peered out of the narrow slit. A dark figure wrapped in a cloak stood just under his sill. Hefting the knife, he lifted the pane open a fraction. The spicy scent of holy oil wafted in with the warm breeze and he lowered the blade, but he did not put the knife away.

“What are you doing here, Bel?” He asked, opening the window all the way. Bella raised her hood. In the gloom her smile was a strip of light.

“I am bored and in need of company,” she said. She sometimes spoke like someone who had learned to talk from an old book – which she had. “May I come in?”

“No. Go back to the dorms; read a book.”

“But I have read every book in their system.”

“Already? What of your classes?”

“We are mired in theory,” she said with a sigh. She leaned against the wall below his window and slid down until she was sitting, her feet splayed out in front of her. “Theories of the body, theories of pleasure, theories of connection, and on and on. What, I ask you, is the point of theory? Why worship the goddess of sexual pleasure if one cannot even touch oneself!”  

Drake suppressed a laugh at that. They were only two years apart, but separated by a lifetime of experience. He had been assigned to her guard detail when he was 12. He had heard stories of the secret genetic experiments the Amethyst Order conducted on their lab-grown children. When he first met Bella he had searched for any signs of what they’d done to her: horns, a tail maybe, but there was nothing he could see. Just a little girl – small for her age as the lab-grown usually were – who kept staring at the sky because it was the first time she’d ever seen it.

He had been warned not to get attached. The girl had a sacred destiny to fulfil as a holy sacrifice and merely touching her would contaminate her. But he couldn’t help it. Maybe it was the way she’d stood in the sunlight in the temple garden with her eyes closed. Like a plant left too long indoors. Maybe this time he wouldn’t have to destroy it.

In a few days, it would be two years since their escape from the Order. He still searched the news waves for any reports on them. So far, no one had come looking. Maybe Mars was far enough away.

“Do you want to leave?” asked Drake. “I thought you liked it here?”

“I do, but–” Her head snapped up and she fixed him with a quizzical look, her yellow-gold eyes catching the light from the security lights in the distance. “Do you not wish to leave? I thought you hated it here.”

“I do, but…” He looked at the knife he still held. His red-tinged fingernails were a sharp contrast against the dark leather of the blade.

Bella leaped to her feet and draped herself over the windowsill. She reached out a hand to him, but Drake was careful to shift back, maintaining a safe space between them.

“Let’s visit the Night Market,” she whispered.

“No, Bel, have you forgotten what happened last time? Those men thought you were a Nightwalker.”

“No one will bother us this time, I am certain. We will be in disguise.”

“No.”

“Please?” She fixed him with a look so pitiful it cut Drake to the deep. “Please?”

Drake scratched at his bald head. It was a bad idea and this was shameless manipulation. He sighed. It was going to be a long night.

#

Drake loathed the Night Market. Its filthy pathways were a churn of mud and garbage and it smelled like a mix of oozing sewage and the oily clog of fried and roasted fish. He couldn’t walk among the chaos of people and music, the inflatable shacks and plexiglass stalls arranged in no order, and those solar lamps that lit the place with flat earth-light, without his stomach clenching. It wasn’t as if gardening was a clean job, their fertilizers were the by-products of human faeces after all. It was more the way he had to be.

When he was gardening, it was just the sun, the soil and the tender green. In the Night Market, everyone was trying to hustle everyone else. Thieves would steal the shirt off your back, if they could. It was like being back at the barracks again. Drake had to straighten to his full height, which was at a foot taller than most, square his shoulders and keep his arms loose at his sides. No expression. He had to make sure that people know he wasn’t the one to target; that he was not weak. It made his bones ache.

Bella wore one of the long-sleeved red and green jumpsuits favoured by the temple servants, which she’d stolen from the laundry room. She’d changed the linen wraps around her hands to a pair of black gloves which were less conspicuous. As they plunged into the cacophony of hawkers calling out their wares, shopkeepers and customers haggling over prices, and entertainers displaying their skills, Bella transformed.

Her graceful poise disappeared, replaced by the hip-rolling swagger of a street girl. Her usual mask of serene composure morphed into sneering weariness. To complete the image, she reached into one of the pockets of the jumpsuit and produced a stick of dog’s gold. Popping one end of the bark-wrapped sweet into her mouth, she chewed with crass abandon.

“You are disturbingly good at this,” he whispered to her.

She beamed at him. “Thanks!” Then she went back to scowling.

At every turn, impromptu bars of two or three tables squeezed together attracted miners, labourers, and factory workers to drink cheap potato gin. And in the dark corners between shops and stalls, just beyond the pale floodlights, were the huddled masses of the city’s discarded, lost in their worlds of synthetic bliss.

They passed a jewellers’ kiosk where a long-limbed woman displayed sets of bronze necklaces under a glass case. Bella stopped to admire the goods and pointed out a string of coins looped like prayer beads.

“How much?” she asked, even though neither of them carried any money and Acolytes of the temple were forbidden to wear jewellery.

“Thirty credits,” the woman said.

“That’s too much, nah!” Bella said, doing a passing imitation of a colonist’s accent. “It’s not fifteen?”

“Ah Misseh, fifteen is too low. See the quality; you can’t find this handwork anywhere on the planet. That’s earth craft, right there. Lowest I can go is twenty-eight.”

“It is lovely,” Bella said and traced the outline of the necklace on the glass. “I’ll give you seventeen.”

“Twenty-five – and I’m practically giving it away.”

Drake kept one ear on the conversation, waiting for the seller to realise she was not dealing with a serious customer, while he scanned the crowd. He stood just behind Bella, his bulk shielding her from any accidental contact while giving her enough space to keep from bumping into him. All around people scurried about like ants: A hunched woman with a sleeping baby strapped to her back; a slack-faced beggar in a dirty turban and tunic; a group of raucous ore miners, their helmets and pressure suits slung over their shoulders; two prostitutes in diaphanous robes that left little to the imagination, the male winking at him. Drake noted their bodies, whether they kept their backs straight or bowed, the placement of their hands, the pace of their walks. Each body told a story, and sometimes it told of violence.

Drake heard the shouting first, a disturbance somewhere beyond the glare of the solar lights. A wave of tension rippled through the crowd as many stopped to determine what was going on. Others moved off into the shadows between the stalls, ready to flee at the first sign of true trouble. He shifted to keep Bella behind him, one hand out to shepherd her away if need be, and the other at the hilt of the knife by his side. The shouting grew louder, and on the far side of the pathway across from the stall, he saw the source of the disturbance: A man, running.

The man moved with the wiry smoothness of a dancer, bounding over tables, slipping between stalls, and slicing through the throng like a fish through water. The three men who pursued him were not as graceful. They overturned stalls and tables, and shoved aside anyone unlucky enough to get in their way.

The runner sprinted past the jeweller’s table and Drake had just enough time to step out of his way. Drake managed to catch a glimpse of his face, though. It was locked in a rictus of glee. Minutes later, the man’s pursuers thundered past.

Drake shook his head. You never knew what could happen in the Night Market, he thought and turned back to Bella. She was gone.

He looked around and saw that she was ahead of him, running after the men.

Olori buruku,” Drake cursed in Old Yoruba, and raced after her.

He followed the flash of her temple livery through the crowds. They were headed to the market’s main complex, a series of prefabricated buildings from the early settlement period, little more than windowless white boxes stacked atop each other like children’s blocks. Makeshift ladders ran from one level to another and rope bridges linked each stack to the ones nearby. The area was deserted this late at night.

The three pursuers had cornered their man in a dead-end alley between two of the stacks. A faltering solar light buzzed on the wall above them, casting strange distorted shadows. The running man leaned against the wall, heaving with exertion, the manic grin still on his face. Bella had managed to catch up to them and stood in the circle next to him. She had found a sharp piece of rock and brandished it at her attackers. She was doing a fair job imitating a fighting stance, but anyone who knew how to brawl could see that some of her moves were not quite right. From the bulges under their black jackets, these men were more than brawlers.

Drake spied a foot-long iron bar in a pile of rubbish at the mouth of the alley and picked it up. He crept up behind the nearest man and cracked the bar against the base of his skull, hard. The man went down without a sound. He jabbed the second man in the solar plexus with the butt of the bar, knocking him breathless, then caught him behind the knees and swept his legs out from under him. The third man had time to scrabble his blaster out of his jacket, but he was far, far too slow. Drake whipped the bar against the man’s shooting arm, eliciting a dull crack as the bone broke. The man howled in pain and dropped the weapon. Cradling his useless arm, he loped off, leaving his unconscious companions behind. Drake stepped into the circle of light and kicked the blaster into the shadows beyond the alley.

“Bella, what in the Seven Hells were you thinking?”

“He needed help; I could not stand by and do nothing!”

“You do not know what is happening here; you cannot just jump into other people’s business!”

Before Bella could reply, the man groaned and slumped down against the wall, head tucked into his chest. In the light his features were clearer. Slender, with a loose mop of dark curly hair that fell over his heavy brows, the man could not have been more than seventeen years old.

Bella ran to his side and whipped off one of her gloves, but Drake stopped her hand with the metal bar before she could touch him.

“Don’t,” he said.

“He may be injured.” Bella glared at him. “I want to help.”

“You cannot simply fix everyone you meet, Bella.”

“And what am I to do instead? Watch silently as they suffer?”

“Once you heal him, then what? They will know that we’re here and they will come for us,” Drake forced himself to lower his voice. “Besides, people were never meant to be perfect, you know. Our weaknesses are what make us whole.”

“Is that why you won’t let me touch you?”

Drake didn’t know how to answer that. But he didn’t have to as the man in the alley jerked awake and looked wildly around him. His eyes were bloodshot. He fixed Drake and Bella with a look of surprise, then he burst into high-pitched maniacal laughter. Before he passed out again, Drake caught the smell of something sickly sweet on his breath.

He muttered another curse in Old Yoruba. The young man, whoever he was, was high on Drop.

#

“Mother Superior says that should you save a life, you are responsible for it ever after,” Bella said, arranging the addict’s feet on the makeshift pallet they’d cobbled together out of metal in the storeroom of the shop they’d broken into.

He and Bella had carried the young man as far from the alleyway as they could. They had slung his limp form between them, pretending he was a friend too drunk to make his own way home, but they could not leave the Night Market. As long as they remained on the market’s raucous grounds, no one would look twice, but their ruse would never fool the guards of the City Watch.

“Your Mother Superior has obviously never met anyone on Drop,” Drake said. He patted the man down for weapons. The man wore fine linen clothes, though wrinkled and dirty, and soft-soled sandals. From his smooth, manicured hands to his golden-brown skin, unmarked by any scars, he reeked of wealth mismanaged. “These addicts would sell their own children for a hit.”

Finding nothing, Drake straightened and stretched, unknotting the kinks in his back and shoulders. He unclipped the flask strapped to his belt and poured a measure of water into the cap. He offered it to Bella who gulped it down, then poured a cup for himself. The cold of it burned pleasantly.

Art by Sunny Efemena

“We should try to find his family,” said Bella. “Perhaps we can ask him about them when he wakes.”

“This is crazy, Bel. You know that, don’t you?”

She sighed. “I know. But sometimes I want…” She hesitated, looking down at her gloved hands, and folded them under her armpits. “There’s so much pain all around us, and I want to feel that I am significant. That I have this gift for a reason.”

“And I’m sure you’ll understand that, someday. But until then you can’t take these kinds of risks. New Thebes is a harsh city. Believe me, you don’t want to be alone on her streets.”

She gave him a long-suffering look. “You cannot care for me all your days, Drake. Your service ended when we left the Order; you are no longer bound to me.”

“It’s not about my service,” Drake protested, oddly hurt by her words. “We’re family now; we look out for each other.”

The young man on the crates stirred and sat up. His eyes – an attractive shade of honey brown – had cleared.

“Where am I?” he croaked. Drake poured him a measure of water, which he drank in one delicate sip, his long fingers cupped politely around the cap. “Thank you.”

His voice had a sibilant edge to it, the kind Drake often heard on the temple’s high-born visitors.

“What’s your name?” Bella asked.

“Abbeh,” he said. “Abbeh Nuhu Moro.”

Drake could barely suppress his groan. This young drug addict was the son of one of the most powerful women in the city.

“And the men who were after you?” Drake asked.

“I’m not sure….” Abbeh blinked in confusion. Memory loss was a common side effect of the drug. Hard users could erase whole years – which was often why they went for it. “My mother’s men, probably. Or Congo’s.”

“Congo, the drug dealer?” Drake made no attempt to hide his dismay. The last time he and Bella had come to the Night Market, Drake had tangled with some of Congo’s underlings. He had no wish to repeat the experience.

“I suppose he might sell drugs. He does always have something for me,” Abbeh said, as if talking to himself. He steadied himself and spoke up, his voice firmer. “But I’m done with him.”

“Good for you!” said Bella. “I’m sure your mother will be happy to have you back.”

“That witch? Life with her is hell.” Abbeh began to rub his arms as if he was cold even though the room was close and unpleasantly warm. “So many rules, you know? Every day it was: ‘Do this, go there.’ I could barely breathe. No, I’m not going back there. I want live free, you know?” By the time he had finished talking he was shivering from the first stages of withdrawal.

“Yes, well, good luck to you,” Drake said. He had no interest in whatever Abbeh was caught up in, especially if Congo was involved. He straightened and put his flask away. “Come on Bel, it’s time we get you back.”

He started towards the door, but Bella blocked his path.

“Are we just to leave him here? You said yourself the streets of New Thebes are harsh.”

“We don’t need his kind of trouble, Bel. He’s not one of us. He’s not family.”

She fell silent at that, her fingers drumming an unknown rhythm on her thighs. Behind them, Abbeh groaned. They turned to find that he had slid off the crates and was curled into a foetal ball. Drop addiction was so powerful that for its heaviest users, even a few hours off it was agony. For some the withdrawal could kill. They needed to be far from the scene before that happened.  

Drake pressed on. “Don’t worry about him, his mother will find him. The rich always look after their own.”

Bella clenched her fists, pinning him with her yellow-gold eyes. Drake knew that look. When he spoke he tried to keep the note of pleading out of his voice.

“Bella, think about this. Everything we’ve been through everything we’ve worked for… You do this and you’ll throw it all away. We’ve finally found a life here.”

“No, you’ve found a life, Drake. All I did was trade one prison for another. I became an Acolyte to heal people. Instead I am groomed like a pet, forced to mime empty rituals and mouth empty words. And now when I may be able to truly help someone, you wish that I should turn my back and run? No!” Tears sprang to her eyes and she rubbed them away angrily. “No, Drake. I will run no longer.”

“Would you rather be selling your body on the streets?” Drake said, choking back the lump in his own throat.

“At least it would be my choice.”

She went to kneel over Abbeh, who was convulsing now. Gently, she eased his head onto her lap and took off her gloves. She placed a naked palm over his forehead. At her touch, Abbeh shuddered like a man being electrocuted, then his body went limp. For a moment, Drake thought was dead, until he caught the slow rise and fall of the young man’s chest.

“You should go now,” Bella said. “It’ll be bed check soon.”

Drake felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. As if to punctuate his despair, they heard the storeroom door open.

#

A heavyset woman wearing a hairnet and a lappa wrapped around her chest – she’d obviously been woken from sleep – entered the room.

“I don’t know who told you that,” the woman said as she walked in. “My shop has been closed all night.”

The shopkeeper stopped short when she saw them: Abbeh still stretched out on the floor in the middle of the room with Bella kneeling beside him. Her eyes grew wide with fear and flicked to Drake just before four black-jacketed thugs marched into the room. The men wore the same uniforms as the ones who had cornered them in the alley, but only one of them had participated in the attack. He had a bandage wrapped around his head and held back when he recognised Drake.

The other three brought out their blasters and circled him. Drake slipped out his hunting knife, settling into the familiar ease of a fighting stance. He was out-armed and outmanned, but unlike them he had once been an Enforcer of the Ameythst Order. Some of these men will die tonightif they’re lucky. The thought saddened him.

“Stand down!” A woman’s voice cut through the tension. The thugs straightened up and backed away. The shopkeeper took the opportunity to scurry out of the room.

The woman who strode in looked as sharp as a blade – not a crease or wrinkle in sight. She wore a black high-necked tunic with long sleeves and matching trousers, a black hijab and a pair of round-framed smoked glasses. She towered over everyone in the room, her frame earth-dense. She was either a recent arrival or one of the city’s super-rich. Drake didn’t need to note the family resemblance to recognise Haleemah Zazzau Moro, Abbeh’s mother.

Haleemah removed her glasses and her icy gaze swept across the scene. She stalked slowly across the room until she loomed over Abbeh, who was now sitting up and looking dazed. She fixed her son with a look of contempt. Then she slapped him across the face.

“You stupid, stupid child,” Haleemah said. “Have you any idea what you’ve put me through? Two days I’ve turned this market upside down searching for you.”

Abbeh rubbed at his cheek and stood slowly. At his full height he matched his mother. There was a steadiness to him that hadn’t been there before. Haleemah squared her shoulders, as if readying for a fight.

“Never lay a hand on me again, mother.” Abbeh voice was soft, but there was hard certainty behind his words.

“When you insist on acting like child, you will be treated as one,” Haleemah said, though her voice faltered a little. “This isn’t some kind of game.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” said Abbeh, without any trace of his earlier petulance. Haleemah’s eyes widened. She gaped at her son as if she had forgotten what she was about to say. Abbeh laid a slim hand on his mother’s elbow. “You and I have much to discuss, mother. But first, I want you to meet someone very special.”

Abbeh took Bella’s ungloved hand and held it like a precious jewel. “Mother, this… This is my healer.”

When Abbeh looked at Bella, he radiated more joy than Drake had ever seen in anyone. What demons had she saved him from? He wondered. He expected Bella to have a look of similar elation, but she was calm, her expression open. This was no role she was playing, no pantomime. Bella was blooming, and it broke his heart.

#

The guest quarters of the Moro family home was thirty paces long and fifteen paces wide. Twice the size of Drake’s room in the gardener’s cottage. Lavish tapestries embroidered with the flora and fauna of a faraway planet lined the walls. A massive canopied bed dominated one end of the room, while a dresser and closet of real wood crowded the other. Bella sat on one of the three brocade divans arranged around a low glass table in the middle of the room. Hands bare and dressed in the loose silk kaftans favoured by Mars’ elites, she sat calm and straight-backed, her eyes fixed in the middle distance. It was one of the poses she’d learned as a child to hide her fear.

Drake stopped his pacing to stand before her. “So, you’ve made up your mind, then?” He said, breaking the silence that had grown between them for the last few minutes. 

Bella took a deep breath before speaking. “I’m going to the underground levels; Abbeh says there are Drop treatment facilities there.”

Drake bobbed his head, not quite understanding. He struggled to articulate what he wanted to say next, but the words had left him. “I’m sorry,” was all he could manage.

Bella’s pose dissolved as she bounded to her feet.

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Drake. I’m the one who should apologise. I was selfish and you were only trying to protect me.”

“No, it wasn’t about you. I just… I didn’t want to lose you. I don’t want to be alone.”

“You cannot lose me. We are family and our bond is more than distance. But you must let me go.”

She reached out to embrace him, and for the first time in both their lives, Drake did not resist her touch. As her arms wrapped around him, he braced himself for the electric charge of her gift, but it never came. He raised his eyes to hers in a silent question.

“There is nothing wrong with you,” she said. “There never was.”

Drake broke into tears, the years of fear, heartbreak and guilt breaking to the surface. He wept, but he could not have said what he mourned: the children they had once been or the people they were about to become.

They stayed wrapped in each other’s arms until the sun crept over the horizon.

#

The gong that woke Drake the next morning was insistent with alarm.

“What’s going on?” he asked Oduwe when he shambled into the kitchen. His head throbbed with pain and his eyes burned. Every muscle ached with weariness, but he felt a curious sense of lightness – as if he’d been freed of a burden he hadn’t realised he carried.

Oduwe, who sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of hot corn mush and a cup of mint tea, raised an eyebrow at Drake’s dishevelled appearance but made no comment. It wasn’t her way to delve too deep into the personal lives of her employees, as long as they got their work done.

“One of the Acolytes has run off,” she said as she tucked into her breakfast. “Get dressed; we have work to do. The Mother Superior will be in a black mood today.”

Drake nodded and turned to head back to his room when the gardener called him back.

“Just wanted to say I’m sorry,” she said. “It was the bald one; I know you had your heart set on her.”

“It’s not like that,” Drake said. “She’s family. And she’ll be fine.”

END

Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian writer and editor living in Toronto. She co-hosts Griots and Galaxies, a podcast about African Speculative fiction and the people who write it. She was a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and she studied journalism at Syracuse University. Ex Marginalia, her collection of essays by writers of colour is available now.

The Locket | Nerine Dorman

0

“So, did you get the job?” Yulli leans across the tearoom’s sticky table so that her breath almost tickles my face. It’s noisy in here, the establishment filled with dozens of factory workers and shop girls taking lunch. A thin haze of leaf smoke turns the air acrid over the greasy aroma of fried root and bitter tea.

I lean back and nod, twisting my locket. “I start tomorrow.”

“But that’s great!” Then she scowls. “You coulda told me earlier.”

She’s right. I could have. We’ve been talking about getting out of work here for months. But I feel guilty. I’m the one who’s getting out. Yulli will still be here tomorrow, next week, next month. I have a shot at something more. Finally.

“Hello, ladies!” The speaker clamps his hand down on my shoulder, hard, so that I start, but he leans so heavily that I can’t rise.

Yulli’s wide-eyed shock turns to pleasure. “Den!”

I turn my head, my brain catching up with the voice and why the fuck it’s so familiar. His name isn’t Den. It’s Bodin. It’s like seeing a ghost. He’s older, sure, but those features I always thought were fae-like are hard, too sharp, like I’m going to cut my eyes on his contours. Last time I saw him, he wore his hair long, feathered, with dyed-white braids woven in and tied back in a knot. Now he’s shaved the sides, and a floppy dark blond mop falls over one eye. A small skull tattoo on his left cheek grins at me. Badly done. Prison tat.

“Bo—”

Den,” he completes for me, grinning, that hard gleam in his eyes warning me to agree. Or else. “It’s been years, Em.”

“It hasn’t been long enough,” I snap and make to rise, but that hand on my shoulder tightens, fingertips digging in so that I’m forced to remain on my arse. The locket around my neck buzzes, grows warm, and I resist the urge to pat at it beneath my factory tunic. To make it stop.

Five years ago

“You be careful of that one.” Gem leans against me at The Stuck Pig’s counter, and glances meaningfully at the boy laughing opposite us at the other end. Her breath tickles my ear, and it’s noisy in here; the establishment is filled with students and Gardens District slickers slumming it with the East Bank slackers.

He’s taller than his two mates, no slicker – not with that crazy hairstyle and the multiple piercings that gleam in his ears’ cartilage.

“What about him?” I ask.

“Oh, he’s trouble.”

Maybe I like trouble. I catch his eye across the bar and slide the keep a silver. “Another for me, and another for that boy there. You can keep the change if you tell him it’s from me.”

Later, when the boy leads me out back, I can still taste the dog-root liqueur on his mouth.

Now

“I won’t do it!” I whisper back at Bodin as he all but frogmarches me down the Avenue. He’s moved his grip from my shoulder to my upper arm, and I swear there will be bruises later. The wind is rattling the planes’ bare branches, making me think uncomfortably of bones. The few fellow pedestrians bundled in their fur-trimmed coats barely spare us a glance. To them we’re simply another couple out for a stroll.

“Oh, you will.” He squeezes that much harder, so that my arm is numb.

The locket is hot against my skin, and a corresponding pressure against my skull presents with an insistent almost-audible whispering. It wants in.

“I should go back on shift, it’s my last day,” I whimper, hating myself.

“If it’s your last shift, they won’t really miss you now, will they?”

“I need to pay my landlady.”

“You won’t need to, after this.” His grin is feral.

Bodin brings me to the Grand National Museum, a foreboding edifice built in the post-royal style—a façade of angular columns, a hundred feet high topped with imposing crenelations.

“What?” I snap.

“Look.” He gestures at a billboard that’s recently gone up advertising an exhibition of Roanish grave goods brought over from across the continent.

I goggle at him like he’s grown a second head on his shoulders. “Are you mad?” I snarl. “Breaking into the GN is what got us locked up last time. What makes you think it’s going to work now?”

He presses his hand flat on my sternum, over the locket, his gaze boring into mine with the kind of mania I’ve seen in smoke-dreamers’ eyes on a First-day morning after week’s end. “Because this time you’ll let it out to play.”

Four years ago

I don’t want to do it, but I’m shaking so bad, and it’s like my veins are drawn into my skin, like sinews left to dry when making a drum. Everything is tight, and each breath wheezes in and out of my lungs. Whatever the fucking shit is we’ve been smoking, it’s not just leaf.

Bodin has me waiting in the Avenue, down where Salt-and-Pepper Lane crosses it, where all the whores and peddlers hang on the corner waiting for their customers. Except it’s so late, it’s early, and the wind is rattling the planes’ bare branches, making me think uncomfortably of bones. I hate dressing like a whore. Especially in winter. But it’s how Bodin baits the hook. And he’s the only one fishing at this hour.

The priest is sensibly bundled in a thick army-issue coat; the collar turned up and his knitted cap pulled down so far that his eyes barely peep out from beneath the ribbing.

“H-hey honey,” I say, my teeth chattering as I step out before him, parting my jacket to reveal my corsetry. “You looking?”

His step falters. I recoil from his hollow gaze, the way his eyes are sunken into the sockets. The skull leers at me from beneath its parchment skin, gains a predatory cast to it in the gaslight. I glance about for Bodin, but wherever he’s lurking—behind a tree or in a doorway—I can’t see him. Oh shit. I’m committed now, though. I need to go through with this. Bodin, where the fuck are you?

The priest and I get as far as the portico of number twenty-three, where the whores usually take their clients, when Bodin slits the man’s throat. He had to, for the priest has his hands wrapped around my neck, his eyes blazing, feral. He’s already bitten me three times and drawn blood.

Later, we’re back at our room in the tenement of Quarter Street, disappointed with our pickings spread over the blanket on our mattress.

“Can’t believe I had to kill a man for this shit,” Bodin says, scratching through the objects scattered before us: two bronze leos, five copper chits, an ivory comb with half its teeth missing, and a tarnished silver locket on an equally tarnished chain. The latter’s clasp is broken. “This isn’t going to pay Clobber.”

And we need more leaf now. Or more precisely, as in yesterday. I’m still shaking, and it isn’t from the cold.

Art by Sunny Efemena

Now

It gets easier every time you do it. I don’t even have to open the locket—I simply open myself. It’s hard to fully put into words what happens when the demon slides under my skin. It’s like I fill out, become more vital. No leaf rush or even a sniff of powder rivals what the demon gives me when I let him ride me, let him send his tendrils through my veins.

Tumblers slip in locks, bars bend like rubber, and safe doors swing open at the merest nudge. Later, like an obedient puppy, the demon slips back to sleep, and I pay the price for acting as his mount. No leaf-low or three-night dust-binge leaves me this flat. My stomach is twisted into a hard, sick ball, I’m sweating and shaking like an old woman, puking into the chamber pot while Bodin gallivants off to the gods know where. He returns, often days later, gin on his breath, wearing unfamiliar silk shirts, and smelling of cheap perfume.

In another world, Bodin would never have been released from prison on the Queen’s Pardon and I’d be working as a chambermaid for some lord and lady in the posh Harbour Crescent. I’d still be poor, but I’d be healthy, the locket quiescent, and its whispers no more than the wash of the ebb tide in the far distance. But it’s this world, and I spend days recovering from each ‘daring heist’ as Bodin likes to put it, while he ‘invests’ our earnings in whorehouses and gin palaces. He hasn’t changed.

One afternoon I’m well enough to wrap myself in an old coat and make my way to the canal a block down. The water is an oily, opaque green, and a dead pigeon drifts past as I regard my haggard reflection over the railing of the pedestrian bridge. The demon is sleeping, sated, and has no idea of my intentions when I drag the chain over my neck and let the cursed locket plop into the water.

Like every other time I’ve tried, this is a futile gesture, for when I manage to drag my creaky frame back upstairs, the locket is resting on the bedside table, still beaded with river water and with a skein of algae threaded through its chain.

Three years ago

The tumblers slip with a click-clickety-clack, and we’re in by the staff entrance of the GN. My vision swims with the demon’s power, and Bodin’s aura is shot through with sparks and whorls. Tonight’s possession makes me feel as if a bladder has been inflated in my chest cavity, pressing against my lungs so that each breath squeaks.

A metallic screeching, like metal on metal, has started in one ear, and when I wipe at the tickling at my nostrils, the back of my wrist comes away scarlet. My face is tight with a rictus grimace, and I can’t stop grinding my teeth. It’s like someone laced powder with scai-syrup. The come-down’s going to kick me. Hard.

All I want to do is send the demon back to sleep, but Bodin needs me alive while we traipse through the halls to the exhibit of Early Kingdoms’ jewellery. He’s been gasping after the peacock gold bracelets—they’re small and easy to melt down, and he can get a fortune for them on the black market. We’re the only ones who can circumvent the museum’s security. They still haven’t figured out how we got in the last time.

It’s when we’re passing through the reconstruction of an Ogdoad-era boudoir that I glimpse myself in a mirror and recoil. A walking cadaver, her eyes sunken into a skull with sallow skin stretched over it leers back. My hair has been falling out in clumps awhile, but this is my first good look at myself in ages.

Bodin hasn’t wanted to fuck me in months. I can see why. I should care more.

The demon’s killing me faster than the drugs.

I don’t think things through. That’s both a blessing and a curse. We’re high-tailing through the Late-Ninth Kingdom Hall when, on a whim borne out by the absence of aura around the various objects on display, I pluck the locket from around my neck and drop it in the funerary bowl of King Nennefer III. I slam back into meatspace with a drunkstumble that has me fetching up against a plinth.

“Em!” Bodin whisper-shouts as he rushes back to pluck ineffectually at me.

But I’m too busy puking up half a lung now that I’m shut off from the demon’s influence. Fine grit from the parquet floor is sandpaper against my cheek.

I start seizing when the city guards arrive, and the oblivion offered by nothingness is a blessing.

Now

The problem with too many possessions in a row is it dissipates you, so that you’re leaf crushed for too many pipes. The demon is hungry, but it’s not clever. It’s also the only thing that gives me the power to kill Bodin.

I should have done this ages ago. I simply didn’t see any other way out of it.

Murderer.

Killer.

Aberration.

My fingers are the iron jaws of a gin trap around his scrawny throat, and I squeeze and squeeze until the cartilage is crushed to a pulp. And then I squeeze some more until the vertebrae give with slick pops. Only then do I drop this meat puppet. This unfathomable mess of ropey muscle sliding under skin.

He used to be pretty. Now he gapes like the fish unloaded at the wharf, his eyes peering sightlessly into nothingness.

Understanding rises in me like our moons revolving, their bright faces gleaming small skulls waxing and waning in their eternal dance. The night is crisp. The night is cold. Yet I don’t need a coat, my skin standing in pins and needles, needles and pins, as I slip downstairs and weave between the bollards alongside the canal where the bargeman smokes a rollup and the water slaps against the hulls. He twitches when he glances my way but turns to face the opposite bank, apparently fascinated by the regimented bollards there.

The cobbles are round and rubbery beneath my feet. Or perhaps it’s my feet that are rubbery. It doesn’t matter, for the sky is shattering above the roofline, sending a web-tracery of cracks into the cloud-scudded sky where ragged tears briefly present pinpricks of stars.

Skolos tumbles her face from the clouds before she grows shy, then I’m dancing down the colonnade that brings me to the Avenue, where the plane trees are raising their arms to the heavens, the wind beating a triumphant tattoo. Inside me crystal-bright splinters twist outward, as I turn and twirl.

No leaf-high, not even the spicy smoke of patu flowers, has ever sung my bones this way.

I caress the locket, and it is icy against my palm.

Two whores dance back from me, their auras pulled tight against them lest I swallow them both down.

“Crazy leaf-head,” the one mutters.

“Sweet saints.” The other makes the Sign of the Star.

This merely draws forth a glossolalia of laughter from me. Mired in the flesh, they don’t understand.

I see him then, in Salt-and-Pepper Lane, and the demon opens my arms to the man in the pea coat. Like a flare, the locket blazes, reflecting and refracting in this wondering, wandering night-stranger’s eyes, singing to the need, the hunger in his blood. How strong and clean his limbs are, the weight of well-fed flesh and ale on his breath. He catches me, and I turn to smoke in his embrace, sliding to the cobbles with a sigh as a moon winks above me through another tear in the clouds caught on the plane tree’s fingers.

The man paws at my bare chest, fumbling at the locket that blazes brighter than the sun.

“What have we got here, my pretty?” he murmurs, his lips pulled into a delighted snarl.

I have strength remaining to clasp his wrist before he whispers the steel tongue of a blade to his other hand. A benediction, then.

“I think I’ll have this, luv.”

“Please,” I hiss. I don’t know if I’m begging or pleading.

It’s so cold. So very cold. The cobbles are leeching what’s left of my warmth as my blood draws me between the cracks and makes runnels towards the gutter where the lost summer’s leaves drift in soggy clumps. A dozen ways in which I could have done this differently, am I right? It all ends in the same place, for all of us, save that some have a last blaze of ignominy. In the stories we tell ourselves when it’s dark, and the wind is howling beyond the shutters, we slip from life in warm beds, surrounded by friends or family holding our hands while telling us how much they love us. The truth is death snatches us when we least expect it, and I don’t even know if my mum or my siblings are still alive to shed a tear at my passing. And I doubt my father has waited for me, wherever we go when our lights are snuffed.

Regret is a vain gesture. The demon is gone, and I can breathe even as I fade. And I am myself. Alone. That matters. A moon is shrouded once more. So it goes.

Nerine Dorman is an award-winning South African author and editor of science fiction and fantasy. She is a founding member of the SFF authors’ co-operative Skolion and curates the South African Horrorfest literary component, Bloody Parchment. An active member of the African Speculative Fiction Society, she is represented by the African Literary Agency.

Yoyin of the Captivating Form | Rafeeat Aliyu

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Before the Great Snake tumbled from the Stars, hunting was the profession of choice. Everybody who had the means sent their sons and daughters to apprentice with the hunters guild. Hunting wasn’t simply venturing into the bush to find food for supper. Their ultimate goal was to penetrate the forest and to return with tales of bravery and unimaginable wealth. The forest was a magnificent equaliser that did not care whether the person venturing into its depths was the son of a king or the daughter of a farmer. Under the canopy where treetops blocked the sky, creatures attacked at will and spirit beings roamed free from the often curious, often judgemental gaze of their human kin. Naturally, hunters were admired for the bravery they showed when they disappeared into the dangerous world that was the forest. Among the guild, only the most skilled thrived. Those that made it back alive, came with bounties, both material and in the form of stories. Children dedicated to the guild started preparing from a young age. They learned how to command the juju of the hunt and how to protect themselves when faced with creatures that were not human.

The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter was such a child. He was from a nameless town and apprenticed for two decades with a nameless hunter before embarking on his first solo adventure—he came back with precious metals and a thrilling story about a village of people whose hair grew to great lengths in the dark of the night and embarked on exploits as the people slept. The Man Who Used to be a Hunter returned to the forest and came back with glittering jewels and stories about rivers that flowed in the sky, crowded with slippery fish that had arms and legs. The Man Who Used to be a Hunter went back into the forest a third time and emerged with the softest furs and a story about a city of diseased elves that made everyone that heard it weep. The Hunter went out and came back. He traded stories of his battles for the admiration of his community time and time again. After fifty-something exploits, he was sick of it all.

It was after eight months in the Impenetrable Forest. The Man Who used to be a Hunter emerged scarred in too many ways to count, stained red from the top of his bushy out-grown coils to the bottom of his feet with the blood of slain imps and goblins. The Hunter lifted his head to the blue skies, the opposite of the stormy atmosphere within the forest and decided that he no longer wanted to be a hunter. It was time to put an end to it all. Back in those days, they used to say that a hunter finds a wife when a hunter is ready to retire. He had to find a woman to take back home first. Then, he would find another profession, maybe palm-wine tapping. The idea had taken root in the back of the Hunter’s mind so when he found his wife, he recognised her immediately. 

The Man Who used to be a Hunter was in a market of monsters. Spirits bartered rare items from the Otherworld, gnomes displayed cutlasses of the shiniest metal and mermaids sold raw pearl and corals for next to nothing. And there she was, his wife, sitting amongst six other women, selling her wares at the market. In those days, ladies would go to the market with their friends to sell akara, however we can’t really say what sort of wares this woman was selling because we do not know who her people are. We can, however, say much about her appearance.

Let’s start at her hair. Her hair was long, braided and packed in a tall crest atop her head. It was styled in a manner which drew one’s eyes down the arch of her crown and to her neck and further down her spine till the cloth she tied across her chest put an abrupt stop to one’s voyeuristic view.

Her skin was as dark as rare ebony fruit. If you know your fruit, you know the fruit from the ebony tree is as lovely to look at as it is luscious. While the fruit bruises easily, the Hunter’s wife appeared sturdy. If we’re to talk about her figure, we have to talk about her hips. Poems could be recited on how they were wide and accommodating, how her behind curved in a way that spoke of dancing, in the market square and deep into the night beneath the stars.

This was how beautiful his wife was, and of course, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter was entrapped. They say that there are seven steps to love. Our man, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter, he didn’t start at the first step. He jumped all the way to step six.

Obsession.

When times were not marked by the year, they were marked by events or by whatever name was the most popular. This era was one when all girls born into noble families of repute were called Yọyin. Yọyin could have been a woman who lived true to her name and brought sweetness wherever she went, or she could have been an enterprising businesswoman who made the sweetest wine. We cannot say for sure, but we can assume that the wife the retired hunter found was also called Yọyin. The Hunter didn’t want his Yọyin for one night, or to even glance his way with a smile. He hastily put together a plan of action.

He snuck into the nearest compound, he hid in the bushes waiting for the perfect time to steal from a water pot in order to wash himself. It had to suffice. There was no time to search for a razor with which to shave, or a tailor to provide reams of cloth. Markets only happened so often—every three, five or seven days—and there was no guarantee that his wife would still be there when he returned.

When the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter approached Yọyin, he approached her as a hunter would. Chest out, walking tall, oozing confidence from every pore. Before he left his town upon his first venture into the bush, he had been widely praised as attractive. Of course, each battle and fight chipped away at his beauty—but the Hunter had enough of it that he was not rendered ugly. When he approached Yọyin and pointed at her wares, she quoted the price without looking at him. Anyone observing would conclude that she wasn’t interested in what he had to offer. Yet, she turned her head in a way that displayed the long line of her neck and adjusted her wrapper so that it hung lower exposing more of her cleavage. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter talked and coaxed and poured sweet words into her ears right there in the marketplace.

Yọyin was the woman who kept him warm through nights spent sleeping upon branches of trees in the forest. He had known her even before he’d met her. She was more beautiful than the most radiant flower. Her laugh was rare and pleasing, it set his desire alight and brought him pleasure inside out. If Yọyin married the Hunter, she would be pampered beyond measure. The Hunter promised to take care of her, to provide for her, to love her even after grey hairs sprouted on her chin.

Such sweetness matched her name, and combined with The Hunter’s rugged charm, this may have been why the gorgeous Yọyin paid him her full attention. Finally, as the sun neared home for the night, Yọyin agreed to his proposal. The hunter had hit his target.

“I will marry you,” she said. “But you must live with me and my sisters.”

Such was tradition and the Hunter eagerly shadowed Yọyin as she packed her wares.

The world was originally water before the gods formed the forest overrun by many spirit-creatures. It was after humans descended from the sky that parts of the forest were beaten back by civilisation creating the ‘Otherworld’. Still, the forest surrounded everything, separating houses, compounds and villages.

After the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter won Yọyin’s heart, they left the market and walked through the edge of the forest to her family home. As the bush cleared to reveal a circle of rectangular huts with thatched roofs, the first thing the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter noticed was commotion.

It was night and under the light of the lamp-posts, he saw two women locked in fierce battle. One held onto the other’s hair while the other beat her attacker back with her hands. A crowd of women stood watching.

“Give me back my hands!”

Those were the words the retired hunter had thought he’d heard but that couldn’t be. This wasn’t the forest of mysteries. Yọyin led him past the crowd, unaffected.

“Should we not stop them?” The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter asked.

“My sisters fight over everything,” she replied.

They walked past huts for sleeping, an outdoor kitchen, and a bathing area marked by the woven mats that covered it on four sides before reaching the hut that was Yọyin’s.

This is where they would live and this was where Yọyin would reveal herself, eventually. Before that, however, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter could say that he enjoyed his wife. He spent his mornings tapping palm-wine as he planned and selling it in the same market where he’d met his wife. At night, he learned the intricacies of Yọyin’s dances and studied every bit of her body as the learned man studies his juju.

So, naturally, he knew when her body changed.

A lesser entranced man would not have noticed that his wife’s neck seemed shorter than it was before.

The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter knew his wife’s neck fit snugly in the cup of his palm. But one day, he touched her there and felt the tight coils of her hair resting against his thumb and forefinger. Yọyin’s neck was two fingers shorter than it should have been. Then, when the Hunter thought of it, her hair wasn’t the same once she’d loosened her crested hair-do. One day, she left for market and returned with her head almost bald, with scraggly patches of matted hair.

The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter did not mind all this initially, because Yọyin’s face was still there and her face was still beautiful.

Months after his marriage, he was home, seated in the inner courtyard, when a strange voice called out in greeting. Yọyin ran out to welcome her guest and The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter paid no attention as both of them disappeared into a private room.

“Sister, I am here to collect my breasts.”

The words sailed from the interior and hit him in the face. Curiosity got the better of him, and the retired hunter crept toward the room where his wife sat with her guest. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter watched in horror as, in the dark interior of the room, Yọyin plucked first her right breast, then her left breast from her chest and handed it over to the woman that came demanding. When he shouted out in astonishment, the look she shot his way was scathing.

They argued afterwards, but Yọyin offered no explanation.

The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter moved between anger and confusion, and failed to come up with any reasonable questions. What he had witnessed was impossible, his wife was human…wasn’t she?

Yet, a breastless and hairless Yọyin remained beautiful for her face.

Then, it became a pattern.

Art by Sunny Efemena

Each month came a visitor and with each visitor, Yọyin lost a part of her body. By the time she was worn down to just a head on the floor, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter lost all sense of composure. He had to be honest with himself, he was married to a daemon.

This was what they called real entrapment, his life as a hunter would not let him go.

Soon Yọyin was without limbs. It became his duty to go and fetch water from the stream and to prepare dinner for her and sometimes for her sisters, whose bodies also changed with the seasons. When he went to the stream, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter felt Yọyin’s eyes burning into his back. Sometimes, he would look up and think he’d seen her face, her head hanging low from a tree like fruit, still as beautiful as the first day he had met her. Whatever juju he carried was not strong enough to guarantee an escape. Powerful magic would have saved him from this predicament in the first place.

One day, another voice came calling, and this time when the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter went to check, he saw a headless body. Tall and smooth-skinned with lean muscles. The body felt its way along the wall toward Yọyin’s room and this time, Yọyin called for her husband.

The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter stood aside as the headless body lifted his wife’s head from the floor and plucked both eyes from Yọyin’s head.

“Thanks for keeping my head safe for me, Sister,” the stranger said as she departed.

“My husband,” called Yọyin, “put my eyes into the wall just above the entrance. I want to see everything.”

This was the hunter’s chance to flee.

There was nothing left of the woman he had married outside her eyes and her honeyed, disembodied voice. At night when he tried to sleep, her voice reverberated through the house.

“What are you scared of?”

“I knew what you wanted from me from the first day you laid your eyes on me.”

“You don’t remember me, but I remember you.”

But the hunter waited for his chance, and soon it came. One of her sisters came and plucked her eyes from the mud wall.

“I am going to get another body that you will like,” were Yọyin’s parting words. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter knew he wouldn’t be around to see it.

Leaving the way he came was impossible, as her many sisters lived out front. He ventured out the back carrying an empty water-pot. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter returned once more to the forest, this time using it a shield as he traced his way home to his nameless village.

Back in his homestead, the Hunter remembered why his first venture into the forest was not his last. He would say it himself, his family was composed of vile vultures. With each expedition into the forest, they attacked his riches like hyenas upon carrion. His siblings nagged. His father complained that his palm-wine calabash was empty. His mother demanded a new set of cooking pots because her old ones had chipped. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter grumbled as he shared his hunting gains until he was left with nothing. They were greedy, always fighting over something. They were brothers who would kill their own brothers for a mat full of cowrie shells. They were sisters who would poison their nieces and nephews for an inheritance. Naturally, they were not happy when the Hunter returned empty-handed and announced that he was now retired. His family were vultures but they were better than the wife he’d abandoned. These were humans, after all. The Hunter made his bed among those who preyed on him.

In the nameless town, the Hunter spent his days lying on his mud bed in his darkened room. Sometimes, he would attend the meetings that were required of him as a renowned hunter, or sit in the wide courtyard of the palace while their chief celebrated his achievements. He did not tell any stories. The topic of Yọyin was too sore for comfort. The Hunter imagined his audience laughing at him. How could he claim ignorance after marrying a woman who sold her wares in a market where monsters and humans mingled? They’d mock him for refusing to marry a wife from the Otherworld earlier like other hunters did. Both sides of the forest were littered with half-human-spirit offspring. Even the Hunter’s own master, the one who had taught him to survive in the forest, had a string of failed relationships with daemons. Master’s heart had been broken and mashed to pulp like gruel but he continued to pine for the women of the Otherworld like he was under a spell.

Two harvest seasons had passed without Yọyin. She must have moved on like daemon spouses did, always flitting about like mosquitoes. They say that when a hunter is ready to retire, he finds a wife. This hunter, however, was going to retire without one. But society loathed people who remained alone. The Hunter’s family found a new topic with which to torture him.

“It is not right that you are unmarried at your age,” they said. “It is shameful!”

He looked at his fellow hunters who fell into two categories. There were those who would die happily in the thickness of the forest and there were those who had retired, like him. The latter were growing fat, surrounded by their children. They looked happy enough.

So, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter decided to give marriage a second chance with some necessary conditions. Anybody unnaturally beautiful aroused his suspicion. He would marry but he did not care to see any woman’s face. He didn’t care that she was alluring or hideous. Love, lust and all its attendants were not needed. Despite how their relationship ended, Yọyin had consumed all his love. This time around, he would be less superficial. The Hunter now wanted a woman who will take care of him and who will perform her duties as a wife.

His family agreed to his terms and employed a matchmaker to find him the plainest girl possible. True to their word, the matchmaker found a woman from another nameless village on the other side of the forest that would have been undesirable to most men of that era. She was blind.

On his wedding day, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter allowed his family to make a fuss. He couldn’t be more overjoyed when he was first introduced to his wife and saw that they had married him to a blind woman with skin as silky as palm oil. With her eyelids glued shut, her hands reached out to hold him. In that instant, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter’s skin grew cold, as Yọyin’s voice whispered in his ear.

“I am so happy to be reunited with you, husband. I missed you so much, my Hunter.”

That night Yọyin told him a story about their meeting. The Hunter couldn’t have recognised her but it must have been his thirty-seventh trail in the forest. The Otherworld is filled with a complex set of rules that no human can hope to understand. Take for instance this one;

If a brave hunter is to step over your house on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, he will be your husband.

The woman, or monster, you know as Yọyin was not even in her house when the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter leapt over it. This was during his battle with the giant bird with lightning in its wings and a beak of two metal swords. Yọyin was bartering with the woman who would trade her human body for the antelope one she then occupied. So far away, she felt that her home was disturbed and saw the Hunter as if he appeared next to her in the Market at the End of World. She was formless yet enthralled. A moment before, Yọyin desperately pleaded with the trader to be rid of her antelope form and in the next, she was at her house.

“That is your husband,” the Balance that kept the forest and the rest of the world in order declared.

But, how could her husband have leapt over her home when it hung mid-air? Yọyin’s answer was clear, right in front of her eyes, as she saw the Hunter climb trees and leap from branches locked in a fierce battle. Needless to say, the Hunter did not even notice her. Yet Yọyin observed him and to her delight, her husband was almost perfect in form. As perfect as any human could be. No human had access to the Weavers who were so excellent at their work that the skin they wove bore no marks. When the Weavers wove feathers, the colours could be as brilliant as freshly dyed cloth or as dull as muddy soil.

Humans had little knowledge of the perfection in imperfection and disproportionate, asymmetrical forms. So, in the grander scheme of things, her husband was fine-looking. She especially liked the way his muscles gathered beneath the skin that covered his legs.

“A gift to congratulate you,” Balance interrupted Yọyin’s observation and gave her a pair of eyes, at once whiter than white and darker than black.

Yọyin accepted the gift, but her regard never left her husband, who had now defeated the creature he’d been fighting. It was not a bad match. She would shape herself to be whatever he desired. Not just that, she would be a better form of whatever he had imagined in his head to be irresistible.

So, she started building. Those eyes that were gifted to Yọyin went through four bodies as she exchanged, bartered and bought her way to the perfect form. When her eyes were returned to her, all that was left was to visit the Weavers for the perfect skin. Whatever form her husband desired, Yọyin would take. Time was no consequence to a fated match. He was human and he was sure to die but when he died, Yọyin would capture his essence and shape him into a body that was her preference.

They would live together, Hunter and Yọyin, with and without form…forever.

And this is what we call a happy ending.

Rafeeat Aliyu writes about women, magic and myth. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. Her short stories have been published in Nightmare, Strange Horizons, FIYAH and Omenana, among others. Rafeeat received the Norwescon Scholarship to attend the Clarion West Workshop for science fiction and fantasy writers in 2018. In 2020, she was one of three African writers selected for the AKO Caine Prize Online with Vimbai mentorship program. She is a 2023 Miles Morland Scholar (Fiction).

Alpha’s Gambit | Mazi Nwonwu

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Art by Sunny Efemena

Anna tried to kill me today.

It happened around noon, on the concrete roof of what used to be 241 Artillery Battalion’s administrative block.

Lying naked, spread-eagle, on a camp bed I had retrieved from a store downstairs, I could feel solar radiation flowing into my body with no interference, save for the shadow cast by the rare cloud that sailed across the sun’s face now and then. Even though I came for the sun, I enjoyed the intrusion of stray clouds. A brief splash of icy water was what those brief moments reminded me of. The thought caused me to smile. There was nothing truly icy about the shadows cast by cumulus clouds, especially for someone who has spent 48 hours chained to the tracks of a polar exploration vehicle in the South Pole.

I shivered as I remembered and felt goose bumps spreading across my body. Even now, the dread remained. My body had adapted to the cold, but it was a slow process. Very painful too. I had hated the cold before that training trip, but it solidified it. It was funny, my feelings, because my body wouldn’t have adapted to intense heat that well. It could endure pain more than most people, but my body won’t change fast enough before being devoured by fire. In Antarctica, my body had started producing a slime from my sweat glands as soon as we left the confines of the plane that brought us, and by the time they had me chained to the tracks, it had thickened and offered protection from the wind. What remained was to endure the pain that came with my body adapting to the subzero temperature.

I opened my eyes and felt my pupils adapt to the light instantly. Bored, I started counting the clouds.

I must have dozed off because when I woke up, I was standing by the edge of the concrete roof thinking how lovely it would be to fly with the birds, to give it all up to the freedom of the sky. I felt wings, powerful wings, on my back. I felt them beat. I tested their strength; knew they would carry my body. I bent my knees, readying to fly towards the sun. It was then that another sense began to question how I had all of a sudden developed wings. It was dream-like, the state I was in, but clarity came with the sharp pain that came from where my toes pressed into the tar that lined the edge of the roof. The midday heat had softened the tar to a state that wasn’t yet liquid, but soft enough to encase my toe and transfer heat to it. I jerked my leg back, that motion pulling me away from the edge of the roof. I bent to rub off some of the tar that clung to my toes.

A soft moan behind me caused me to turn sharply.

Anna was standing in front of the roof access hatch. She stood there, not moving, staring at me. Her pupils were dilated to an extent I had never seen before and the milky white spittle clinging to the corners of her mouth reminded me of something wild. She was looking at me but seemed to see into and through me. It took all my strength to walk across the distance between us as the wings I then realised were imaginary, again reared from my back and the urge to fly became stronger. I got to within touching distance and found that I couldn’t take another step. It was as if I had encountered a wall, a wall of compressed air.

Thinking fast, I tried to move sideways and found I could. I took 4 steps to the right and tried moving forward again and found there was no restriction even when I got adjacent to her. I tried approaching her from the side but encountered the same restriction when I got two metres close to her.

Of course, she has an invisible wall protecting her,” I thought.

I manoeuvred around until I was sure that the gentle breeze I could feel on my skin would carry from me to her, and opened the pores behind my ears as far as they could go. Hot liquid seeped from behind my ears. Soon enough, I felt the compulsion leaving my mind and when I pushed my hands forward, the resistance they encountered was akin to pushing through water. Anna’s eyes snapped open as I reached her, her lips parting for a kiss. She couldn’t have dodged the slap had she seen it coming. I left her on the hot decking, writhing in pain.

I climbed into the building and the further away I got from the access hatch, the fainter I could still sense the wings on my back.

As I turned into the former brigade commander’s office that I had converted into a bedroom, the last of the wing beats faded from my mind. Where love once existed, a hollow thatholds anger now existed.

In one corner of the room, a large wardrobe held my knives, guns, and other implements of my trade. I shrugged and walked towards it, my thoughts focusing my anger into a featureless white void.

In my world, the world of assassins and spies, the code was simple: kill or be killed

***

The first day I met Anna, I was following my eyes. My eyes were following her.

As I placed the pad of one foot in front of the other in that sure-footed waltz that was part natural and part result of the years of stealth training, I could hear my heart beating within its cage. How that was possible amidst the buzzing of traffic and electro-fuji emanating from a music mart opposite the busted-up traffic pillbox about 50 metres ahead of me didn’t matter to me. Truth was, it was normal for me to hear my heart beating, and I would be very surprised if I couldn’t under the prevailing circumstance. My heart was not so different from the average human’s. Yes, there are some differences—all genetically enhanced humans are different in one way or the other—but I guess it’s not so strange that I could quicken or slow the rate of my heartbeat at will, considering all the differences between one person and the next: how fingers could be shorter or longer, skin hues that are darker or lighter and eyes in more shades than you could count.

There are other things that make me different. Like the liquid that I could feel was about to spill down the back of ears; like my eyes that could pick out a single pin from hundreds of meters away; like my ears that could hear sounds almost as well as a dog could; like how I have never met any stronger than me; like many other things about me.

There is something else about me, something more personal, secret. It was the reason I was following the lady I came to know as Anna down a street in Oshodi.

I had been following her for about ten minutes—ever since I spotted her as I stepped down from the shuttle that brought me into the city centre from my home in the suburbs. No, I had never seen her before, but I had always been a victim of my wandering eyes. Once my eyes saw and lusted, my legs followed.

I was struggling to control my heart, which was pumping hard, a consequence of the hot flush that had just then begun moving from my chest towards my groin. The hot flush threatened to become an agonising heat with each step I took to close the gap between my query and me.

I walked a little faster. The heat spread across my middle, clawing deeper. My fingers itched and I didn’t need to squeeze them to know they were slick with sweat.

I tried to blank my mind, to clear it, but I could taste the salt on her skin and her musk filled my nose. I frowned at the futility of my actions as I scrunched my nose, trying to stop the sensory overload that my gifts cursed me with.

It didn’t work. The image that I was sure was her face enlarged in my mind. I felt sweat drip from my armpits to soak into my loose-fitting cotton shirt. From the back pocket of my tight jean trousers, I pulled out a rose-scented kerchief and wiped both palms before dabbing my forehead and neck, paying close attention to the back of my ears. I hoped the mix of rose perfume and alcohol neutralised my pheromones as well as it was supposed to.

Ahead of me, my query jumped across an uncovered manhole.

I looked away.

I felt my heart slowing down as I regained control. I lengthened my stride, hoping to reach the next shuttle stop in time to catch the same bus with her, if that was her aim.

The crowd was thick near the shuttle stop with shoppers coming from or going across the road to the twenty-five-storey plaza that housed Oshodi market. The escalator that looped across the 8-lane road appeared to have broken down again, for the traffic cops were guiding shoppers across the busy traffic. A snarl was building up and the impatient horns of drivers, the shouts of anger, the curses flying back and forth, reminded me of why I moved to the suburbs.

I lost her in the crowd. I had expected that possibility and had even worked out a plan to mitigate it, but a sudden fight between a street vendor and a municipal worker caused the traffic on the walkway to stop moving as people stopped to watch. Thus hindered, I found I had to use all my senses to track her. My sense of smell had always been my strongest sense, and it had served me well in the past. I pushed through the crowd and sniffed the air along the route I thought she may have used. I caught it, that light musk—her personal scent, one I had filed away in my mind. It wafted through the air, fuller in front of me and fainter behind. I felt the heat returning as my blood began warming again.

I followed my nose.

I could see the two shuttle bays, hardened plastic structures that the government built for passengers waiting to board the new solar-powered shuttles. As I stepped over the broken chairs that littered the first bay, a testament to a gang war a few days prior, her musk overwhelmed my nose. She was there. On the other side of the second shuttle bay. I could sense her, even though I couldn’t see her.

I walked across the space between the two bays, pushing through the people milling around. I stopped when I was sure I was opposite her, and turned, slowly, for effect.

She wasn’t looking my way.

Though her face was averted, her stance allowed me a view of her side and front.

She was tall like me and wore flat-bottomed shoes; perhaps also abhorring the need for added height that caused many to become addicted to high heels and the sprained ankles that came with them. I had noted her shaven head before but had not realised she was bare-chested. Elaborate tribal-inspired body paint on her chest and stomach and tight combat trousers that hung low on her waist protected her modesty, somewhat. I had noted her bare back as I tracked her but had expected one of those adhesive bust claspers that were in-vogue. Instead, a pair of multiple tasered drooping earrings that flowed down to her chest to clip to gold-coloured nipple claspers adorned her bosom. I couldn’t say for sure if the earrings were holding up her breasts or if her breasts retained their teenage tautness, the way cosmetic surgeons have long promised. My appreciative eyes scanned downwards, again taking in the contrast between her covered legs and naked torso. Most people who adopted the painted body fad mostly went full natural, letting the patterns do what they can for modesty. I scanned upwards again, beholding taut jaws and well-defined ears.

Just then, she turned towards me. I stepped back, surprised. The face she wore was the one I’d pictured—the very same one I’d imagined smiling back at me as I tracked her a few minutes ago. I gave faces to my queries when I had nothing to work with or when the face they possess was not dramatic enough for me. But seldom was the face I give such an accurate replica of the real person—especially someone I had never seen before.

The corners of her eyes narrowed and her lips drew apart in a sardonic smile.

“Hi Alpha, nice for you to finally catch up,” she said in the same voice I’d imagined she would have.

“What did you say?” I muttered before I could stop myself.

“You appear shocked,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’ve never met a mind reader before?”

Lost for words, I gaped at her, my shock turning to embarrassment.

She smiled again, turned and started walking towards a shuttle that had just pulled up. I discovered that my feed was laden. Rooted to the spot, I watched her get on the shuttle and the transparent doors closed behind her as she waved at me.

[Learn how to mask your mind, Anuli. For someone of your skills, that shouldn’t be difficult. And I am not gay.]

It was her voice in my mind; I was sure. She had turned around and was looking at me, her lips curved in a sardonic smile. I stood there, looking at the shuttle until it turned the corner towards Mushin and was gone.

Interlude

Dr. Zainab Dangiwa. Sector 9. Psychoanalyst, Eko Central.

Tape of session with Anuli Ezilo, better known as Agent Alpha.

Tape will play in 5…4…3…2…1…

Dr. Dangiwa: Start by introducing yourself. Please feel free to say anything else you would want me to know about you.

Alpha: They call me Anuli, my parents I mean. Everyone else calls me Alpha. I am a mutant. No, not one of those comic book varieties that movies make so much money from. I am a mutant all the same. My parents are both genetic engineers. They used to be employed by the government. They topped their respective classes at a time when selective gene engineering was still acceptable and encouraged. You know, the idea that people could be bred for a specific purpose had always been around. Some governments and people with the means and drive have always tried to propagate a desired trait, to breed humans the way animals are bred. My parents’ marriage was government-sanctioned, to produce the next generation of super scientists, only they produced me. Though my parents claimed to have fallen in love during the course of their ‘forced’ marriage, I was not conceived the natural way. I was cultivated. Yes, cultivated, created in a test tube, or whatever they used, and traits were added to boost what I already had.

Dr. Dangiwa: It says in your file that you are no longer living at home and that you have ‘no fixed address’. This anger at being ‘created’ as opposed to being procreated, is that why you left home? Are you angry at your parents? Do you hate your parents?

Alpha: I don’t know. I don’t know if I am angry or if I hate my parents. You know between them they were responsible for over fifty thousand genetically engineered children before the civilians closed the labs? Over fifty thousand handed over to the military and they chose to keep me. I mean, I was the only one they raised as their child. I think that counts for something, doesn’t it?

Dr. Dangiwa: But they are your parents, in every sense of the word. Emeka Ezilo’s sperm fertilised the egg produced by Kemi Ezilo, who opted to carry the child to term when surrogate machines and humans were better alternatives.

Alpha: You think I don’t know that? The truth is that it does not change the fact I was engineered and that my genetic structure was tampered with…

Dr. Dangiwa: I take it you refer to your claim that your parents removed the X chromosome to ensure you are born female.

Alpha: Why do you people insist on calling it a claim? My father admitted it… he did not deny it.

Dr. Dangiwa: But he did not confirm it either. What is your relationship with your mother like?

Alpha: My mother does not talk to me. I have not spoken to her in three years.

Dr Dangiwa: And your father?

Alpha: My father… umm… I don’t know. I don’t know what my father thinks. He calls me every week. He wants to know how I am. I tell him I am ok, to stop calling if the process is hurtful, but he calls all the same. Why are you smiling, doctor?

Dr. Dangiwa: Your abilities, it says here that you call them ‘powers’. Why do you think they are powers? Doesn’t that, to use your words, sound comic-book-like?

Alpha: What else are they? I can make you want me so bad you’d do anything to have me, and I mean anything. That is power… are you scared of me, Doctor?

Dr. Dangiwa: I have a record of your abilities here. Your file from military intelligence is impressive. That brings me to my next question. Why did you leave the army? Your file says you liked the army.

Alpha: Doctor, you did not answer my question.

Dr. Dangiwa: Your handlers say, and I quote, “Alpha was happiest when she was on a mission and the problem we had was ensuring that there was something for her to do.” If you love what the army offers that much, why did you leave?

Alpha: I see you’re one of the professional ones. Okay, okay. I liked the army. I still do. Doctor, why are you not looking at me?

Dr Dangiwa: So why did you leave?

Alpha: Just because I could.

Dr. Dangiwa: Will you go back to the umm… the… army?

Alpha: No.

Dr. Dangiwa: What about your umm… parents… will you go back home?

Alpha: No.

Dr. Dangiwa: So, what do you want to do? You are young, you can do anything…

Alpha: I just want to live on my own terms. The Army lets me do what I want as long as I am willing to do this and that for them once in a while, but what I really want is to be free…

Dr. Dangiwa: But is that not freedom, to be allowed to do what you want most of the time?

Alpha: No, not if someone had specially engineered every fibre that makes you who you are for a purpose. Not if you are me.

Dr. Dangiwa: I won’t pretend to understand all you are saying. However, there is this other question of your sexual orientation. The Army file says you are attracted to women but insist on being referred to as straight. Why is that?

Alpha: I am surprised you asked that question, especially if you are aware of how my father manipulated my genes. Anyway, I am not gay; I am.

Art by Sunny Efemena

I followed my heart

My heart took me home

It was noon when I alighted from the municipal shuttle. I waited for the shuttle to turn the corner at the end of the street, checked that no one was looking, and then leaped over the 12-foot fence separating the old shooting range from the rest of the suburb.

The shooting range has always been here. It was here first, like all military live-fire training ranges, built far away from human habitation. The town had encroached. It ate the outer parameter of the range, flats and tenements creeping inwards until only the cluster of buildings that served as administration offices for the old range remained.

The military still owned the buildings, and the perimeter fence was meant to keep out intruders. The intelligence service leased it to me when I needed to lie low after my last mission three years earlier. Yeah, it was three years since I went AWOL. Well, not necessarily AWOL. The army knew where I was and how to find me. I knew about the move by some civilians, realtors, to lobby the government to take the land from the army and sell it to them. The army brass was still holding out, but I knew they would buckle. Not that I minded. One of the more forceful realtors represented my interests.

The 12-foot fence I scaled was the smaller of the obstacles designed to keep intruders at bay. I was getting ready to scale the second obstacle, a thirteen-foot electrified chain-link fence, when the sense that I wasn’t alone nagged at me. Not one to ignore my senses, I extended all six.

I followed my nose

There, from a copse of trees, a whiff of musk. I tasted the air: salt, sweat.

I stood. Still. Waiting.

Soon enough, she walked out from among the trees. She was smiling. It wasn’t a fun sight. My senses were acting up; they do that when a threat is nearby. I looked at her hands; she was clasping a semi-automatic pulse pistol. I noted the make and calibre. One shot from it wouldn’t kill me, but it would carry a punch sufficient to stop me long enough for her to kill me.

[Not true. I don’t need the pistol to kill you; I can do that with my mind.]

I ignored her voice in my mind.

“What do you want?” I asked, immediately wondering why I did not ask how she found me, or how she got into the compound.

She did not respond. She stood there, looking me in the eye, smiling like someone who just won a bet. “Are you reading my mind?” I asked, not for any reason. I just wanted her to talk, to say something, anything.

[Your thoughts, they scream. I want you to stop screaming. It’s like shouting when you talk, only louder. Take this morning, for instance; I could hear your thoughts even before you directed them to me. After I met you, I could hear them from across the city. What are you? Why do you scream your thoughts?]

I did not know how to respond. Her hearing my thoughts was bad enough not to talk of them screaming across the city. “What are you?” she had asked. It was a question that was also on my mind.

“Can you please stop talking in my head?” I said, trying to keep my mind blank.

“Okay,” she said as she moved to stand in front of me. “My name is Anna. You obviously were not trained to deal with someone with my ability.”

She said it in an offhand manner, the same way I would introduce myself to someone in my unit, or a fellow mutant. I knew about telepaths, but never heard about anyone with the range of telepathy she claimed. She could be lying, but I doubted it. She could read my mind clearer than any of the military-level telepaths could. I scanned her body, seeking for unit tattoos. There was none—beyond the body paint, the combat trousers and ear to nipple rings, she was unadorned. However, that indicated nothing; they could well be hidden under her paint, an intricate meshwork of Nsibidi scripts, drums and tribal masks. 

“I was never in the army, Anuli, but like you, I was trained to hone my ability. Unlike you, I only have one. Do you really mean to do to me those things you thought of? No, don’t answer that.”

“Please don’t call me Anuli. I don’t use that name anymore. My name is Alpha!” I said, wondering how deep in my mind she had gone to get my given name, which only exists in the birth certificate that must still be in my father’s home office drawer.

She laughed. I struggled not to think how rich her laughter sounded.

[I could teach you to mask your thoughts, you know?]

“Stop talking in my head.” I was furious and getting madder by the second. “Why did you come here?”

“I have questions. One is to ask if it was just to grab my hips and thrust a strap in me that you followed me this morning, and how do you intend to achieve that?” The way she said it infuriated me. She said it the same way she would have asked how I took my coffee. I was the hunter here. Why was a girl giving me the runaround?

Ok, you’re a telepath. You know what I wanted when I saw you. You know what I want now. So why are you still here?

[I got curious, and your thoughts kept screaming in my head. I wanted to tell you to stop shouting, so I followed your thoughts here].

“Okay, fine. How did you get in?” I asked.

“I used the gate. Don’t worry, it was locked. I know about codes.”

“Or you picked a specialist’s mind?”

[My power doesn’t work that way. I only hear the thoughts of someone when I touch them or if I have a connection to them. Lovers, friends, family or people who are directing their thoughts at me. To read your mind, I have to touch your forehead.]

“So, how come you can read my mind?” I spoke aloud, unable to shake the nagging fact that the whole conversation we’d been having was lame and that she was in control.

“That’s the question I wanted answered. I’d never seen you before. Then, suddenly, your voice was in my mind, sending me sexual depravity. Is it always about sex with you?”

I looked at her, at the shaven head, the luminous body paint, the nipple rings and her relaxed stance and knew. This was all camouflage. Her appearance was all bluster. I decided to test my theory and took two steps forward, trying my best not to think about my next move. I leaned forward and kissed her. At first, she did not respond, even tried to push me away, but as my pheromones started dribbling from the ducts behind my ears, she grabbed me. “I hope I didn’t use more than necessary,” I thought as I pulled back from her.

“Not here,” I said.

As I picked her up and leapt across the electric fence, I felt my control returning.

Interlude

Axis Insurance recorded meeting between Agent Alpha and John Moses. Tape obtained by military intelligence. Tape to play in 3, 2, 1, 0…

Mr John Moses: Please sit down, Miss Ezilo. Welcome to Axis Insurance.

Alpha: Please call me Alpha.

Mr Moses: Okay, Alpha. I have been looking at your health policy and want to be very clear of the claims. You request for a full body swap, female to male, for your present body to be kept in stasis until the male clone is ready for transplanting, for the female body to be returned to stasis afterwards and for your…erm…partner to also be placed in stasis until after your successful transfer.

Alpha: It says my wife in the document, not partner.

Mr Moses: Yes, it does, but I don’t…

Alpha: Are you homophobic, John?

Mr Moses: No, I am not! Why would you say that? You know it is against the law to be homophobic.

Alpha: It is against the law to do or be a lot of things, but that doesn’t stop them from happening.

Mr Moses: Well, I am not homophobic. I can’t afford to be in my line of work. The thing is, I always find it difficult saying “husband and wife” for same-sex couples. I mean, who is the wife and who is the husband? But let’s not argue about that. The terms of your health policy actually used the term “husband”. So, we’re finding it difficult to accommodate her.

Alpha: That’s bullshit. Wife, husband, partner—Semantics, that’s all they are. You want to tell me that Axis Insurance does not cover same-sex relationships? That’s illegal, Mister…

Mr Moses: No, no, no… don’t get me wrong. Axis covers everything. Just last year, after the government approved marriages between humans and other species, we immediately changed our policies to reflect that. It would be bad business practice to discriminate. The thing is the wording of an insurance policy is very important. In insurance, semantics is king.

Alpha: So…

Mr Moses: So, while the policy covers you completely, it does not cover your par… erm…wife. However, since the army covered your policy and graciously paid your premium, a go-ahead letter from them would serve here.

Alpha: You want me to get a letter from the army before you honour your commitment?

Mr Moses: Miss Ezilo…

Alpha: Alpha!

Mr Moses: Sorry, Alpha, as much as I would love to help you, this is company policy. I am just the messenger.

Alpha: Perhaps I should give you a message for management.

Mr Moses: No need to get angry, Miss… Alpha… These things can be resolved… amicably. You can even take out a policy on your partner… wife… and I will ensure it kicks-in in a few weeks. Your stasis will only begin a month after the papers are signed and stamped.

Mr Moses: Also, you need to know that yur clone would not have any special abilities.

Aplha: What do you mean?

Mr Moses: Your files… they speak of “special abilities” they are actually in quotation marks. You see… a section here… written by the army and signed by your father says “every special ability in Anuli Ezilo body is the property of the Nigerian government and cannot be transfered unto another without the permission of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”.

Alpha: Yeah… I know. I am the prime example of “government propery”. However, I am only understanding how much of a property I am.

Mr Moses: Yes. Also note that where we can cover for your body to be in stasis, It will have to be at a governmet facility and everything that happens afterwards depends on the army or the government.

Apha: I don’t care.

Mr Moses: So… You understand why you will be a different person?

Alpha: No. I understand I will be me.

Mr Moses: That’s alright. I will prepare the documents for your signature.

Alpha: Wait… what happens to the coverage for my ‘partner’ that the present policy contains?

Mr Moses: You forfeit that, but that is why your new policy can kick in automatically. The forfeit is noted and compensated.

Alpha: Okay, I have to think about this. But is there no other way? A new policy, not covered by any third party, will cost what I can’t afford at the moment.

Mr Moses: Well, you could get one of the directors to sign a waiver.

Alpha: Are you a director?

Mr Moses: No Alpha. My father is, though. I could set up a meeting. He’s coming to my house today. Dinner with the family, you know. Yes, most definitely, you should be there.

Alpha: Thank you, Mr Moses. I will be there. Guess I’ll be on my way then.

Mr Moses: It would be a pleasure, Alpha. Erm…but can’t you stay a little longer…we could do lunch, coffee maybe…

***

I had woken up with a clearer head than usual to find Anna’s naked, sleeping form beside me. It was very atypical of her. She usually wakes up hours before me. I had kissed her on the forehead and started making my way to the rooftop. The weather app had forecast clear skies and I wanted to take advantage of that and sunbathe. Also, I had always managed to think more clearly there since Anna started living with me.

I had followed my heart. At first, I thought it was lust. Then it became something else.

Bent over the worktable where I clean my gun, knife, and other work tools I had not used for three years, our minds melded. Do you love me? I asked.

“Yes, even without the pheromones seeping through the tiny holes behind your ears, I love you. I want you to be the man you really are, in body as well as in soul. I want you to be complete,” she said.

She made me understand that. She said it was the only way we could truly be together; the only way she could love me as much as she wanted without the feeling of revulsion that came after we’d lain together. It became difficult to get her to lie with me without the pheromones from behind my ears. Once I forgot that and she gave me a blinding headache. All I did was try to kiss her, and she gave me a headache that lasted a day. I never knew she could do that, give headaches.

Her coming meant change.

I knew I was changing, adapting to her, making adjustments. I noticed the lower temparatures of the central air conditioner. I noticed the cleaner rooms and the watched her start using the kitchen I had never cooked in and then joining her without complaint.

One day, I went out with her, spotting the same bare-chested look.

Another day, I caught myself in the bathroom mirror taping up the ducks behind me ear and I couldn’t remember thinking of doing that. I had shruged at my reflection and adjusted the flesh-coloured tape to fit more perfectly.

I went back to work. Well, I dialled the number I had not called in 3 years and asked to be assigned work. The first assignment had come a few hours later and I was back walking the long collidors of the State Security Service offices at Alagbon Close and peering through top secret files.

Somewhere at the back of my mind, I sometimes wondered why I was back doing something I swore I won’t do ater I found out about my father’s deception and how I had been designed to be a tool from the womb. Like now, I was thinking about all thouse things in ways I hadn’t done in weeks. It was as if there was a fog in my mind that had cleared up and now I could think clearly.

I shook my head, struggling for more clarity and continue on towards the roof.

As I walked past the old gym, a place Anna called her “danger” room, I spied her gym bag by the door. I didn’t need to look twice to see that it was packed and locked. She never packs or locks her bag. I didn’t want to, but all of a sudden, I began thinking about that bag and how somehow I had never cared enough to know what was inside. I walked into the gym proper. One moment I was standing beside the bag, the next I was grasping two ends of it and hearing the strong khaki material tearing. Then it was lying empty, in two bits, on the floor beside me, the contents strewn on her cot. My eyes were drawn to a faded ID among the bit and ends.

With shaking hands, I picked up the ID. Anna’s face looked out at me. It was a practical military-type ID photo, showing a bit of wear and devoid of any embellishment. Though the style of the photo told the story, the name on the ID gave it context. Major Anna Momoh, Royal Gambia intelligence, it read.

I shook my head to clear away the lumps of cotton wool that were making it difficult for me to think clearly. I tried to remember all I did or said in the 3 months that I had known Anna. I remembered her asking questions about my work with the army. I remember vague flashes from my visits to several army black ops sites, but I couldn’t recall making the decision to go there.

My heart started to race and as adrenaline flowed through me, clarity dawned.

Anna wanted my body. Whole. Mindless. For her government or the highest bidder, I don’t know and don’t care.

I raised my eyes to look at the webbing of circuitry that shielded the building from electromagnetic intrusion. It must have been the source of my clarity and the circuitry probably interfered with Anna’s telepathy.

Anna didn’t understand the full extendt of my body’s adaptability. My body adapt’s to ensure I survive the most extreme of situations. I had sought the roof without knowing why.

I wanted Anna to know that I knew, so I left averything the way they were and climbed to the roof. I wanted to give her time to run and then I would give chase. What type of cat would I be if I don’t play with my prey?

END

Mazi Nwonwu is the pen name of nigerian journalist and writer Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu. He is the co-founder and managing editor of Omenana magazine, a leading platform for african-centric speculative fiction. He was part of the Lagos 2060 workshop, which produced Nigeria’s first science fiction anthology, and he contributed to Afrosf, Africa’s first pan-African science fiction anthology. His works have also appeared in publications such as Brittle paper, Saraba magazine, Sentinel Nigeria, Jalada, the African futurism anthology, and the anthology “it wasn’t exactly love“. Through his speculative fiction, he aims to project Africa’s diverse culture into the future, offering a unique narrative that blends tradition with the futurescape he creates. His first collection of short stories, “how to make a space masquerade”, was published by narrative landscape press in 2024

Omenana Speculative Fiction Magazine Issue 29

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Omenana speculative fiction magazine issue 29 cover

What is your favourite type of African speculative fiction? Are you fantasy all the way, or do you swing better with Sci-fi and /or futuristic tales? Or is Urban legend your thing? Maybe with a touch of horror, tilted with love and/or a few twists, or you probably like a spin on some good-old African mythology? Or maybe, like me, you are in love with the full gamut of possibilities that our stories can take. Whatever your preference(s), allow me to welcome you to Omenana 29.

In this issue, we have a story that shows us that if the world as we know it comes under threat, and human leaders seeks alternative worlds and ways to exist, our survival and eventual death will depend not only on science but also on our humanity–Lynn Onywere brings us this gripping dilemma of a tale in Isn’t it Kinder. We also have a rather quaint take on an other-worldly story that many of us are familiar with. Watch out for it in The Annunciation by Chikodili Emelumadu.

Having survived the menace that COVID-19 wreaked on our world only a few years ago, I am not very fazed when I read about diseases, but Chukwunwike Ajemba had me on the edge of my seat with Burnt Shawarma. I hope you enjoy the twisted and bumpy ride with this story, which I promise you is as feverish as malaria.

Catfish Grief is not a fishy story, it is not really about the catfish that feature in it, but in this piece, Tiah Beautement invites us to explore the intricacies of cross-cultural expressions of grief, wines, dancing amidst and despite ailment, and a programmed companionship robot. Outside grief and wine, we invite you to sit back and enjoy the ways that a goddess who is both royalty and deity decides to joggle her options for leading her people and her human subjects. Will she rise to the bait and act like a human in the grips of passion, or will she place head over heart and rule first? Chantelle gives us the answer in A Goddess has Several Options.

This month we also have a special excerpt from our Publisher and co-founder, Mazi Nwonwu, whose new collection How to Make A Space Masquerade and other Speculative Stories, was released on May 25. This issue, we feature the story Alika’s Dilemma.

You can get Mazi Nwonwu’s collection on Amazon.

The spread is vast and diverse, and we invite you to jump into this lavish pool of stories and enjoy. Drop a comment or question if you feel like it and see you soon!

Iquo DianaAbasi

Omenana speculative fiction magazine issue 29 cover

In this issue:

A Goddess Has Several Options | Chantelle Chiwetalu

Annunciation | Chikọdịlị Emelụmadụ

Catfish Grief | Tiah Marie Beautement

Alika’s Dilemma | Mazi Nwonwu

Isn’t it Kinder | Lynn Nyaera Onywere

Burnt Shawarma | Chukwunwike Ajemba

A Goddess Has Several Options | Chantelle Chiwetalu

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Art for A Goddess Has Several Options in Omenana 29
Art by Sunny Efemena

1.

The Mirror was an imperfect square that sat atop one of the majestic columns that decorated Saeci’s chambers. In it, Saeci viewed the happenings of a realm several light years away. A long time ago, she had broken the piece off the Eternal Mirror, a portal that stood in the middle of the Eternal King’s inner chambers. ‘Stolen’ was perhaps the better word. But a goddess does not steal.

Now, she narrowed her eyes and sighed. “It is hard to protect this girl, Ni. She is of all women most moronic.”

“Yes, Majesty.” Saeci’s servant, Ni, had a voice as soft as morning dew. She was standing behind her mistress, her head bowed, fingers clasped in front of her.

“She reminds me of that other one,” Saeci continued, “the one that had five children by that hirsute beast. From four generations before, I think.” She pursed her lips and frowned. “What was her name?”

“I believe you are referring to Nwasini, Majesty.”

“No, I don’t think that was what she was called,” Saeci said. “She was very tall and had very handsome breasts. She used to weave fabric or something. There was a cleft in her chin. I used to joke about wanting to hide a rock in it. And she sang beautifully, which was what attracted the beast to her in the first place. The day he heard her voice and began to follow it, I wanted to reach into her chest and crush her vocal cords. I said that to you then. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” Ni said carefully. “Her name was… Nwasini, Majesty.”

Saeci shook her head. “Wasn’t Nwasini the one that died of…oh, yes, you are right. Nwasini.” She looked through the Mirror again. “Ifeoma knows that this man has more regard for dogs ­­­- the variety that eat shit, mind you – than for her. And yet she clings to him. Her behaviour would be easy to forgive if she was wretched. But her profession thrives. There is no reason for her to drown in this pit she has dug for herself. It worries me. I should take her life.”

Ni cleared her throat. “Please be merciful, Majesty. If it pleases you.”

Saeci chuckled. “I would never kill one of my own. Well, not again, at least. The Kameda girl’s episode was unfortunate.”

“Her name was Kanneda, Majesty.”

“Wonderful,” Saeci said. “The episode is wedged so deeply in the cracks of time that I cannot remember the details. Such luck.” She waved her slender fingers and stepped away from the Mirror. The Iridescence flickered just then.

She looked at Ni, who said nothing.

No one said anything about it. The depleting iridescence.

 It was fueled by the worship of followers. When Saeci was younger, it had burned with a blinding brilliance. But things had changed. Humans, over time, venerated her father less and less. They now believed that they could handle their business themselves. They built fewer and fewer temples for him. Worship was rushed. The faithful’s numbers dwindled with each passing day. Although he never let it show, it was a source of worry for her father. There was no telling what would happen if the Iridescence ran out.

It was the life source of Celeste, their home.

It pulsed through the streets. It lit up the firmament. It ran in a straight line from every god’s forehead to their back and then branched out to their hands and feet. It was the reason they could levitate, fly, create. It had become the essence of their god-ness. She had often wondered how this came to be, how they had come to rely on the creation, so to say, of their creation. Before he created humans, surely her father was all-powerful?

Her father never wanted to discuss it. He had begun to speak of putting her in charge of Celeste and going to form new worlds in the bowels of the galaxy. A long time ago, he had created earth, but left its watering to Saeci’s brothers, Haego and Ilimg. That was why, according to him, it was full of irreverent ingrates. Saeci was his fourth child. If not for Haego and Ilimg’s shortcomings, she would have no claim to the throne whatsoever. She would be worried about an uprising from them if they had not confined themselves to the nether parts of Celeste, whiling away time in drunkenness and debauchery.

“Ni, you may go now,” Saeci said.

Ni bowed and retreated.

Saeci looked again into the Mirror. Her father’s flawed creations had always fascinated her. As the ages turned, she had taken a special interest in some of them. All women. All strong worshippers. She sent Ni to their aid sometimes; once, to take the form of a leopard and devour seven men who wanted to sacrifice her favourite to a non-existent god. Another time, to place a basket of yams in her favourite’s shack in the midst of a famine. In Nwasini’s case, Ni had gouged out the eyes of her abusive husband, a man with the body hair of a wild goat. Nwasini had a thriving weaving business and five strong children. She could have cast him away. But she had kept him, tended to him in his disability, endured his biting words in place of his physical assaults until he died. And then she had died a month after, to Saeci’s relief.

There had been four others after Nwasini: a devious queen whose schemes gave Saeci unquantifiable pleasure, a brilliant translator who remained a virgin till her death, a naïve housewife with more children than she could take care of and now, the young lawyer who had transformed herself into a doormat and lain under a cheating degenerate. Saeci watched her with pride as she spoke in courtrooms. Ifeoma -that was her name- was envied by her colleagues and respected by judges. She could move a courtroom to believe that her client had done no wrong in all their existence.

And then she would suspend her ability to think and defer to a man Saeci now called the Dog.

Just like Saeci’s father would expect her to defer to Hev when they were joined, no doubt.

Hev had been created before her. He was the only child of Dia, her father’s first consort. Dia the Rebellious. Dia the Failed Usurper. She had somehow gotten it into her head that she could overthrow Saeci’s father, and he had put an end to her with a wave of his staff. Hev might have grown up with the stigma of being the offspring of a traitor, but he had distinguished himself in combat. He was her father’s highest ranking general, even though his right to the throne had been extinguished by his mother’s treachery.

Saeci detested Hev.

He never smiled. He talked sparingly. When he looked at her, she did not see the adoration and awe that she was used to receiving from Celeste’s gods. She saw, instead, what was obtainable when Hev looked at everything else. Disinterest. Aloofness. She knew, instinctively, that he would seek to dominate her if they were ever to become one. She would never stand for it. That sort of thing happened on earth, not here.

She floated through her chambers. It was pure opulence, made of splendor beyond human knowledge. Precious stones lined the walls. The floors were fine gold. Reflective, pure. Iridescence permeated the atmosphere. Saeci herself was beauty personified, the first female from her father’s loins, and as such, the standard of which every other female god, except his two consorts, was a variant, a copy. Because of Dia’s treachery, Saeci’s mother, Ufi, had not been of elevated status. She had been created merely to carry the Eternal King’s seed and no more. She lived in the consorts’ palace a short distance away, along with about a hundred others, some without offspring, just creatures of beauty for their master’s pleasure.

It was one of the two things that she disagreed with her father on, the second, of course, being Hev.

Hev had not even seen war. Why would he? Celeste was a kingdom of the gods of the universe. Who would come against it? The army he commanded was just for show – and perhaps to discourage any further attempts at usurpation. Still, Saeci saw no reason for him to be by her side. Her father had scheduled a meeting, one of many. They always went the same way: she and Hev would sit at the foot of her father’s throne. Her father would do most of the talking. She and Hev would avoid eye contact. Then they would leave in opposite directions.

Ni materialized in front of her. “Majesty, the Eternal King has directed me to inform you that the meeting has been moved to a later da-”

“Praise the Eternal King!” Saeci exclaimed. “That is quite all right. Thank you.”

She floated back into her chambers and stared into the Mirror. Ifeoma and the Dog were lying on Ifeoma’s bed. The Dog reached for her but she did not budge. He tried again, a little more aggressively this time, and she slapped his hand away. “What is all this?” he said, in the nasal way that always made Saeci sick. The man was a mix of all things unpleasant.

Ifeoma turned to him. “Charles, look at me. Very well. No, really. Look. Good. Do I look like your shoe rag? Because that is how you treat me. You cheat as if you were cursed with it. I ignore it all because I want ‘us’ to work. But my mother did not give birth to a sheep. I will not be made a fool of any longer.”

He was dazed. “What has gotten into you?”

“And you dangle marriage like a prize before me,” she continued, ignoring his question. “Marriage. Me. What an insult. You behave as if you’re a gift I should be grateful for, a gift I am not worthy of. Well, screw that.”

Saeci’s eyes widened in glee. What had she missed? It was all happening so fast. Where had her girl found a new spine?

The Dog looked at Ifeoma as if two tusks had grown out of her face. “What did you just say to me?”

Ifeoma sat up and faced him squarely. “I am a lawyer, Charles. A great one. I have three degrees. People look up to me. In my circle of friends, I am the star. And yet I bend down and roll over to accommodate you. I cannot bend anymore. You are in the gutter and I cannot join you there. Get out of my house.”

Ifeoma made to stand up, but he grabbed her arm. His face was black with rage. Saeci’s grin died. Ifeoma did not know it, but she was in danger. Saeci tried to summon Ni, as she always did, with her mind, but there was no response.

“Ifeoma, you have gone stark raving mad and I will show you how I deal with mad people,” the Dog said.

It took a second for Saeci to make a decision. She put her finger on the Mirror, and concentrated her energy into pushing through it. The atmosphere in her chambers changed. The Iridescence flashed in blinding colors. For a moment, Saeci was lost in space.

2

Saeci stared back at two astonished pairs of eyes. The air was different. Clammy. Threatening. Why hadn’t Ni told her that the earth’s energy was this dark? It was such a small space. The little room bore down on her, threatened to compress her.

But her instincts took over. She rose to her full height, towering over both of them, her form a levitating ball of brightness. Her eyes shone white. The iridescent strip on her forehead twinkled. “Show us, why don’t you, Charles,” she said, her voice the sound of many waters. “Show us how you deal with mad people.”

Charles began to gulp like a fish out of water. His eyes darted from Saeci to an astonished Ifeoma. “I am sorry, I am sorry.” He dropped to the floor and prostrated. “Please spare me,” he pleaded. “I did not mean to do anything. I am all talk. Even she knows,” He gestured to Ifeoma. “Please spare me.”

Saeci was unmoved. “Get out of her life,” she said. “For good.”

“Yes,” Charles said urgently as he scrambled to his feet.

“Yes. I will never come near her, I swear it.”

“Say ‘Praise to the Eternal King.’”

“Praise to the Eternal King.”

“Go on.” She nodded at him, her meaning clear.

Charles gulped and assumed the posture for prayer. “‘Praise to the Eternal King who set forth—who set forth the seas—set forth the seas and the towering mountains. Praise to the Eternal King who-’”

“It wouldn’t even count; you are filthy. Get out.”

Charles reached for his clothes.

“Leave them,” Saeci said. “Run.”

And he ran, clad in only a pair of briefs. Now it was Ifeoma’s turn to descend to the floor, her eyes round with awe. She bowed. “All my life, I worshipped an Eternal King. I had no idea I was supposed to worship an Eternal Queen as well. Forgive me.”

Art for A Goddess Has Several Options in Omenana 29
Art by Sunny Efemena

“No, I have no need for your worship,” Saeci said quickly. “You know what? I’ll just-” She bent and tapped Ifeoma’s forehead. The mortal’s head swung up and light shone in her eyes. In a second, the light was gone. She fell into an unconscious heap.

The rational thing would be to get out, but Saeci delayed. She looked around the room. Ah, but it was different, viewing it in real time, in real space, not through the Mirror. How small the human essence was! Ifeoma’s chambers were tiny, dainty. Saeci could never live in a place such as this. And still…

She ran her hand over the things in the room: the table, the bed, the books on the shelf, the lamp. She opened Ifeoma’s drawers, examined her underwear, her stationery, the coloured rollers she had seen her attach to her hair on occasion. There were two spherical raffia figures on the table, made in the shape of human heads, held up by three cane stands. One was bare, and the other had a wavy brown wig on it. Saeci ran her fingers through the wig and decided that it was too smooth to the touch. She walked to the window, trailed her fingers over the flowery curtain, tapped the blinds.

The knock on the door made her jump.

Saeci contemplated it only a second before she let her feet touch the ground and walked to the door. She opened it like she had seen Ifeoma do several times: Unlatch bolt one. Unlatch bolt two. Turn the key in the lock to the right twice. Turn the handle.

She gasped when it opened. She planted herself firmly in front of the door. And then she looked at the visitor.

Time stopped.

Saeci felt a sensation so potent, it threatened to swallow her whole. Her Iridescence shone. From the crown of her head to her toes, she felt a whir that threatened to tear her apart.  It made her doubt her reasoning. It made her head buzz. Her body seemed as though it was no longer hers. The sensation frightened her. No, it petrified her.

She stared at him.

He was the epitome of beauty. Small eyes regarded her behind clear glasses. His skin was the colour of rich soil. His lips were the most sensual thing she had ever set her eyes upon. He towered over her. She looked down at his fingers. They were long and slender. An artist’s fingers.

Art.

He too appeared to be smitten by her, because he stared, and stared, and stared.

Suddenly, she took his palm in hers.

She Saw

Herself, returning to the earth again and again for this man. He would touch her in ways she did not want to be touched. He would stir her, upturn her, change her. Her essence would long for him, to be with him, mate with him, meld with him.

Her reasoning would desert her.

She would leave her family, her home, her throne, for this man.

She Saw

She and he, stretched out on his bed, limbs intertwined, speaking about everything.

a.

I love you.

-I don’t have the right words with which to explain how much I love you.

b.

-I must tell you something. I’m not human. I’m a child of the Eternal King.

-We’re all children of the Eternal King.

-No, his actual child. The third by his second consort. I want to show you something.

c.

-Are you scared of me now?

-No. The glow was very…startling, I won’t lie. I think you burnt my eyes.

-Stop.

-You know I’m just trying to manage these eyes. And yet you nearly set them ablaze. Tell me, are all goddesses this mean?

-Stop joking.

-Okay. I am not scared of you. I could never be scared of you.

d.

-I have killed an innocent.

-What?

-A woman. I was her protector. She did not ask for it. I…I helped her and she attributed it to a non-existent god and I was furious. I sent my servant to kill her. I have tried to pretend that it meant nothing to me. But it does mean something. I am ashamed of it. I regret it.

-Then that is all that matters. It is gone. I love you still.

e.

-I lied. About being the third child by my mother.

-Oh?

-I am the fourth. My eldest brother, Hamav, lived a long time before me. Millennia, in human years. He was sent by my father to guide humans, so to speak, along with my other brothers, Haego and Ilimg.

-What happened to him?

-He fell in love with a mortal. Lay with her. My father banished him. He was stripped of his powers and he became mortal. His name was blotted from our history. It was as though he never existed. He died a broken god.

-Your father is a mean old being.

-Don’t say that!

-What has he ever done for anyone, really? And he expects us to worship him blindly. You, at least, have made an effort. You’ve directly helped people. He sits there, absorbing our worship, doing the barest minimum-

-Stop-!

-More worried about keeping the balance of good and evil in the world than actually helping his creations. And he can do that. He’s a fucking god!

-Please, stop talking.

-You’re better off here, with me. You will feel things. I’ll always protect you. I will never allow any harm come to you. Be mine. Please. Talk to me. Saeci? Saeci.

-You are forgetting something.

-What?

-A goddess needs no protection from a mere man.

Presently, Saeci released a deep breath and bent over at the waist. She was shaking. The human reached for her, steadied her, his voice full of concern as he asked what was wrong.

“I am fine. Please let me go.”

He left her and took a step back, worry on his face. “I am… sorry. I came to collect Ifeoma’s share of the electricity bill. I live upstairs. Are you her sister?”

“Yes,” Saeci replied. “She’s asleep. I can’t wake her.”

“Oh. Okay. I can always come back.” He started to walk away, but then he stopped and turned. “Are you okay? Is there anything I can do to help? I’m more than happy to-”

“Surely you have no wish to be struck with blindness.”

3

“You must wonder why I have summoned you.” Saeci was sitting in the room just outside her chambers. General Hev stood before her, two steps below her gilded seat.

“I do not appreciate your choice of words,” he said flatly.

This was the first time that Saeci had allowed herself to really look at him. He was a wonderful specimen of a god. His dark skin shone. His eyes were intelligent and quick. He looked like he could run through a troop – or run a troop through- and not break a sweat.

“Why, General Hev?” Saeci asked. “I am next in line to the throne of Celeste. You are a general. It is within my power to summon you.” She looked him in the eye. “I have summoned you.”

“Very well.”

“Majesty,” she said, her eyes still firmly on his. “You will address me as is customary.”

His face betrayed no emotion. “Very well, Majesty.”

“Good. General Hev, I do not wish to be joined with you. You know this.”

“There are few things that are more apparent. Majesty.”

“I could choose to honour my father’s wishes. But I would frustrate the rest of your existence. You would wish to cease to exist. I am Saeci.”

The first hint of emotion showed on his face. His jaw worked. “YouareSaeci.”

“You know about the Iridescence problem.”

His face was blank.

Saeci rolled her eyes. “This is not a diplomatic meeting, General Hev. We must be honest with ourselves and with each other.”

“What about the Iridescence problem?”

“You must find a way to solve it.”

He arched his eyebrow. “Me?”

“Yes. You pride yourself on being brave and strong. I would like to assume that you are wise as well.”

“The Eternal King is wise.”

There were two possible interpretations to this. The first was that, in true Celeste fashion, he was expressing modesty by deferring to her father. The second was that he was stating that if her father, in all his wisdom, could not solve the problem, how could she expect him to?

His expression was inscrutable. Saeci decided to take the first interpretation. “If you solve the Iridescence problem, I may be favourably disposed to a compromise in our relationship.”

“’May’?”

“May.”

“What sort of compromise?”

“Companionship.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“I would be more than happy to enlighten you. It means that you shall be a consort, of sorts.”

He did not like that word, she could see. His gaze was cold. “I will not be a servant.”

“Was your mother a servant?”

His eyes burned now. It filled Saeci with some sort of feral excitement.

“Do not speak of my mother.”

“A goddess cannot be dictated to.” Saeci stood up and sashayed to him. “I know that you wish you could thrust me through with that…spear of yours,” she whispered, her index finger on the tip of the spear that he held. The finger made slow, circular motions. General Hev’s nostrils flared, and Saeci smiled. “But there are worse things than this arrangement, don’t you agree? This way, you can prove yourself worthy.”

“My abilities have never been questioned.”

“Says the general that has never been to war.”

That hung between them. General Hev’s eyes grew cold again. “In the true sense, my mother was a servant. As is-”

“Pick your next words very, very carefully.”

He fell silent.

 “I cannot lie with anyone I consider a servant, General Hev. If that puts you at ease.”

He cleared his throat. “I shall think about it and give you my answer as soon as I am able, Majesty.”

“Do not think too long. A goddess has several options.” She nodded him away. “You may go.”

Chantelle Chiwetalu’s works have appeared or are forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Redevider, Isele, and elsewhere. She won the 2023 Wakini Kuria Prize for Literature.

Burnt Shawarma | Chukwunwike Ajemba

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Burnt Shawarma art for Omenana Issue 29
Art Sunny Ifemena

James took a bite of his first meal of the day and recoiled. “Guy, did I order roasted corn?” He started to demand a refund, but his phone rang and he stopped to fish it out. On the screen, the caller ID read Sweetheart with three heart emojis. James picked up the call.

“My love,” his wife said into his ear.

“Sweetheart. How are you and my baby doing?”

Charity chuckled. “Baby hasn’t been born and you already love her more than me. Where are you, my love? Are you driving home?

James scratched his head. “Err– not yet. I’m looking for one more passenger, then, I will be on my way.”

“By ten thirty p.m.?”

He hated when Charity did this, talking like his Bolt driving wasn’t a sacrifice to put food on their table. But he knew to hold his tongue. “Just one more ride, sweetheart.”

“Do whatever you want. Good night.” James kissed her through the phone and hung up. He gave the vendor one final look of disgust and, taking another bite of the burnt shawarma, turned the ignition of his 2004 Toyota Corolla and the radio’s crackling echoed in the cabin.

      And now, a public service announcement from the NCDC. Hypermalaria is a new and deadly disease caused by a genetically engineered subspecies of mosquitoes that mutates the malaria parasite into a highly virulent strain. These engineered mosquitoes were created to cannibalize other mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasite, activate it within themselves, and then die as a strategy to eliminate malaria once and for all. Unfortunately, these mosquitoes escaped containment due to a city-wide blackout before testing was concluded. Hypermalaria is transmitted to humans who ingest the remains of an infected mosquito. Infected patients suffer rapid symptoms of malaria and die within twelve hours.

     James turned off the radio, he’d heard the infomercial so many times that he could recite it. Then his phone buzzed with a ride request. James accepted and let the app guide him to a stop beside a lanky young man in his early twenties who was wearing an undersized shirt over a faded pair of jeans.

“Good evening, sir, I’m going to Ejanla Crescent.”

James nodded to both statements and replied “Enter” and the young man got in the seat beside him.

“So how much is the ride on the app?” James asked.

“One thousand naira.”

“To Ejanla? Haba, no please,’ he complained. ‘Fuel prices have gone up again. Your bill is one thousand, seven hundred.”

The young man didn’t balk immediately. He looked to be considering the likelihood of finding another ride that late. His best option, his only option, was James, and they both knew it.

“One-five” he finally said.

“I’ll start the trip.”

     They drove in silence for all of five seconds before the boy pulled out his phone and started listening to a podcast on speaker. An Igbo man’s baritone reached James.

“The problem is that these scientists always think they know more than God, eh? Tell me, who sent them to create their mosquitoes, eh?”

The young man settled into the passenger seat with a plastic bag full of beans, bit the tip off the bag, and started sucking the food out as he listened. James half-turned to look at him, astounded. “You listen to Ibe?”

“Yeah. I’m a third-year microbiology student so I like to stay informed about these things.”

“Really? What is your name?”

“Ireti. I’m planning to write my project on the hypermalaria parasite.” Another speaker came on the podcast and Ireti’s attention shifted again.

“Ibe this thing no clear again oh. We are outside the hospital with my cousin’s two sick children and they won’t allow us to enter. More than twenty families are standing outside but the doctors have locked the doors. Two people have died outside already. Kai, Ibe you need to see these bodies…”

The deaths started some three weeks ago. Accounts of sick people dying before the results of their blood tests were ready put everyone on alert. Then more reports flew around the internet and people started coming up with their own theories, forcing the NCDC to make the infomercial. That’s all it took for the bug spray shelves in every supermarket to go empty. Drug stores sold out all the typhoid and malaria medication they had, within hours. Still, people kept dying. James had seen one of the bodies before it became a body. The little girl looked like all the moisture had been sucked out of her skin. She held her joints stiff against relentless shivers, her mouth was a tight grimace, her eyes screamed in agony. She grew up next door to James and he had stood in a circle and prayed for her before she left for the hospital last Monday. By afternoon Charity called to say the girl was dead. James changed their window nets after that. He was the only son of aged parents and Charity had a baby on the way, there was no room to take chances.

He took another bite of his shawarma and turned to Ireti who was sitting quietly.

“How are you coping wi– kaff kaff!

James gripped the steering wheel tight and tried to cough up the chunk of beef that went down wrong. Ireti jerked forward in his seat.

“Oga are you okay?”

When James started thumping his chest, Ireti whipped out a bottle of water three-quarters full and handed it over. James snatched the water and gulped desperately as he parked the car. The bottle was nearly empty before he felt relief. After taking a moment to catch his breath and wipe tears from his eyes, he set the squeezed bottle down and offered Ireti a hoarse thank you. A sharp honk made James and Ireti look up to see that cars were congesting at the next intersection, looking for ways to get to the masked NCDC personnel charged with checking people’s temperatures at six-hour intervals with infrared thermometers. James watched the cars snaking around each other and saw the checkpoint for what it was; another well-intended medical precaution but all it did was get in the way. What was the point? There was still no cure for hypermalaria, all the testing would do was tell him that he was about to die. Ibe was right, who asked the scientists to create mosquitoes?

Ireti squinted at his watch and wrote something down.

“What time is it?” James asked.

“Ten forty-six p.m.”

James let out an impatient scoff and put the gear in reverse. “Ireti, I don’t have time for all this. I know a shortcut we can take to bypass this checkpoint.” Ireti nodded and James started driving back the way they came. His eyes scanned for an intersection with rusted gateposts. The street was easy to miss in the dark because it was so narrow that two cars couldn’t fit through at once. Ireti found it first and sat up, alarmed.

“Wait, is this the shortcut you want to take? Oga no, no, no.” He tried to open the door like they weren’t going forty miles per hour and when that didn’t work, he scrambled to find the central lock button. James had to snatch the hand away before it broke something.

“O-boy calm down. What’s wrong with you?” But Ireti wasn’t listening, his heart was a wild thing in his chest and his eyes darted about restlessly. The poor boy probably thought he was being kidnapped. James looked at the street as he slowed to a stop. There were no houses to be seen from the gate, only a collapsing fence on the right and gnarled trees to the left. Creeping plants were reclaiming small sections of the tarred road, yet no leaves rustled, no crickets chirped and the only source of light in the shunted darkness was a naked bulb too far away to see with. Outside, just beside the left gatepost was a broken sign half-swallowed by the tall grass that read “Simin Street”.

James would have turned back but he saw the traffic behind them growing even longer in the rearview mirror.

“Look,” he said as he unmounted his phone from the dashboard. He opened Google Maps and showed it to Ireti. “See, we take this road, turn right, and continue till we reach that shop, then we enter the main road again, hm?” James waited for Ireti to calm himself before continuing.

“It’s just to beat traffic. Abi you wan sleep for road?” When Ireti raised no further objections James fired the engine again and as he did, a cold shiver shook him from neck to knees, but he didn’t stop to acknowledge it. He was not a man to contemplate fear, not at his age.

     They didn’t drive very far before the road ran out of tarmac. James kept on making small talk and pretending not to see Ireti share his live location in a chat.

“This road is worse than I thought oh, but it’s short. What are you afraid of, hm? Big boy like you. Abi them don rob you f–”

“Oga watch oh!”

James slammed the brakes and the car screeched to a stop two feet from a little boy. All three of them froze in place, petrified. Then James shivered again and he remembered he had a horn.

Honk-honk!

The boy didn’t even blink. He just stood there clutching his red ball and staring through James like he wasn’t there. Then he turned to Ireti, and his body suddenly jerked into motion.

James watched the boy cross the road as he forced down chills crawling up his spine. About thirty feet away, the headlamps spilled light on a woman standing in the bushes and resting against a tree. Her hair was a bird’s nest and her calf-length dress had rips and mud stuck all over it. She looked up to see who was coming, a tired smile spread across her cracked lips and she stood to approach them, straightening her dress as she walked. James took one look at her and didn’t bother stopping. The woman looked half-mad. She held her fingers stiff and crooked and used her wrist to grind the dirt into the fabric while trying to dust off her dress. She picked through the grass like she was wearing heels but when she stepped out of the shadows James saw she was barefoot.

Ireti turned to look at her as they drove past. “Oga, I told you not to follow this road oh.”

As if it was in agreement, the car went off. James smacked the steering wheel in fury. “I told Chisom to change this spark plug yesterday. What is wrong with all these mechanics?”

The tires stopped rolling before James could park the car, so he got down and popped the hood right in the middle of the road. The night was chilly, but he wiped sweat off his forehead as a headache formed at the base of his skull. His bladder tickled urgently, so he replaced the plug after dunking it in fuel, slammed the hood, and walked over to the edge of the road to unzip his jeans. Just before he zipped up again, James spat out phlegm so bitter he cringed at the taste it left in his mouth. He turned on his phone flashlight to examine it, his urine was stained with a tinge of red. Blood.

Malaria. Hypermalaria. He was infected. Shivers became trembles as he hastened to the car.

Infected patients suffer rapid symptoms of malaria and die within six to twelve hours.

“What will I do? What will Charity do?” A memory of his neighbour’s daughter flashed in his mind and he tried not to imagine himself looking like that. James had to get home, fast. He turned the ignition and the car sputtered for a few seconds, then died again. He tried once more, the same result. James all but punched the windshield, then he deflated in his seat.

Burnt Shawarma art for Omenana Issue 29
Art Sunny Ifemena

“Ireti, please come and hold this light for me.” He turned to get out of the car again and the woman was standing right there.

“Yes, what is it?” James fumed. She opened her mouth to respond and James saw her top left canine grazing her bottom lip. It was so big the tooth before it had fallen off to make room. She started to say something. He leaned in to hear and, in a flash, she opened her mouth all the way and lunged to take a bite out of his cheek. James dodged just in time, and she hit her chin on the half-open window. Someone screamed and a second later Ireti was fleeing the car.

“Ireti wait, wait,” James called after him, but the boy didn’t stop. James wanted to stay with the car, but the woman turned her head sideways and tried to climb in through the space. Her second bite almost nipped his ear, but he scrambled over the center console and tumbled out through the door Ireti left open. He walked around the car to confront the woman, but the sound of shuffling feet made him look behind her. At least fifteen more were making their way to the car, dragging their limbs along like pieces of wood. Each one of them was half-living proof of something James once thought didn’t exist.

He knew he couldn’t fight them. There were too many, their thirst for blood too great. Leaving his car felt like abandoning family, but James ran, he didn’t even take his keys. He heard something crash behind a tree and more stumbled into the road as if they were spawning in the shadows. One came close enough and sprang on James but missed completely, crashing face-first to the ground. The thing that used to be a teenage boy didn’t even stop to register the pain, it just righted itself and began crawling after James again, that tired smile revealing its massive proboscis.

     James ran so fast he felt the sand he kicked up hitting his back. He ran so fast he forgot that any form of exercise would accelerate the effects of hypermalaria, and focused on pumping his legs, pumping his heart, anything to get him to the safety of certain death. A few feet ahead, Ireti was fighting off an old woman. She held his collar and was pulling Ireti’s neck to her toothless maw. James ran over to them and pried her grip free. He got a good look and was shocked to find that she looked familiar. Not the woman exactly, but her twisted features. Cracked lips, screaming eyes, skin taut with dehydration. The truth struck him hard in the chest.

“Ireti, these people died from hypermalaria!”

“No, they are still alive,” came the reply between puffs of air. “Just barely.”

Footsteps approached from behind and James turned to see one closing in. This one was faster, more sure-footed. It passed under the light of the naked bulb and James saw a waterfall of blood splattered on its mouth and down its shirt with some feathers and fur in the mix.

The sand started touching James’ neck after that. He saw the turn leading back to the road up ahead and willed himself to run faster but it was no use. Fatigue slowly crept into his muscles and the spots in his vision made it harder to traverse the uneven ground. James knew he was slowing down because the distance between him and Ireti kept widening. Panic rose with every footfall, the ragged breathing behind him growing louder and louder. He bit his lip and shut his eyes for a moment to gather all his strength but that proved a mistake. His foot caught a rock and sent him sprawling to the dirt. Everything hurt. He tried getting up again but pain negated adrenaline so fast that his head spun. The hypermalaria was getting to him quickly but the thing behind him got to him quicker. It tried jumping on him, but James rolled away and gave it a feeble kick to the head. It staggered two steps back then jumped at him again. It used to be a large man, James saw that in the broad shoulder and slack clothes, and even though hypermalaria had reduced it to skin and bones, James still couldn’t fight it off. It sat astride him and went for his neck, biting a mouthful of sand instead. James held that neck before it could try again and fought to keep it away. They struggled like this for what felt like an eternity, James using what was left of his strength to save what was left of his life, the fiend adamant to get its first meal of the week. James felt his arms growing numb as it pushed against him. He could feel death cornering him from all sides, so he took a gamble. Swiftly as the deadening limb would allow, he took his left hand off its neck and searched around for anything he could use as a weapon. In a stroke of luck, his fingers found a stone. He grabbed the lifeline and hit as hard as he could on its temple. The impact lulled its head back and around in a semicircle, bringing it within striking distance so James struck again with everything left in him. Crack! This time a gash appeared, and a sickly yellow sap trickled out.

Once more, James aimed and swung. But this time, it was ready. With one hand, it brushed the stone from his grasp, and with the other, it started to scratch the arm at its neck, jagged fingernails cutting into flesh. The grip finally came loose, and it held both hands apart in triumph, spread its jaws wide, and thwap! Ireti caught it right in the face with a tree branch. This time, it toppled over and James scrambled to safety. Ireti pounded it with the branch three more times before it stopped moving. James struggled for breath as his mind raced, torn between gratitude for Ireti’s heroics and astonishment at the boy’s killer instinct. But then remorse gutted him. This boy had warned him not to take Simin Street, this same boy was saving his life,

“Ireti wait, wait,” he said as his saviour helped him to his feet. “I think I have it. I have hypermalaria.” He stopped to spit out more vile phlegm. “Just leave me here. Save yourself, I will die soon anyway.” But Ireti shook his head.

“No, don’t worry, oga. I told you I’m a microbiology student, and my mother is a nurse. We have been working on a cure together. If we can reach our pharmacy, then I can save you.” James did not argue further. The hope that he would see Charity again lent his knees strength to hobble along. They got to the turn and the sound of speeding cars reached them.

“Charity, Peace, my baby. I’m coming.”

     They turned the corner and the stretch of road was pitch black. A thicket of trees and grass held the light from the naked bulb hostage. James couldn’t see his legs in front of him. He fished his phone from his pocket and tapped the power button. Three-quarters of the screen was ink black, and the last quarter had technicolor lines running across.

“Ireti try your phone. Mi-ne-is-broke-n.”

Ireti whipped out his Samsung and tapped the flash icon several times.

“My battery is too low. Two percent. The phone won’t let me use the flash.” They heard something fall behind and watched in horror as the undead turned the corner. One of them fell flat on its face, another stepped on it, tripped, tripped two more, and still they kept coming.

Ireti tweaked the screen brightness to its maximum and they continued their three-legged run. James ran as fast as his weak legs would allow, focusing on the roar of engines far ahead and not the shuffles inching closer from behind. He fought to see through the spots in the darkness. Ireti tried to keep the small circle of light under their noses but a crash came from the bushes behind them, he whipped around to investigate and James promptly missed his step.

“Oga, take it easy. Sorry.”

James wasn’t listening. It hurt to stand; it hurt to breathe. His head weighed two tonnes on his exhausted neck, and he lost control of his bladder.

“Just leave me here.”

“Remain small. See that shop you showed me on the map? We are almost th–” Ireti’s foot hit something and this time they both fell, banging their shins on metal. Lightning fast, Ireti sat up, feeling around for his phone, and then jumped in alarm a second later.

“Wait, I know what this is.” He fumbled around in the dark some more, found his phone, and cast its dim light on a motorcycle with the keys still in the ignition. James wanted to feel relief, but all he felt was dizzy. Not even the enemy ten feet away could make him stand up.

“Hold the phone for me,” Ireti said as he heaved the motorcycle upright. He helped James on first, then angled his body to climb on and the light flashed into a ditch beside them.

The bike man lay there, riddled with bite marks and staring blankly at the night sky. They had clawed the clothes away to get to his flesh, then sucked all the blood from his body. Each bite mark was punctuated by a hole so deep it looked like someone took a concrete nail to his corpse. In some places, they could see crunched bone. James lurched forward and vomited all over the front tyre.

     And the fiends were upon them. Ireti kicked the first one away and lost a shoe to another, who grabbed his foot. There was no time to climb on, so he pushed the bike with James still on it. James wiped his mouth and kicked the starter twice to wake the engine. It stuttered and sputtered and stalled but eventually answered. Ireti jumped onto the seat and grabbed the handlebars from behind to keep them steady. They drove as fast as the motorcycle would go and three minutes later; they were back on the open road. James fought to stay conscious as they zipped to safety. He tried holding on to hope, but he felt himself dying. It was hard to recall Charity’s face through the delirium. It was even harder to breathe through his exhaustion. Just as he was about to pass out, a skinny hand came into his field of vision, pointing.

“There, that’s my house. Park near that black gate.” James crashed into the gate and Ireti hopped off.

Knock knock knock.

“Who’s there?”

“Mommy it’s me.” The deadbolt clicked free and Ireti’s mother opened the door for them.

“Good evening, Ma. I’ve brought him.”

“Oya, carry him inside the pharmacy and put him on the table.”

The table was a wooden thing so short that everything from James’ knees was dangling off the edge. The stout woman placed a hand on his forehead and flinched. “This man is burning up. How many times will I tell you to stop bringing them this late?”

“The car broke down on the road. Sorry Mommy.”

“Sorry for yourself. That’s how you applied for medicine and messed yourself up in post UTME. Tell me what I will do with microbiology, eh? She kissed her teeth and Ireti tried to make himself invisible.

“Which method did you use?” she asked.

“Bottled water.”

“What time?”

“Ten forty-six p.m.” It took James a while to process this. “Eh?” He sprang up. “Ireti, you infected me? You infected me! Why?” He would have kept going, but the rest of his shawarma chose that moment to exit the wrong way. James didn’t even have the strength to wipe his mouth. He just collapsed onto the table, panting. Ireti came over and wiped it for him.

“Sorry oga. We are working on a cure that can save thousands of lives. The versions we tested on the people on Simin Street were defective, but this one–” he raised a syringe filled with a pale-yellow liquid, “this one will surely work.”

James was powerless to stop the tears when they came. “Please. Please, just let me die. Let me call my wife one last time and die. I won’t tell anybody you did this to me, I swear.” But neither of them listened. Ireti’s mother came over to the table, tied a tube over his elbow, and flicked his biceps twice. James tried to thrash, tried to scream, but he had no strength left in him. Ireti slipped the needle into his exposed vein and he started convulsing.

“He’s dying. Give me the–”

The woman pushed her son out of her way and deftly replaced the empty syringe with another that eased the shaking. First came a gentle calm, followed by roaring pain. White hot pain that curled his toes and crooked his fingers. Eyes wild with anguish, James writhed and contorted as the liquid coursed its way up his body.

“Hold him down. Hold him.”

Searing hot pain pooled in his head, condensed in his jaw, and twisted his insides so hard he tasted blood. James tried to vomit again, but this time only a single tooth fell out.

Chukwunwike Ajemba is a writer who trailed his roots from Lagos to Awka and discovered his love for speculative writing along the way. He enjoys exploring narratives afforded by human experiences and imaginative perception. 

Alika’s Dilemma | Mazi Nwonwu

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Art for Alika's dilemma in Omenana issue 29
Art by Sunny Efemema

Dusk had just passed into deeper darkness and the night market of Alor had come alive.

The river harbour was crowded with slave and livestock pens, and the cluster of homesteads on their stilt legs. The light from hundreds of oil lanterns, swinging from bamboo poles, beat back the shadows cast by the red moon — the sister of the silver moon — that would not rise until just before twilight. The light from these lanterns bounced off the raffia buildings and sheds that served as temporary dwellings for the merchants who came from near and far, where trade routes meet the great Mmamu river.

Away from the harbour, towards the well-trodden road that leads to the Northlands, where the light by some kind of trickery appeared not as bright as elsewhere, a singular building made of baked river clay stood, alone. Here, the business, like at the slave pens at the harbour market, is of flesh, albeit of a more sensual leaning.

It is from this latter place that the captivating sound of flute music wafted out, drawing even the attention of ears not attuned to music. The music was played by an expert, and the applause and encouraging loud voices that accompanied it, attested to the audience’s enjoyment. The flute music rose and fell, and just as suddenly as it had started, the music reached a crescendo and died, leaving echoes of the magic of pleasant music. Then there was a lull, as when people pause mid-chew to savour a tasty mussel they rue to be done with, and then, clapping and ululations broke out.

Standing on a low table in the middle of the tavern, longlimbed with the face of a mischievous cherub, was Obele Okwu. He bowed low with an ornamented flute clasped in his hand, first in one direction then in the other, smiling as he fed from the praise by his captive audience.

Grabbing the large gourd of palm wine that the proprietor of this not too respectable establishment held out to him, he settled into a chair that became vacant as soon as he walked towards it. The owner was appreciative because just within a little lengthening of shadows, Obele Okwu had just drawn in more customers than he had seen during the festival season. Throwing his legs on a nearby table, Obele ignored the clay cup the proprietor was holding out to him as he lifted the gourd to his lips with both hands and drank thirstily.

“Whew!” he exclaimed, after lowering the gourd, wiping off the froth from his lips with his long-fingered hand. “Obele has arrived! If there is one thing that my mother’s people are good at, it is the tapping of the raffia palm. This is excellent wine, Okadi, my mother’s kin. You know good wine.” With that, he saluted the tavern owner and drank again.

“Not a thing, son of my sister, not a thing. Since you are of our blood, I knew you would know good wine, so I offered you one. Most of your brothers from the Seven Hills cannot tell an average wine from a super wine,” Okadi said.

At the mention of the Seven Hills, the tavern quieted, and everyone turned to look at Obele Okwu. Wonder shone in their eyes as most speculated on what a man of the Hills was doing in the Lowlands at this time of the year.

“You are of the Seven Hills?” the man that had vacated his seat for him asked.

“Yes,” Obele said, taking a deep swig from his gourd.

“And what brings a hill man to the Lowlands in the wet season?” someone else, hidden in a dark corner, asked.

Obele did not answer at first. He sighed deeply and nursed his drink while the crowd, feeling a tale in the air, shifted as close as they could without upsetting Okadi, who was known for his deadly temper.

Obele lifted the gourd to his lips, drained it, and slammed it on the bamboo and raffia table between his feet. He then declared that if the Lowlanders wanted to hear his tale, they must refill his gourd, since wine helped the tongue flow better. This made the whole tavern burst into laughter. Though some murmured that this hill man who drank like a fish may burn holes in their pockets, they all agreed that his tale would be worth the expense.

More drink was bought and Obele walked to a more central position in the tavern, surrounded by the Lowlanders. Then he cleared his throat and began his tale.

“My name is Obele Okwu, which you will find is a misnomer, for I earn my living as a bard, and you know we bards sing as loud as the Iroko gong — I know some of you have never seen the Iroko gong. It is a large gong cut into the base of the giant Iroko, but that is not the tale for today.

“I am of the Seven Hills, though I am kin with the people of the Dry Marshes through my mother’s mother, as Okadi over there will attest to, having hailed from the foothills. I am presently on a fool’s errand for my famous friend Alika of the Seven Hills. Perhaps you have heard tales of his exploits in the Two Markets War and the Taming of the Plain Lion?

“I was sent to these foothills because of my bloodlines, for it is hoped that I can convince some of my grandsire’s kin to follow me back through the dreaded path to the hills and bring the fabled northern ox with us. The ox is for Amaoge of the Shrines, who Alika hopes to make his partner at the Festival of Bonding.

“I would like to tell you a bit about Alika, my friend, whose tale this is. I would have loved to tell you of his exploits in the Two Markets War, assuming you have not heard of it, but we both know that will call for more palm wine than I can consume at this sitting.”

Laughter followed in the tavern as Obele lifted the fresh gourd and tapped the bottom to show its emptiness. Someone brought another full gourd over and Obele grasped it by the slender neck and took a swig, belching contentedly as he shifted his weight on his stool before resuming his tale.

“Alika, the strongest man in the Hills, has walked away from more battles than any other warrior in the Seven Hills. No, not for cowardice, but for lack of a worthy opponent and his unwillingness to inflict harm on a fellow human. The songs of the Hills have it that the most well-kept secret of the Two Markets War was the fact that Alika was coaxed to appear on the battlefield by his mother with the solemn promise that he would not strike a blow. Then on the front lines of Umumba like Ala, the Earth God’s wrath, Alika stood trying his best to look as mean as possible. Now, now, I am not trying to put wings to that story, and I can only confirm that Alika shared two burly rams with me after that hardly fought battle, presents from the elders he said.

“Yes, I assure you, even the elders agree that had the Ezilo clan summoned enough will to strike out, they would have hauled home the lone human head that would have given them the battle. But the fear of the gentle giant, Alika, robbed them of a ready victory though they out-numbered Umumba three to one and owned the most feared war Ikenga (war totem) in the entire Seven Hills. This is not a summon to arms for you faint-hearted plains and river men. Remember that Ezilo is of the Hills, and we fight all outsiders together.

“But I digress; I was talking about my friend, not the war.

“Alika is tall, everyone agrees. The tallest man the Seven Hills has ever produced. You know, we of the Hills are born tall, most crossing the length of six feet. But Alika stands above seven and has the mass of two Hill men without the fat of the Lowlanders. He could easily lift ten times his body weight and till the fields at par with five strong workers combined. Everyone also agrees that Alika is an asset to the Seven Hills. In the crowded market, women look at him with doe eyes, and men envy him. His mother could not have prayed for a better son.

“All appeared well, but Alika nursed a secret pain.”

Obele paused, as if to gauge the crowd’s enthralment. He noticed that most of his audience had limp lower jaws, a good enough sign of their rapt attention, so he smiled to himself and continued.

“You see, marriage in the hills is unlike those of the Lowlands and elsewhere. There, parents take pride that their children chose a life partner on their own. We hill dwellers bond at late adolescence or early adulthood, and most get married soon after that. Here lies Alika’s dilemma. Fear, fear for the weaker sex. Though strong and built like the ox of the northern plains, Alika gets queasy around women. He cannot go beyond the first few words of pleasantries before his habitual stammer takes over. No, Alika rarely stutters. His affliction only occurs when a maiden’s smile lights up her beautiful eyes.

“Now, the time of bonding drew near and Alika’s soft heart had been seized by the medicine man’s beautiful daughter, Amaoge, who stands taller than her brothers and is known to shun womanly tasks, choosing instead the hazards of her uncle’s hunting lodge in the Twin Forests. No one knows why she caught Alika’s attention but, I, Obele, his bosom friend and confidant in many adventures, swear by the Thunder God’s Bellow that it is because she is the only woman in the Seven Hills who can look Alika in the eye and hold his gaze, rather than her beauty that makes even old men dream of youth long spent.

“Our hill bonding ritual is done at the lesser market square away from the cradle of the elders, effectively hidden from the prying eyes of parents who harbour prejudices and want to lift their families standing in the Hills with their choice. Before the day of bonding, a suitor is expected to give his intended a gift known only to her. If she fancies him, she will give him hers on the day of bonding.

“Now, it is a common occurrence for suitors to be led on and then dumped for another at the bonding. In the hills, a woman’s pride is measured by how many suitor gifts adorn her mother’s hut. The youths avoid this situation by seeking and getting assurances from an intended beforehand. This is done at the Iyi Ama stream, where a promise given is broken only at one’s peril. It was exactly two moons short of the yam harvest and would-be-suitors had about a full moon circle to either get the promise at Iyi Ama or hope for any maiden left over from the choosing, which would not be suitable for the most feared warrior in the seven hills.

“The day this adventure began was not remarkable. I was busy cleaning new flute woods my master tutor sourced from an antelope hunter in the Twin Forest. Having eaten a stingy meal of roasted locust and ncha, tapioca meal to you Lowlanders, that was provided by my tutor’s wife, whom he met with the river dwellers at his music’s prime, I was still feeling hungry. I was about to give into temptation and raid my other mother’s loft when a shadow fell across the stacked wood pieces in front of me. I almost jumped out of my skin but for that irritatingly familiar voice that reached my well-tuned ears.

“‘Obele Okwu,’ Alika called out in that hoarse voice of his that always jangles my nerves, ‘are you scared of a harmless shadow?’

“I looked at him for a bit, thinking up the best retort to counter his wit. I will also have you know Alika is quick with his tongue — at least when it is not a maiden he is addressing — and I always must fight for words to keep him at bay.

“And who would not jump back from a shadow without substance?” I finally retorted.

“He looked at me for a long while, like the times he was preparing for our speech battles, which always lifted his spirits and left me drained. When I thought he was about to throw a hard counter at me, he shifted his weight and sat down heavily on a disused mortar.

“I noticed Alika’s spiritless countenance, and squatting on my heels beside him, I hailed him, ‘Brave warrior, what draws twilight’s shadow across your brave heart?’

“He looked down at me, a weary smile playing across his full lips, and swatting tiny blood-sucking insects that plague the Hills on his broad shoulders.

‘Obele,’ he called.

‘I am here, Alika. Speak your fill.’

‘Obele, you know the day of bonding is upon us?’

‘Yes, I am aware,’ I replied, dreading he had gotten wind of my assent with his younger sister. An awkward situation I had hoped would only come to light after the bonding when he was forbidden by law to hurt an in-law. ‘What about it?’

He looked at me and asked, ‘Do you not see any problem?’

‘No,’ I replied, with all the sincerity I could muster.

‘How then, Obele the bard, can you be my friend and not know that it is a few twilights to the night of bonding, and I, Alika, have no mate?’ he bellowed, standing to his full height, arms akimbo. ‘How then?’ he added for emphasis, his voice a whisper.

‘But Alika, you are the last man I expect to have that dilemma.

All the girls want to be with you, even the married ones look at you with longing and I am sure it is just the taboo that keeps them away from your hut. You can have anyone you want.’

‘Have you forgotten my difficulty?’ he asked, glaring at me manically.

‘Oh! The difficulty.’

‘Yes, that difficulty.’

“He glanced around to see if we were still alone. Spying my tutor’s foreign wife at the far end of the compound, he pulled me away towards the ill-used hunter’s path.

“We walked in silence for a long while. Well, long enough for my acute ears to lose the sounds of the village, until we arrived at the forked crossroads at the forest of Abam. Alika crossed over to the wayfarer’s seat, under the large wild looking Ugba tree that is rumoured to harbour the traveller’s goddess, Ijedimma. I felt a little slighted that Alika, a warrior, was this free with Ijedimma’s domicile. Being a bard, I considered myself more of a journeyman than a warrior, so I rushed to claim the place, beating him by a hair’s breadth.

“He looked at me with forced tolerance and dropped the customary kola nut at the sacred tree’s foot. Not being of a priestly line like him, I assumed a pious demeanour and nodded my head at the places and accepted the proffered kola nut. You know what kola does to a bard’s voice, but then a little piece hardly makes a difference and a friendly, if not patron goddess shared it. We did not sit there long before Alika told me he was taking the left fork of the road, which led to the Twin Forest.

“Intrigued, I asked him why he was going there. He looked at me with his big innocent eyes as if I had gone mad.

‘I am going to court Amaoge and I need you for moral support,’ he said casually.

‘Court Amaoge? Have you not been doing that a lot recently?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t play dumb, Alika; everyone knows you like her,’ I replied, clenching my fist to stop myself from laughing at the horrified expression on his face. ‘And those late-night vigils outside her homestead, the water fetching and barn making for her father. Everyone is doing something for some girl’s family these days. I even spent the whole of last market day tilling your mother’s vegetable patch for Chi… eh…’ I cut myself off, hoping he had not caught the significance of my blunder, but one look at his smiling face and I knew that the harm had already been done.

‘Relax, Obele, I know about you and my sister. I am not blind, too. You two have always liked each other. We all knew it would lead to this.’

“I felt my unease fade away like a whiff of summer smoke carried by the strong winds. I turned away from him, hiding the relief that flooded my face.

‘What do you want to do?’ I asked.

‘We will go to her uncle’s hunting lodge. I have a deer trap near the stream. I noticed fresh tracks there yesterday, and I am sure it would have snared something now,’ he said, pausing to look back to see if I was following him.

‘If that trap fails, we will check my fish trap in the stream. Hopefully, we’ll go with one or both. Now I want to give her the gifts before her uncle knows we are there, so I need you to distract him long enough for me to deposit it where she will find it later. Are you following? Now the tricky part is not giving her the gifts but holding my act long enough to ask her.’

‘Ask her what?’

‘Hey! Were you following anything I said? To ask her to be mine.’

‘Okay, I get it. But why don’t we just wait for her to come back home and give her these gifts at home?’

Art for Alika's dilemma in Omenana issue 29
Art by Sunny Efemema

‘No, it is better done in the forest. That way, if she rejects me, it will be known to only three people: me, you and her. Same goes for if I make a mess of it,’ he concluded smugly.

“I wanted to argue further, but I saw the sense in his reasoning and held my peace. I was dying to ask him why he decided on non-conventional gifts when everyone else just got ornaments. We took the left fork like he wanted and got to the stream at about midday. Now you know how dense the forest in the Seven Hills can be, especially at the peak of the rainy season when the elephant grass is most luxuriant. Well, the trap was hidden by such a growth and my untrained bush eyes did not even realise we were in its vicinity until Alika exclaimed in unabashed horror.

“Following his furious gaze, I looked again and saw what was aggravating him. In the grasses lay the despoiled carcass of a rather large deer. Its bowels had been ripped open and most of the meat chewed to the bone. What was left looked more like a bloodied mass of bone and cartilage attached to a strangely whole head, which still hung from the taut vine rope of Alika’s trap.

“As we looked on, a young lioness strolled out of the thick grass with her brood. She licked fresh blood from her jowls and growled contently as she strolled casually towards us. Some of her brood, wanting second helpings, trotted back to the carcass and tore off bits and pieces and fought over them.

“I know you want to ask what we did in the face of that blatant theft. Well, being of the Hills, we are kin to the lions. Aside from being the totems of the Seven Hills, they are also bound to us by the blood pact our ancestors had with theirs, so we expected them to protect our kill and not eat them for lunch. It took all my talking skill to persuade Alika from taking his revenge on the lioness there and then, an action that would have brought on us the wrath of the guardians of the caves that protect the Hills and its lions.

“So, reluctantly and with great disappointment, we left the trap and its ill-fated catch and made way to the stream where we hoped for better luck, leaving the young lioness rolling on the forest floor with her cubs. She clearly needed the meal more than us, but that would not stop us from taking the matter to the Guardians.

“The stream had no name, not having the luck of being affiliated to any god or spirit, but it originated from the smallest of the Seven Hills. Somehow, the water dodged the slopes that would have led to its capture by the other streams that flow into the great Mmamu River. Rather, it ended in the Twin Forests where it collects into a little lake called Beautiful, for its collection of rainbow butterflies and bright plumaged birds. At the centre, it is said to drain into an underground river, and anyone caught in its swirl is lost forever, but the shallows are perfectly safe and the fishes are large. It was at the shallows that Alika had set his trap, and as we approached, the splashing of a captured prey welcomed our wary eyes just as the water cooled our parched throats and soothed our insect gnawed upper bodies.

“We did not immediately go to the trap but sat by the shore eating a meagre ration of dried nchi meat and trading banters on our extensive adventures, believing our catch was waiting for us, and no harm would come to it. How wrong we were.

“It was I who went to pull the trap from the lake. Not having much trap fishing experience, I wadded into the water that came to my knee. I thought nothing was amiss when I saw the black polished diamond glitter of the prey’s skin. Grabbing the tapered neck of the fish trap, I lifted it onto my back without looking and headed back to shore. I noted the heaviness of my burden and smiled, knowing that it meant a big catch.

“I must have gotten very close to shore when Alika’s scream stopped me in my tracks. My heart wobbled and my knees knocked together as I looked up at him and around me, seeking the source of his distress. He was still where I left him, only he was dancing around horrified, pointing toward me, gesturing and shouting incoherently.

“I turned around, alarmed, but the water behind me was still and the forest beyond held no trouble. Turning back to him, I was about to tell him off for playing a joke on me when something slippery brushed my shoulder. No, mind you, I was not spooked by it, not yet; I was more worried about the smell of the fish that may cling to my new shawl. I lifted the trap off my back and manoeuvred it to my front, intending to rest it on the soft shore sand so that I could wash the fishy water off my shoulder before it sticks and starts smelling. You can imagine my horror at the sight of the biggest water snake I had ever seen, staring at me with vexed eyes.”

There was a collective gasp from the audience at this point. Apparently, everyone knew the potency of the water snake’s bite. Some even murmured that no one comes that close to a water snake and lives to tell the tale. If he heard these murmurs, Obele did not show. He only signalled to Okadi with his upheld flute that his gourd was empty before going right back to his tale.

“I do not know how I threw the trap away before its poised head struck or how I managed the strength to throw it as far as I did — a feat, I tell you, even Alika envied. But I remembered vividly that it was fully out of the broken trap and coming at me with blinding speed. I waited only long enough to note that I had underestimated its size, and then my heels were touching my head. I caught up and passed Alika, who was struggling to pull out our machetes from the solid grip of the clayey soil, and without looking back, shouted that it was a venom thrower. He overtook me before I got to the bush path. We ran like mad for several stone throws. The venom thrower, you see, is as aggressive as a woman in labour and will chase you for a great distance if it feels you have hurt it greatly. We had, by catching it in a trap, done more than hurt its bristly feelings. When we finally came to a heart shuddering halt and found out that it was no longer in pursuit, we picked a high branch to rest on, in case it was still bent on catching up with us.

“I do not remember who it was that suggested to use it in place of the fish as a gift for Amaoge, but we were both too scared and beat to go back to the lake just then. We were still resting on the branch when Amaoge and her uncle walked up to us from the direction we had come. It was my acute ears that heard rumour of their whispered conversation. I alerted Alika, and we climbed down from our branch and stood by the path awaiting their coming.

“Mazi Akani called out to us as they neared, and we walked down to meet them.

“Amaoge looked as stunning as ever, and even the jungle tattoos on her person and the large basket on her head took nothing away from her beauty. I almost envied Alika because of his choice.

“She smiled at me and gave Alika an appraising gaze. As usual, he averted his eyes, and she smiled secretly at me. By thunder, I thought, she really likes him. If he can see her as clearly as I can, we would not be thinking up all these schemes to win her love.

‘We caught us a large venom thrower,’ Mazi Akani announced. ‘It must have tired-out chasing after some prey and was resting when we came up to it. Amaoge here got it dead on the head with her bow from fifty paces out,’ he added.

“The pride in Mazi Akani’s voice was clear. I looked to a scowling Alika, who shook his head warningly at me as I made to offer information on the dead snake. I endured the secret humiliation of weighing the worth of venom thrower skin in the market for the happy old man who looked on, pride dancing in his deep-set eyes. I walked over to Mazi Akani and started a debate about whether the gash the arrow left on the snake’s forehead would demise its value if it was to be sold as a walking stick head.

“My congress with the old hunter gave Alika his time with Amaoge. Hell, they were walking behind me and Mazi Akani, so I saw and heard nothing. I only knew something good must have happened for my friend when Amaoge sauntered past us, a big smile on her face.

“We did not follow them all the way to the hunting lodge but said our goodbyes at the next turning. Twilight was turning to darkness, and I was itching to get home to my flute and leafy yam porridge. But no, Alika had not had enough adventure, not that day. He said he had promised Amaoge an elephant tusk and a plains ox for her bonding if she would take him. Now he is going to the eastern foothills to trap an elephant while I head home, get my gear and go to my grandmother’s people for an ox.

“I thought him mad; I raved and ranted, telling him that a woman who loved you would not make you go to such extremes. He only smiled, his eyes far away.

‘Obele,’ he said after he tired of my questions, ‘she accepted me before I made the promises, and I want her to have the greatest bonding gift ever seen in the seven hills. You are my friend and in-law… Okay, okay, would be in-law, get the ox for me and you will have my gratitude forever. There might even be an elephant tusk for Chiwendu. Think what that will mean.’

“That got me.

“What? I never said I was not weak in the knees where the fair sex is concerned.

“Well, I got home that day when the hyena’s laugh began in the valley and left with the first embers of that day’s sun. As for Alika, I do not know. I left him at the crossroads arranging poles he had cut in the forest, preparing for his long trek east where the wild elephants hold sway. By now, he probably is at the eastern foothills trapping an elephant while I am here with my mother’s people, drinking free wine and searching for someone willing to drive an ox into the Seven Hills.

“Knowing Alika and his hunting luck, he might even be back in the Seven Hills already, waiting for me. I am yet to get a cattle man brave enough to take the route to the hills this rainy season, even with my promise of protecting them from our guardians, as I do not possess the skills to herd that fierce species. Time is passing and I cannot go back empty-handed and my bond waits.”

There was a deep silence when Obele stopped talking. Even a silent fart would have been too loud in the ensuing silence. All eyes were on Obele, following his every move. Like a charmer who knew he had entranced a prey, Obele slowly pulled out his flute and lifted it to his lips. He blew a blast that seemed to convey all his frustrations, before finding a sorrowful tune. He stood up gingerly on his feet and danced a little jig even as he swayed from side to side, pushed by the music. Buoyed up by the drink, his dance became more dramatic, and his flute changed tune, becoming more soul-lifting as he moved from one end of the tavern to the other. Soon enough, the music swept everyone up.

The flute music drifted through the night air, again reaching the river harbour where an Orten, struggling to adjust the worn shoes of his fierce looking enyinya, paused for a long while to savour the sound of the flute. Then suddenly, he felt the need to seek the musician whose flute had stirred his soul.

The laugh of a lone hyena echoed in the distant marshes as he hurried towards the tavern, where the sound of a raunchy chorus flitted through the night air to spur him on. He knew he was going to meet fate, but what that fate had in store would be told in another tale.

Mazi Nwonwu is the pen name of Nigerian journalist and writer Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu. He is the co-founder and managing editor of Omenana Magazine, a leading platform for African-centric speculative fiction. He was part of the Lagos 2060 workshop, which produced Nigeria’s first science fiction anthology, and he contributed to AfroSF, Africa’s first pan-African science fiction anthology. His works have also appeared in publications such as Brittle Paper, Saraba Magazine, Sentinel Nigeria, Jalada, The African futurism  anthology and the anthology “It Wasn’t Exactly Love“. Through his speculative fiction, he aims to project Africa’s diverse culture into the future, offering a unique narrative that blends tradition with the futurescape he creates. His first collection of short stories, “How To Make A Space Masquerade”, was published by Narrative Landscape Press in 2024