I don’t mean to eavesdrop. I’m bored and drifting, wishing I could be back in the hostel with Rosemary. I want to call or text her, but I can’t risk it while I’m here, where my mother would sense it like a shark scenting blood.
Something about this house makes me drop my guard—or perhaps its my instincts, ironically sharply tuned by my mother’s training, that makes it easy for me to filter everything out but the sound of their voices coming from the study directly below.
“… happy, then?” My grandmother’s voice sounds mocking. Perhaps I’m imagining it.
Silence.
“Shey, I told you?” Mama continues, eerily calm. “When you tried this nonsense before, what happened when her first ten years were up? Eh? You somehow managed to convince yourself that things would be different this time, abi? But here you are again, crawling back, as I expected. How well is this pretence going for you?”
“Mama.” Mummy sounds like she’s clenching her jaw. She sounds angry. I’ve never heard her sound angry. Disappointed, yes. Irritated, often. But never angry.
My grandmother kisses her teeth. “You better fucking wake up, o. You better start—”
The memory shifts. Time speeds up.
I’m in the second bedroom, shooting abruptly awake. My eyes immediately go to the bedroom door. It’s open a few inches, like someone had been standing there, but the moment I’d awoken, they’d disappeared just out of frame.
I’m practically holding my breath, waiting for the person to reappear. I wait nearly thirty minutes before I feel a shift.
I spin around but it’s too late.
My mother grabs me by the jaw and shoves her second hand into my mouth. Something wriggling and alive, fat and slimy and disgusting, worms its way down my throat.
She abruptly lets go.
I twist onto my side, stomach heaving, but I’m passing out before I can gag or cough.
When I wake up again, memories from my childhood—stolen, but now forcefully returned—are stuffed into my head like sludge, threatening to trickle out of all my orifices. I feel the phantom wriggle of the maggot my mother had shoved down my throat, its slimy skin clinging to the insides and forcing me to swallow to try and wash away the feeling.
I want to heave and gag, but I don’t. I don’t moan with discomfort. Don’t fist my hands. I just lay there, still and silent, until the overwhelming feelings pass.
Then I sit up.
My mum is in the desk chair turned to face the bed, sitting just as quietly.
I’m thinking of when I was ten, my mother putting me in a pure white shift and scarf to match hers, both made of thin cotton. She’d dipped a finger in a small bowl filled with goat’s blood, placing three dots along my forehead and my cheekbones, then had taken my hand, leading me barefoot out of Mama’s house through the back door.
Mama had been waiting by the gazebo, also dressed in white, her face also dotted with blood. The steps leading up to the small pavilion had been shifted, somehow, revealing a dark, previously hidden stairway leading down into the ground.
I’m still not outwardly reacting as I think of the woman locked deep down underneath, of her brown skin, pallid from years spent hidden away from the light of the sun, her eerily prone form and unseeing eyes, strange plants and flowers sprouting out of her limbs like her very flesh is their nourishment. How I’dtried frantically not to stare, wondering why she looked so much like my mother and grandmother, but saying nothing because I’d been trained not to ask questions.
Mama plucking some of the plants brutally from their roots, ignoring the thick, dark blood spilling from the wounds—ignoring when said wounds immediately close, healing shut until the skin is left smooth and unblemished. The gnarled roots of the plant immediately wrap tightly around each other once they’re exposed, forming a sharp, needle-like point. It’s “flower” disappears into the air like the smoke it resembles, until something that looks like a harmless, if crudely-made toothpick is all that’s left.
The woman gasps awake out of whatever trance she’d been placed under, but remains unable to move, unable to speak, watching with a simultaneously furious yet empty gaze as Mama recites what sounds like a prayer in Ibiiom; a request to any gods listening to bless the food we’re about to eat, and an expression of gratefulness for providing the food in the first place. My ten-year-old heart had raced, my mind swirling with a strange fear and confusion.
Then she’d slipped out a strange-looking dagger I hadn’t noticed had been strapped to her thigh, and carefully cut the woman open from underneath her jaw all the way down to her stomach, ignoring the torrent of blood spilling from the wounds, soaking into the woman’s pure white shift.
Ten-year-old me trying not to recoil with horror, gripping my mother’s hand tight as I frantically held on to my lessons, to my control as my grandmother broke open the woman’s rib cage, and ripped out her heart.
I don’t know what my mother expects me to do, now. Why had she given these memories back to me? Is this yet another test?
I don’t get an apology for my stolen memories, not that I’d expected one.
Mummy simply says, “Come,” and I go.
She’s being purposefully quiet—quieter than usual, so I automatically do the same. We sneak out the back door, and she leads me straight to the gazebo. I’m dressed in only a worn t-shirt and shorts, my feet in my plain black sliders.
I should be panicking maybe, but all I feel is numb. I think of the strange woman buried deep down in the ground, of Mama telling me, “Look her in the eye, edémi. You’re only where you are—alive and safe—becauseof her.Lookat her, and thank her for her sacrifice.”
