The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021)

by Oghenechovwe Ekpeki

  “I think they’re a tribe of little people.”

  * * *

  A dance of the tribe parts to reveal Wells bound on the ground. He’s naked, his mouth and eyes covered with leaves. His cries are muffled. He’s trussed up like a pig on a bamboo pole. It doesn’t need a genius to figure it out.

  “Put him down. At once, you brutes!” But there’s fear in Clyde’s voice. “Stop it. I said now!”

  The tribe ignores him. They click and clack as they shoulder Wells away.

  Revita’s cry pulls from her toes, surges to the sky. It is like the howl of a hound.

  The cleft lip suddenly attacks and tears out Clyde’s face. It’s possible that he faints. He stirs as the pain settles. A sweet aroma of roasting meat seeps into the air.

  * * *

  They come for him at dawn. It’s still fog in the air, but a light grey one.

  Clyde is in shock or despair. He doesn’t struggle as they uncouple him from Revita, as they haul him with a tug of rope to his feet. But Revita is livid. She’s fighting with every inch of her living. She’s snarling and thrashing, scratching and biting. Any part of her body is a weapon. Her heel connects with a jaw.

  Clyde wonders how long through a roast before you die? Or do they knock you unconscious with a coconut. He’s heard of superstition about albinos, how pieces of their limbs are meant to bring luck. If the tribe thinks his whiteness is albinism, will they chop something for some mythical power before they cook the rest of him? What will they take? His arms, legs, ears or genitals? But Wells was trussed whole.

  He has much to say to Revita, to their unborn. He’d like to think of them as twins. He’s never doubted Revita, not from the moment he saw her cleft lip in a room full of United Nations people. The connection he felt. It’s like the lip reached out for her. She stood out like an African protea, radiant and thriving, regal the way she moved. She was the first woman he ever saw who never hid from a cleft lip. He thought of the Greek god Proteus, prophetic, exploratory… Clyde knew he would ride a chariot with Revita to any sun.

  But she transitioned like the god, was elusive to his interest, avoided him like a turd. One day in the canteen, as he stuffed sweet potatoes and beans into his face, ravenous after a long morning of diagnosing and treating typhoid, pneumonia and malaria in babies only weeks old, Revita clapped her tray of rice and goat meat onto his table. She sat opposite him and proceeded to eat. She pulled his heart with her chestnut eyes, and he could only stare in adoration and astonishment. Finally she said, “Your eyes and your work—they suggest you’re a people lover. It so happens I’m altruistic too. But what I’m wondering is this: Are you going to propose or what?”

  Now these imbeciles, unschooled carnivores, they would bloody dare to eat her and his—

  Something stirs in him. He leaps with a roar. He headbutts the first one. Leaps and stamps on the next. A torso slam takes out another of the tribe. Clyde’s arms are still bound behind. He flips, now on the ground. His bare feet knock out a few more shorties. The ropes give. Now he is locking with his elbows. Pulling eyes, strangling. He’ll teach the half-sized philistines before they make a broth of him.

  A coconut knocks him cold.

  * * *

  When he comes to, Revita is kneeling beside him. She’s wiping his face with bark cloth. The little people are clicking and clacking, bowing and bowing, as if in reverence.

  “The hell?” Clyde sits up with a start. Members of the tribe in the room fall away.

  “Look, Clyde,” says Revita. “Look at their lips.”

  Only then does he notice. Each one has a cleft lip. Unsealed like his and Revita’s.

  And they are still clicking and bowing, when two women sashay in with an offering. It’s a fresh roast in a calabash, some rib or thigh. Clyde and Revita are too hungry to question it.

  On the last swallow, a tribesman with ash hair—perhaps an elder—appears. He claps his hands, gestures wildly.

  “I think he wants us to follow him,” suggests Revita.

  The elder hurries out of the hut and walks in half a trot. He keeps the distance from Clyde, as if petrified. Everywhere is ruined. It’s like walking on cold lava in the dawn of a mountain’s fury. They tread across bleak soil and all that fog. Now the elder is pointing at a charcoal-black statue climbing from the ground.

  Revita peers long and hard at the effigy. “I have to agree, the resemblance is uncanny.”

  The gargoyle has an opening from its lip to its nose.

  The elder is clicking, bowing.

  “I don’t know,” says Revita. “But I could swear he’s worshipping.”

  Clyde laughs. “What will they do when I start doctoring? When they see some true healing?”

  “You’re totally a god. It saved you from being dinner.”

  * * *

  And so it was that Clyde and Revita lived with the tribe in no place. On the days he wondered about his widowed mother in London, how she might be doing without knowledge of her son’s fate, Revita consoled him with the intensity only a person touched by the profundity of the Greek god Proteus understood.

  Something else happened. Like a twist of fate. He first panicked when his cleft lip brought him to the ground in agony, but it only heralded a plague of locusts that fed the village for a month. When the lip hit his face like a hammer, a murder of crows appeared from nowhere. Nothing a well-aimed coconut couldn’t fell.

  As he found crude ways to cure without proper medical supplies, trusting the power of the earth and nature to restore a burn, break diarrhoea, assuage acid from gout, Clyde began to associate the agony in his lip with blessing.

  So he wasn’t astounded when he woke up with anguish on his face, and Revita went into labour that same day. She gave birth to one boy, not twins, and the child was cleft-lipped. Next Clyde’s lip wrenched all the way to his guts, the tribe clicked and clacked, and he clicked and clacked back. It was like a miracle of Babel uncoded by a holy spirit. Suddenly he understood everything they said.

  Thus, in clicks and clacks, the tribe unravelled the story of the cataclysmic event that happened before Clyde and Revita tumbled from the sky.

  Two days after a millet harvest, a big bird, giant like the one that brought Clyde, Revita and the tasty one, soared in the sky. But this bird did not cartwheel to the ground. It opened its mouth and vomited light. After the light came a hiss. After the hiss, came a bellow that felled people—they died clutching their heads. When it boomed, people scattered, bits of them everywhere. A few villagers survived the bellow and the boom. Some collapsed to the fire that ravaged nearly everything. Survivors looked around, saw dust and ash everywhere. A grey world full of stumps and rock.

  The branding on their face, when it happened, started without warning. One day someone noticed their lips were beginning to crack, forming a split that ran from mouth to nose. In no time, everyone was branded. It was then that they understood. The flash and boom were the work of the great god of the sky. Now He had marked them as His chosen. What they didn’t understand was why He set fire to the cows and goats, sheep and cockerel. Even the maize, peas, cassava, bananas, beans, sweet potatoes and millet were gone.

  Villagers fell back when they faltered into the statue. The god of the sky had lodged Himself in their midst, reincarnated as a boulder. To appease him and continue their ancestry, for indeed they would perish if they ate nothing, they sacrificed and dried the meat of newborns that arrived without a split lip.

  Imagine their gratefulness, clacked the little people, when the god rewarded them with a great big tasty one from the sky. Clyde thought of the white East African’s generosity, how he pulled them from the wreck.

  Imagine their happiness, when it was light and they saw that the god of the sky had appeared to them in true flesh, but they were astonished He had chosen to reincarnate with no skin. They apologised completely for binding Him. Did He see how they did not harm the woman with slippery hair? Despite her charcoal face, she was made in His likeness, shape
d from His ribs.

  The only time they killed a tribesman with a broken lip, they clacked, he was one of them, but he was also the one who struck the god of the sky with a coconut. They served him as a fresh roast to the god, if He generously remembered.

  Revita by now also understood the click language. She clicked her message to the tribe. The god’s name is Baba Cleft Lip. He’s no longer angry with you.

  No? they clacked.

  No. And He has absolved all your babies from sacrifice. From now on, you are not to kill or eat anyone born without a broken lip.

  But, but… clicked the tribe. What does Baba Klep suggest we eat?

  Coconuts aren’t just for knocking people out, clacked Revita. You can crack them like this. Drink their water and eat their sweet white meat.

  But, but… we can’t live on coconuts alone, clicked the tribe.

  Ah, yes. Baba Klep has also blessed your land, clacked Revita. And I will show you.

  Clyde needed no convincing that, between the two of them, his wife was the brain, most shrewd. She taught the tribe to listen for water by following locusts and birds. She taught them to dig up the poison in the soil and separate it in latrines. To mark and dig trenches. To make pipes of bamboo poles, create crude but resourceful irrigation systems. Before long, the land was lush with maize, peas, cassava, bananas, beans, sweet potatoes and millet. It also appeared that either the air chose to cleanse itself or the fog that wrapped around the land had fled.

  The villagers thanked Baba Klep for His goodness.

  He dispersed them to scout what was left of the big bird. They returned hauling or balancing on their heads cartons of towels, gauze, painkillers, antimalarials, gin, beef jerky and bars of chocolate. They pulled apart the light plane and upgraded their irrigation pipes.

  Pain coloured Baba Klep’s vision, fireworks everywhere. Revita birthed the second child. It squealed out of her womb like a banshee, no broken lip. She suckled the tot with a mother’s poise, her world never bleak or grey.

  As the sun ebbed from the birthing bed and night brooded in, a sputter of his mother’s face crossed his memory, a broken image on a trembling screen. The shape of her jaw, the cast of her gaze, fleeting like a chapel ghost, waiting, waiting, then she was gone. And there was just his wife and newborn. He wondered if he’d ever know that he’d stayed too long, and when that happened if he could ever leave. He stared at the facts, the taste of a muddy river in his mouth.

  18

  “Desiccant” © Craig Laurance Gidney

  Originally Published in Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire edited by Nicole Givens Kurtz (Mocha Memoirs Press: October 13, 2020)

  The Bellona Heights Apartments were rundown. The pavement of the open semi-courtyard had cracks, concrete wounds that oozed out moss and straggling weeds. An old fountain, spattered with bird droppings, was filled with stagnant rainwater and trash. The first level beige brick had graffiti, scrawls of obscene words and nonsense shapes scrawled across it. The balconies that faced the courtyard were over-stuffed with plants, bicycles and rusting lawn furniture. The cornices were crumbling. Hiphop and Reggaeton blasted from open windows.

  Tituba shuddered in revulsion. But she had no choice, did she?

  You get what you pay for, she thought, and a one bedroom in Bellona Heights was what she could afford. At least she'd found a place to live on such short notice. Her sister’s new boyfriend, Vaughn, had threatened to change the locks one too many times. Tituba loved her sister Leah, but her choice in men was terrible. At least Juan, the last one, didn’t misgender her. Yes, this place was below her standards, but, she reasoned, the lease was only for one year. And surely, she could find a more suitable place by then?

  Inside the building, Tituba saw worn linoleum and the chipped paint on the walls. She picked up her keys at the office from a sullen clerk who couldn’t pull her eyes away from a game on her phone and rode the old gear-grinding elevator up to the fourteenth floor. Phantom odors drifted down the hallway: weed, old fried fish and of course, boiled cabbage. Boiled cabbage was the smell of despair and deferred dreams.

  1412 was semi-furnished, with a futon/couch frame and dresser-drawers. It was on the other side of the building, so there was no balcony. The window faced the alley, which was full of dumpsters.

  At least it was clean, for the most part. The only visible flaw was the discoloration right outside the air-conditioning vent. Carmine smears dribbled from the grate. Tituba touched it before she thought better of it. She felt a powdery dust on her fingertips, surprised to find that it was not dried paint or even worse, blood.

  * * *

  Fabiana was late, as she always was. Tituba had been sitting at the cafe for a good fifteen minutes. She entered the space with a dramatic flair, her face wrapped in a bright orange scarf, and wearing bejeweled sunglasses. Her hands were encased in some silvery gloves. Heads turned, whispers came up from the other tables. She always wanted to be noticed. While Tituba had her moments, for the most part she wanted to be left alone.

  Fabiana air-kissed her and then ordered an Americano and a low-fat blueberry muffin. She ignored both of the items.

  “How’s the new place? And when’s the housewarming?” Fabiana asked her as she removed her sunglasses, revealing violet-colored contact lenses.

  “The place is ratchet, so there will not be a housewarming party. Leah and that scrub Vaughn practically tossed me out into the street.”

  “I thought Leah had your back,: Fabiana said.

  “She usually does,” Tituba said, “when she’s not dick-a-matized. Vaughn pitched a fit when one of his boys asked him for my number. He threw around the words, ‘she-male,’ and tranny and accused me of flirting. Leah didn’t stop him. She became a whole other person. Meek and useless.”

  “Girl, if he had called me those names, I’d have sliced him up. I still carry my knife, in case anyone is fixing to get smart with me!”

  “Trust me, it got ugly. He was all, ‘What type of crazy name is Tituba?’ Frankly, I was angrier at my sister than I was at him. I felt betrayed.”

  “I’m so sorry for you,” Fabiana said. “Do you want me to do something to teach this dude a lesson? I know some people.”

  “No,” she replied. “I guess this is part of my journey. I thought I’d lucked out and wouldn’t have to go through people around me rejecting who I was.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Fabiana replied. She finally ate a bite of her muffin. A tiny bird bite. “You sleeping alright?” she asked.

  “No… Why do you ask?”

  “Them bags under your eyes, child. You know what will fix them? Hemorrhoid cream. It tightens the skin.”

  “I am not about to put ass cream under my eyes!” Tituba said. Both of them laughed loudly, causing the other café patrons to glance in their direction.

  Fabiana said playfully, “Keep it classy, bitch!”

  Tituba swatted at her hand. “Oh, hush. Seriously, though. Falling asleep isn’t the problem. Hell, staying asleep isn’t, either. I sleep, but I wake up tired, as if I had a tough work out at the gym or gone a few rounds with a boxer. And when I wake up, there's always some weird reddish dust on me. And it's not just me. My neighbors all look…—drained. One day, I saw a kid at the bus stop and his collar had stains of that red dust.”

  “Huh,” said Fabiana. “Have you heard about Sick Building Syndrome? It’s a place where all of the occupants get headaches and permanent sniffles. And fatigue. I think the Post did a series about it — one of the buildings owned by the EPA had it, and they had to close it.”

  “The effing Environmental Protection Agency had a ‘sick building?’”

  “You have to get out of there,” Fabiana said, “Or, you need to get all Norma Rae on the building supervisor!”

  * * *

  Dust! Miles and miles, dune after dune of rust-red, as far as her eye could see. A red that was the color of old blood, slowly changing from crimson to brown.

  She stood knee-deep in the middle
of a valley, surrounded by mounds of the stuff. The sky above was hidden, obscured by a veil of red powder. She was sinking under, unable to get purchase on the feathery ground. The clothes she wore were reduced to blood-stained rags. It looked like she was shedding a membranous skin, like a snake. Her skin had abrasions, a network of thin cuts that were crusted over and flaking.

  She must move on, before being swallowed whole by the wavering ground. If she didn’t move, she would drown and die, forever preserved beneath, a beautiful mummy no-one would ever see. She must move, or else she would die.

  She lifted one foot clear of the squelching redness. And the wind began to blow. Dust rose up into the air, into a corrosive mist that erased her body. Soon, she could not see anything. All was lost in the simoom.

  * * *

  Tituba woke up coughing. Her body shuddered with the fit. She could feel something rattling in her chest, as if her body were a percussion instrument filled with dry rice or sand. After the fit was over, she got up and switched the light on. Her tongue was heavy in her mouth, so she stumbled to the sink and drank two full glasses of water before she felt relatively normal.

  She put the glass in the sink, checked the time. It was three-thirty AM, early enough for a second shift of sleep. But she was too wired to get back into her bed. And, it seemed that she wasn’t the only person up at this hour. The floor above her creaked with footsteps. Bellona’s paper-thin walls revealed activity on either side of her apartment, coughing on the left, the plaintive voice of a distressed child on the right.

  Tituba knew that falling back to sleep would be difficult, so she pulled her phone from her charging port. Her headphones were on the ottoman next to her futon. That's when she first noticed the red dust. It was all over her mattress and futon, a fine sifting of rust-colored powder. She touched it. It didn't feel of anything. It was not coarse or smooth. It was feathery and insubstantial, even though she expected it to have a gritty feel like sand or salt. Then, it moved. An infinitesimal slither through her fingers, a blur of micro-movement. Reflexively, Tituba shook the stuff off her fingers and headphones.