by Kwame Mbalia
I looked at Lady Night, excitement replacing my previous despair. “I know how to power the Story Box. I don’t always have to be the one to tell the story. Nana, my grandmother, she told me that. I just have to be the one to listen.”
A confused look crossed her face, but I squeezed past a baffled Junior, grinned at Ayanna, and slid out of the booth. “Lady Night, would it be okay if I moved the pot and stones to the stage?”
“I suppose…” she said. “Let me cool them down so you don’t burn yourself.” She blew once on the outside of the pot. “There, that should do it.”
I poked the pot with one tentative finger. Cool to the touch. “Thank you.” I put on the lid, grabbed the pot. “Gum Baby,” I called back over my shoulder, “grab the stones and meet me on the stage.”
“Why?”
“We’re gonna crowdsource a story.”
While I carried the pot, Gum Baby sat on my shoe, juggling the cooking stones and calling out directions.
“A little to the left!”
“No, your other left!”
“Watch out for that—”
I stubbed my toe against the bottom edge of the stage and toppled forward. I managed to keep the jollof rice from spilling out, but I banged my knee and collapsed into a heap. Gum Baby executed a perfect somersault and landed in the center of the stage, bowing to a smattering of applause from the crowd.
I glared at her as I picked up the cook pot and sat it on the stones, which Lady Night had set to glowing again from the back of the room. “Some guide you are.”
“It ain’t Gum Baby’s fault you’re clumsy,” she said.
You know that look grown-ups give you when you just did something wrong and they’re ready to unleash a blistering lecture that would strip paint from the walls, but they can’t because they’re in public? That’s the look I turned on Gum Baby. People were starting to gather around the stage, so I gritted my teeth and gave her my best You’re gonna get it later glare, which she ignored. I turned to watch everyone approach and got a good gander at the juke joint’s patrons.
They were a mix of folk. Farmers in boots caked with mud and couples in fine outfits and expensive jewelry. The boar who’d led the band cradled his saxophone in one hand and smoothed down the bristles atop his head with the other. A trio of badgers the size of golden retrievers huddled close together near the edge of the crowd. The strange pair of oxen from before, still wearing the weird sunglasses. And still more Alkeans flooded through the door, filling the room to capacity and then some.
There was a pocket of space surrounding an empty table on the edge of the dance floor, and on a hunch I held the Amagqirha’s bead from Isihlangu.
Sure enough, the table I’d thought was empty actually seated five or six spirits. Their golden eyes were turned to me, curious and expectant.
Lady Night had said that before Big Big took over, the juke joint was a place of refuge, a place to forget troubles, if only for a couple of hours. Entertainment and stories and good times were had. I guess word of Big Big’s downfall had spread quickly throughout the area.
And now they’re all looking at me, I thought. No pressure.
I clapped my hands once, twice, three times. “Alkeans,” I said loudly. “People. Animals. Spirits. My name is Tristan Strong.”
“I know you,” someone said. The boar. He pointed at me with the saxophone. “You’re that storyteller. The one who battled them iron monsters.”
The crowd murmured and I nodded. “Yes. That’s me.”
“You gonna tell a story? One of them magic ones?” Everyone seemed to lean forward at the question, and I swallowed a lump in my throat and shook my head. I wasn’t even going to attempt it.
“No. Not today.” The disappointment was audible as everyone in the room seemed to deflate. “Today, I need your stories.”
Silence.
“Alke’s in trouble,” I said. I forced my voice to project to the far corners of the room. “There’s a menace stalking the land, taking our joy and leaving behind fear.”
“There’s always a menace!” someone else shouted.
“That’s true. There will always be some new evil on the horizon looking to sneak into our lives when we aren’t looking and take what isn’t theirs. We will have to be on guard constantly.”
Lady Night moved through the crowd, slipping between her patrons with ease, until she stood just to the left of me, off the stage. She nodded at me to continue, Big Big the weasel now in her arms like a rich person’s Chihuahua. Ayanna and Junior joined her. Having friendly faces to focus on when I got nervous helped. I took a deep breath and spread my arms wide.
“I…need your help.” Saying those four words felt like pulling nails from my heart, but it got easier after that. “Someone—the Shamble Man—took something from me.” When I spoke the villain’s name, the murmuring crowd fell silent. “Not something, but someone. Someone special. And I’m going to get her back.”
I paused, then spoke those words again, slowly. “I’m going to get her back. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. I know I’m asking a lot, and we risk drawing the attention of the Shamble Man. You don’t have to help me. But…I would appreciate it greatly if you did.”
I stopped speaking abruptly. It was like my words had just run out and all that was left were the indescribable emotions rattling around inside me. The crowd shuffled, and murmurs traveled throughout the room. For once Gum Baby didn’t have anything to say.
Because she was sleeping.
She was lying on her back on stage left, one arm thrown over her eyes and a sap bubble slowly inflating and deflating as she snored softly.
Some people, I swear.
Just when it felt like I was completely on my own and nobody was going to put their life on the line to help me, some movement caught my eye. A mother and daughter who’d been keeping to themselves in the back now made their way to the stage. The little girl couldn’t have been more than four. She wore a simple gray dress and black shoes with silver buckles. Her hair was braided into two pigtails, each with a white ribbon tied in a bow at the end.
Her mother, with tired eyes but a gentle smile, nodded at me. “How can we help?” she asked.
I smiled back gratefully and dropped into a squat. “I am an Anansesem. I tell stories, and I collect them to share with others. Right now, I need your stories.” Standing up, I looked around the room and raised my voice. “I need stories about those people in your lives who helped you when no one else would or could. You know the ones I’m talking about. The people who, at a time in your life when you were struggling to keep your head above water, threw you a rope and pulled you to shore. Tell me about them, so I can find the person who helped me like that.”
No one spoke for a moment, and then the little girl raised her hand. I smiled and pointed at her. “Yes? Who’s your story about?”
She dropped her head shyly, fiddling with her hands as she spoke. “My grandfather. When my mommy was trapped inside the mean ship, he took care of me. When I cried or was afraid, he’d make silly shadow puppets by candlelight and tell me stories.”
Her mother’s hands held her close, and I met her eyes in shock. She’d been inside the Maafa, the slave ship that had sent forth the iron monsters. That experience, the trauma—it was something you never forgot.
I knew.
I nodded at the little girl. “Your grandfather is a wonderful man.” That made her smile, and she hugged her mother, happy to have contributed.
“My sister,” another man called from across the room. A farmer leaning against a wall. “When my home burned in the MidPass fire, she opened up hers to me and a few others until we got back on our feet.”
Lady Night caught my eye and nodded at the cook pot. It was glowing. The stories were working!
“Anyone else?” I asked. “Who stepped up for you when no one else would?”
The badgers stood as one. “The raven who lived in the tree above our den! He helped us escape the fires.”
“My aunt.”
“My brother.”
“Mami Wata from Nyanza.”
More people began to call out the names of those who had left an impression on their lives.
Like my nana.
The juke joint was filled with laughter as people swapped stories about their heroes. At my feet, the cook pot began to pulse with a silver-blue glow. I crouched just as Gum Baby yawned and stretched.
“How’d we do?” she asked.
“I did okay.” I lifted the lid of the cook pot and was hit with steam and spices that made my eyes water and my stomach growl. But I hungered more for the sleek black-and-gold phone resting on top of that mound of savory jollof rice.
It blinked to life, and the splash screen appeared: a tiny spider crawling across the display. That disappeared, and the home screen I’d been used to seeing dissolved into view. And there, in the top corner, Anansi lay sleeping in his web hammock.
I’d never been happier to see someone I didn’t actually trust.
I wiped the phone clean with a handkerchief the boar handed me. (Yes, I know, just roll with it.) For the first time in a long while, I felt like I had my feet under me and I just might have a chance of finding the Shamble Man, rescuing Nana and Mami Wata, and returning to my world safely.
And that’s when the plat-eyes returned.
I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF CELEBRATING.
I stood on the stage holding the SBP, grinning down at Anansi as he slept through all the chaos and turmoil. I raised the lit-up phone, and the crowd cheered. Ayanna and Lady Night high-fived. Everyone smiled and continued to call out the people who helped them, and the mood in the juke joint was incredible.
Except for Junior. He stared at me with a baleful glare. What was up with him now?
Meanwhile, Gum Baby was running back and forth across the stage, encouraging the crowd to tell their stories. “What about you? Somebody helped you with that outfit, ’cause Gum Baby saw you last week, and you were a mess. Shout them out!”
Everyone laughed, and I got an idea. I tapped the Listen Chile icon, the app that recorded stories and translated them for me so I could retell them on my travels. A blinking red light appeared in the corner of the screen, severing one of the anchor strands of Anansi’s hammock and sending the trickster god tumbling to the bottom of the phone.
“Hey!” he shouted, but I ignored him and held the SBP’s camera steady as I videoed the crowd, watching in awe as the names being mentioned appeared as golden text bubbles above each speaker, before bursting into dazzling confetti that floated to the top of the screen and filled the battery meter.
“Their stories are charging the Story Box,” I said in wonder. Lady Night stepped up onto the stage next to me and peeked over my shoulder.
“Of course they are,” Anansi grumbled. He climbed to his feet and dusted off his pants. “I could’ve told you that if you had—Oh, excuse me.” His gaze fell on the boo hag and his manner switched completely. “Pardon me, ma’am, I don’t believe we’ve met. My name is—”
“Anansi,” she interrupted. “The Weaver. Trickster god. Spinner of tales and tangled lies. I know who you are.”
I fought back a grin as Anansi hemmed and hawed, unused to being labeled so accurately. Lady Night winked at me and I shook my head, continuing to sweep the crowd, when a sound reached my ears.
He’s coming.
Those weird whispers again. Like when I’d seen the spirits in my grandparents’ barn. Right before…
A chill ran down my spine. Right before the plat-eyes had arrived.
I scanned the crowd. There, near the back of the club, was one of the creatures I’d thought was an ox, with the weird sunglasses.
You might think it strange that I said one of the creatures I’d thought was an ox, and you’d be perfectly justified in thinking that. However, one thing I need to make perfectly clear is THAT WASN’T AN OX!!!
“Anansi,” I whispered, “there’s a plat-eye in here.”
He glared at me. “Don’t you start…” His voice trailed off when he saw where the SBP’s camera was pointed. I pretended to move the phone around, but I kept it mostly on the plat-eye. Now that I studied the spirit, I didn’t see how I ever could’ve been fooled.
The sunglasses barely covered the creature’s giant white eyes. One horn was broken and dangling off the side of its head. Its fur was gray and matted, and clouds of steam trailed from its nostrils. The SBP outlined the creature in faint green, the same color Anansi’s adinkra glowed when there were iron monsters nearby, but I hesitated to jump to that conclusion. This wasn’t an iron monster…it was a creature from folktales. Now, what was it Nana had said about them? They could change shape and grow….
Before I could remember all the way back to…yesterday (wow, time flies when you’re saving the world), someone screamed.
I whipped around to find the second ox—no, of course, it was a plat-eye, too—standing next to the little brown girl with the pigtails. Her mother shielded her as the spirit stood on its hind legs and snorted. This one had three horns, the third peeking out from under its top hat. I really needed to work on my ability to see through shoddy disguises. If these were the same two that had attacked me in the barn, they’d looked a lot better as rottweiler cats.
“Is anyone here not a plat-eye?” I shouted, hopping off the stage before shouting directions. “Gum Baby, you’re with me! Ayanna, Junior, Lady Night, crowd control, please!”
The three of them nodded and spread out, directing people to a side exit. Lady Night spoke in a clear calm voice as Ayanna and Junior helped those who couldn’t move fast. The patrons listened to them, thankfully, which left me, a ten-inch sap doll, and a god trapped in a smartphone to face two plat-eye monsters.
Light work.
“All right then, y’all wanted to crash the party,” I told them. “Let’s go!”
Gum Baby ran up my side and flipped onto my shoulder, sap balls in hand as she waited for one of the spirits to make the first move. I slipped the SBP into my shorts pocket, vowing not to let it get damaged again. Then, favoring my uninjured wrist, I raised my hands and dropped into a boxer’s crouch. “C’mon, then!”
Several tense seconds passed. Then a minute. Still no one moved. The plat-eye duo shuffled their feet (hooves?) and kept glancing at each other. It was almost as if they were stalling. I jabbed a foot forward, feinting an attack, and they retreated. By this time the juke joint was empty, the enchanted drums tapping out a medium-tempo rhythm with the booming thump of the kick drum interrupting every so often. Ayanna and Junior returned and divided to take up stations on opposite sides of the room. We now had the plat-eyes surrounded.
Gum Baby shifted on my shoulder. “Are these cowboys gonna fight or what? HEY! ARE Y’ALL GONNA FIGHT?”
But it didn’t seem like the monsters wanted to. In fact, the way they snorted and tossed their heads at each other, it was almost as if each was trying to convince the other to make the first move. Like a dare. Or they were trying to work up the courage to…
“They’ve got something to say,” I said slowly.
“What?” Gum Baby accidentally smooshed a sap ball in my face as she turned to look at me. “Say something? What’re they gonna say? Moo? Speak up, Bumbletongue. You can’t just start talking to Gum Baby and not finish your sentence.”
I wiped sap from my lips and glared at her. “I said, I think they’ve got something to say, but I can’t understand it. We need a translator, something that can help me with…”
The SBP vibrated in my pocket at the same time that I realized the answer to my problem. When I took it out, Anansi was leaning against the edge of the screen eating an apple he’d pulled from…Actually, I had no idea where he’d pulled that apple from. He tossed the core away and it disintegrated into pixels as he brushed his hands on his pants. “So…are you ready to listen?”
“Yes,” I said, straightening. “Yes, I’m ready.”
“Good. I seem to remember your gra
ndmother telling you about the plat-eyes, and what they represented. Do you?”
I wrinkled my forehead as I tried to think. “They’re spirits that can’t move on. There’s something they need to get done, and they haunt the person they think can help them.”
Anansi nodded, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a giant wallet. He opened it and flipped through the billfold like a rich person searching for a bill smaller than a hundred. But it wasn’t money he pulled out.
“Ah, there it is.” He stuck in his fingers, then his whole arm, until his shoulder had nearly disappeared into the wallet, and emerged with a rounded rectangular app clutched in his hand. The icon had a glittering black background with a single uppercase letter D in the center that flickered from red to green. Anansi tossed it into the air, where it began to spin slowly in the middle of the screen.
“What is that?” I asked, keeping an eye on the milling plat-eyes at the same time.
“That, my boy, is the Diaspor-app.”
“It’s bigger than the others.”
“It better be. All those permissions you were so kind as to grant me? They went into the construction of this beauty. It’s your one-stop shop for everything dealing with the Diaspora. Those stories you collected? They will be sorted and categorized, and you will be able to trace their origins and also the relationships between them. Ever wonder why Brer Rabbit’s stories are so similar to my own? Find the roots. Mine are the originals, of course, but that’s a lesson for another day. Right now, you need a translator. Well, pop open this one-of-a-kind web app and watch the language barrier disappear.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Go ahead,” Anansi said. “Give it a whirl. Sure beats standing around doing a whole lotta nothing.”
“Tristan?” Ayanna called. “Is everything all right?”
Gum Baby tossed sap balls menacingly. “No, it ain’t all right! He’s gonna try and talk it out! Can you believe that? Gum Baby came with two tickets to the gum show, and she ain’t handing out rain checks.”
I ignored them all and tapped the icon. The SBP vibrated twice, and then the screen went black. After a few seconds, a pulsating amber globe appeared and started to rotate. I waited for something else to happen, but nothing did.
