It would be nice to say he was a changed man. In a sense, yes; freed from the tyranny of telling, his hearing improved drastically. Otherwise, no; true change only happens in the world, not in stories. But perhaps she measured her husband’s change in ways that are important to wives, not storytellers.
So make what you will. On some moonlit nights, redolent with fading jasmine blooms, Shanti’s hands would slow to the pace of oars in quiet water, then stop entirely. On account of his improved hearing, she had no need to say anything. Sankara would reach for his wife and strive to tell, as all storytellers are wont to do, the impossible to tell.
Northern Lights
Eden Robinson
We lived in a trailer and the sun beat down on the roof in the summer and I would lie on the top bunk and let the heat fry my brain.
The mattress was lumpy. My shiny, satin basketball shorts were loose, hand-me-downs still in the shape of their previous owner. My mouth was dry. Sweat pooled everywhere, dripped down my face, down my armpits, slid across my skin like snails. The walls were warped fake wood panel. The ceiling was stained. I lay with my hands at my side, palms up, feet slightly apart, breathing slowly. Long breaths in. Long breaths out. I’m not sure where I read about astral projection but decided to give it a go.
We lived near a dock where the children would swim. Their voices echoed in the bay the way they would underwater. The washed-out sky darkened near the mountains and the reflection of it colored the ocean. Speedboats carved white wakes. A car cruised by. A woman called out:
“Get out of the damned water! I mean it! I told you to be home hours ago!”
Night never really came. I knew, I knew, I knew I could rise up out of my body and wander in space if I could just forget to think. If I could tune out the cats yowling in the neighbor’s yard or the cough of the woman who walked her dogs and smoked cigarette after cigarette, curled into herself like a question mark.
The sun rose like the dead on Judgment Day, all jubilant and shiny, judge-y gold fingers pointing everywhere.
I tried for days. I tried until green geometric patterns swirled in front of my eyes and my body felt Novocain numb. I crawled from the bunk and staggered down the hallway and poured myself a bowl of Honeycomb cereal. I sat beside my brother and we watched cartoons.
“Were you sick?” he said.
“No.”
“I thought you were sick. You were green all over.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Glowstick green, like you got bit by a radioactive spider.”
“Huh.”
I was imagining myself as Spider-Man and thinking how cool that would be, or my brother was imagining me as Spider-Man. When we were small our thoughts ran together like streams merging. Sometimes we’d think together and we’d get ourselves mixed up and I’d remember him on the top bunk glowing like Northern Lights in the middle of winter, crackling, surrounded by the dead who whispered like dry leaves.
One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sunlight
Tade Thompson
One
It started with a thud, then a prolonged scrape, earth and gravel against metal, followed by a muted thump. Digging. It shook me out of my reverie.
Someone was digging into my grave and I had nowhere to run. Something hard and sharp hit my left shin. I was bleeding; I could feel the warm wetness. Movement stopped. I imagined the digger contemplating the horror of finding a buried human leg. He muttered something to himself, but the earth muffled it. He started to grope my leg. I let him. He could do the work of exhuming me.
This was like being born.
He pulled me from the earth, alternately praying and swearing. I kept my eyes closed while he brushed me clean, blew dust out of my ears, the angles of my eyes, my nostrils, my mouth. I heard him hawk, spit, banish evil spirits, invoke his ancestors.
I opened my eyes a crack. The digger was short, very dark and sweaty. He had a small, round belly, but the rest of him was muscular. He wore only a loin-cloth and various trinkets—hyena’s teeth, snakes head, cowry shell necklace. His hair was ragged, dreadlocked. He was a witch doctor. No wonder he didn’t run.
Witch doctors were troublesome. Quite impossible to predict what any given one would do. I had encountered many and still wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. They could fall prostrate and worship. They could draw a machete and attack. They could self-mutilate. Mostly males, but the females were always more extreme in their reactions. They were, to a one, lacking in supernatural ability of any kind. It wasn’t always so.
This witch doctor began a dance but I couldn’t make up my mind if it was a form of worship or protection against evil. At this point I didn’t care; the sun had gone to work on my skin. I felt tingling, pins and needles. The wound he had inflicted on me with his shovel itched. I opened my eyes fully and sat up.
There was a time when he and I would be obligated to try to kill one another, a mongoose-cobra kind of relationship.
I brushed off the dirt, blinked a few times to clear my vision and stood. The witch doctor didn’t move, kept his eyes fixed on mine. The sun broke through the leafy canopy in columns of light, one of which fell directly on my back, in between my shoulders. I could feel the skin crawl. I moved. The doctor said something, but I couldn’t understand the dialect. I left him making odd gestures in the air, powerless, impotent supplications to long dead gods.
What you need to know about witch doctors:
Nobody really likes them except during times of smallpox epidemics.
Many of them are completely insane.
They are good with herbs.
Witch doctors trade in fear.
No matter what you may have heard no witch doctor has ever been able to fly.
The last real witch doctor died in 1956 when Her Majesty Elizabeth II visited these shores.
The first witch doctor was a hunter.
Getting away meant I had to cross a plain in the middle of day. I stood in the shade of a palm tree and calculated going around as opposed to sprinting across in direct sunlight. There were no animals.
I crouched, waited; a place without animals is rarely healthy.
After about an hour an obscene scream split the air, followed by an explosion of foliage and wet timber.
The humans were fighting each other again.
Two
The skirmish lasted all day and I had to wait. After the rocket launchers and the automatic weapons the two sides finished it off with bladed weapons. I watched, I waited. I can be patient. Twelve hours is nothing to me.
I did not feed on the dead humans.
As soon as the last wounded man was helped into the Medevac truck I sprinted into the open. The sun was almost down but the exposure had given my skin a baked texture, with cracks around the joints. I followed the dried up river bed through some overgrown, long-abandoned plantation. The irrigation gullies were better for travel so I favored them.
I reached Lei’s house by nightfall.
Lei’s was a cottage of wood and corrugated tin hacked out of the forest. She had some animals—goats, pigs and a few geese, protected by netting from wild canines and felines. The windows to her bedroom were open and a tallow candle burned within. She made the candles herself from lard, and they smelled foul. The grass ended sharply a few yards to the cottage. Lei was obsessive about cleanliness and kept the foliage at bay.
On approach I made as much noise as was possible. It was only polite to announce my arrival. I coughed, disturbed the animals, causing a few bleats and squeals, making sure she would be awake. Lei’s face appeared at the window; she saw me but showed no surprise.
“Welcome, visitor. I hope your journey was pleasant,” she said. She always greeted me formally.
I said nothing. Her face disappeared and I heard rummaging. I went round to the front of the house where she held the door open for me. The first time I met her she blew my chest apart with a shotgun from this same doorway. It was most unpleasant.
She started off with a
smile, but saw my skin and her face crumpled. In the cooler night air steam rose off me steadily. I was surprisingly touched by her concern—I didn’t feel a lot of emotions anymore.
Lei was a witch. This was fine with me because witches were helpful most of the time.
About Lei: many years ago she was a young woman, recently married, from a village called Aba, known for its prolific local tin mines. Her husband was a farmer, finding the whole mining process made him claustrophobic, and who could blame him? Lei became pregnant after a year of trying, uncharacteristically slow when the fecundity of her sisters was considered. When her time came near, however, Lei started to hear her ancestors whisper blasphemous songs and couplets, and with time she could be seen wandering the byways, shiny belly protruding, arguing with phantasms. Her husband, a good man, was clearly distraught. He went to see the witch doctor, who said Lei was possessed. He recommended the forty sacred lashes, which would cleanse any person from unclean spirits.
The result of the exorcism was blood, torn muscle and one stillborn male child, with Lei still talking to herself.
The good doctor declared her a witch and banished her. They strapped her dead baby to her still bleeding back and sent her into the Forest of the Dead along with her demons.
She got better.
She lived in a pit, screamed through the fever of infection, survived tetanus, fought the woods for a living. The women of Aba brought her gifts so that she could tell their fortunes. She did well; they built her a proper house. She never buried her son. His dried-up, shrunken corpse dangled from a ceiling ornament in her living room. It impressed the customers.
The first time I came across the cottage I thought it was abandoned.
More about Lei: she was heavy-breasted and coffee-skinned. She wore her hair long and plaited.
“Why do humans fight each other?” I asked Lei.
These were the first words I had spoken in this visit. On some occasions I would say nothing at all.
I lay on a raffia mat, supine, while Lei poured palm oil on my skin, a salve for my burns. They would have healed in a few hours without intervention but this felt good and I enjoyed being with Lei. The room was filled with the disgusting tallow odor from the candle, but she had once told me it kept evil spirits out. My ability to tolerate the smell made me a good spirit in her eyes.
After applying the oil she would stop and rub it in with calloused hands, not realising this caused me pain, but I didn’t complain. The skin had begun to harden. This always happened when I got exposed to the sun. It would have the consistency of leather for one hundred and twenty days, and then I would shed it like a snake does its own skin. My weakness is also my strength.
Lei said, “Iron birds fly overhead, shitting fire into the woods, because men choose to kill each other. Maybe I should put these birds in a cage, ask them to sing their death songs to me.”
She rubbed oil over my belly, an elegant move for someone with farmer’s hands.
“The eggs they lay hatch destruction.”
Her hand moved toward my groin.
“The birds drop men from on high, highways of blood. They have wings which billow upwards and let them fall without harm befalling them.”
Her hand encircled my penis.
“Yes,” I said. I pulled her down to me. “But why?”
Three days I stayed with Lei. By the time I left I might as well have been wearing clothes. Hair wouldn’t grow through the leather plates so my skin was smooth on my back, head, armpits and groin. The paradox is that in this state I could easily walk about in daylight.
One hundred and twenty days of sunlight.
I used them to observe battle from the treetops seventeen miles west of Lei’s place. No offal and blood from this distance, just bodies breaking and the pretty lights of explosions or the ghostly progress of sarin gas.
I could not understand the futility: the two sides were evenly matched, supplied weapons from the same manufacturer, probably from the same arms dealer.
My leather face has no emotional expression. This is important in what happened next.
I never found out what the field commander’s name was. In the ebb and flow of battle there are usually only brief flashes of bravery before the brave become the dead. The field commander was one of those rare creatures who could create miracles several times a day and live through it. Neither side lost or gained ground but the field commander lost fewer men. Before excursions into the enemy zone he would scour the area with field glasses. I hung on to a tree trunk and by then my skin was no different from the bark. No risk of being seen. His men followed without question, moving from spot to spot quietly and swiftly, mourning loses, encouraging, bullying. I wondered if he believed in the reason for the war. I became fascinated with him.
He had complete fatigues, unlike others who sported a ragtag appearance. His cheekbones were prominent and there looked to be no fat on him anywhere. He was taller than most, wiry, agile. He always widened his eyes when going into battle, the whites contrasting the dark brown skin. He killed automatically, but without unnecessary cruelty. He did not condone cruelty among his men although there was the one time he ordered mutilation. He chopped off the right hands of enemy prisoners and then let them loose. I imagine it was a terror tactic.
After posting lookouts they withdrew to various camps and celebrated … something. I followed, leaping silently from treetop to treetop. The commander stayed apart from the rest, drinking quietly, declining the attention of the topless females dancing around a fire. As part of the bacchanal they shot rounds into the air, shooting God, showing off their power with their mechanical erections.
The commander did not even break a smile while the others whooped like spider monkeys. And shot rifles. In my direction.
I took four hits. Belly, chest, collar bone and forehead.
I’ve been shot a number of times before and as weapons go I find firearms unimpressive. The impact from these dislodged my grip on the tree momentarily. I slid down a few notches before stabilizing. By the time my thighs had gripped the trunk all had gone quiet in the camp. The field commander was standing, holding binoculars, pointing them in my direction. His mouth opened; he could see me.
He pointed and a dozen automatic rifles swung toward me. I left the way I came, cries of iwin dying away as I created distance, chased by bullets that whined like mosquitoes.
Iwin.
This is a Yoruba word meaning “spirit” or perhaps “demon.” It does not mean “ghost” as the iwin have never been human. A human of great skill in any area can be colloquially called iwin.
Spirits in Yoruba legend can be tangible and interact on the physical plane with humans.
That is not me.
I was once human.
Three
I was drowning.
Again.
When I was seven my father told me about a Portuguese slave ship called Tecoraz. The story came back to me at the bottom of the river as I drowned for the fifth time.
When I was seven my father said, “we ran guns. Our family had an agreement with the Portuguese to supply gold and slaves for gunpowder and rifles and odd mechanical contraptions. And medicines. The mechanicals were from Venice. This arrangement worked for three generations. The white men liked it better if they could stay at their camps at the coast. The interior was full of malaria and savages, which is what they called us even to our faces. We brought them cargo, they paid for it. That was the arrangement. Your grandfather was the last of our men to deal with them.”
“Because of Tecoraz?” I asked.
“Because of Lord Wilberforce. But, yes, also because of what happened on Tecoraz. There was a problem with the gold mines and we had to make up the shortfall with cargo.”
“You mean slaves? People?”
“From the Nsi village. You know they’re not people in the real sense. Nsi men wipe their arses with their hands after shitting. Disgusting. Little more than baboons. We were doing them a favor sending t
hem across the sea. And we were at war with them back then. Your grandfather organized a raiding party. I was seventeen and he took me along. It was easy; we had rifles and they didn’t. By the light of the moon we had the briefest of skirmishes and they surrendered. They were chained in less than an hour, and on the beach by dawn. By sunrise they were all tightly packed in the Tecoraz and our Portuguese contact had paid us. His name was Anacleto. Stinky little man, but ruthless. He used to carry six flintlocks in his belt in case he had to fire rapidly. I never saw him again.”
“Why?”
“The Tecoraz never returned. Initially your grandfather assumed it was shot to pieces by the British, which was probable back then because Anacleto was an occasional pirate. But years later one of those insane Catholics wandered into our village, delirious with malaria but not dead. In his ramblings he mentioned the ship. He said there had been a fight.”
When I was seven my father said, “the story we got out of the catholic was … disturbing, but not without precedent.”
“What happened?”
“Anacleto was hanged in Sao Paolo. They charged him with murder, cannibalism and blasphemy. All the slaves were dead, but not all accounted for from the manifest. The dead ones had been cut or gouged or bitten. At least half had been drained of all blood. The judiciary thought he had become a lunatic, but he seemed lucid on examination. He spoke of a beast that emerged from amongst the cargo, killing and eating its way through like a canker worm. Then it attacked the crew. Anacleto said one of his workers, a mulatto called Pedro, engaged the beast and they both fell overboard. Anacleto alone escaped to tell the tale. Quite a feat of navigation to get to a port.”
“What was the beast?” I asked.
My father looked at me briefly in the firelight. He seemed to stare at the smoke rising from the flames and escaping through the roof of our hut.
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