Now, standing amid the bamboo, she closed her eyes, and thought of the drums, hard and heavy in her ears, her voice lifted to follow them, and her feet rose to match their rhythm. Her voice lifting into the old chants, the ones that would carry her spirit far from her body. The ones her mother had forbade her to use.
Out of the bamboo, above the house, she floated, followed the scent of her mother. Incense and oranges on her tongue as she followed her mother into a dark house, the sharp tang of citrus overtaken by the cloying smell of rotting flesh. Disease buried deep and working its way outward.
But it was not the older woman who smelled this way. Death had marked her. That was certain. Even Gable could see it from her place in the doorway, but the disease was in her brain, not in her body, and the decay that Gable smelled now came from her mother.
Uma turned and fixed her eyes on the spot that Gable occupied, and Gable fled the doorway, made her way back to her own body where she lay sweat slick under the green canopy waiting for Sisi to burst through the back door and tell her to come back inside.
When the girl finally did, Gable rose and made her way back to the house, gathering her dress against her as she went to ward off the chill settling deep into her flesh.
Her mother came in late. Gable heard her opening the door, taking off her shoes, before moving to the kitchen, and starting the burner for tea.
The door banged again as Sisi left, no doubt tucking the bills Uma paid her inside the small woven bag that she carried.
Gable pretended to sleep when Uma drifted past the door, but her mother did not pause to look in at her as she had on so many other nights. Instead, she went on to her own bedroom and closed and locked the door behind her.
In the morning, they did not speak, and Gable sat at her mother’s table and fought to keep from crying.
When her mother slipped a small black and white feather into the itiye she poured, Gable pretended not to notice and drank it down.
* * *
It was stupid and juvenile, and she should be ashamed, but she could not stop herself and flitted from house to house delivering her small gifts. These women with their barbed, gossiping tongues. They deserved something nasty.
The night air pulled at her, hard and insistent. The stillness in those enclosed houses and rooms stifled her, and she moved more and more quickly. If anyone were to wake, they would see only a bird, a blur of black and white feathers as it sought an exit, and then tumble back into dreams and forget.
Eventually, she found herself perched at the foot of a bed, staring down at the sleeping form of a young woman. Her belly swelled with child, and she twitched in her sleep, her hands pressed against the life that sparked there.
Gable did not remember flying here, to this house, and her mind searched back and back, but everything was dark.
Sisipho lay before her, and the girl reached out a hand to the opposite side of the bed. When she found it cold, found it empty, she withdrew her hand and frowned in her sleep.
Watching her, Gable felt no pity. Sisi had chosen poorly. A stupid, infatuated girl whose mother had to rush the marriage ceremony so that no one would see the slight bulge already appearing under her daughter’s dress.
Gable crept closer and pressed her beak against the hot skin stretched tight. It would be nothing, nothing at all, for her to push against that membrane, let the blood rush into her mouth, hot and bitter, and drink until she was full.
“Impundulu,” the voice said, and Gable looked up into Sisi’s open eyes. Her face was wet.
“Please,” Sisi said. “Take it out. Take it out of me.”
Gable traced her beak down Sisi’s abdomen, let it come to rest at the crest between her thighs, and breathed in. Salt and blood and sweat, and Gable was so thirsty. It would be so easy. So simple to take what she wanted.
From Sisi’s inner thigh, Gable tore away a chunk of flesh and gobbled it down where it sank like a stone inside of her. She could not bring herself to take more, no matter how it eased the burning in her throat.
She left the girl she had once known lying beneath her and sobbing, her hands twisted around bedclothes gone dark with blood.
Until morning she flew without stopping and without awareness. There was still the taste of blood on her tongue like burning iron, and it was only when the sun finally rose that she slept and did not dream.
* * *
Under moonlight and weak flame, Gable washed her mother’s wasting body, gathered old blood in a wooden bucket and carried it into the bamboo, dumped it back into the earth. There kneeling under the sky, she would let herself drift into the darkness, her lips barely moving as she chanted, the tiny skull and vertebrae of a bird pressed into her right hand as she threw them into the dust.
“Save her,” she whispered, but the ancestors did not hear, and every day her mother withered.
“I cannot do this,” she said two nights before the last breath her mother drew. “Not without you.” She could not tell her mother that she was frightened. Could not tell her of the nightmare she’d had the night before. Blood like a river flowing over their bodies. The both of them, submerged. Drowning. And the terrible bird, rising from the waters, its white feathers stained crimson.
Uma lifted her eyes, fever bright and rolling in their sockets. “Intombi. My little daughter. My little bird. Give me your hand.”
Rising up onto her arms, her mother panted. “Not alone. Dream of me, intombi. Dream of me and bring me back,” she said, and then her eyes fluttered backward, and she fell onto the pillow. She did not speak again, and in a day, her breathing slowed.
The old grandmothers found the two of them together, had to pull Gable away from the body, and still, she screamed and clung to the cold fingers.
“Leave us!” she told them, but they clucked their tongues and shushed her, smoothed her hair back as they whispered that it was better this way.
Gable let them bend and shape her body as they wished. Watched as their people streamed into Uma’s home, watched them slit the throat of a goat that should have been oxen, and opened her mouth to receive the small portion of meat that was meant for her and her only.
The women had not left her alone that night, and she closed the door of her bedroom on their small sounds. Again and again Gable chanted, tried to catch at the sounds of drums, but sleep would not come, and her mother’s body lay in the next room, a cold, rotted thing that would not rise again.
* * *
Outside, the sky turned black. Clouds piled one atop another, and she went to the kitchen and turned on the light. The faint yellow glow did little to chase away the gloom, so she turned to the window to watch the storm.
When the thunder began, her stomach clenched around the hollow Sisi had left, and she heaved. A thin line of drool fell from between her lips, and she sank to her knees, her fingers splayed before her, as the floor seemed to drop away and the back door blew open.
Again, her stomach contracted, and she gagged until a dark feather fell from her lips.
Taking it up, she smiled into the storm creeping into the kitchen. Lightning cracked in the distance, and the room flooded with ghostly light. The thunder drummed against the house, and she stood and gave herself over to the sound.
The heady scents of orange and incense flooded the small room, and she breathed them deep, took her mother’s smell inside of herself and hid it away.
“Uma,” she spoke into the lightning, and it was as if the lightning itself answered. The sound broke her wide open, and she sank to her knees under her dead mother’s voice.
“Bring me back, Gable. Lindelwa. Little daughter with your dark dreams. Bring me back.”
She thought the light would tear her apart, and she closed her eyes against it, but it still wormed along her skin, cutting against her with tiny, hot teeth, and she clawed at her dress, ripped at her hair. Everything burned and burned, but it was not beautiful in the way that she had always thought lightning to be.
Ugly and painful and
ugly, and she could not escape, but there was her mother’s voice, and she gave in to it. Sank into it like hot water, and her mother kissed her face and her hands, and Gable let her mother wipe the tears from her cheeks and the blood from her mouth, and there was no reason to fear.
Uma had died, had crossed into the place of ancestors, but she was here, with Gable, and it didn’t matter how it had happened, didn’t matter that it made no sense.
Cradled and safe, she followed her mother down into the dark, the places where Gable’s dreams dwelled, and her mother fed Gable from her own mouth, and she ate hungrily. She drifted and dreamed, images of water and feathers and shadowed places opening their mouths, and the thunder coursed through her, the lightning burning inside of her veins, and she was again inside of the river of blood, but this time she did not drown.
“Bring me back, Gable,” her mother said again, and the thunder stopped, and she lay on the kitchen floor, her dress torn to shreds, and her monthly blood between her legs.
Rising, she went to the sink, ran the water until it went hot, and then passed a rag beneath it. Carefully, she cleaned herself, and the water turned pink with her blood. When her skin was clean, she pulled her torn dress over her head and walked through the house naked. Here and there, she touched her fingers to a figurine, to a ceramic bowl, hard and smooth under her fingers, to the delicate lace embroidered along the bottom of the white curtains.
When she came to her mother’s bedroom, she opened the door and moved to the old dresser, pulled a dress from the drawers, and tugged it over her head. It did not fit, but it did not matter.
With her mother’s dress against her skin, she lay down on the bed, felt her blood come hot and thick between her thighs, and waited once more for nightfall.
* * *
The house was cold, and the rooms smelled of stale air and the slight salty tang of unwashed bodies. Gable stretched her wings to their full length, allowed herself to fill the room. She did not have to hide, did not have to tuck herself away into small corners, a tiny, skittish thing that moved on the night wind.
The rooms were dark, and Gable made her way through the sitting area crowded with piles of clothes that stank and down the hallway where a lone door stood open. From inside came the small sounds of someone pretending to sleep.
Sisi sat up when Gable pushed herself through the door, the lower half of Sisi’s face cloaked in shadow as if the dark was slowly gobbling her up. “Who do you work for, Impundulu?”
Gable did not need to answer her question. Uma’s spirit burned through her like lightning, shook her heart like thunder. There had never been anyone else. Just the two of them moving through the shadow world, their dreams thick on their tongues, the hard angles of bones clutched against their palms, and the taste of incense lingering in their mouths. Mother and daughter together as one.
Gable went to the girl then, and Sisi lay back, went quiet while Gable, while the Lightning Bird, moved above her, the bloodied beak dipping in and out of that secret place that created life. A life that had not been wanted but now rushed inside of Gable like strong, clean water. The current of a river filling her up until she thought that she would stop breathing.
In the morning, Sisipho’s husband would stumble home, his hands stinking of another woman’s body, and all that he would find was the empty shell of the woman he’d been forced to marry.
The old women would gather and mourn Sisipho, mourn the loss of her child, and Gable herself would perform the umkhapho, blood running over her hands as she ensured the first step in Sisipho’s descent into the world of ancestors.
Eventually, Sisi would appear before Gable in a dream, as the death ritual indicated, her teeth stained red, and Sisi would whisper that she was hungry. So hungry. And Gable would do what was expected of her—the amagqhira, the diviner, the healer—and guide her through.
* * *
Alone in her mother’s house, Gable waited. When the baby kicked, she sang to it, all of the songs that Uma had taught her, and from deep inside, the child remembered who it had once been. Gable was sure of it.
When the time came, the contractions shuddering through her, she bit down on her screams and walked deep into the bamboo. Panting, she squatted over the earth and let the pain roll over her, lost herself inside of a darkness so deep that she wasn’t sure she would ever break the surface, but then there was only a deep ache inside of her and the world filling up and everything stretching and tearing and there was only this moment, this bearing down, and the sky opening above her with brilliant light, and her blood rushing through her like thunder.
The girl child did not cry when her mother cradled her against her breast. Gable wiped the blood from the baby’s face and brought her lips to the small, sweet forehead, breathed in the smell of citrus and beneath that, a smell of something much older.
Gable’s daughter looked up with eyes the color of a deep river.
Eyes the color of dark feathers.
The Dream Eater
I don’t remember anything before the field.
Momma tells me that I wasn’t born here, that there was a time where I had seen something other than tall grass gone wild in the wind, but if that’s true, I don’t remember it. I can’t even be sure that I want to.
“It was beautiful,” she says and pulls a wet sheet from the basket at her feet, snaps it cleanly before hanging it on the line between us. I hand her another pin and don’t say anything. It’s better to lock everything up inside of me. Even if the words burn like acid deep in my stomach.
She hangs the laundry, and we don’t talk about how the circle of red clay that surrounds our tiny cabin seems smaller, the long, green blades closer. We don’t talk about the grass or the voices that come out of it in the night.
Instead, we finish the laundry, and I follow her inside where I pretend to swallow one of the meal replacement pills that are left in the white, government-issued bottles—Momma dry swallows hers—and we wait for the sun to set.
Momma sleeps, and I wait for the dreams.
I dream of the grass, verdant and cool on my tongue, as it unfurls delicate tendrils down my throat. Dream of it taking root and spilling out from between my teeth and then covering the world. Everything bright and green.
I asked Momma once what she dreamed about, but she shook her head and pressed her lips together so that I could barely seem them.
I know what she dreams about though. The grass breathes her nightmares into the wind, and I catch at them and gobble them down until I’m so full I think that I’ll burst.
The nightmares split open on my tongue. The forgotten taste of vanilla and burnt sugar. The smell of woodsmoke. Vermillion and gold and sapphire painting my insides. The colors of the old world. In my mother’s dreams, there is no green.
I haven’t taken one of the pills in three weeks. Momma needs them more than I do, and I haven’t been hungry in so long. Not with the grass grown so high. Not with it creeping closer every night. For a long time, it stayed away from the house. For years and years we played keep away. When it started to move, Momma cried. There isn’t anywhere else to go.
The next morning, I pull the old bucket off of the hook beside the back door and step outside. Fifteen steps should carry me to the well Momma’s daddy dug on this land when she was a little girl, but there is the line of grass, and I’m still five steps shy of where I should be.
I leave the bucket and come back into the house. Momma stares out of the window, and I know what it is that she’s seeing.
“Water’s gone, ain’t it?” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
She turns to me, and the whites of her eyes are spidered with red. “We’ll die without water.”
I look down at the gaps between the floorboards.
“Take your pill,” she says, and I palm it, put it back in the bottle when she ain’t looking.
That night, Momma doesn’t dream. There are things moving in the grass, great beasts lifting terrible, beautiful v
oices in song, but they offer me nothing, and my stomachs shrinks into itself.
I fall asleep to the chorus of their voices, and in the morning my mother stands over my bed. More red lines thread through her eyes.
“Have you been out there?”
“No,” I say.
She licks her lips and shifts from one foot to the other. A long time ago, a fox found its way to the cabin. Momma trapped it and kept it in a box with some holes punched through the top. Said that this was the last thing left. Other than us.
But there wasn’t nothing to feed it other than the pills, and so it wasn’t long before it died. She buried it, and I couldn’t tell where the clay stopped and its fur started.
Momma looked like that fox now. Eyes rolling around and nostrils flared. Like I’d trapped her in a box with nothing to eat. She brings her face close to mine, and her breath is hot against my skin. It smells like old earth, and I try not to open my mouth to breathe it in. Momma wouldn’t understand.
“They said it wouldn’t come here. They said to take the pills and to wait. But it’s out there. Isn’t it? In the grass?”
I hold her hand while she cries. I can’t cry for something I never saw, and all I can think about is the tinge of salt that will lay thick on my tongue when the grass brings me her dreams.
I don’t get out of bed, and Momma stays with me, curls her body close to mine, a womb of bones. We drift in and out of sleep, and sometimes, she trails her fingers over my hair, and I wait. I listen.
We stay like this all day. Locked around each other until shadows appear in the corners of the room.
The sun has not fully set, and the grass is moving. It creeps on quiet feet, but I hold my breath, and I can hear it. I open my mouth.
Everything That’s Underneath Page 9
