Freshwater

by Akwaeke Emezi

  “I fucking love you,” I said.

  Ewan kept thrusting, pounding in the dark, and when he spoke, his voice was a stranger’s, slurred and hard.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said.

  I swear, I never felt more stupid and useless than I did in that moment; like I was some whore he was just dumping into. Ada knew how Ewan was when he was drunk and high, when he pissed on coffee tables, when he couldn’t remember a thing that he’d done or said—which was the case this time. He went back to himself in the days afterward, but it didn’t matter. He had already insulted me, and wallahi, I was unforgiving and petty and vindictive. Don’t expect anything else from an ọgbanje.

  I targeted one of Ewan’s friends on the tennis team, a boy who had always seemed to hate Ada, but I could see him and I could smell the truth. Ada was a beautiful girl and this friend had to watch her, knowing that Ewan got to fuck her and he didn’t. He was human. There was bound to be desire lying under his hatred—there always is. So it was easy to take him home at the end of one night, and of course he agreed. He kissed me and sank his fingers into Ada’s body before coming with my hand wrapped around him. I kicked him out of Ada’s room as soon as we were done and turned inward.

  “Really?” said Ada. She was folding her arms and leaning against the marble, her eyes red from crying over Ewan. “His friend?”

  “And so?” I answered. “Ewan won’t care. He let us go, remember? He doesn’t love us. He made that fucking clear.”

  Ada winced and looked away. I came close to her and ran my hand along her cheek.

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “Fine girl. There are others who will want us, who I can make want us. It’s easy.”

  I had her put her pain with me because I could use it as fuel, I could do things with it that she couldn’t. Like fucking one of the track runners, a boy with a silken Southern drawl and hooded eyes that dripped sex from the lashes. Trust me, I didn’t need Ewan, and if Ada thought she did, I would make her forget. There were many, many other things we could be doing.

  Saachi and Chima were angry because Ada insisted on flying to Georgia to spend a month with her friend Itohan, instead of coming straight to Saachi’s house with them. I didn’t give a shit about their anger—mine was much larger and stronger. Except for Añuli, they’d soured the graduation for Ada, keeping her from her friends, the people who really knew what was going on in her life. She didn’t know when she’d see Malena or Catia again. Luka was going back to Serbia. Axel and Denis were going to Iceland to coach volleyball, Juan was going back to Mexico. The house at the bottom of the hill was going to be empty.

  We had lost Ewan. Ada was devastated, but I had work to do, so we went to Georgia.

  It felt strange to be back there. Things there were the same, but everything for Ada and I was completely different because we’d just spent a whole year with Ewan. I was done with him. I wanted him out of Ada’s head and I wanted her to stop loving him. I was furious. I wanted a new toy and I already knew I was going to play rough. It’s not as if there was gentleness in me to start with. I was hungry and I was hunting. I couldn’t stop myself and I didn’t want to—the whole point of my existence was to run wild and tear whoever fell into my mouth into pieces. I picked Itohan’s other brother, the older one. I started grooming him, which was easy because he and Ada were close, and after about a week or two of this, Itohan pulled Ada aside, saying they needed to talk.

  “What’s up?” Ada asked, her face open and friendly. I lurked behind it, as usual.

  “I know you don’t know how it looks,” Itohan said, her long hair roughly pushed behind an ear, her lipstick matte and red. “When you and him are hanging out upstairs and the rest of us are downstairs.”

  “He was just showing me his books,” Ada said, and I fought to keep from laughing out of her mouth.

  “I know.” Itohan kept her voice friendly. “But it’s just somehow when you and him are alone in his room together.”

  She smiled, trying to be kind. Inside the marble room, I let out a shriek of laughter and Ada kicked me in the shin, hissing at me to shut up. On her face, she was maintaining a worried and slightly scared frown for Itohan’s benefit.

  “I know it’s not intentional,” Itohan was saying, “but just think about how it looks, okay? You two can’t date, not after you dated my younger brother.”

  The marble suddenly felt cold around me. “Wow,” I said, my laughter fading. “She really thinks we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “Good,” muttered Ada. “Lucky for me.”

  I couldn’t fucking believe it. They still saw only Ada; they still gave her the benefit of the doubt even when you’d have to be an idiot not to realize how it looked, as Itohan put it. It was amazing. I had planned every touch of skin, every coy glance that wove the older brother in, yet everyone stayed blind. It was as if they were all stuck in that nice, innocent Christian world Ada used to be a part of, before she was ripped out by my birth. And now, after everything that had happened with Ewan, there was absolutely no way Ada could return. She was an imposter; she was now me. I’d contaminated her too much—we had done too much together.

  So she and I nodded obediently at Itohan, but I had no intention of stopping. What for? I wasn’t finished with the older brother, not yet. I had spent weeks trying to crack him open the way I wanted. I played soft and sweet, I pretended to be Ada since she was the one he loved. I brushed her fingertips over the back of his hand as he drove and gave him shy smiles till we were alone, and then I slid my palms over his jeans, but he stopped me. Maybe he could smell the difference between her and me, between the grassy lemon of her and my coppered scent. I don’t know what it was—maybe he just knew her well enough to know who I wasn’t. But he wouldn’t surrender and it made me angry. I told him I loved him and he still wouldn’t surrender, he wouldn’t let me touch him. I had arrived in Georgia wrapped in a red rage, and after Ewan, this second refusal blinded me with fury. He denied me at his own risk.

  So the night before Ada was leaving, I slid her out of the guest room and into the younger brother’s room. He was the type I knew, easy and predictable. I fucked him with Ada’s body, with his older brother in the next room, asleep and still in love with Ada, with their mother down the hall next to her Bible. The next morning, I sat the older brother down and pretended to be Ada and told him that she had never loved him, a trick I learned from Soren. I watched his heart crack and fall into shimmering pieces of dust, and it was good, it felt correct. This was the lesson: I can fuck you or I can fuck you up—simple.

  After I hurt him, he still got up and drove Ada to the airport. You see, what I realized later was that he wasn’t like the others I targeted. He was gentle; he didn’t deserve to be punished. But we had lost Ewan and I was there and I was born into what I was born into. I have always been a weapon and I am not obliged to be fair. My only mistake was that I forgot one small detail: Ada did love the older brother. Very much, in fact.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I had gone too far.

  Chapter Eleven

  You will always be in the process of change because every time you get born into a basilisk, that basilisk consumes itself so you can be born into another basilisk.

  We

  Asụghara could not be left alone; that would be unnatural. When something stands, something else stands beside it. So on the day she was born in Virginia, there was another one born with her as she tore through that window. His name was Saint Vincent, because when he sloughed off Asụghara’s side, he fell with holiness on his hands.

  The Ada named him and he remained in the marble of her mind because he couldn’t survive her body. Saint Vincent was long fingered and cool, with slow and simmering hungers. He was strange; we could never quite place him, where his parts came from. He was not expected to come through the window, but he did and so he was born in a portal, a son of flux space. What we mean is that he was not godspawn like Asụghara. He belonged nowhere, except maybe to th
e Ada. He was gentle, soft as a ghost. That was good—he was no threat to Asụghara, he would not compete with her for control.

  No, Saint Vincent preferred to move inside the Ada’s dreams, when she was floating in our realm, untethered and malleable. He molded her into a new body there, a dreambody with reorganized flesh and a penis complete with functioning nerves and expanding blood vessels, tautening easily into an erection. Even Asụghara was impressed; she couldn’t mold or build in our realm the way that he could. Saint Vincent used the dreambody as his. He wove other bodies in our realm for him to ride, for him to place astride his hips, swallowing him up. When he came, his pleasure was a concentrated burst of light, anchored and distilled in his groin. It was different from what Asụghara experienced with the Ada’s body—those orgasms would spread in a diffuse wash that drowned her. This separation of pleasures was good: Saint Vincent stayed in our realm and in the marble of the Ada’s mind, while Asụghara met him in the marble but moved in the flesh.

  He was no less holy for the things he did with the dreambody—you must understand that we see holy as removed from flesh and therefore purer. Saint Vincent was uncontaminated, quarantined, even. Perhaps in another world, where the Ada was not split and segmented, she and Saint Vincent might have been one thing together. After all, she was always being mistaken for a boy when she was a child, when her hair was short for the first time. Perhaps he had been there all along and we just never noticed, we were so young.

  The Ada had liked being seen as a boy. She felt like it fit, or at least the misfit of it fit, the wrongness was right. She was perhaps eleven years old then. Her chest was flat, her hips were narrow, her hair was short, and there must have been something about her face that wasn’t delicate enough. When she went swimming at the local sports club with Lisa, adults would stop her in the women’s changing room.

  “Why are you in here?” they’d ask, or, “Why are you wearing a girl’s swimsuit?”

  The Ada felt like a trickster, which felt right. She could move between boy and girl, which was a freedom, for her and for us. But when she turned twelve and started bleeding, everything was ruined. The hormones redid her body, remaking it without consent from us or the Ada. We were distressed at this re-forming of our vessel, very much so, because it was nothing other than a cruel reminder that we were now flesh, that we could not control our form, that we were in a cage that obeyed other laws, human laws. We had no choice in this warping, this unnatural maturing. There was blackish blood, a swelling chest, hair sprouting like an evil forest. It pushed us into a space we hated, a marked plane that was too clear and too wrong.

  Around that time, one afternoon, the Ada was walking down the road with her cousin Obiageli. The Ada said something rude, a touch insolent, and Obiageli reacted by reaching out and poking her finger into the Ada’s chest, right in her new breasts.

  “Because you have these apples now, ehn? That’s why you’re talking like that?” Obiageli chuckled at the Ada’s shocked face and kept walking.

  Inside the Ada, we shuddered and retched from that touch, turning her stomach over. The quick revulsion wouldn’t go away. We were loud and kicking against this meatbody we’d been shoved into; we wanted to be let out, this was an abomination. But the Ada had learned her trick of quick sacrifices just that year, so when they got back to the house, she cut into the back of her hand and bled us into a restless silence. She would continue, if you remember, for another twelve years, but back then was when she learned that the sacrifices worked, that using blood could make existence bearable, at least for a little while.

  She tried to make us comfortable, as if in apology for her bleeding and bulging body; she dug into Saul’s old suitcases and found his shirts from when he lived in London, button-downs that were too big for her, which was perfect. The Ada covered her new body in flowered red polyester and crisp green cotton, hiding it away. She wore loose cargo trousers in army green with seven deep pockets, until the cuffs tore and frayed. When she overheard one of her classmates describe her as busty, she decided it was not real. It felt like he was talking about someone else.

  All of this is to say that everything has existed in another form prior to its current one, so when Saint Vincent showed up, the Ada was not surprised. She welcomed his delicate masculinity arranging itself in folds inside her; she welcomed his company because she was, of course, always lonely. It brought her a small amount of grief when she realized that he was restricted to using only a dreambody because hers was simply wrong. Her body worked for Asụghara, but Saint Vincent would be neutered within it, with nothing weighing down between his legs, just canals lined in velveteen. His hungers were different, but simple. Saint Vincent wanted the soft nape of a girl’s neck against his mouth and he wanted it enough that the Ada went to get it for him.

  It was a clumsy attempt. The Ada tried to explain the existence of Saint Vincent to one of her college friends who he found beautiful, but this was the Ada and she was not Asụghara, she did not have that silken charm. So the conversation was awkward, and as the Ada spoke the words exposing Saint Vincent’s existence and desires, she knew it sounded crazy; you could not put him into a mouth and expect it to sound sane. Her beautiful friend was polite but uninterested, and she turned the Ada down. It should not have been surprising, yet the Ada found herself retreating inside her mind, humiliated by this rejection, confused and hurt.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she muttered to herself as she paced around the marble. “Of course she doesn’t want you. Who would?”

  “It’s enough.” Asụghara stepped in and grabbed the Ada’s arms, pinning them at her sides, leaning her forehead against the Ada’s. “You tried. It’s enough. We won’t tell anyone about him ever again, you hear? We’ll keep him in here. No one except us can understand.”

  Teary-eyed, the Ada nodded, and just like that, Saint Vincent became a secret buried in the marble. Perhaps it is not how we would have done things, but as we said, the beastself was running things and she thought it was for the best. It was how she moved; she pushed them back and hid them in the marble in order to protect them—first the Ada, and now Saint Vincent. Asụghara was the blade, forever flirting with the softness of people’s throats. They were balanced now—the Ada, her little beast, and her saint—the three of them locked in marbled flesh, burning through the world.

  But no matter what skins they shed in this foreign country, we remembered where they came from and we remembered the first mother. Ala is all earth, no matter the oceans; the Ada was still walking on soil that belonged to her mother. Even her flesh belonged to Ala, for, as we have said, it is on her lips that humans are born, and there they live until they die. We were still her children, distilled into tripled hatchlings. Otu nne na-amụ, mana ọ bụghị otu chi na-eke. And to be named is to gain power, let alone to be named thrice over. Our heat was building, spilling through the gates, calling the others, pulling them like a sun with weight. We should have known, we should have been warned—the children of our mother do not forget pacts and their oaths taste of anger and alligator pepper. They were gathering in rain clouds, their voices distant and dreamlike, but grating like torn metal.

  You are looking for our trouble, they sang. Gin spilled on the soil, blood wiped over clay, and they spoke in a legion of voices.

  What are you going to do when we come?

  Chapter Twelve

  I can die today, I can die tomorrow.

  Asụghara

  I heard the clacking first.

  It was rhythmic and regular, bouncing off the walls and domed ceilings of Ada’s mind. “Stop it, Vincent,” I said, not turning around. “I don’t like that sound.” Sometimes he got restless and did things that irritated the hell out of me, like whistling ghost-birds across the ceiling or turning the marble into a maze of crying walls. I wasn’t in the mood for another of his games. I had been having a quiet morning standing at Ada’s eyes, not really doing anything, just looking out into her world.

  The cla
cking continued, and under it I could hear a soft brushing that made my bones start to itch. That was definitely not Vincent. I turned around with my fingernails biting into my palms and I saw the first one. It was moving across the floor toward me, wearing a hooded bodysuit woven from twisted raffia that had been dyed red and black and fringed with grass at the wrists and ankles. It was clacking with its carved teeth, low to the floor, sweeping its legs out in wide circles.

  I took a step back. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The thing laughed, like rattling fingers. Eh henh, it said. We knew you would forget, nwanne anyị.

  The hair on the back of my neck went taut and electric. I knew that voice from somewhere. The thing stopped moving and unfolded itself upright. A hole opened in its chest. Xylophone music hammered out and the second thing tumbled forward from inside it. This one looked like a young girl, short hair stained with camwood, skin dusted with nzu, coral slings over the chest. It sprang up and laughed at me.

  See your face, it said. Were you not expecting us? After you went and became just one, by yourself! It danced a short burst to the xylophone music still spilling from the first one.

  Oh, I realized, of course. I should have recognized them—the brothersisters, children of our first mother, ndị otu. A spike of exhilaration shot up through me and I laughed. These were the mischief-makers, you see, the tricksters; they were like me. They didn’t give a shit about humans, they enjoyed causing pain—they were me and I was them. It was the best visit I’d ever had in the marble, a thousand times better than having Yshwa show up with his sanctimonious nonsense.

  The first one scratched the raised black spots on the sides of its mask-face, slowly rotating its head all the way around like an owl, following me as I walked around them.