Eclipse Three

On the Road by Nnedi Okorafor

A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It pounces.

– Wole Soyinka

Sub-Saharan Africa 's first Nobel Laureate

I slammed the door in the child's face, a horrific scream trapped in my throat. I swallowed it back down.

I didn't want to wake my grandmother or auntie. They'd jump out of bed, come running down the stairs and in a string of Igbo and English demand to know what the fuck was wrong with me. Then I'd point at the door and they'd open it and see the swaying little boy with the evil grin and huge open dribbling red white gash running down the middle of his head. Split open like a dropped watermelon.

My stomach lurched and I shut my eyes and rubbed my temples, my hand still tightly grasping the doorknob. Get it together, I thought. But I knew what I'd seen-jagged fractured yellow white skull, flaps of hanging skin, startlingly red blood and some whitish gray jelly… brain? I shuddered. "Shit," I whispered to myself.

The boy had been standing in the rain. Soaked from head to toe, as everything outside was from the strange unseasonable three-day deluge. He'd been smiling up at me. He couldn't have been older than nine. I gagged. I couldn't just leave him out there.

Knock! Knock! Knock! In hard strong rapid succession. "Oh God," I whispered. "What the hell?" Every hair on my body stood on end. I took a deep breath. Before really thinking about what I was doing, my hand was turning the knob and pulling the door open. I kept my eyes down. His wet black shoes were clumped with red mud. Gradually I brought my eyes up, past his soaked navy blue school uniform pants, to his worn out and cracked black fake leather belt, his tucked in white dress shirt, the brown skin of his throat, his little boy face… cleaved open, all the way to his eyebrows. Fuck! I thought.

In all my five years as a cop on the south side of Chicago I'd never seen anything like this. Never. The boy laughed and spoke to me in Igbo, water dripping from his lips. "You, too," he said, his voice so much like that of the little boy that he was. "Me and you."

"You need… help," I whispered. I was about to reach out, despite my repulsion. I'd seen plenty of dead, mutilated, bleeding bodies. A year ago, I'd had a boy's life blood run over my hands as he stared sadly into my eyes. He'd been stabbed five times. His blood had been so warm on my hands and it remained under my nails for days. And that wasn't even my worst encounter with death. So I wasn't easily shaken. But this boy standing before me shook the hell out of me. He should have been dead or dying; not knocking hard on the door, smiling and saying ominous things.

Before I could reach for him, he reached for me. Lightning fast. He tapped my right hand. Just before it happened, I had a flashback of when I used to play tag in grade school. I loved playing tag.

"You're it," the boy said in Igbo. He laughed again.

The touch of his finger burned like a hot rough metal poker. I yelped. Then it was as if my very being was repulsed. I flew back about five feet before landing hard on my ass, the air knocked from my chest, my teeth rattling. Sharp pain shot all the way to my fingertips and toenails. I hit the coffee table and groaned as the clay vase on it fell to the floor and broke in two.

I heard footsteps upstairs. I looked at the door. The boy was gone.

"O'u gini?" Grandma shouted from the top of the stairs. She barely had her blue wrapper wrapped around her waist and she looked much older than her eighty years. Auntie Amaka was probably still sleeping, as she remained upstairs. Grandma looked at the door and then met my eyes. "Were you outside?" she asked.

I shook my head, trying to get up. Both my hands felt numb, though the boy had only touched one.

"But you opened the door," she said, still looking at the door like she expected armed robbers to burst in.

I didn't answer. So much adrenaline was flooding my system that I'd begun to feel faint.

"Who was at the door?" she demanded. When I didn't answer, she narrowed her eyes at me, sucked her teeth and said, "Stupid, stupid, girl."

Three days before, it had started raining cats and dogs. Out of nowhere. Thunder rolled in the skies, lightning crashed. The wind shook the trees and turned the red dirt to red mud. Three days of steady rain. It had stopped only minutes before the boy showed up at the door. This kind of weather never happened in this part of Nigeria during this time of the year. But who was I to question the doings of nature? Who was I?

I'd laughed to myself thinking, Of course, it just has to happen right when I arrive. I was only going to be in the village visiting my grandmother and grand aunt for two weeks and now the entire first week was going to be a guaranteed mud and mosquito fest. Little did I know that this was the least of my worries.

I told my grandmother everything. Without a word, she frowned and walked outside. I followed her. Squishing through the mud, we looked all over the yard for that creepy boy. Grandma even looked in the chicken coop and behind the noisy generator. We didn't find a trace of him. Even his footprints had disappeared in the mud. Above, the sky churned with exiting rain clouds. Already I could see peeks of sunlight but I was too bothered to be happy about it.

We went back inside. I took off my muddy shoes, picked up the two vase pieces and plopped down on a kitchen chair, rubbing my lower back and forehead. I was sore but I actually felt ok. I didn't mysteriously grow sick or break out in blue hives or start speaking in tongues. I was fine.

"Grandma, he should have been dead," I said yet again, pressing the pieces of vase together, as if that's all it would take to fix it. "I saw brain. Who would do that to a child? And where the heck would he go? This is so weird."

"Why were you stupid enough to open the door the second time?" she suddenly asked, crossing her arms over her chest, irritated. "If you see a monster at your doorstep, the wise thing to do is shut the door." She sucked her teeth and shook her head. "You Americanized Nigerians. No instinct."

"He was hurt," I insisted. "You can't just… "

"You knew better," she said, waving her hand dismissively at me. "Deep down, you knew not to open that door."

Ok, so she was right. I don't know why I opened the door again. It was like my hand had a mind of its own. Or maybe it was some sort of grim fascination? I put the vase pieces down.

"You feel alright?" Grandma asked.

I nodded, rubbing my hands together. They still felt a little numb.

She sighed. "We'll have to keep an eye on you."

"Have you ever… "

She held up a hand. "We speak of it no more," she said. "The mud is still wet."

Whatever that means, I thought. I got up, went to the bathroom and shut the door behind me. A large black wall spider occupied the ceiling corner above the toilet. A tiny pink wall gecko eyed it from the other corner. I chuckled despite myself. In the village, one is rarely ever truly alone. Not even in the bathroom.

I wiped my face with a towel and stared at myself in the mirror. I patted down my short 'fro and used some toilet paper to wipe the sweat from my brow. "Chioma, you're fine," I said with a laugh. Just some weird shit, that's all, I thought. Maybe the boy's head wasn't as bad as it looked.

I froze, the smile dropping from my lips. I smelled something. I sniffed at my clothes and my skin. No, it wasn't coming from those either. Not from me. But close to me. Like something unnatural breathing down my neck. Movement on the ceiling caught my eye. The wall gecko was slowly closing in on the spider. I quickly left the bathroom and sought out Grandma. She was sitting in the living room with my grand auntie Amaka.

They both wore the same blue wrappers but Grandma wore a t-shirt that I'd brought her from America and auntie Amaka wore a white blouse. Their rough wide feet dangled from the couch; their smallness always gives me pause as I'm over six feet tall. They looked at me with furrowed brows. Two old Igbo women with wrinkles so deep their eyes almost disappeared under the folds of skin whenever they made any facial expression.

"I'm fine." I assured them.

They knew I was lying. Yet they said nothing.

I laugh about it now. Of course they wouldn't have said anything.

That boy set something upon me. I was sure of it. Shit like that didn't just happen and that was it. Plus, I could still smell that weirdness in the air. Only I seemed to notice. It was like a bit of foulness. Something unpleasant definitely still lingered. Something unpleasant stayed.

The first few days, it was just that smell and odd shifts in the air. I'd be on my way to the bathroom and the leaves of the faux houseplant behind me would quiver softly. I'd turn around to see if someone was there. No one ever was. But that smell lingered a bit before fading away like an old fart. I started hearing whispers behind me, especially when I was the only one home. These were also accompanied by that smell and the sound of footsteps outside the house, loudly squelching in the drying mud. Not something you want to hear while in a rural village deep in southeast Nigeria. You're basically cut off from the rest of the world here. And then there were the lizards.

Normally, they ran about like squirrels, especially the large pine green and orange ones. They'd run up the cement block walls that surrounded the house, weaving between the protective shards of glass and razor wire at the top. They'd stop and do their lizardly push-ups. They were like little foul-tempered dragons. Corner one and you'd get to see just how wild and dragon-like they could get. I'd once seen one accidentally run into a plastic bag. The thing went temporarily insane when it couldn't figure out how to get out. Normally, the lizards of Nigeria were a source of hilarity for me.

When they started showing up everywhere accompanied by that unpleasant smell, they weren't so funny. I'd sit on the porch and three would show up and just look at me. If I stayed in one place for too long, those three lizards were joined by another seven. They'd scramble close. Watching me. As if they were waiting for something spectacular to happen. They only left me alone when I went in the house.

Being police, I know how to observe and listen. I'm always aware of my surroundings. I know when I'm being followed. Even when I'm on vacation in my mother's village visiting my grandmother and grandaunt. Dammit, I wish I brought my gun, I thought. How silly I was.

Days after the encounter with the boy, I had the shock of my life.

Upon my grandmother's request, we went with auntie Amaka to the village market. I was glad to get out of the house. Even if the "mud was still wet," whatever that meant. It was your usual affair. Piles of tomatoes here, piles of peppers there, boiled eggs, sacks of groundnut, stacks of hugely overpriced cell phone cards, bunches of plantains, pungent dried fish, flies, women in traditional or European-style clothes with their nosy eyes and ears and sharp-tongues, dodging the hot mufflers of overzealous shortcut-seeking okada drivers. I'd normally have enjoyed this, but I kept noticing lizards lurking too close to me, and the boy was still on my mind.

I closely followed my grandmother and auntie as they bought dried crayfish, plantain, oranges and so on. I guess we were going to have a feast tonight or something. As we walked, I felt like I was being watched again. When the feeling grew too intense, I whirled around, my hand going to my hip for the gun that wasn't there. I saw nothing but people going about their business. I sucked my teeth, my nerves sparking.

"Shit," I whispered. "This has got to stop, man. It's driving me nuts." Being this jumpy was so unlike me. We were standing at the booth of a fruit seller when I caught a whiff of sugariness, sweet and flammable. I turned my head toward the scent and met the eyes of a scruffy-looking palm wine seller.

"Good afternoon," he said, leaning on his ancient-looking dusty bicycle. His large brown gourds full of palm wine dangled from each handlebar. A basket of filled and empty green glass bottles hung from the front of the bars.

"Good afternoon," I responded, still preoccupied. I turned the other way and there he was, standing in the road. The boy who should have been dead. He wore a spotless pair of navy blue pants and a white pressed shirt. It was tucked in. And his head was shaven close. Nothing but a slightly gnarled gray brown scar ran down the middle of his head. He looked like a perfectly normal kid. Except for the knowing way he smiled at me. I stared back. He nodded, laughed and continued on his way, school books in the crook of his arm. No cars came down or from up the road. A lizard scrambled across the street feet from him.

"What the fuck," I whispered to myself.

The palm wine seller laughed and elbowed me. He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. "That boy's probably going to be the smartest kid in this village's history."

"W… why do you say that?" I asked, glancing at my auntie and grandmother. They were haggling hard with some old man over a large pineapple.

"You saw him, right?" he said. He pointed at me with a well-calloused finger. "It was you. Least that's what people are saying."

I wanted to ask, "What people?" Instead I just asked, "How can he be ok?"

The man nodded. "They took him into the forest."

"Not the hospital?" I asked, frowning.

"The hospital would have been no good for that boy."

"Who took him?"

"The women, of course." He kicked at a man inspecting his gourds of wine. "You buying or not?"

As the seller haggled with the customer, I watched the boy walk into the market crowd across the road. I watched until I couldn't see him anymore. I felt something cool against my hand and looked down. The tapper smiled, pressing it into my hand. A green bottle of palm wine. "On the house. You'll need it soon. One for the road."

I smiled uncomfortably, taking the bottle. "Uh… thanks." I had no intention of drinking it or anything else offered by a stranger that wasn't properly sealed. I mentally patted myself on the back again for thinking to bring all those packets of ramen noodles, my jar of peanut butter and canned salmon.

"What… what happened in the forest?" I asked him, lowering my voice and grasping the bottle.

He paused, then only shook his head as he laughed. "You ask too many questions. Go and drink that while you can."

That night, I tried to just go to bed and forget about the whole thing. Of course, I couldn't sleep. Outside, the warm wind blew hard. It should have been soothing but it wasn't. I could hear wet footsteps underneath the sound of the wind, squishing just below my window. Though my room was on the second floor of the house, I didn't dare look out.

I considered closing the window but that would have been like shutting myself inside a furnace. Squish, squish, squish. Someone was definitely just below my window. And was the ground that muddy? When I could take it no more, I grabbed a can of beef ravioli from my suitcase and went to the open window. Any weird shit I saw out there was going to get hit with that can.

I saw nothing but deep darkness. The power had been turned off an hour ago. Still, that piercing sensation of being watched increased tenfold. I stepped back and pulled the curtains closed. That didn't help. The wind made the curtains billow out like ghosts. I pulled them back open and spent the rest of the night huddled in my bed, staring at the window, the can in my lap, knowing whatever had smashed that boy's skull in was still out there. And now it was interested in me.

"What's wrong with you?" Grandma asked as I dragged myself into the kitchen. I felt sluggish but it was the kind of sluggish you feel after hours and hours of deep sleep. I was too rested. I'd finally fallen asleep near daybreak and now it was late evening. I'd slept the entire day away. It wasn't jetlag; I'd gotten over that by my second day there. Something else had made me sleep for over twelve hours.

My belly grumbled with hunger. My grand auntie Amaka was just walking in. She looked me up and down with way more scrutiny than I was willing to tolerate when I was so hungry. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. She loudly sucked her few uneven white teeth.

"What?" I snapped, as I ladled some freshly made stew over the plate of steaming white rice my grandmother handed me. I loved my auntie Amaka. She talked a lot of shit about everyone. But once in a while her scrutinizing eye turned to me. Like now. The woman hadn't even finished walking in.

"She's looking thin," she told my Grandma in Igbo, ignoring me. As if I couldn't understand the language.

I scoffed. Maybe I'd lost a pound or two since getting here but I was still my usual thick-bodied Amazon build. My nicknames in the village were "giant" and "iroko tree."

Grandma nodded. "Like it's hollowing her out."

"So it can fill her up," Amaka finished.

"I don't think I've lost a pound," I said, sitting down with my huge mound of rice and stew. My mouth watered. Gosh, I do feel empty, though, I thought. But I'm about to solve that problem. I dug my spoon in, inhaling the smell of the spicy red stew and fragrant rice.

"Not physically," Grandma said.

I shook my head. "Whatever," I said, the spoon halfway to my mouth.

A loud BUMP came from the back of the house. Then a CRASH. I put the spoon of uneaten rice down. "What the… " Then a great roar that made me nearly jump out of my skin. About ten large brown, black and orange lizards skittered into the room, from the hallway, their tiny claws whispering on the wooden floor. Some climbed the walls, others scuttled across the floor. Neither grandma nor auntie moved. My eyes sought the nearest weapon. There. A large knife in the sink. My grandma had used it to chop meat. I jumped up and grabbed it.

A horrified look on her face, grandma grabbed auntie's shoulder and started speaking in rapid Efik, a language they only spoke when they didn't want me to understand. I frowned at them, but I was more concerned with whatever the hell was in the house.

The deep guttural roar came again, this time closer, from down the hall. The sound touched my very being. I held the knife more tightly, trying to think. I knew this was the thing that had been following me, biding its time. This was the thing that had smashed that boy's head open.

The movement of a black lizard on the wall caught my eye. I held the large knife more tightly, ignoring my grandmother and auntie's now angry and loud argument. I only vaguely wondered what the hell they were shouting about. Slowly, knife held before me, I moved toward the hallway. I could see a large shadow creeping forth. Whatever it was was breathing deep and hard. The air grew warm and took on the smell of tar. I realized that this was what that weird smell reminded me of. Tar and maybe soil or crushed leaves?

I glanced at the front door. Still open. I ran for it. This thing meant to take me. On instinct, I knew this. I ran out of the house. It was after me, not my grandmother and auntie. At least I could save them. I surprised myself. I really was one of those people who would happily die to save the ones they loved.

I ran onto the dirt road. At some point, I must have dropped the knife. It was pitch dark out there. People were awake most likely. Deep in their homes. But tonight, no one played cards on the porch. No one stood in the doorway, smoking a cigarette. I think people sensed it was a bad time to be out. So I ran and I ran alone. I wasn't even wearing flip flops.

I could hear it coming. Slobbering. Wheezing. Blowing a strange wind. The smell of broken leaves and tar in the air. The half-moon in the sky gave a little light. I could have sworn there were hundreds of lizards running with me, some crisscrossing my path. It felt like I stepped on some as I ran. I only managed to stay on my feet because I knew the shape of the dirt road.

I passed the last home and entered the stretch of palm trees.

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I'm going to die out here, I knew. Just as the boy should have. A burning heat descended on me from behind. I fell to the dirt road, coughing as I inhaled its dust. Lizards scampered over me like ants on a mound of sugar. I felt their rough feet and claws nipping at my skin. Something grabbed my hands as a great shadow fell on me. Yes, a shadow in the darkness. It was blacker than black.

The air was sucked from my lungs.

My eyes stung with dust.

The road beneath me grew hard as stone, as concrete.

My arms were pulled over my head and ground into the concrete beneath me.

First the left hand and then the right. At the wrist. Something bit right through. I felt painful pressure, then tendons, bone, blood vessels snapping and cracking and then separating. I heard it; the sound was brittle and sharp. Then the wet spattering and squirting of my blood. I only smelled warm paved road. A pause. Then bright white pain flashed through me, blinding the rest of my senses. Like Che Guevara, I thought feebly. Now no one will know who I am.

Time passed. I remember none of it clearly.

The sound of grass and twigs bending and snapping roused me. The feeling of hands roughly grasping me. I dared to open my eyes. They carried me. One woman carried my hands, like two dead doves. I almost blacked out again from the sight but I held on.

"Hurry," one of the women said quietly. "She's going to die."

"It takes what it will," another woman said.

"She'll be fine." This was my grandmother's voice. My own grandmother was one of these women!

"It's still best to move faster." Auntie Amaka!

Suddenly we came upon a road. It was paved, black, shiny, new. Something you didn't normally see in Nigeria.

"Listen," one of the women hissed, looking around.

All of them froze. I was too weak to do anything. The edges of my vision were starting to fade. I heard the sound of my own blood hitting the concrete as it spurted to the beat of my heart from the stumps of my wrists. It soaked quickly into the concrete.

"It's coming," one of the women said.

There was a mad scramble. They dumped me on the hard concrete. Two items dropped beside me. SLAP! SLAP! My hands. Then other items. Some cocoa yams that rolled to rest against my leg. Tomatoes that rolled in all directions. A bowl of still steaming rice that shattered, some of the porcelain and hot rice hitting my face. A bunch of cell phones that clattered to the ground; the ones I could see were still on. And some other things I couldn't see from where I lay.

"What are you… " my voice was weak and I had no energy to finish my question.

After a glance up the road, the women started running off. I couldn't get up, I couldn't speak. Soon, I wouldn't be breathing. Their feet made soft sounds in the grass as they ran into the forest.

I was alone in the middle of a road in Nigeria. I couldn't get up. My hands were cut off. I was going to be run over, bleed to death or both. All I could think of was how hungry I was. That I'd give anything for sweet fried plantain, egusi soup heavy with goat meat and stock fish, garri, spicy jallof rice, chin chin, red stew with chicken, ogba…

I stared at my severed hands. My long fingers were curved slightly. My thumbs were both bent inward. My nails still had their French manicure. The bronze ring my boyfriend gave me two years ago was still on my left middle finger. I could see the palm of my right hand with its small calluses from my regular days at the gym lifting free-weights.

The middle finger of my right hand twitched. I blinked. Then all five fingers wiggled and the hand flipped over, reminding me of a spider flipping back onto its feet. My left hand was rising up, too. Barely a sound escaped my lips as my eyes started to water from sheer terror. I was too afraid to move. If one of them came near me, I knew I'd pass out. Instead they both just "stood" there; again that strange waiting that I'd also witnessed with the lizards.

Suddenly, the concrete grew hot. I tried to get up but fell back. The road shook. And as I stared down the road, I wondered, What the goddamn fucking hell is that? I tried to get up again; anything to get away from my hands and the chaos happening up the road.

About a fourth of a mile away, the concrete road undulated as if it were made of warm taffy. It broke apart and crumbled in some places and piled up in others. It rippled and folded and fell back into a road as the chaos progressed toward me. I looked at the sky. It was black but starting to burn. I didn't know if this was morning's approach or my own death. I did care. I didn't want to die. But I knew I was dying. Still, not a car came up or down this mystery road. No one would save me. My grandmother and grand auntie had left me.

The noise was deafening. Like a thousand dump trucks dumping hot gravel all at the same time. The air reeked of bitter tar. The closer it got, the clearer its shape. Slabs of road the size of houses arranged themselves into a giant body, tail, legs, short arms, and finally a horrible reptilian head. Vines whipped out of the forests flanking the strange road creature and attached themselves to the slabs. They started snaking up to the items the women had dropped. Snatching up the yam tubers, cell phones, tomatoes. They took every scoop of rice, right down to the grains on my face. Every piece of broken porcelain. They left nothing but me.

It stood several stories high, the vague shape of a monstrous lizard of hot gravel. It snapped and tore connected vines as it moved, only for more vines to reconnect. It slithered toward me, its hot black gravel sizzling.

Vines snatched up my hands, which wriggled about like captured crabs. Then the vines snatched my wrists. They dragged me close to the creature. By this time, I was done. I had nothing left. I don't even know why I was conscious.

The vines connected to my open wrists and I could feel them… pumping something into me. It was warm and that warmth ran up my arms, to my shoulders, to my chest, all the way to my toes. I felt like I was going to be sick. How can one who is dying feel sick?

The moment the sensation made it to my toes, I experienced a terrible stab of pain that radiated from all over my body. Like a light switch had been turned on, my mind cleared. Just like that.

I screamed.

My eye landed on the horrific creature again. I screamed again. The vines were doing something to my severed hands and wrists. I could hear a soft wet smacking sound. When I finally chanced a look, I saw that the vines were knitting. They were knitting my veins and arteries.

Lying on my back, I turned my head to the side and vomited. That road monster was hovering over me like an over-attentive doctor. Hot pebbles and stones rained on me. The sky was brightening as the day broke. From where I lay, I could now see that it had several lizards running about its body, mainly those large orange and green ones.

Then the worst happened. Its attention focused on me. Every muscle in my body tightened, every one of my physical senses sharpening. I felt that which is "me" fear for her very existence.

The creature brought its huge stone face up to mine. Within inches. Heat dripped from it like sweat. Its bitter tar odor stung my nostrils. Beneath the stench there was another scent, something distinctively native. That woody, rich perfume that I always noticed as soon as I got off the airplane. There was life and death in that scent. But I was only thinking about death, as the smell filled my nasal passage.

It moved closer, within a half-inch. Its appearance began to shift. Stone became wood, elongating into a giant long-faced mask of black ebony with prominent West African features. I nearly started laughing, despite is all. You saw this face in many markets; it was that generic face of most West African ebony masks. I had many masks with this very face on my wall back home.

But this was the real one, the living one, the first one. This was the face that people were selling. My ears rung and my eyes watched; no species of terror could have been more profound. Its thick lips puckered, the deep deep eyes piercing. Over its shoulders, I could see the hard faces of others. They floated like puffs of powder and undulated like oil. They had large eyes, wide-nostrilled noses, cheekbones like granite. Many of them were familiar to me, also. Even more were not.

Some had what looked like ants skittering about their faces. Others had red eye lids and deep tribal scars on their cheeks and foreheads. Blue horns. The face of a great red bird. A tree frog sitting on its forehead. Eyes like mud. Skin like leaves. Some radiated beautiful liquid light. Others sprouted pink flowers. Spirits, masquerades, ghosts, and ancestors, these were deep deep mmuo! I was actually seeing mmuo! Me, Chioma, born in the USA. Why me?

These ethereal faces crowded far far back, tens, thousands, millions, billions, an infinite number of them peering from infinity. Looking over the creature's shoulders. Watching. Seeing me. Like those lizards, they were waiting for something to happen to me. Can you imagine?

My chest felt like a block of ice and my eyes burned. My scalp itched. Then I felt it. It was pleasure and pain, black and white, cacophony and stillness, perfumed and pungent. Something inside me both died and was birthed. I moaned, looking into its eyes. At once, there was clarity. I saw a young woman with a chain of thick red-orange beads woven into her tightly braided hair. She danced slowly, lizards following the movement of her feet. And there was a vertical line scarring each of her ankles. Her feet had been cut off and reattached. Yet look at her dance. Was she the first? I wondered. First what?

Then, just like that, the vines retreated. The lizards scattered. And the road dragon monster ancestor creature grunted and quickly began to shamble back down the road. It was like they all feared the sunlight. I dunno. What do I know?

When I sat up, I was in the middle of a lumpy dirt road and there was a car coming right at me. I jumped up and ran out of the way. The driver didn't even see me! Am I invisible? I wondered. I realized I knew where I was, less than a mile from the house. There was no dense forest near the house, never had been. It was all impossible.

Images of mmuo rose and fell in my mind and I swayed. I steadied myself by looking at my hands. Slowly, I brought them up. There were dark bruises on my wrists, as if someone had tied them too tightly with heavy ropes. There was dried blood, too. But my hands looked… normal. They weren't turning purple or black as they should have been nor were they behaving like independent creatures. And most importantly, they were connected to my wrists. I dared to move a finger. It worked just fine. Except for a weird tingle I felt in the fingertips.

I made a fist and wiggled and flexed all my fingers. Still that weird tingle. But that was it. My hands were still alive and they were my own. I wiped my lips with the back of my hand, the taste of vomit still in my mouth. Even my vomit was gone from the ground.

I walked home.

I killed a man once. With my bare hands. This was before I was a cop. It's probably the reason I became a cop. It was during my second year in college. I was twenty. He followed me home one night and dragged me between the dorms onto a narrow road that ran between the buildings. He was bigger than me. Stronger, too. I'm tall and a rather strong woman, but just a woman nonetheless. So there we were on the concrete, his hands squeezing the air from my neck. I was seeing stars, galaxies, black outer space. There was a ringing in my ears. My head was full of pressure. Tears were in my eyes. I was fading.

Then something swept over me. I raised my hands and grabbed his neck, too. He looked surprised at first but didn't seem too bothered. Until my hands locked on his neck like a vice. Suddenly I knew I could crush stones with my hands. I crushed his neck like it was one of the stones I was imagining.

My parents are lawyers and somehow they kept it all away from the press. And somehow they kept me out of jail, thank God, though that was the easy part. The guy had apparently done to several women within the state what he tried to do to me. Since then, I've always been suspicious of my hands.

Typically when you think of one's identity, you think face, right? The eyes are the windows to the soul. You cut off one's head and the person dies. You see a picture where a woman's face is not shown but her body is and you think misogyny, no? She becomes objectified, nothing but a body. But what of the hands? Fingerprints are as distinctive as one's face, as unique.

When we want to really identify a suspect, we go to his or her prints. Again, I think of Che Guevara and the depth of the insult in cutting off his hands. The depth of attempted annihilation. So what happens when your hands kill a man? What happens when those hands are cut off and then start behaving like freed spiders? What happens when those hands are reattached by some fucking dragon monster Nigerian ancestor being made of rolling hot gravel and vines and wood? What just happened to me?

As I slowly walked back to my grandmother's house, my stomach groaned and my temples throbbed. Grandma and auntie, I thought. They just… left me there. I heard the crunch of my bones, the snap of my arteries and veins, the splatter of my blood. I saw my own hands moving about on their own. I saw billions of mmuo, all staring at me. I stopped, put my hands on my knees and bent forward. My stomach heaved but thankfully I had nothing in it. Tears dribbled from my eyes. More cars passed me by. I wiped the tears away but more tears came. It took me a half-hour to make the ten-minute walk to the house. By the time I arrived, I was deeply pissed off.

I threw the front door open. "Grandma! Auntie! Where are you?" I screamed in Igbo. I stood there, breathing heavily, wiping the tears from my eyes, so I could clearly see the looks on their faces. I watched them descend the stairs looking guilty as hell. I shouted and cursed and accused them of everything from black magic and Satanism to witchcraft and juju; anything that would make them feel ashamed, as I knew they both claimed to be good Catholics. Spit flew from my mouth, snot from my nose. My voice quivered as my entire body began to shudder. I started sobbing, images and sounds and scents racing through my mind again. And my grandma and auntie leaving me.

Then I blurted the story of the murderer who tried to murder me and instead got murdered. I laughed wildly through my sobs, feeling lightheaded, frightened, desperate and confused.

"Oh we knew about you killing that man," grandma calmly responded.

My mouth hung open. I sat on the couch, my heart slamming in my chest.

Auntie Amaka sat beside me and took my hand in hers. I yanked it away from her. I had a brief thought of leaving my severed hand in her hands. I had to work hard not to screech. "Don't touch me!" I snapped.

"My dear, we could have told you, yes," Auntie Amaka said, delicately. "But once… once you opened that door… "

"No," Grandma said. "Once it started to rain, I think. And you being here."

"Regardless," Auntie Amaka said. "It was going to happen."

I ran my hand over my face. Who knew what the fuck they were talking about? "What was… that thing?" I asked.

"It has many names. We speak none of them," Grandma said.

"Why the boy, then?"

"All we can guess is that it was because he outsmarted a great snake that was meant to kill him," Grandma said. "It was last year. The snake was about to strike as he passed through a field. The boy somehow knew. Before the snake could do the job the boy smashed its head with his school book."

"Again, not his fault," Grandma said. "It never is."

"So you're saying we were both supposed to die but something… "

Grandmother laughed. I felt like slapping her. "You think this is about you?" she asked, ignoring the irate look on my face. "You think it had anything to do with any of us specifically?" She shook her head. "In this village, when it rains for three days during Harmattan, certain people start… getting maimed. Us women know where to take them and what to bring. It's been like that since anyone can remember."

"But we don't know the why or the how of it," Auntie added. "It doesn't happen often. Maybe once every ten years." She shrugged and both women looked at me apologetically.

It was like being the victim of an unsolved hit and run. No one knew the motive. No real answers. No revelation. No "aha" moment. So all I knew was pain, mystification, terror and the eerie feeling of having my face seductively licked by death. I looked at my hands. The thin green lines on my wrists had faded some. I was heading home in a few days.

I sit looking out the airplane window now. We land soon. I never return home from Nigeria the same person I was before. But this time takes the cake.

Minutes after takeoff, I felt a rush of relief like no other. I was glad to be leaving the motherland. After what happened, I needed some serious space. I scratched at a mosquito bite on my arm. It was red and inflamed and I knew I should leave it alone. But damn, the thing was itchy. Nigerian mosquito bites were always the worst. You never feel them land on you and then you can't stop feeling the itch of their bites.

I was glad to be sitting near the window. The plane was pretty packed, so turning to the window gave me at least a little privacy. I looked closely at my mosquito bite, rubbing it with my thumb as opposed to digging at it with my nail, the way I wanted to. The more I rubbed, the better it felt. The less itchy. The less red.

"Oh shit," I whispered. The guy beside me looked at me with raised eyebrows. I smiled at him and shook my head.

It was as if I'd rubbed off the mosquito bite. My skin was healed back to its usual brown. I quickly got up.

"Excuse me," I whispered as I made my way into the aisle. I went straight to the bathroom. Once inside, I unbuttoned my blouse. I had all types of scratches from the incident. I touched the painful bruise on my side and ran my finger across it. Erased like chalk on a chalkboard. I undid my jeans and rubbed the scratches on my legs. I rubbed my hands all over. Then, naked, I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror. Not a scratch, bruise, pimple or blemish on my body.

I was thirty-nine years old. Happy with my life. "Why?" I whispered. "Shit, shit shit! No, no, no." I was a cop. And I loved being a cop. Now what will I become? I wondered. I considered asking my hands. But what if they answer? I thought.

I sit here looking out the window at the ocean below. What will become of me?

I hear a sharp scream behind me. Then a gasp. "I… I didn't… he tried to… " The sound of commotion. A woman yells, "Get his hands!"

"Oh my God!"

Grunting, screeching, shouting. I jump up along with everyone around me. We're all probably thinking of the same thing. Terrorists, 9/11. I whirl around to see what's happening. It's a sight to behold.

There are five men piled in the aisle. Two of them are dark-skinned Africans; one wears a white caftan and there is bright red blood smeared on it. One of them is Asian, he wears a black suit with a golden dragon pin on the left breast pocket. Two of them are white men; one in jeans and a t-shirt, another in a navy blue suit. They sit on, hold down, and punch a young white man, mashing his head to the floor. The young man's wide eyes water and he sweats profusely. His face is beet red. He's breathing heavily and babbling, "Get me off this goddamn plane! I want to get off! GET ME OFF!"

In the seat before them, a woman lies in a man's arm. She coughs, her hands to her throat. A yellow number two pencil protrudes from the side of her neck. Blood spurts and dribbles down. The man holding her, an old Igbo-looking man in Western attire, looks absolutely lost.

I look at my hands. I don't even hesitate.