Remote Control

^{CHAPTER 10} NEW YEAR

Sankofa had once sat in a circle of young children and listened as a woman told this exact version of her own story. No one there had any idea that she was The Adopted Daughter of Death and she was glad. She’d once watched a naked mad man in a market frantically tell the story to himself. His telling made her seventeen years old. Another time, two teenage thieves told her the story as they tried to convince her that they could protect her from the powerful “remote control” of Death’s Adopted Daughter… if she agreed to be their girlfriend. In their version of the story, they tried to scare Sankofa by exaggerating Death’s Adopted Daughter’s methods of killing. They said Sankofa carried a rusty machete that magically cut deep with the slightest pressure. The real Sankofa only rolled her eyes and walked off.

Some people said Death’s Adopted Daughter was riddled with leprosy. Others said she was pretty, “like an American.” Some said she was ugly like a girl raised in the bush. Some marked her as a bloodthirsty bald-headed adze, mythical vampires of the oldest stories who resulted from life’s ugliest moments. Others said she wasn’t human at all, that her blood had been tainted with radioactive gas by aliens who’d come to Earth through a black hole one night; that this was why she shined green. What they all agreed on was that wherever she went, she brought death. The only part of the shifting story that Sankofa hated was when people added the idea that her parents left her. Her parents never ever would have left her. She’d had the best parents in the world. Now, in her fourteenth year on earth, if there was one rule she lived by it was the fact that Stories were soothsayers, truth-tellers and liars.

She knew where she was going now. As New Year approached, she moved faster and more directly. When she needed rest, she stopped in towns and villages along the way. She accepted gifts. And though asked many times, only twice did she ease people into soft deaths. And only once did she kill in defense, days before, on Christmas night—a gateman whose mind was poisoned by the wild rumors that preceded her. She met more farmers and they were almost always kind, and when they weren’t, they at least knew to stay out of her way. She had no other trouble. And Movenpick had finally decided she was worthy of his full trust, coming close to sleep beside her at night, finally, and always following from a slight distance when they travelled during the day. No one gave Movenpick any trouble, either.

Sankofa arrived at the border on New Year’s morning. She was wearing her long yellow skirt, matching top embroidered with expensive lace and a purple and yellow headband made of twisted cloth. She’d acquired another simpler green wrapper and top and had worn that all week, saving this one from Christmas for the day she entered Wulugu. She wanted to arrive in style.

The trees looked different. So did the road. It was so black that it looked like it led to another dimension. The stripes on it were so yellow that they looked like the paths of shooting stars. But this was the road that led into the town of Wulugu. At least what used to be Wulugu. Who knew what Sankofa would find here? Even at this hour, the road was busy with autonomous delivery and transport trucks and personal vehicles. She stood to the side of the road remembering. Not a mile away was the place where her normal life had ended.

“We’re back,” she said to Movenpick, who stood right beside her. She could see the top of the mosque in the distance up the road, so there was still something left. “Let’s go home.”

Her stomach was growling, but she was too excited to care. As she walked, old darkened memories tried to sneak into her mind, her mother’s face, her father’s voice, her brother’s laugh. Her heart fluttered and she shut her eyes as she walked. The feeling passed and she was happy again. Movenpick trotted at her heels like a dog.

There were still ghosts in Wulugu and Sankofa was relieved. She felt them as she strolled into town, lingering in shadows, between buildings, on front steps. Reminders that everything that had happened truly happened, no matter how much had been covered up, rebuilt, replaced, reorganized. As she came up the road and approached the mosque, she passed several people leaving it. She recognized no one and she was glad when no one recognized her. And she was glad Movenpick stuck close.

She passed a small and very empty market area. This place looked the same, though it wasn’t. The old table outside a closed restaurant where in the evening men would sit outside and play cards and smoke cigarettes was still there. She wondered if it still had the same purpose. The narrow dirt road that ran through town was now paved with fresh asphalt and used by people on foot and on bicycles instead of cars.

There was joy in the air. And beyond the homes and buildings on the right were the shea tree farms, Sankofa knew. A few years wouldn’t matter much to trees; if anywhere looked the same, it would be the shea farms. She stopped at one of the random shea trees that grew in the town square. She stepped closer. Carved into its trunk was “#AfricansAreNotLabRats”. She ran her hand over it, wondering who’d taken the time to carve it. Probably someone who’s long moved on, she thought.

She passed Wulugu’s biggest hotel and, now twice the size as it had been, it was much nicer than she remembered. It even looked like it now had running water and more generators. And there was a very new-looking pharmacy attached, a big advertisement for LifeGen nasal spray in the window. Sankofa stopped at this, frowning. She glanced up, surveying the sky.

Two dark-skinned tall women dressed in stylish western jeans, T-shirts and gym shoes and with long perfectly coiffed dreadlocks came out of the hotel entrance, giggling as they looked at their mobile phones. When they noticed Sankofa they grinned. “Good morning,” they said to Sankofa, walking in the direction she’d come from. They had American accents. Why were Americans here?

“Good morning,” Sankofa said, smiling back.

“Cute dog,” one of them said. She held up her phone, took a photo of Movenpick and then they both were on their way. Sankofa watched them go for a moment and then she moved on.

When she reached her home and knocked on the door, no one answered. Instead, the door swung open and the smell of dust and abandonment wafted out. She stood there looking inside, Movenpick beside her. If she’d needed even one hint of what had transpired in Wulugu six years ago, here it was. Every single home she’d passed up to this point, every single building, every booth in the women’s market, the bicycle shop, everything was occupied. Different faces, different families, but people. Except this house.

Sankofa looked at Movenpick. “They’ve tried so hard to move on,” she muttered. Across the street, she eyed a woman sitting on her porch watching her. She waved and smiled and the woman slowly waved back. Sankofa had no idea who that woman was. The house itself hadn’t even been there when she left. She went inside.

The house had been gutted. Every piece of furniture, every rug, her brother’s collection of wooden carvings, old photos, everything. It was just an unoccupied home now. Left to crumble back to the dust it came from on its own. However, for Sankofa, it was full. Right there was where her mother used to sit and listen to audiobooks on her mobile phone when she could get it to work. Right there was where her brother would lay out the pages of his school assignments and work his way meticulously through them until dinnertime. Right there was the spot in the kitchen where his father would make a pile of the best shea fruits that fell from the tree in the backyard, the tree that was not a farm tree, but the family tree.

And in the back of the house was the family tree that Sankofa used to secretly climb and hide in for hours. It was taller now, and wider, its branches healthily green with long leathery leaves and unripe plum-sized shea fruit. At its base was where the seed had fallen on her “sky words” and later the box had been pushed through the soil.

She gasped, realizing. “My ‘sky words,’” she whispered, brushing a sandaled foot over the dirt where she used to draw them. She hadn’t thought about them in over a decade. She blinked. “Did my drawings bring the…” She frowned and decided it didn’t matter. Not right now.

Sankofa slowly walked up to the spot before the tree. She knelt down. Movenpick trotted past her and easily climbed up the rough trunk and sat on a thick branch. With her small hands, she started digging. There was only one place on Earth where this thing would be at rest, where this thing would allow her to rest. The red soil was soft, yielding and moist as her fingers dug into it. She inhaled its fragrant aroma, feeling herself begin to glow. Above, the tree seemed to lean over her. Her fingers dug deeper into the soil and soon, she felt something beneath it. Solid, but moving. She did not pull her hands away. Instead, she let it firmly grasp her hand.

The tree’s root, a brownish reddish thing, snaked up. With her free hand, Sankofa reached into the pocket of her worn pink pants and brought out the box. The root wavered before her and then stopped, waiting.

“What are you,” she asked it. “The devil? A demon?” An alien? She blinked, knowing this was true. Knowing that her “sky words” were at least part of why it had come here, to this specific spot. How she’d been able to see and duplicate what she saw in the stars was a question she’d ask herself for a long time. “Fatima,” she said. “My name is Fatima Okwan.” But I’m Sankofa, too, she thought. Always. “Fatima,” she said again, and the faces of her father, mother and brother shined brightly in her mind for just a moment before fading back to the washed-out images they had been since she’d left.

She cast the box into the hole and spat on it. “Stay there. I don’t want you. You weren’t a gift, you were a curse.” Her shoulders slumped as she felt something leave her. The waiting roots slid almost lovingly around the box, their roughness grating softly against the box’s wood, a sound Sankofa would remember for the rest of her life. Then their grip tightened, crushing the box and seed. She saw the seed inside crack in two just before it all descended quickly into the dirt, pulled down by some force Sankofa would never fully understand.

Sankofa felt her legs weaken and she sat down in front of the hole and stared at it. She looked past the hole, at the tree. She looked past the tree and only saw the farm. For a moment, she recalled her father walking in from the farm, a sack of personally picked shea nuts over his shoulder. He always used these ones to make the shea butter his family spread on their skin. Her heart ached.

She put down her satchel and stretched out on the ground, flat, her face to the soil. For an hour, she sat facing the tree, remembering and remembering. No mental walls. No turning away. Her body softly glowing.

She stayed home, curling up on the bare floor and falling into a deep well-earned slumber. Hours later, her empty stomach woke her. It was dark, so she brought forth her glow to light the room. She stretched and went outside to the backyard. Movenpick was in the tree looking down at her. She climbed up to join him. When she looked out over the shea tree farm she was met with an eerie sight. She gasped, clutching the tree’s trunk so she didn’t fall.

In the night, the view was like a galaxy of green stars. They shined from the base of almost all the trees. All except the base of hers, because her seed had been crushed. No one had spent time in the trees as she did. Had that been why the seed was offered to her? Or was it solely because of her “sky words”? What would these grow into? And now that LifeGen had entrenched itself in Wulugu, were they going to harvest them? International corporate-level remote control.

“That would be bad,” she muttered.

And so she brought forth her light. When she did, all the seeds glowing in the soil brightened. She pushed her light to grow brighter. The seeds brightened some more. Then some more.

Then even brighter. And this time, she did it on purpose.