Remote Control

^{CHAPTER 4} GODDESS OF TRAVEL

After three days at home, she had to walk. As she walked, she wept. Her mother, father and brother were dead and she now understood this deeply. The dust on her face made her eyes sting and itch.

She’d left her mother’s body in the house. After a few days, it had started bloating. And then there was the smell. And the flies. They were all over Wulugu, sprouting from people’s bodies like fidgeting black flowers. The house was suddenly full of them. Maggots wriggled everywhere. The newly hatched flies crawled on the walls, slow and bewildered, their wings fresh and moist. The adults beat themselves against the windows, copulated and laid more eggs in her mother and under the carpet. She hated the sight and sound of them. She would hate flies forever.

She found that when the flies really angered her, her body would glow, not heat, glow, and every fly in the room would drop dead. Her body did this many times when she crept into the main room to see her mother’s corpse. But the flies always returned hours later. They emerged from her mother’s body, from other rooms, from outside when she opened the door.

And so the seven-year-old girl in her pink knee-length skirt and yellow T-shirt gathered what food she could find, soap, her brother’s Sankofa bird that she’d broken, her mythology book, her mother’s favorite gold hoop earrings, a wooden owl her brother had carved for her, and a jar of her father’s shea butter, put it all in the satchel she used for school and she walked up the road.

She stopped, turned back and went a last time into her parents’ bedroom and took one of her mother’s black curly-haired wigs to cover her bald scalp. It didn’t fit her small head, but she wore it anyway, imagining it to be more like a hat she hid beneath.

“I am like Hermes,” she said aloud as she stepped onto the quiet road, just to hear her voice. Hermes was a god of travel. Maybe she could find the box that her father sold away. The box that was taken from her and if it had not been taken, none of this would have happened. It was mine, she thought. And it was all she had left of home.

She nodded to herself as she walked, back straight, stride true. “I will find you. Wherever you are.”