Nnedi Okorafor - Who Fears Death

She leaned close to my ear. “It’s a mixture of palm oil, the tears of a dying old woman, the tears of an infant, menstrual blood, the milk of a man, the skin from the foot of a tortoise, and sand.”

I shivered, repulsed.

“You don’t know Nsibidi,” she said. “It is a written juju. To mark anything with it is to enact change; it speaks directly with the spirit. I’ve marked you with a symbol of the crossroads where all your selves will meet. Kneel forward. Ask it of Ani. She’ll give it.”

“I don’t believe in Ani,” I said.

“Kneel and pray anyway,” she said, pushing me forward.

I pressed my forehead to the sand, the sound of the wind in my ears. Minutes passed. I’m so hungry, I thought. I began to feel something holding me down. I turned my head and stared into the sky. I saw the sun set, come back up and then set again. A long time passed, that’s what matters.

Suddenly, I dropped into the sand. It swallowed me like the mouth of a beast. The last thing I remember before the world exploded was a girl saying, “It’s okay, Mwita. She’s releasing. We’ve been waiting for this since she got here.”

Every part of me that was me. My tall Ewu body. My short temper. My impulsive mind. My memories. My past. My future. My death. My life. My spirit. My fate. My failure. All of me was destroyed. I was dead, broken, scattered, and absorbed. It was a thousand times worse than when I first changed into a bird. I remember nothing because I was nothing.

Then I was something.

I could feel it. I was being put back together, bit by bit. What was doing this? No, it was not Ani. It was not a goddess. It was cold, if it could be cold. And brittle, if it could be brittle. Logical. Controlled. Dare I say that it was the Creator? It Who Cannot Be Touched? Who doesn’t care to be touched? The fourth point that no sorcerer could ever consider? No, I can’t say that because that is the deepest blasphemy. Or at least that’s what Aro would say.

But my spirit and body were utterly completely obliterated… was this not what Aro said would happen to any creature who encountered the Creator? As It reassembled me, It arranged me in a new order. An order that made more sense. I remember the moment the last piece of me was returned.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I breathed. Relief, my first emotion. Again, I am reminded of that time in the iroko tree. When my head was like a house. Back then it was as if some of that house’s doors were cracking open—doors of steel, wood, stone. This time all of those doors and windows were blown out.

I was dropping again. I hit the ground hard. Wind on my skin. I was freezing. I was wet. Who am I? I wondered. I didn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t remember how to. Something hit my head. And something else. Instinctively, I opened my eyes. I was in a tent.

“How can she be dead?” Diti was screaming. “What happened?”

Then it all slammed into me. Who I was, why I was, how I was, when I was. I shut my eyes.

“Don’t touch her,” Ssaiku said. “Mwita, speak to her. She’s coming back. Help her complete her journey.”

A pause. “Onyesonwu.” His voice sounded strange. “Come back. You were gone for seven days. Then you fell from the sky, like one of Ani’s missing children in the Great Book. If you live again , open your eyes, woman.”

I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back. My body hurt. He took my hand. I grasped his. More came in that moment. More of who I now was. I smiled, and then I laughed.

This was a moment of madness and arrogance that I cannot say was only my fault. The power and ability that I realized was a part of me now was overwhelming. I was stronger and more in control than I ever imagined I could be. And so as soon as I returned, I was off again. I hadn’t eaten in seven days. My mind was clear. I was so so strong. I thought of where I wanted to go. I went there. One minute I was on that mat in the tent, the next I was flying, as myself, as my blue spirit.

I was going after my father.

I flew right through the sandstorm. I felt its stinging touch. I burst through its wall into the hot sun. Morning. I flew over miles of sand, villages, dunes, a town, dry trees, and more dunes. I flew over a small field of green, but I was too focused to care. Into Durfa. Straight to a large house with a blue door. Through the door and up to a room that smelled of flowers, incense, and dusty books.

He was at a desk, his back to me. I dropped deeper into the wilderness. I had done it to Aro when he’d refused me one too many times. And I’d done it to the witch doctor in Papa Shee. This time I was even stronger. I knew where to tear and bite and destroy, where to attack. Layered over his turned back, I could see his spirit. It was a deep blue, like mine. This startled me for a moment, but it didn’t stop me.

I pounced the way a starved tiger must have long ago when it found its prey. I was too eager to realize that though his back was turned, his spirit wasn’t. He had been waiting. Aro had never told me how it felt when I’d attacked him. The witch doctor in Papa Shee had simply died, no physical markings on him when he fell over. Now, in this moment with my father, I learned what it was like.

It was the kind of pain that death wouldn’t stop. My father put it to me in full force. He sang as he tore, gorged, stabbed, and twisted at parts of me that I didn’t know were there. He sat at his desk, his back turned. He sang in Nuru but I couldn’t hear the words. I am like my mother, but not completely. I cannot hear and remember as I suffer.

Something in me kicked in. A survival instinct, a responsibility and a memory. This isn’t how I end, I thought. Immediately, I pulled what remained of me away. As I retreated, my father stood and turned around. He looked into what were my eyes and grabbed what was my arm. I tried to pull away. He was too strong. He turned the palm of my right hand over and dug his thumbnail into it, etching some sort of symbol there. He let go and said, “Go back and die in the sands you arose from.”

I traveled backward for what felt like forever, sobbing, pained, fading. As I approached the wall of dust, the world grew bright with spirits and the desert sprouted those strange colorful wilderness trees. I faded completely and remember nothing.

Mwita later told me that I died a second time. That I turned transparent and then completely disappeared. When I reappeared in the same place, I was flesh again, my body bleeding all over, my garments soaked with blood. He couldn’t wake me. For three minutes, I had no pulse. He blew air into my chest and used kind juju. When none of this worked, he sat there, waiting.

During the third minute, I started breathing. Mwita shooed everyone out of the tent and asked two girls walking by to bring him a bucket of warmed water. He bathed me from head to toe, rinsing away the blood, bandaging wounds, rubbing circulation into my flesh and sending me good thoughts. “We have to talk,” he’d said over and over. “Wake up.”

I awoke two days later to see Mwita sitting beside me humming to himself as he wove a basket. I slowly sat up. I looked at Mwita and couldn’t recall who he was. I like him, I thought. What is he? My body ached. I groaned. My stomach rumbled.

“You wouldn’t eat,” Mwita said, putting his basket down. “But you would drink. Otherwise, you’d be dead… again.”

I know him, I thought. Then as if whispered by the winds outside I heard the word he’d spoken to me, Ifunanya. “Mwita?” I said.

“The one and only,” he said coming over to me. Despite my body’s pains and the restriction of bandages on my legs and torso, I threw my arms around him.