Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

An influx of new guests in search of the perfect beach-to-town balanced holiday meant that Sade couldn’t help Miranda with her knitting for another three days, and it was four days before Miranda saw Eliot for longer than the time it took for him to stumble indoors in the early morning, toss food into his mouth, go to bed, then, in the late afternoon, rise from his bed, toss food into his mouth and leave the house again.

Eliot came and found her in the garden, where she sat beside Sade and her enormous crochet project, a book on her lap, her face turned up to meet a butterfly that flitted in place just above her nose.

“What the fuck is that in your room?”

The butterfly veered away.

“It’s a mannequin,” Miranda murmured. “Have you been having fun?”

“Yeah. But I start work tomorrow. What’s the mannequin for?”

“Work?” Both Sade and Miranda looked at Eliot.

“Indeed. Junior reporter at The Dover Post . Probably just retyping memos from the council on their new initiatives or something. What’s the mannequin for?”

“My coat,” said Miranda.

“Oh.” Eliot looked at the scarf she’d begun for him, nodded politely and grabbed his bike.

Agim died — it was in The Dover Post . Unexpected medical complications were cited — even Eliot was unable to explain what that was supposed to mean. Miranda hid the newspapers for that day under an armchair in the sitting room and resumed work on her coat. Her hands shook, and her stitches kept failing.

In the evening Sade took advantage of the empty sitting room and watched a Nigerian film. She put her feet up and divided her attention between a bowl of salted peanuts, some warm Guinness drunk from a glass she’d left to chill in the fridge all afternoon, and the film, which brought tears of silent laughter into her eyes. The film seemed not to be a film at all; rather it was a competition between a cast of actors to see who could shout and moan the loudest and show the greatest amount of agony at the death of a close relative.

Miranda got up and wandered out to the garden just as Sade called out to Luc— “Mr. Dufresne, Mr. Dufresne! This part you will love — Wole now knows that Yemisi is the one who poisoned Mama Atinuke’s chin-chin.”

Luc smiled at Miranda as he passed her. Sade had been teaching him how to make chin-chin, which was basically pastry, thickly folded and heavily buttered. Luc couldn’t bear to bake anything as dense as the chin-chin Sade produced, and his version of the snack was closer to mini-palmiers than anything else. Sade disapproved, but she took some on her weekly trips to the detention centre and said that they had been declared passable.

Miranda moved Luc’s spectacles and notebook onto a nearby deck chair and climbed into the hammock that Luc had set up between two of the trees. She rocked, but the moon wouldn’t let her sleep. Its light was faint, yet, like the breeze that soothed her bare arms and legs, it kept moving. She had to watch the moon through the apple-tree branches. It was easier to watch through her fingers.

When she grew tired of watching and realised she couldn’t drop her hand, she began to think it possible that in those months of her madness she had been supplanted by someone that she could only be vaguely aware of. Her nails locked into her forehead, but there was no pain.

Interesting, all is very interesting.

She closed her eyes.

Heavy footsteps crossed the grass and stopped just behind her.

“Miranda,” her GrandAnna whispered in her ear. Her words met the air with difficulty, as if there was something in her mouth she had to talk around. “You must eat.”

Miranda said nothing. She had decided the key was to pretend as if she hadn’t heard. Her hand came loose, the moon let her alone, and she tried to sleep on an empty stomach, which everyone says not to do.

After a while she pushed herself out of the hammock, rolled confusedly on the grass, then picked herself up, arms above her head in case the trees fell on her. The air was full of the smell of burning. There was screaming. It wasn’t human, it was mechanical and without pause. There wasn’t a house light on for miles and miles. She had to get into the shelter, they were calling her, they were waiting. She moved through the pitch-black house and she was the only thing that stirred. She came through the trapdoor, and Lily stood beside a table laid for four. Miranda put her arms around her mother, and they held each other for longer than a greeting took; the house shook as the ground outside was beaten — just one hit, but the vibrations went on for so long that Miranda realised it was only her ears refusing to forget the sound.

Over Lily’s shoulder, Miranda counted — four places, four people — Lily made one, Miranda made two, for number three there was Jennifer, Lily’s mother, and the fourth was her GrandAnna, her white hair gleaming. Jennifer and GrandAnna sat side by side with their elbows on the table. They leaned forward, anticipating a meal. They were naked except for corsets laced so tightly that their dessicated bodies dipped in and out like parchment scrolls bound around the middle. They stared at Miranda in numb agony. Padlocks were placed over their parted mouths, boring through the top lip and closing at the bottom. Miranda could see their tongues writhing.

“Who did this to them?” Miranda asked Lily, curling her arms around her mother’s neck.

Lily turned her head away. “I did,” she said. She sounded proud.

The long table was made of pearl, or very clean bone, and it was crowded with plates and dishes; there was fruit, and jugs of the spiced wine her father would make in a cauldron at the beginning of November. There were jugs of the pithy lemonade that her father made in the very same cauldron when May came. Miranda knew exactly what was on the table because she and Lily joined hands and walked up and down its length, looking for something, anything, that Miranda might like to eat. Food steamed and sizzled and swam in juices and sauces hot and cold and rich and sweet, there were even sticks of chalk and strips of plastic, but all they did was make Miranda hungrier for what was not there, so hungry that she released her mother’s hand and held her own throat and gagged. Her hunger hardened her stomach, grew new teeth inside her.

“Miranda you must eat something,” Lily said, sorrowfully. “What will you eat? Tell me and I’ll bring it to you.”

Miranda shook her head. She didn’t know. No, that was wrong. She knew, but she couldn’t say it.

Lily sat down at the table, opposite Jennifer and GrandAnna. Lily played with a padlock. She looked angelic, too pure to be plainly seen. Her combat trousers and vest top were badly crumpled, the way they usually got when she took night flights and spent the hours squirming in her plane seat. Her hair was a little longer.

Miranda began to speak, but Lily raised a finger to her lips — there was a fifth in the room, someone listening. Miranda looked very carefully at each thing in the room, waiting for the fifth person to appear. She looked under the table — maybe the fifth person was there. They were not. As she straightened up, she met her GrandAnna’s gaze. Her GrandAnna’s eyes spoke to her; they said, Eat for me .

“Eat for us,” Jennifer slurred through her padlock.

Another bomb struck, with such force that Miranda fell. She lifted herself up on her hands and crawled into the corner, feeling as if she’d broken her shoulder on the floor. None of the others had even moved. They were used to this.

“Will there be another one after this?” Miranda asked. No one answered her. “Oh my God,” she said. She was shaking already, in anticipation of the next drop. “Please don’t let there be any more.”