Nnedi Okorafor - Akata Witch

She would have to deal with whatever was going to happen alone.

When Sunny tried to sleep, her head buzzed. Her hands shook and itched. She sweated through her sheets. When she closed her eyes, she saw crumbly brown dirt. She could taste and smell it, too. She felt as if she was sinking into and through her bed, her body trying to return to the earth. So she kept her eyes open.

By three A.M., Sunny was weeping. She didn’t know what to do or how to stop it, and there was no one to turn to for help. Around four, her body started shifting. Her face would become her spirit face and then it would go back to normal, then it would become her spirit face again.

Once, when her spirit face came forward, she got up and looked at herself in the mirror. She nearly screamed. Then she just stared. It was her, but it felt as if it had its own separate identity, too. Her spirit face was the sun, all shiny gold and glowing with pointy rays. It was hard to the touch, but she could feel her touch. She knocked on it and it made a hollow sound.

Her spirit face was smiling. Still, somehow she knew it could be angry if it had to be. Her eyes were carved slits, yet she could see perfectly. The nose was shaped like her nose. As she stood there, she watched herself change back, her human face sucking her spirit face in.

She was scared, but she was excited, too. Her spirit face was beautiful. And it was utterly crazy-looking. And it was hers .

All through the night, she battled herself. Or battled to know herself. She fell apart and then put herself back together and then she fell apart again and put herself back together, over and over.

Finally, she opened her window. She needed fresh cool air. Her room was on the second floor of the house, so the mosquitoes weren’t so bad. At least that’s what she told herself. She’d have told herself anything-the fresh air felt that good. She eventually fell asleep right there, beside her window.

Red. A river at sunrise. She was swimming in it, and through the water she could see the wavy red sky above. A new day. She laughed and did a somersault. Then she looked down and met the two large eyes of the river beast deep below her, just close enough to catch the glint of red sunshine from above.

When Sunny awoke, the sun was shining directly on her face. She’d been sleeping in it for hours. She gasped and quickly moved out of the raw bright sunshine. Her face was almost certainly badly burned.

She tentatively touched her cheek. She froze. She touched her cheek again. Then she got up and ran to her mirror. Her face looked fine! She grinned. Then she laughed out loud, and rushed to stand in the sunshine again. She closed her eyes and soaked in the warm light. She didn’t need to stand in there for an hour to know-she knew deep in her skin. The sunshine felt like a warm friend, not an angry enemy. She didn’t need her umbrella anymore.

“Oh my goodness,” she whispered. “I can play soccer!”

Realizing what she was was the beginning of something, all right… but it was also the end of something else.

What Is a Free Agent?

A free agent is one who isn’t privileged with even one pure Leopard spiritline from the survivors of the Great Attempt. She or he is a random of nature, a result of mixed-up and confused spiritual genetics. Free agents are the hardest to understand, predict, or explain. Learning will not come easy to you. You are a Leopard Person only by the will of the Supreme Creator, and as we all know, She isn’t very concerned with Her own creations.

After your initiation, make sure that someone is there to help you, for you will not be able to help yourself, so new the world will be to you and so fragile your ego. You’re like an infant. You will be dumbfounded and disoriented. What’s most important is-

Sunny threw the book across the room. How am I supposed to read this? she thought. What a pompous, discriminating idiot of an author . If they have racism in the Leopard world, this book is so “racist” against free agents!

She sighed. The last thing she wanted was to return to Anatov still ignorant and prove the author right. As she grudgingly got up to get the book, something began to happen to it. Tiny black legs sprouted from the spine. Sunny fought hard not to flee. The legs suctioned themselves to the floor and pulled the book up, pages facing the ceiling.

Sunny scrambled to the other side of the room as the book walked back to her bed, climbed up the side, and plopped itself near her pillows. The legs retreated back into the book’s spine with a soft slurping sound. Sunny didn’t move, staring at the book, waiting for it to do something. When nothing did, she crept toward it.

Once at her bed, she slowly reached forward, planning to grab the book and fling it back across the room. When she was within an inch of it, the book flew open. She leaped back. The pages leafed this way and that. They stopped and the book opened and stretched out so flat that she could hear its spine crack. She leaned just close enough to see what it had opened to. Chapter Four: Your Abilities.

After a few minutes, she sat beside it, ready to run away if the book so much as shivered. She began to read.

This will be new to you, since you are fresh from Lamb country and have just entered the high society of Leopards. Lambs are on a constant, unrealistic, irrational, and unnatural quest for perfection. They seek to have bodies with no blemishes or disease; that do not age; that have perfect eyes, noses, and lips all in the right places; that are thin like fashion models’ or muscular like athletes’; that are tall, lacking warts, extra fingers, pimples, scars; that always smell fresh like flowers; etc. There are no Lamb cultures where people do not strive for this inferior thing called perfection, no matter their definition of it.

We Leopard folk are nothing like this.

We embrace those things that make us unique or odd. For only in these things can we locate and then develop our most individual abilities. Even you, free agent, have an ability given to you by the omnipotent, distracted Supreme Creator.

HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR ABILITY

It’s doubtful that you have the intelligence to figure out something so important. But here is something to think about: one’s ability lies with those things that mark him or her. They can be talents, like an affinity toward gardening or being able to play the guitar well. Often they are things that Lambs make fun of, imperfections. They can be physical, psychological, behavioral. And I do not mean things that are a result of your actions, like being fat because you eat too much and sit and play video games all day.

Usually someone of pure spirit will have to help you figure it out. But once you discover it, you will have to find a dedicated and patient pure spirit who is willing to help someone as needy and ignorant as you.

Once Sunny got past the book’s rude, condescending tone, she found it had plenty to teach her. She also found that the book itself was eager to be read. It made sure that it was always nearby. Sometimes it crawled onto her lap! The strange black legs were actually soft as mushroom stems, and were careful to tread lightly.

Over the next few days, when she wasn’t in school or doing homework, she was reading Fast Facts . No time for television. She focused most on Chapter Eight: Very Basic Beginner Juju. It was the juju called “ Etuk Nwan ” that most interested her. If she could get it to work, she would be able to leave the house for Saturday night’s meeting with Anatov. There were only four ingredients, and most of them were easy enough to collect: chamomile leaves, palm oil, some rainwater. It was the fourth that she was worried about.