The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021)

by Oghenechovwe Ekpeki

  It wouldn’t come off. There was a slight disturbance, but then the powder-dust settled back. It clung to the curve of the headphones, the whorl of her fingertips. Tituba rubbed at the dust, hoping to dislodge it with friction. That did not work. Her fingertips were stained.

  She muttered a curse word or two under her breath. She ran water over the stubborn stain at the kitchen sink.

  A piece of dried skin, embossed with a fingerprint, fell off her hand, leaving behind tender new skin. She watched as the opaque red crinkled skin settled in the sink.

  The powder-dust plumped up with the water. Fat with sudden moisture, the flakes began to rise upward, as if buoyed by an unfelt breeze. Red drops of old blood hung in the air, hovered. Then, they burst open.

  Tituba screamed.

  * * *

  The office door was locked, as it had been for the past two weeks. Tituba had stopped by the superintendent's office before and after work, on the weekend, but the door had always been locked. The emails she sent were unanswered, and the phone calls went straight to voice mail.

  She didn’t know if she’d even seen him during the time she’d been in Bellona Heights. Her neighbors confirmed that he was elusive and unreachable at the best of times. Everyone she’d spoken to had given her a ‘why bother’ attitude. When she told the residents in the mailroom or lobby about the mysterious, weird dust she'd seen, they just shrugged, as if defeated.

  One time in the laundry room, she asked Phylis, an older woman who lived on the same floor, if she knew anything.

  Phylis had been folding a child’s clothes when Tituba had entered the shabby basement with a week’s worth of dirty clothing. Phylis had grudgingly given her a greeting when Tituba broached the subject.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen it,” Phylis had said, dripping with attitude. “Folks made a stink about it, back in the day. Nothing happened.”

  “But it must be unhealthy. So many people here have respiratory problems.”

  “And?” Phylis said, as she went to unload a dryer that had just buzzed. “Ain’t nobody who owns this glorified flophouse care about our health. This ain’t Northwest.”

  Tituba purposefully ignored the bitterness dripping from Phylis’s voice. “Maybe not. But the dust isn’t natural. I hear it rattling in the vent, like tiny ants. Like it’s alive…”

  Phylis stopped folding the laundry and threw it into the basket. “You’re a fine one to talk about ‘unnatural’ things,” she announced as she headed to the door.

  Tituba said, “Excuse me?”

  But Phylis was already out of the room.

  Now, she stood in front of the office door for the umpteenth time. She jiggled the lock, even though she knew there was no point. Maybe Phylis was right, and she should leave well enough alone. But she couldn't. Tituba’s entire existence had been full of struggle, starting from birth, and it didn't look like it was going to get easy any time soon. The dancing dust was just one more obstacle to overcome.

  Tituba went to the mailroom instead. She found the tiny room was full of packages and guessed that some of them were nebulizers and humidifiers. All week long, residents had unboxed the machines in the room, leaving a pile of broken- down cardboard boxes. She had toyed with getting one herself, to combat the dryness in the building.

  Fabiana was right. Bellona Heights was a sick building. Ever since she’d moved in, she had been plagued with low-key headaches that threatened to grow in to full-on migraines. Her stomach was unsettled, and food tasted weird. Walking down a city block easily winded her. And she began to notice discolorations on her skin: darkness beneath her eyes, and white spots on her arms. Most of all, she was always thirsty. She would drink bottle after glass of water or juice, but she could never be satisfied. She didn’t pee often, for the amount she drank. Where did it all go?

  She passed by the superintendent's door, in futile hope.

  “Warren not in again?” said someone behind her. It was Ty, who also lived on her floor. He was around her age and height, with a muscular lithe physique. His skin was dark and velvet-smooth, his bald head glowing with head wax. At least, that had been his appearance. Now, crows’ feet and forehead wrinkles marred the smooth expanse, and the lustrous blue-blackness of his skin was dried out to a leathery brown.

  “Apparently not.” Tituba looked away from Ty, hoping that he didn't notice her shocked reaction.

  He jiggled the doorknob, as if to verify. Then, he glanced at Tituba, and gave her a conspiratorial wink.

  “Desperate times,” he said, and he pushed against the door with his shoulder. The door quivered with the pressure and after a few more aggressive pushes, it popped open.

  Ty and Tituba were immediately hit with a wave of stale air that had a slight cindery taste. They simultaneously began coughing in response. There was also another smell beneath that one—a smell of turned meat and the coppery tang of old blood. A haze of carmine simmered in the room, thick enough that they both had to wave it away. The shades were drawn, so it was dim in the room.

  “Oh, my god,” Tituba said, after her eyes adjusted to the gloom.

  There was a body slumped over a desk. She knew that it was a corpse. The angle of the head looked too uncomfortable to maintain, and the visible eye was open. She switched on the overhead light and immediately wished that she hadn’t. The older gentleman was in a grey mechanic’s suit, and his mouth was opened in a grimace. Dust pooled around the open mouth, on to the desk. It was embedded on his skin, in his hair, and she could see flecks of it in the whites of his eye.

  Ty walked around the desk, reached out to touch the body.

  “Leave it alone,” Tituba said.

  Ty lowered his hands, and reached for his cellphone instead, presumably to call for an ambulance.

  Tituba saw the wrinkled flesh, fold upon fold of thin skin, some of it so dry that the pigment had leeched out. It didn't look like skin. It was papery, cracked like old parchment. And in the folds of skin, remnants of the red dust gathered. His mouth was open and a crumbled pink tongue lolled out past black and cracked lips.

  “He looks like a mummy,” Ty said after he finished speaking to the emergency operator. “I wonder how long he's been here.”

  Tituba heard him, but she was distracted by the thin trail of red dripping down from the HVAC vent.

  Whatever lived there had drained the superintendent, had turned him into a husk. His skin had the same color and texture as a tamarind. She could only imagine the poor man’s innards, the pulp toughened into sponge and coral.

  “He's been sucked dry,” Tituba said. “We're gonna end up like him.”

  * * *

  With tweezers, Tituba scraped the red residue into an old nail polish bottle she had cleaned out. Something was in the vents, something that left behind this weird substance.

  She brought the bottle with her to dinner at a restaurant.

  The first thing Fabiana said when she saw Tituba was, “Girl, you look ashy and worn out!”

  “I know,” she replied, waving the comment away. “Listen to me. You were right. Bellona Heights is a sick building. Some kind of virus or something lives in the vents and gives everyone who lives there breathing problems!”

  “Last week, one of the other residents and I found the superintendent dead in his office. His body was dry. Bone dry. Desert dry. All of the moisture had been sucked right out of him.”

  Tituba pulled up a picture on her phone, and handed it to Fabiana.

  Fabiana shrieked. “Put that thing away!”

  Tituba complied.

  Fabiana said, “I don’t think I've ever seen anything so terrible. Poor dude. He looks like one of those apple head dolls.”

  “I asked the EMTs if they were gonna do an autopsy to determine the cause of death. They ignored me.”

  Fabiana sucked her teeth in sympathetic dismay. “They always do. And we end up dead because they won't listen!”

  Tituba dug around in her handbag until she found and pulled out the nail polish b
ottle.

  “Look at it, Fab. Look closely.”

  “Look at an empty bottle of Carolina Beet lacquer?” Fabiana cautiously picked the bottle up, and peered into it.

  “Stop kidding around, girl. Tell me what you see.”

  Fabiana stared at it for a long moment, still looked as the server refilled their wine glasses with Rosé.

  Finally, she said, “That dust moves.”

  “I’m glad you saw that too! I thought I was going crazy!”

  Fabiana still held the bottle close to her eye. “I don’t think it’s dust, Tituba. I saw one fragment of whatever-it-is, apart from the others, move on it’s own. I see wings. Tiny, infinitesimal scarlet wings. The wings of a moth, not a butterfly. The straggler eventually joined the rest of the swarm, I suppose. And it looked like a swirling dust.”

  “You think it’s insects?”

  Fabiana shrugged in response. “I don’t know. All I do know is, you have to get the hell out of there!”

  * * *

  Tituba was unlocking the door to her apartment when she heard the scream. It came from down the hall. She found herself running there and knocking on the door until Phylis, the grandmother who lived there with her daughter Krystle and grandson Kendrick, opened it.

  “What’s wrong, Miss Phylis?” she asked.

  Miss Phylis was wild-eyed and apoplectic, apparently unable to speak. She gestured weakly to an opened doorway off the L-shape of the apartment. More screams came from there, mostly Krystle saying, “Lord, lord, lord!” Tituba left Miss Phylis behind to look in the doorway.

  She tried to make sense of the bizarre scene. This was obviously a child’s room, full of Thomas the Tank Engine paraphernalia, the google-eyed train’s face on toys and curtains and posters, with its frozen smile stretched across the face. The walls were splattered with moving constellations that came from a projector lamp. Tituba saw little Kendrick being cradled by his mother, in what looked like a grotesque parody of the Pietá, his limp body draped over her lap. His eyes were closed and fluttering, as if he were fighting to keep them open, some nightmare thing wouldn’t let him wake up. Things moved on his unconscious body. Scarlet specks, a tide of them spilling over his pajamas, arms, and face. The tiny little blister-colored things vibrated as they moved. And they moved with purpose, heading for his nostrils and slightly opened mouth. She imagined the minuscule things coating his nasal passages, flurrying in the chambers of his sinuses, ricocheting and embedding themselves in spongy alveoli as they drank up the mists of the boy’s body, drying out mucus membranes, turning plasma into dust. She heard Kendrick begin to wheeze, heard the raspy rattling in his chest.

  Those creatures have done the same thing to me, every night, she thought. She recalled her dreams about Martian-red deserts and dust storms.

  She switched on the overhead light. The stars became invisible. The moth-things slowed down, and lazily detached themselves from the child’s body. They drifted upward, red motes of dust, heading toward the ceiling, heading toward the grates of the vent. More of them dribbled from Kendrick’s nose and mouth. It looked like a twinkling river of blood. Tituba dug around her purse until she found a bottle of spray lotion. She spritzed the red-speckled air with the thick mist, saturating it. A clump of the things fell from the air, a worm-like wriggling ball of red paste with the consistency of snot. The coagulated mess fell on the floor with a wet splat. Tituba, Krystle and Miss Phylis watched with disgust at the wet wings flexing in globules of oily lotion.

  Tituba said, “Quick! We have to get the rest of the stuff out of Kendrick! Wake him up and make him drink water. Maybe that will flush them out.”

  Krystle carried Kendrick into the kitchen, where he blinkingly woke up in the harsher light. They got the confused child to slurp down a couple of glasses of water. Then he began coughing, body-wracking spasmodic coughs. His mother patted his back, calling Kendrick her little angel, her sweetheart, her precious boy.

  Then, he vomited.

  Out of his mouth came a stream of red paste. They saw the fragments of wings and waterlogged pieces of something drip onto the floor. The swarm of dust-insects was decimated. But more lived in this forgotten, neglected building full of brown and black bodies. Were these tiny, moth-like vampires conscious of what they did as they fed upon sleeping bodies, draining the moisture of breath, crawling down throats? Perhaps they weren't malevolent, these winged specks of decay.

  Bellona Heights. More like Hellona Depths.

  * * *

  Back in her apartment, Tituba blocked the vent with a piece of plywood. It was a temporary measure. She thought of black mold, or Legionnaires bacteria brought to life with some dark magic. She thought about contacting the press or an exterminator. But people ignored the superintendent’s death, and the complaints bought by the other residents. It was unlikely that anyone would listen to a black trans woman.

  She would have to fix this on her own. Survival was in her DNA. Survival, and its importance, was why she chose her name. Titus, her birth name, had been meek and a victim of the church, his family, and society. Titus would have succumbed to the dust-moths and been one more epidemiological statistic to be ignored.

  Tituba, however, would fight. She would survive, like the historical woman she'd named herself after.

  As she lay down at 4am, exhausted from saving Kendrick’s life, she heard the scarlet moths skittering around in the blocked vents, banging against the plywood barrier.

  “I dare you,” she said.

  And she began coughing. Violence was in her lungs, her chest, her throat, her head. She coughed so hard that black spots appeared before her. Some of those things must’ve found their way into me. The malevolent red moths were attacking her, with clear intention. It could not have been a coincidence. They had heard her issued challenge, and now they responded.

  If—when—Tituba survived this assault, she would destroy miniature dust-demons. She would kill them tonight.

  19

  “Disassembly” © Makena Onjerika

  Originally Published in Fireside Fiction (October 2020)

  Eighteen years ago, Ntinyari takes her heart out of her chest for the first time. It is a frightened bird in her hand. An ugly thing, slick with fat and slippery and loud, kugu kugu kugu. She squeezes it, willing it to still for just a moment and let her hear herself. Mother finds her fallen over, a marionette in a heap. Her heart has rolled under the bed.

  “Why would you do this?” Mother asks, jamming her heart back in place and shuttering her chest. “I have given you everything.”

  Ntinyari tries to remember she has no right to unhappiness, but she cannot help occasionally taking out and cataloging her parts: kidneys, lungs, vagina, eyes (those she puts back in immediately; watching herself from the table is disorienting), lips, spleen, uterus, nose, stomach (it sloshes with undigested breakfast), pancreas, ears, tongue, intestines. Everything is present, she thinks. Everything is present. Not a single part is missing.

  Why then doesn’t laughter escape her in puffs of yellow, pink, and blue as it does the other girls at her secondary school? Could she not be as possessed of saccharine happiness? Or at least be at the center of some frivolous rebellion — going without a bra, for example? Anything to make her more than a well-mannered, if awkward, blob of excellent grades.

  * * *

  They meet at a nightclub they are both a year too young to be in. Together and drunk on fruity cocktails, Kiku and Ntinyari own the deserted floor, vanishing and reappearing among the coloured strobe lights, each feeling secure because the other is there. They shout introductions over the licentious dancehall music and are soon grinding buttock to pelvis, because they can and because it makes men stare greedily. A few hours later, they are bent over a sink, united in vomiting and the best of friends.

  Kiku’s love for nail polish, makeup, and perfume soon permeates Ntinyari’s bedroom. Mother approves: Kiku is just the kind of influence Ntinyari needs to smooth out her edges.

  “Ask
her what she is doing to her skin,” Mother says.

  Ntinyari’s hand goes to her cheek. A new pimple is sprouting there, hard and stubborn. Her forehead is a constellation of rashes and black spots. Nothing she does seems to stop her pores from secreting thick, greasy sebum. She feels poisonous. If only she could slip into Kiku’s skin.

  At their next sleepover, she presses against Kiku as they lie on their bellies watching a bootleg DVD on Kiku’s laptop. Kiku’s face is wet from all the crying she has done along with one of the movie’s characters.

  “I can’t help it,” she says every time Ntinyari witnesses her osmose other people’s emotions.

  And this is why they are friends. Ntinyari gets off the bed and slips out of her skinny jeans and t-shirt, then her lacy panties and bra.

  Kiku hides behind her hands. “What are you doing?”

  “I need to show you something.”

  Ntinyari reaches her hand to her back and feels for a zipper. She draws it along the rail under her skin. It splits her open halfway across her neck and then down through her chest. Her ribs peer out, visible through muscle. She is almost unzipped to her navel when Kiku punctures through her shock and screams.

  * * *

  Then come years of endless falling. Ntinyari is a bottomless pit, an unpunctured exclamation, a darkness imperceptible to the human eye. Under a microscope, she finds that her nerve cells have tails like mucus pulled out of a child’s nose. Her blood cells could be doughnuts, her muscle cells worms, her bone cells spiders, her skin cells blocks of gummy sweets stuck together. And yet, nothing is out of the norm here. She pulls away from the microscope and rubs her eye with her fist. A dull pain creeps up her back between her shoulder blades.