I glanced at the front door. Still open. I ran for it. This thing meant to take me. On instinct, I knew this. I ran out of the house. It was after me, not my grandmother and auntie. At least I could save them. I surprised myself. I really was one of those people who would happily die to save the ones they loved.
I ran onto the dirt road. At some point, I must have dropped the knife. It was pitch dark out there. People were awake most likely. Deep in their homes. But tonight, no one played cards on the porch. No one stood in the doorway, smoking a cigarette. I think people sensed it was a bad time to be out. So I ran and I ran alone. I wasn't even wearing flip flops.
I could hear it coming. Slobbering. Wheezing. Blowing a strange wind. The smell of broken leaves and tar in the air. The half-moon in the sky gave a little light. I could have sworn there were hundreds of lizards running with me, some crisscrossing my path. It felt like I stepped on some as I ran. I only managed to stay on my feet because I knew the shape of the dirt road.
I passed the last home and entered the stretch of palm trees.
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I'm going to die out here, I knew. Just as the boy should have. A burning heat descended on me from behind. I fell to the dirt road, coughing as I inhaled its dust. Lizards scampered over me like ants on a mound of sugar. I felt their rough feet and claws nipping at my skin. Something grabbed my hands as a great shadow fell on me. Yes, a shadow in the darkness. It was blacker than black.
The air was sucked from my lungs.
My eyes stung with dust.
The road beneath me grew hard as stone, as concrete.
My arms were pulled over my head and ground into the concrete beneath me.
First the left hand and then the right. At the wrist. Something bit right through. I felt painful pressure, then tendons, bone, blood vessels snapping and cracking and then separating. I heard it; the sound was brittle and sharp. Then the wet spattering and squirting of my blood. I only smelled warm paved road. A pause. Then bright white pain flashed through me, blinding the rest of my senses. Like Che Guevara, I thought feebly. Now no one will know who I am.
Time passed. I remember none of it clearly.
The sound of grass and twigs bending and snapping roused me. The feeling of hands roughly grasping me. I dared to open my eyes. They carried me. One woman carried my hands, like two dead doves. I almost blacked out again from the sight but I held on.
"Hurry," one of the women said quietly. "She's going to die."
"It takes what it will," another woman said.
"She'll be fine." This was my grandmother's voice. My own grandmother was one of these women!
"It's still best to move faster." Auntie Amaka!
Suddenly we came upon a road. It was paved, black, shiny, new. Something you didn't normally see in Nigeria.
"Listen," one of the women hissed, looking around.
All of them froze. I was too weak to do anything. The edges of my vision were starting to fade. I heard the sound of my own blood hitting the concrete as it spurted to the beat of my heart from the stumps of my wrists. It soaked quickly into the concrete.
"It's coming," one of the women said.
There was a mad scramble. They dumped me on the hard concrete. Two items dropped beside me. SLAP! SLAP! My hands. Then other items. Some cocoa yams that rolled to rest against my leg. Tomatoes that rolled in all directions. A bowl of still steaming rice that shattered, some of the porcelain and hot rice hitting my face. A bunch of cell phones that clattered to the ground; the ones I could see were still on. And some other things I couldn't see from where I lay.
"What are you . . . " my voice was weak and I had no energy to finish my question.
After a glance up the road, the women started running off. I couldn't get up, I couldn't speak. Soon, I wouldn't be breathing. Their feet made soft sounds in the grass as they ran into the forest.
I was alone in the middle of a road in Nigeria. I couldn't get up. My hands were cut off. I was going to be run over, bleed to death or both. All I could think of was how hungry I was. That I'd give anything for sweet fried plantain, egusi soup heavy with goat meat and stock fish, garri, spicy jallof rice, chin chin, red stew with chicken, ogba . . .
I stared at my severed hands. My long fingers were curved slightly. My thumbs were both bent inward. My nails still had their French manicure. The bronze ring my boyfriend gave me two years ago was still on my left middle finger. I could see the palm of my right hand with its small calluses from my regular days at the gym lifting free-weights.
The middle finger of my right hand twitched. I blinked. Then all five fingers wiggled and the hand flipped over, reminding me of a spider flipping back onto its feet. My left hand was rising up, too. Barely a sound escaped my lips as my eyes started to water from sheer terror. I was too afraid to move. If one of them came near me, I knew I'd pass out. Instead they both just "stood" there; again that strange waiting that I'd also witnessed with the lizards.
Suddenly, the concrete grew hot. I tried to get up but fell back. The road shook. And as I stared down the road, I wondered, What the goddamn fucking hell is that? I tried to get up again; anything to get away from my hands and the chaos happening up the road.
About a fourth of a mile away, the concrete road undulated as if it were made of warm taffy. It broke apart and crumbled in some places and piled up in others. It rippled and folded and fell back into a road as the chaos progressed toward me. I looked at the sky. It was black but starting to burn. I didn't know if this was morning's approach or my own death. I did care. I didn't want to die. But I knew I was dying. Still, not a car came up or down this mystery road. No one would save me. My grandmother and grand auntie had left me.
The noise was deafening. Like a thousand dump trucks dumping hot gravel all at the same time. The air reeked of bitter tar. The closer it got, the clearer its shape. Slabs of road the size of houses arranged themselves into a giant body, tail, legs, short arms, and finally a horrible reptilian head. Vines whipped out of the forests flanking the strange road creature and attached themselves to the slabs. They started snaking up to the items the women had dropped. Snatching up the yam tubers, cell phones, tomatoes. They took every scoop of rice, right down to the grains on my face. Every piece of broken porcelain. They left nothing but me.
It stood several stories high, the vague shape of a monstrous lizard of hot gravel. It snapped and tore connected vines as it moved, only for more vines to reconnect. It slithered toward me, its hot black gravel sizzling.
Vines snatched up my hands, which wriggled about like captured crabs. Then the vines snatched my wrists. They dragged me close to the creature. By this time, I was done. I had nothing left. I don't even know why I was conscious.
The vines connected to my open wrists and I could feel them . . . pumping something into me. It was warm and that warmth ran up my arms, to my shoulders, to my chest, all the way to my toes. I felt like I was going to be sick. How can one who is dying feel sick?
The moment the sensation made it to my toes, I experienced a terrible stab of pain that radiated from all over my body. Like a light switch had been turned on, my mind cleared. Just like that.
I screamed.
My eye landed on the horrific creature again. I screamed again. The vines were doing something to my severed hands and wrists. I could hear a soft wet smacking sound. When I finally chanced a look, I saw that the vines were knitting. They were knitting my veins and arteries.
Lying on my back, I turned my head to the side and vomited. That road monster was hovering over me like an over-attentive doctor. Hot pebbles and stones rained on me. The sky was brightening as the day broke. From where I lay, I could now see that it had several lizards running about its body, mainly those large orange and green ones.
Then the worst happened. Its attention focused on me. Every muscle in my body tightened, every one of my physical senses sharpening. I felt that which is "me" fear for her very existence.
The creature bro
ught its huge stone face up to mine. Within inches. Heat dripped from it like sweat. Its bitter tar odor stung my nostrils. Beneath the stench there was another scent, something distinctively native. That woody, rich perfume that I always noticed as soon as I got off the airplane. There was life and death in that scent. But I was only thinking about death, as the smell filled my nasal passage.
It moved closer, within a half-inch. Its appearance began to shift. Stone became wood, elongating into a giant long-faced mask of black ebony with prominent West African features. I nearly started laughing, despite is all. You saw this face in many markets; it was that generic face of most West African ebony masks. I had many masks with this very face on my wall back home.
But this was the real one, the living one, the first one. This was the face that people were selling. My ears rung and my eyes watched; no species of terror could have been more profound. Its thick lips puckered, the deep deep eyes piercing. Over its shoulders, I could see the hard faces of others. They floated like puffs of powder and undulated like oil. They had large eyes, wide-nostrilled noses, cheekbones like granite. Many of them were familiar to me, also. Even more were not.
Some had what looked like ants skittering about their faces. Others had red eye lids and deep tribal scars on their cheeks and foreheads. Blue horns. The face of a great red bird. A tree frog sitting on its forehead. Eyes like mud. Skin like leaves. Some radiated beautiful liquid light. Others sprouted pink flowers. Spirits, masquerades, ghosts, and ancestors, these were deep deep mmuo! I was actually seeing mmuo! Me, Chioma, born in the USA. Why me?
These ethereal faces crowded far far back, tens, thousands, millions, billions, an infinite number of them peering from infinity. Looking over the creature's shoulders. Watching. Seeing me. Like those lizards, they were waiting for something to happen to me. Can you imagine?
My chest felt like a block of ice and my eyes burned. My scalp itched. Then I felt it. It was pleasure and pain, black and white, cacophony and stillness, perfumed and pungent. Something inside me both died and was birthed. I moaned, looking into its eyes. At once, there was clarity. I saw a young woman with a chain of thick red-orange beads woven into her tightly braided hair. She danced slowly, lizards following the movement of her feet. And there was a vertical line scarring each of her ankles. Her feet had been cut off and reattached. Yet look at her dance. Was she the first? I wondered. First what?
Then, just like that, the vines retreated. The lizards scattered. And the road dragon monster ancestor creature grunted and quickly began to shamble back down the road. It was like they all feared the sunlight. I dunno. What do I know?
When I sat up, I was in the middle of a lumpy dirt road and there was a car coming right at me. I jumped up and ran out of the way. The driver didn't even see me! Am I invisible? I wondered. I realized I knew where I was, less than a mile from the house. There was no dense forest near the house, never had been. It was all impossible.
Images of mmuo rose and fell in my mind and I swayed. I steadied myself by looking at my hands. Slowly, I brought them up. There were dark bruises on my wrists, as if someone had tied them too tightly with heavy ropes. There was dried blood, too. But my hands looked . . . normal. They weren't turning purple or black as they should have been nor were they behaving like independent creatures. And most importantly, they were connected to my wrists. I dared to move a finger. It worked just fine. Except for a weird tingle I felt in the fingertips.
I made a fist and wiggled and flexed all my fingers. Still that weird tingle. But that was it. My hands were still alive and they were my own. I wiped my lips with the back of my hand, the taste of vomit still in my mouth. Even my vomit was gone from the ground.
I walked home.
I killed a man once. With my bare hands. This was before I was a cop. It's probably the reason I became a cop. It was during my second year in college. I was twenty. He followed me home one night and dragged me between the dorms onto a narrow road that ran between the buildings. He was bigger than me. Stronger, too. I'm tall and a rather strong woman, but just a woman nonetheless. So there we were on the concrete, his hands squeezing the air from my neck. I was seeing stars, galaxies, black outer space. There was a ringing in my ears. My head was full of pressure. Tears were in my eyes. I was fading.
Then something swept over me. I raised my hands and grabbed his neck, too. He looked surprised at first but didn't seem too bothered. Until my hands locked on his neck like a vice. Suddenly I knew I could crush stones with my hands. I crushed his neck like it was one of the stones I was imagining.
My parents are lawyers and somehow they kept it all away from the press. And somehow they kept me out of jail, thank God, though that was the easy part. The guy had apparently done to several women within the state what he tried to do to me. Since then, I've always been suspicious of my hands.
Typically when you think of one's identity, you think face, right? The eyes are the windows to the soul. You cut off one's head and the person dies. You see a picture where a woman's face is not shown but her body is and you think misogyny, no? She becomes objectified, nothing but a body. But what of the hands? Fingerprints are as distinctive as one's face, as unique.
When we want to really identify a suspect, we go to his or her prints. Again, I think of Che Guevara and the depth of the insult in cutting off his hands. The depth of attempted annihilation. So what happens when your hands kill a man? What happens when those hands are cut off and then start behaving like freed spiders? What happens when those hands are reattached by some fucking dragon monster Nigerian ancestor being made of rolling hot gravel and vines and wood? What just happened to me?
As I slowly walked back to my grandmother's house, my stomach groaned and my temples throbbed. Grandma and auntie, I thought. They just . . . left me there. I heard the crunch of my bones, the snap of my arteries and veins, the splatter of my blood. I saw my own hands moving about on their own. I saw billions of mmuo, all staring at me. I stopped, put my hands on my knees and bent forward. My stomach heaved but thankfully I had nothing in it. Tears dribbled from my eyes. More cars passed me by. I wiped the tears away but more tears came. It took me a half-hour to make the ten-minute walk to the house. By the time I arrived, I was deeply pissed off.
I threw the front door open. "Grandma! Auntie! Where are you?" I screamed in Igbo. I stood there, breathing heavily, wiping the tears from my eyes, so I could clearly see the looks on their faces. I watched them descend the stairs looking guilty as hell. I shouted and cursed and accused them of everything from black magic and Satanism to witchcraft and juju; anything that would make them feel ashamed, as I knew they both claimed to be good Catholics. Spit flew from my mouth, snot from my nose. My voice quivered as my entire body began to shudder. I started sobbing, images and sounds and scents racing through my mind again. And my grandma and auntie leaving me.
Then I blurted the story of the murderer who tried to murder me and instead got murdered. I laughed wildly through my sobs, feeling lightheaded, frightened, desperate and confused.
"Oh we knew about you killing that man," grandma calmly responded.
My mouth hung open. I sat on the couch, my heart slamming in my chest.
Auntie Amaka sat beside me and took my hand in hers. I yanked it away from her. I had a brief thought of leaving my severed hand in her hands. I had to work hard not to screech. "Don't touch me!" I snapped.
"My dear, we could have told you, yes," Auntie Amaka said, delicately. "But once . . . once you opened that door . . . "
"No," Grandma said. "Once it started to rain, I think. And you being here."
"Regardless," Auntie Amaka said. "It was going to happen."
I ran my hand over my face. Who knew what the fuck they were talking about? "What was . . . that thing?" I asked.
"It has many names. We speak none of them," Grandma said.
"Why the boy, then?"
"All we can guess is that it was because he outsmarted a great snake that was meant to kill him,"
Grandma said. "It was last year. The snake was about to strike as he passed through a field. The boy somehow knew. Before the snake could do the job the boy smashed its head with his school book."
"Again, not his fault," Grandma said. "It never is."
"So you're saying we were both supposed to die but something . . . "
Grandmother laughed. I felt like slapping her. "You think this is about you?" she asked, ignoring the irate look on my face. "You think it had anything to do with any of us specifically?" She shook her head. "In this village, when it rains for three days during Harmattan, certain people start . . . getting maimed. Us women know where to take them and what to bring. It's been like that since anyone can remember."
"But we don't know the why or the how of it," Auntie added. "It doesn't happen often. Maybe once every ten years." She shrugged and both women looked at me apologetically.
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